Probably the same guy who thought it a good idea to leave a hexed dagger along with a Vendigrothian sprocket and some miscellaneous magick gear that might sell for a few hundred if you're lucky.
Oh I understand the significance of the boot there but if you remove it, it doesn't make the old crone go away, so it can't be whats holding the spirit in the mine. Who would take some lady's boot and stick it in a mine then lace it with poison, fire and harm traps?
It is said by numerous people in Shrouded Hills that old Bessie Toone went down the mine and never returned to the surface. Therefore her body must by laying somewhere in there. The way I see it, the chest/crate/whatever it was, from which you took the shoe contained the whole rotting body of Bessie, but the Living One just took the shoe to give it to Ristezze, guessing it would do for an exchange. As for traps. As you can see a few posts higher I was pretty WTF'd by them, but now when I think of it, the "traps" may be a result of Bessie's haunting. Ghost in a mine, magical anomalies here and there, that sort of thing.
Hmm it has been several years since I have asked what the rumors were when in Shrouded Hills. You have a point. But then as mentioned before, doesn't explain the magical gear, unless the gear wasn't magical in the first place and the ghost's presence somehow transformed it.
That's what I'm thinking. If the ghost's presence and magical nomalies appearing because of it can create traps and decrease the quality of ore, it can very well soak up normal items with magical power. There's also the issue of the "...groth" sprocket wheel. All of it's purpose is to be used to repair just some casual stram engine. The "...groth" sprocket appears in Weldo's quest, so my thoughts are that the one in the mine wasn't supposed to be that kind of a sprocket but just some normal one (or special, but not being the "...groth" one), but somehow somewhere the programmers failed, possibly implementing a wrong item or something like that. Shit happens.
Well he is kinda dead. Makes playing Arcanum a little difficult for him at the moment. Yeah yeah, don't even start the "That's what THEY want you to think!".
That's what they.. Oh I agree with the sprocket, only other explanation for it that I can think of would be the part having been picked up by a traveler who in turn sold it to a junk dealer. That junk dealer then made the sale to someone who obviously was buying spare parts for the steam engine, however you would think the spare parts would be left with the engine in the first place. So perhaps the parts were being used for mining equipment that Bates had mentioned in his story. In that case the people of Shrouded Hills have a Macgyver in their midst!
Well it may be possible to work like that, but the very thought of an ancient invaluable Vendigrothian sprocket being use just for some low class machine, argh. Still, it would fit Ristezze's opinion on the people of Shrouded Hills when talking with him about the GB ring - "More likely they would melt it down and use it for nails..." So true.
I think the trader theory could be possible for it ending up this far from Vendigroth Wastes You seem to be missing one glaringly obvious possibility, the sprocket is found in a mine. Not long before the mine effectively shut down it could have been unearthed in the mine and left there when the ore 'soured'
The trader theory is the only in-game possibility, I guess. Yet I hold that it's far-fetched. It's not like anything gets that easily out of Vendigroth. No one really goes there, people are scared as shit of the wastes. Tollo was in the very ruins and it's a great phenomenon. Weldo mearly found a little bit of old Vendigroth technology. The very Tulla mages, being geographically the closest form of civilisation to the ruins don't have and idea where they are located. People are unaware that anything exists out there, they think it's just a desert and believe brahmins live out there, jeez. All in all, it's very unlikely that anyone goes to the waste, much less him finding anything like that sprocket and being still alive to return with it. There also the Shades Beach on the Isle of Despair, but here the rule is even more strict - what comes in, doesn't come out.
Perhaps someone designed a tunnel-building machine, managed to get a massive distance, and then the machine died, leaving them trapped and far from home? As time passed, the machine rotted away, and they've found one of a few pieces that'll surface in the next few years.
In oh say about 1000 years or so a sprocket could end up almost anywhere in the world of Arcanum right from when Vendigroth was a known nation/country or whatever it was to when it was just a waste
Also, to throw out another idea: the whole area that's a huge, flat desert? That used to be a forest. What if the place where Besse Toone's mine is used to be a shallow stretch of a river, and the cog somehow got dropped in? Say a Vendigrothian flying machine crashed in the mountains thanks to the Young Blind Master shooting it down, and parts of it dropped into a lake, which fed such a stream?