"Fan the flames, mold the metal; We are building an army."
— The Ancestor, Darkest Dungeon, when upgrading the forge
The Ultimate Forge is the only place in the world where the Sword of Plot Advancement or Armor of Invincibility can be made. It's invariably very difficult to reach, atop the highest mountain or above a river of lava. Just what makes this forge so special may never quite be explained, but it's safe to say that either magic or Lost Technology is involved. The Ultimate Blacksmith might hang out here, but it's also common for the Ultimate Forge to be abandoned or guarded by monsters. Alternatively, this place may belong to the Proud Industrious Race, which uses it to make their finest masterworks, whatever they may be.
Most common in video games with Item Crafting systems. Other media are more likely to have an Ultimate Blacksmith, so the characters will have someone to talk to.
Compare Eye of Newt. Unrelated to Master Forger.
Examples:
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Audio Plays
- Big Finish Doctor Who: The Elder God Weyland is a full-time blacksmith, creating a shield which makes its wielder invisible to Elder Gods, and is key to the defeat of Fenric. He has both a literal and metaphorical forge; the former, commonly known as Weyland's Smithy, is inside a dolmen along the Ridgeway Path. According to legend, horses in need of shoeing could be left near the Smithy with payment, and the job would be done by the following morning.
Film - Live-Action
- Marvel Cinematic Universe: Nidavellir, realm of the Dwarves, is a Ring World Planet surrounding a neutron star. By drawing power from this star, the Dwarves are able to forge the strongest weapons in all of existence, including but not limited to Thor's hammer Mjolnir. Before Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos forced the Dwarves to create his Infinity Gauntlet under the threat of death, and then froze Nidavellir's star, along with killing most of the Dwarves save for their king, Eitri whom he instead forced to dip his hands into molten slag to prevent there ever being a weapon made to counter it. Thor, Rocket, and Groot, however, are able to revive the star long enough to forge Stormbreaker, Thor's new axe powerful enough to kill the Mad Titan.
Literature
- The Lord of the Rings: The One Ring can only be destroyed in the same place where it was forged, in the fires of Sammath Naur in Mount Doom.
- In the Redwall prequel Mossflower, Boar the Fighter reforges Martin's sword from Thunderbolt Iron in his forge atop the extinct volcano Salamandastron.
Live-Action TV
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Feeling Overshadowed By Awesomeness of his ancestor, Feanor, Celebrimbor wants to leave something beyond petty jewel-crafts and to devise something unforgettable. And for that, he needs to build the greatest forge ever "able to birth a flame as hot as a dragon's tongue, and as pure as starlight", with which he could transform Middle-earth into a place of beauty. By the end of the first Season, he build his forge, very reminiscent of The Tower of Babel.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: According to a legend related in "The Sword of Kahless", the ancient Klingon Emperor Kahless the Unforgettable forged the eponymous first-ever bat'leth by drawing it from the fires of the Kri'stak volcano.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition Book of Artifacts. Long ago the First King of the dwarves created the Anvil of Songs, one of the five Great Tools. He then used the Anvil to create the fifth Great Tool, the Fierce Axe, which later became known as the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords.
- Warhammer 40,000: Forge Worlds are planet-spanning factories that churn out mind-boggling quantities of weapons, equipment, and vehicles for the Imperium of Man, headed by a Fabricator-General of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and often containing utterly irreplaceable manufacturing facilities and jealously-guarded STCs for designs ten millennia old.
- In the gaiden game Dark Heresy, the Lathe Worlds are 3 Forge Worlds located in a sector that is affected by a strange gravity anomaly. One effect of this is the unique ability of these worlds to make special items like the Lathe Blade, metal blades that can withstand the disruptor effect of a power weapon.
- This shows up a fair bit in Exalted, to the point that it's not so much "a singular World's Greatest Forge" as it is "an aesthetic."
- For starters, there's orichalcum, the favored magical material of the Solars. Forging orichalcum requires melting gold in pure lava while it is also exposed to concentrated sunlight through a series of mirrors. Needless to say, there were a lot of these forges in the First Age.
- Then there are some of the forges the Exalted got up to when they weren't focused on orichalcum. Factory-Cathedrals were large assembly lines powered by geomantically-harnessed prayer, pumping out large amounts of Artifacts. Most of them are utterly wrecked by the time of the Age of Sorrows.
Video Games
- Baldur's Gate III: In the Underdark in Act 1, you can find an abandoned deep gnome community that's been overrun by grey dwarves led by an Absolute cultist drow elf. They're there to take control of the community's adamantine forge. Should you contest them for it, you can use the forge to craft some powerful pieces of armor (or some significantly less powerful weapons) provided you find the right materials, which are scattered around the area.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- The Skyforge is a structure beneath the stone wings of a great eagle statue, said to be older than the elves, and when discovered by some ancient Nord heroes, they decided to build the mead-hall of Jorrvaskr next to it. The Skyforge Steel weapons it produces are superior to normal steel equipment, and after the Companions questline is completed it can also produce Ancient Nord Armor and Nord Hero Weapons. While the resident blacksmith Eorlund Gray-Mane is considered to be Skyrim's Ultimate Blacksmith, some of his rivals in other cities may grumble that they don't have the advantage of a legendary forge to work in.
