The Dead Man's Book, A Grotesque Grimoire Options

[Ancient History]

You shiver with indrawn-breath as your hand caresses the plain but loathsome leather cover. Your gentle, sensitive fingertips caress a map of healed scars, calluses, the whirl of a palm and fingertip, the heavy stitching, gently circling the well-worn designs tattooed on living flesh...which was skinned off with a consecrated knife and tanned for this book. Such a pleasent, musky smell like old leather and paper, such a comforting heft to the tome. You can stand it no longer as you open the blasphemous book to gaze at the hidden horrors within the Dead Man's Book.

The Dead Man's Book is old, as these things go. Fifty years ago, shortly after the Awakening, a simple bookbinder's Talent awoke. Not much of a Talent, as these things go. But enough. He was already old, grey-hamed and hoary, and wanted a legacy. So he made one, stitched from dead men's flesh. And he wrote.

The pages of the book are of extremely fine, thin paper, bound and glued by hand by a master bookbinder. Each page has been hand-written, in English, in a steady, even, elegant and practiced hand in clear, high-quality ink. Aside from the cover and the contents, no unusual or forbidding materials or methods were used to construct this tome. There are six hundred pages, divided into three sections.

[ Spoiler ]

While non-magical, the Dead Man's Book was the subject of despicable rituals and craftmanship, reflected in a loathsome, dark and oily appearence to astral sight. Anyone foolish enough to use Psychometry on the book had best be prepared for a shock.

The White Section
Written on white paper with red ink, the first third of the grimoire may resemble to the layman nothing more than a simple Anatomy book, each of the two-hundred pages containing a picture or diagram of the human corpus or a part thereof, sketched from life in realistic detail. See here the muscles of the hand, the skin removed, the ligaments and viscera bare. See now, the little bones of the smallest finger, the shape and connections of the fingernail still attached and plain to see. Orderly notes dot the page, those unschooled with the Occult will note some are instructions, and containe unfamiliar words or phrases from some thaumaturgical grammer.

[ Spoiler ]

The first section details nothing more, or less, than the proper method of using metahuman materials in enchanting, just as some shamans use animal materials. As with animal materials, the metahuman must be freshly slain by the magician or talismonger to harvest properly. Any magician may so such harvesting provided this section is available for reference, or with careful study may incorporate the process into their own magical workings. To simulate this, a character with the book in their possession must pay the karma and take the time to increase their Enchanting or Talismongering skill by at least one; after the skill has been improved, they may make use of metahuman materials freely.

Using metahuman materials presents a slight, but noticable, taint in any magical working that uses them, detectable by anyone who uses the Psychometry metamagic, though full magical analysis may be required to identify why any given focus, ritual material, or the like seems "off."

The Red Section
Written on red paper with black ink, the second third of the book is much more macabre. Recipes and formulae dot the page in occult script, interrupted regularly with supporting diagrams of a most unwholesome nature: bits and pieces of human flesh and bone arranged in mocking parody of innocuous tools and objects, strange geometrical designs with weirdling and familiar runes forming mystic circles...more disturbing still are the apparently harmless, seemingly unrelated diagrams of common objects, free of any bit of corpse or arcane design. For why would they be in this section, if they were truly not connected in some way with the hellish materials within.

[ Spoiler ]

This section contains the means to incorporate certain metahuman materials as exotic materials in the creation of foci; specifically the properly prepared (read: refined and/or radical) materials of dead metahumans. The proper procedures for searching for such materials in conjunction with grave-robbing and other such activities is included. A magician who wishes to may read this section, and incorporate such knowledge into their own tradition, following the same method as the White section (knowledge of the White section is contingent on, and required, to gain knowledge of this section.)

In addition, the formulae for several foci are included, although given the archaic nature of the text the exact term is never used, rather they are called "a magician's tools," "charms," or "enchantments."

Among them:
The Sword A weapon focus: 8 in the shape of a slim, silver sword (suitable for a sword cane), with a brief Latin inscription. In the hilt must be included a reliquary, containing the properly prepared bone of a saint (in this case, the actual bone of a Catholic or local saint, prepared as a refined metahuman material component.)

