The Schola Artifex is the grand college of arcane artisans, though it functions more as a sprawling consortium of guild-houses bound within a single Imperial charter. The wizards specialise in the transmutation of base matter, and produce and maintain much of the weapons, wands, and armor. They are referred to as goldcloaks for their style of dress and their overwhelming love of the malleable metal.

It had always been the case that the exemplary enchanted items in circulation were the plundered artifacts of far greater, ancient civilizations, with humanity able only to wonder at the secrets of their production, now long lost to time. The Schola Artifex leads a renaissance in invention, testing the limits of what is possible.

Their golimbs are one development - an attempt to graft clockwork golem technology to the human body. Used to be an adventurer? Took an arrow to the knee? Replace that damaged leg with a golimb prosthesis and run faster than you ever did before.

Golimbs must be wound regularly and maintained, and they are far from cheap, being sold to wealthy ex-adventurers and nobility. Each piece is a bespoke work of beauty. But as fashions change, noble purveyors have begun to switch out their clockwork limbs for the latest model, and a supply of second-hand hands has begun to trickle down to the lowest rungs of society, such that even lowly cutthroats have been seen to augment themselves with additional limbs, believing that six daggers are better than two. Some have been so modified as to be unrecognizable as human.