After watching dozens of Blender tutorial videos back-to-back, I needed to take a break. I came to DA and saw this in my DevWatch: http://amandadahamster.deviantart.c.....riah-144723129 by  amandathehamster (but it's not on her FA gallery yet)

I was inspired by the design of the staff, so I decided to use the info I'd gained from the videos and recreate it. This is the result.

I was originally under the impression that it was some kind of axe, so I made the "blade" sharp. I was later informed that it's not really an axe, but a staff. ...so maybe dwarves stole it and modified it. Or maybe it can change appearance to look more threatening in dangerous situations. (OR MAYBE YOU SCREWED UP, TAN, EVER THOUGHT OF THAT!?)

Took a little over 2.5 hours to render in Blender's internal rendering engine with raytracing on the gold material and ambient occlusion turned on.

The "blades" were created by making a wedge shape and using it as a bevel object along a curve, scaling the control points as necessary.

The gold piece that holds the yin-yang symbol was made the same way, just with a flat oval shape instead of a wedge.

The "fins" on the back were created by making a Plane with enough segments for each fin, then extruding every face as many times as necessary.

The twisting on the base was done by extruding a circle to the basic shape, then adding loop cuts on the 3, 6, 9, and 12 o'clock positions, scaling them inward, then rotating each edge loop 60 degrees on the way down.