The Tongue The tongue of a Tibetan, bitten out after their death following the proper ceremonies, and prepared by this formula, becomes a power focus: 8.

The Hand of Glory The hand of a hanged man, prepared into a most unwholesome and disturbing candelabra. It becomes a stacked Sustaining Focus (Mob Mind): 4/Reusable Anchoring Focus (Shattershield): 4 Focus.

The Corpse Servant A Homonunclus Focus: 8 crafted from at least six different corpses.

The Black Section
The third section is written on black paper with an ink that glows white only in the dark, so that the reader sees letters of cold fire form before them, a baleful pale phosphoresence. No diagrams mark this section, no unwholsome pictures dot the pages. The matter of the text is darksome enough, more disturbing for the lack of pictures...as though in this final, blashemous chapter even the author became reticient to put down the full scope of his ebon studies.

[ Spoiler ]

This final chapter describes a number of places of power aspected favorably toward such magics are contained in this book: mass graveyards in Europe and the Americas, certain ancient and sephulcres in Egypt, the Middle East, and South America, the ossuaries and catecombs of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Rome. Geomancers who read this section will discover the vile author describing how a magician might forge their own such unwholesome place, by rites of blood, murder, and desecration, on certain nights in the proper places. Any geomancer who has incorporated the lessons of the White and Red sections may repeat the procedure with the Black section, and learn how to create a proper fane or sanctum sanctorum.

Such a location would be a power site of 3, aspected toward enchanting using metahuman components and the magician who created it, and against all other magical operations, and requires at least a year of rituals (8 hours per day) and at least six sacrifices of bound and helpless or willing metahumans.

The section also contains a horribly perverse unique enchantment known as the "Cage of Bone." Wherin a living metahuman (even the magician themselves) is flayed open, and certain runes (the True Name of a free spirit, along with certain binding spells) are inscribed on the living bones of their ribs or skull (requiring a Biotech(6) test, an Enchanting (6) test and Rune Lore (6) test; and dealing a Deadly wound to the suject, who may resist the damage normally, but who must also test for magic loss normally.)

The "Cage of Bone" is a stacked Free Spirit Focus: 6 (useable only for the Free Spirit whose True Name is incorporated into the formula)/Unique Enchantment. To complete the ceremony as described in the book, the magician summons the Free Spirit, which is bound within the unqiue enchantment of the "Cage of Bone." The magician may then command the spirit to aid him with any of it's powers, up to and inclduing Channeling or Possessing (the nature of the Unique Focus is such that even if the spirit somehow later goes free, or is disrupted, it returns to the Cage of Bone. Even if the bearer of the enchantment dies.)

On the inside back cover, a different hand, using a bit of heated wire or some similiar implement, has burned the formulae for the Corps Cadavre: 6 spell, as used in the Petro Voudoun tradition.

[Aes]

Nasty stuff all around. Why is it that all books that deal on stuff related to necromancy must be bound in human flesh? ;)

I predict a sharp increase in the graverobbing of saintly tombs in the near future.

Oh, and here's hoping our GM doesn't read this thread and gets any ideas.

[Mr Cjelli]

Woah, creepy.

[ Spoiler ]

But how does an aging, marginal power come up with such dark, potent arts? I wonder who the author really was, or what his original sources were.

[Demonseed Elite]

This is excellent.

[Tanka]

AH, as always, I bow to you.

[Ancient History]

Heh heh heh. Thankee, all.

[hermit]

This is awesome. Great work, AH! Will you put this up onto your home page, too?

[DocMortand]

Wow. Disturbing and yet intriguing...so the Nethermancer makes an appearance from Earthdawn into Shadowrun!

Of course, it could be influenced from a Horror...

[audun]

Cool.

Something for the long awaited Boo Scary Book of Shadowrun (which indeed may never see the light).

[Ancient History]

Ah, well. Not something for the site, no. Just one of many such works I've written up for this that or the other reason...they don't really go at all well with my site material. I've taken my liberties with it, for one thing, and not fleshed out the foci formulae as I might have. Imagine requiring a bit of wizard's blood, or the skull of a sorceror for the unique enchantment.