- Located in the Silent Moons Camp is the mysterious Lunar Forge, said to have been used in the past to craft magical weapons under the moonlight. These Lunar Weapons have the unique Silent Moons Enchant(ment), which grants bonus damage at night "while the moons are out". While you can't actually forge such weapons yourself there, you can find multiple already made weapons ready to be used, or disenchanted so you can learn the enchantment yourself and apply it to other weapons.
- The Dawnguard DLC adds a quest "Lost to The Ages" in which your character finds a shard of the incredibly rare material Aetherium. This prompts a quest to hunt down three other shards and team up with the ghost of an adventurer to find the legendary Aetherium Forge and create a unique item.
- The Dawnguard DLC also adds Gunmar's Forge in Fort Dawnguard, the only place in the game where the Dragonborn can make crossbows, enhanced crossbows, and the crossbow bolts of fire, ice, and lightning, which explode on impact for fire, frost, and electrical damage respectively.
- Golden Sun: The Lost Age
- The game has one, but it's not the Ultimate Blacksmith's residence (he lives in Yallam, a backwater-by-backwater-standards). Obaba's forge is located in Champa, and consists of a huge hole in the ground deep enough to reach magma. She uses it it reforge the broken trident and give her pet salamander a huge power boost when she still thinks you're the bad guys.
- In Dark Dawn, Obaba is still in Champa despite it being overrun by the shadow monsters, kept at bay by burning any wood the inhabitants can get their hands on. She now serves as the Ultimate Blacksmith (many other world locations having been fundamentally changed or removed in the thirty-year Sequel Gap).
- RuneScape has several:
- The Dragon Forge, located in an underwater cavern infested by monsters, is the only place where the Dragon platebody, which was the strongest piece of armour available for many years, could be forged. It's also the only place players can upgrade Anti-dragon shields into the more-powerful Dragonfire shields, break down certain high-level equipment into essence used to craft even more high-level equipment, and create certain high-level skilling tools.
- The Sacred Forge, located in the ruined Dwarven city of Camdozaal underneath Ice Mountain, is the only place where the highest-level skilling tools can be crafted.
- The Imcando Forge, located in the centre of the Warforge archaeological site, is the only place where the Masterwork Spear of Annihilation (one of the strongest melee weapons in the game, and purportedly a recreation of a weapon used to kill a god) can be forged, as well as the only place an Imcando mattock (a mid-level tool used in the Archaeology skill) can be made.
- While the player is unable to use it, the Elder Kiln arguably falls under this category. An artefact created by the Elder Gods, the Kiln can create living beings. As a divine artefact, prolonged exposure will also cause a mortal to ascend to godhood.
- Vagrant Story: The "Godhands" workshop located in the Undercity West is the only forge where you can work all types of materials. It's only accessible in New Game Plus.
- World of Warcraft:
- In the classic game, Dark Iron can only be smelted in the heart of the subterranean dwarven city, Blackrock Depths. Which is to say, near the end of an enormous dungeon. Similarly, weapons and armor made from Dark Iron can only be forged at the Black Anvil in the city's center.
- In Mists of Pandaria, Lightning Steel weapons can only be crafted at the Anvil of the Thunder Forges in the Thunder King's palace.
- In the Legion expansion, Demonsteel can only be made in one special anvil, atop the tallest mountain in the continent.
- Non-metallurgical items get in on this as well. In the classic game, alchemy flasks could only be made at alchemy labs, which only existed deep in two endgame dungeons. And Mooncloth used by tailors can only be created by purifying Felcloth in night elven Moonwells, and for nine years you could only create one sheet per day.
Web Original
- Whateley Universe: Eldritch, an Artificer who had just recently liberated herself from the risk of being magically enslaved, found an abandoned Artificer forge left over from Five Courts era, in a hidden cave under Uluru. Realizing that a malevolent force had awakened it, disrupting the Ley Lines near the mountain, she destroyed it to keep it out of the hands (tentacles?) of the Eldritch Abominations that were trying to corrupt it.
Web Video
- Atop the Fourth Wall: Linkara's ship Comicron 1 (which he took from Lord Vyce after defeating him) is revealed to have a program he calls "The Forge" which can draw matter from other dimensions and use it to instantaneously fabricate materials. While primarily used to make shades and weapons, it can also immediately repair the badly damaged ship after Vyce unlocks the function, in fact it's the only thing that can repair the ship as it was made with substances from other universes.
- In Campaign 2 of Critical Role, the Mighty Nein had to locate the Underforge of the Cinderrest Sanctum, which was located inside a volcano, to repair a magical sword known as "the Star Razor".
Western Animation
- Steven Universe: Bismuth has an elaborate, apparently magma-powered forge hidden in a volcano, which she used to make Rose's sword and all the Crystal Gems' other non-summoned weapons.
