Amulet of the Wastelands

The Amulet of the Wastelands was an immensely-powerful artefact created by the Time Lords.

Abilities
The Amulet's abilities were wide-ranging. At its most powerful, it was capable of wide-scale universal manipulation, granting the user the ability to move whole planets through space.

On a smaller scale, the Amulet could influence people's behaviour or control their minds in a form of hypnosis.

Douglas Quilter also wondered if the Amulet acted as a good luck charm. (AUDIO: Operation: Hellfire)

History
The Amulet was held by the Conclave of Grails and Antiquities. At one point, it became lost on Earth. A Time Lady messenger from the Conclave recruited the Third Doctor to retrieve it during his exile on Earth and sent him to its last-known sighting in England in 1943.

The Amulet came into the possession of Sir Davenport Finch, a fascist collaborator and occultist under house arrest in Sussex. He intended to pass it to Ernst Littmann, a Nazi wizard who could use it to help the Third Reich to win World War II, although Littmann was a fabrication of Germany's Littmann Gambit.

With Winston Churchill's approval, the Doctor, Jo Grant and Wing Commander Douglas Quilter of the London Controlling Section infiltrated and raided Finch's manor to extract the Amulet as part of Operation Hellfire. Finch was killed when infighting broke out among his followers and the Amulet was taken by his murderer, Daisy Chapel. She threw it away when it influenced her own supporters to surrender and she killed herself.

Unwilling to return the Amulet to the Time Lords, the Doctor entrusted it to Quilter, who hid it in his sock drawer where no one else would ever have a reason to look. By the 1970s, Quilter claimed it had done very little and stayed quiet, although he was curious about whether it had helped influence his success as an author. The Doctor suggested that, alternatively, Quilter's novels just had mass appeal. (AUDIO: Operation: Hellfire)