Better yet, imagine the author of the book performed the Cage of Bones ritual on himself, and some darksome spirit is trapped within the yellowed bones of his rib cage or the mouldering, worm-eaten hollows of his skull. Trapped within a decayed form, unable to move...sending out silent calls to receptive minds, the queer and pitifully impressionable mourner, the dense but greedy gravedigger, the obstinate but desperate caretaker, even the strange and poetic teenager striving for thanatopsis.

Imagine the crumbled bones unearthed, the graveyard denizens whisked to some dank cellar or workshop. The torturously slow lessons on how to preserve the remainder of the corpse, to gather and prepare the sacrements required animate it, from the fetid corpses of animals and then people slain.

Ah, but even all prepared, the Master requires a true magician...skilled a talismonger the first foul disciple may be, another must be gained. Not one too powerful, not one too skilled or learned or wise or willful. A student. Mayhap even one who does not yet know they possess the Talent. That first one, now mad, oh yes, truly mad, will find such a one and seduce them, by knowledge or the pleasures of the flesh...or even by a common interests, a morbid fascination with the grounds, an appreciation for the atmosphere of the statuesque tombs and sepulchres that dot the cemetary, indeed. A darkling soul.

More nights of instruction, the slow revelation, the muted whisper of the rune-carved skull as the young magician, despite nightmares and some sublime but repressed loathing of self and ghoulish task and idiot assistant prepares the body, and with new-found skill enchants it.

It is enough. Perhaps, with a glimmering of the Sight, the young magician glimpses a fragment of smoky, oily tendril curl from the baleful skull. Sees glittering threads like black ice bind bone and withered sinew, until the dark spirit, not free, not free from its confinement, no, but now possessed of movement, mobility...and perhaps, just perhaps, with tomb dust and tomb rot and dried, dessicated burrowers fall from their hidden homes in joint and hollow, the desperate, desperate need to feed...

[toturi]

"The Dark Side is the path to powers that many consider unnatural."
"Is it possible for me to learn these powers?"
"Not from a Jedi. But you can learn them from Ancient History."

Ancient History is the Emperor!

[DocMortand]

Heh...my soul couldn't be in better hands.

*cackles evilly*

[Fortune]

Very thought-provoking, as usual. Good job Ancient History. Once again I will reiterate my wish that I could play in your game.

[Ancient History]

Fortune, I wish I had a game so you could play in it.

[Pthgar]

Gosh dangit! I just ran a game with the Al Azif last month. I could have really used this then.

[Mortax]

:eek: ........
:eek: ........

Wow. (gets on hands and knees and bows.)

I love this. My players are so going to hate me.

[Tanka]

[Lindt]

Remember kiddies, October is only7 months away.

The last one is the REAL kicker. Binding a free spirit to your own bones. *shiver*

[Ancient History]

For those interested in influences, check out the short stories of Manly Wade Wellman and J. Gregory Keyes.

[Mortax]

"The serpent and the rainbow" would also be good. Espessually if you tie it into vooden. (shivers) god that movie is creepy.

[SykoBear]

Question AH.

Is this material intended for use by ALL awakened, or only those with the Sacrificing Metamagic aka Blood Mages? I can see valid arguments from both ends, so I'd like to get a take from the maestro himself/herself/themselves.

Damn, getting the gender of all them monkeys accurate is tough.

[Ancient History]

All magicians. Why should blood mages get all the fun?

For a more serious answer, all magicians because the enchanter or talismonger in question is not drawing off the life energy of the metahuman subject per se, but rather the innate energies within the flesh, and the act of collecting it. Now, there might be some sympathetic energy generated from using this type of arcana, but I wouldn't describe it as drawing on the fled life energy. So, no direct connection to blood magic, open to all!

[Mortax]

...... oh, that makes it even more horrifying.

[Ancient History]

Really? And here I thought the mispellings did that.

[Aes]

Mmmm... Toxic cage of bone