The Shivering Hammer is a strange tool, as the hammerhead is made out of shimmering crystal with a metal spur at the back. It was chipped with great care from the elemental plane of crystals and shaped by being softly polished over the course of three hundred years by teams of blind dwarves working in perfect darkness, using only the sound of perfect harmonies.

For all that it's made of crystal atop a stout wooden shaft, the Shivering Hammer is not in any way fragile, although it won't do any harm to flesh or other soft materials, but when it is tapped on a hard material - the harder the better - it begins to emit a soft hum which quickly grows in pitch to a high tone. If subsequently rapped sharply and quickly against the same material, it will shatter a large piece of it into rubble.

This works against cliff faces, shields, statues, pillars and any mass of solid substance. The more homogeneous the material, the more damage the Shivering Hammer will do: for example it might smash a solid marble column in two with a tap, but only crumble a few boulders in a sandy hillside since they weren't connected to similar material. Wood is mostly impervious however as it's composed of many different materials woven together.

The hammer will work against almost any solid surface, even if it's just frozen, so it will easily break up icebergs. It is also very effective against natural armour like scales, although it was mostly intended for mining and quarrying rock by its makers.