more game-suitable relicry

Tolkien probably chose a plain iron circlet as the identifier of numerous baddies (Morgoth, Sauron's old boss, had one) because the idea sounded wicked cool. But it turns out there actually is an Iron Crown. The "Iron Crown of Lombardy" isn't actually iron, but the inside bears a thin, purportedly iron, band said to be beaten from a nail from the True Cross. If you've seen the picture of Napoleon crowning himself rather than indicating submission to any church, that's the Iron Crown he's putting on his head. At the time he said something like "God gives it to me. Beware whoever touches it," and he went on to found an Order of the Iron Crown. Geez. I knew Napoleon was kind of a badass, but I had no idea his special attacks included level drain...

The other nail from the True Cross the Lombards had access too made it into the Holy Lance. There are three different Spears of Longineses out there, but one of them is the obviously-not-early-Imperial spearhead (it tests as 7th century) which the Nazis got after Anschluß and which Patton later captured. What I didn't know here was the theory that, since Lombard coronations included grasping a spear as sign of ancestral power, and their royalty were the Gungini (as in Gungnir), there's a pretty good chance the Holy Lance story was a Christian gloss on prior, very pagan rituals. Given the Nazi fondness for Norse mythology, that bit of trivia definitely needs to surface if I ever run that "alternate WWII" game.