Books And Spells

Playing a wizard in the ‘20s is not quite like playing a wizard in a fantasy setting. You get like, two spells, and they’re both gamechangers that will zap your mind instantly if you get them wrong.

There are plenty of wizards kicking around. Look at W. Somerset Maugham’s The Magician or M. R. James’ Casting The Runes (adapted for film in 1957 as Night Of The Demon) to see what they’re like. “Occultist” might be a better term.

The black magician knows just enough to be dangerous. He wants to impress. He’s insecure. A shallow man with a strong sense of his own importance and a nagging awareness that he doesn’t know half as much as he could. Great power used for petty means.

This could be you.

To learn a spell you need a book. Take a month off to study it, then make an Academic roll. (It’s okay and probably good if months of in-game time pass between sessions.) Pass the roll to learn a random spell from the book’s list.

Then make a hard Sanity roll to see if you gain a permanent Disfigurement. This is probably a mental illness. Egomania and paranoia are good. Depending on the spell it could blacken your eyeballs, pockmark your skin or turn your smallest finger into a worm.

Whenever you cast a spell you make another Sanity roll. Lose a Sanity point if you fail. the spell succeeds no matter what - you’re just rolling to see if casting it makes you slightly more insane. Two or three Sanity rolls might be required for a particularly evil spell.

(To recap the rules - you get three Sanity points per session. You gain a Disfigurement if you finish the session with only one. You die or go permanently mad at zero. Roll a d6 for each Sanity point you have and get at least one 6 to pass.)

Here are some books. The name by which you know them is not always a good translation. Remember that if you can learn a spell, so can an NPC.

The Book of Nun. A collection of Egyptian funerary inscriptions from the thirteenth century BC. Found at only three sites - a hidden chamber of the Osireion at Abydos, a vandalised tomb in the Valley of the Kings and (this is disputed) a sandstone cave on the Central Coast of New South Wales.

Contains advice for the recently dead on how to navigate the watery caves of the underworld and plead one’s case before the Ogdoad, the eight frog-headed gods of primal chaos. Careful study reveals a few rituals of use to the living.

• Speak With Dead. Get a corpse, so recently deceased that the soul still lingers in the vicinity. Anoint its forehead with sweet oil. The soul is drawn back in for a few moments, to creak out a few parting words, though it’s already forgetting how eyes and lips work. It has more questions for you than you do for it.

• Black Tongue. Add two dice to all Charisma rolls and speak any language on Earth, though the voice is not your own and you might not understand what you’re saying. Can be used on someone else. Lasts for the space of one conversation. Tongue blackening wears off in a few days.

• Cavern Slave. Animates a shabti figurine to perform an unpleasant task in your place. The shabti resents this and will constantly try to misinterpret or wriggle out of your commands. Stupid and cunning as your average peasant. Responds better to violence than to reason. Can be commanded “die for me” and forced to absorb a curse or magical judgement in your place.

The Necatrix. A compilation of secrets by the Andalusian astronomer Fátima de Madrid. Written in part as a reply to al-Ghazali’s Destruction Of The Philosophers. Refutes all doctrines. Famous for its proof, using pure reason alone, that nothing can or could possibly ever exist.

Known only through footnotes in the work of Renaissance hermeticists, spurious references from dodgy encyclopaedias, and a few back articles from 19th-century periodicals that speak of it as if it were a commonplace. Studying the book entails reading all those. A complete manuscript of the original text would be worth a fortune.

• Speak With Stars. Requires al-Khwarizmi’s star tables and a small glass globe (or ham radio equipment). Lets you pick up transmissions from the other planets of the solar system. Brain molluscs of Mars (descended from Q-men) endlessly discuss Earth invasion plans, but will never do it. Serpent Men in Saturn’s orbit swap mind control tips.

• Escape Time. Requires a labyrinth of mirrors. Allows one willing subject to flee the illusion of history, undoing 90% of her deeds and deleting most evidence of her existence. She’s remembered only as an apocryphal figure. It’s possible she can still act from beyond the veil - how would you know?

• Invisible Tiger. Makes a tiger invisible. Only works on tigers. Does not alter the behaviour of the tiger, except insofar as it can get away with more stuff now it’s invisible. Tigers are pretty smart. Effect is permanent but can be dispelled at the caster’s will. Can be cast from a distance. Easy to use.

The Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres. Tale of twin brothers who sold their souls to the demon Belial, became court warlocks to Ramses II and fought Moses in a magical duel, as depicted in the Book of Exodus. Written by one of Pharaoh’s scribes. Text known only from Abyssinian manuscript, written in Ge’ez, found in a rock-hewn church at Lalibela.

• Speak With Serpents. Bang a staff of almond wood against a rock to summon all serpents in the vicinity. They will listen respectfully to your point of view. They trade information for mice and will attack your enemies if you can pay in gold. You’re allowed to bring your own serpents. Does not work on Serpent Men.

• Water To Blood. A single drop of your own blood transforms all water it comes in contact with into more of your blood, which has the same property. 1 Sanity check for a tub, two for a pond, three for a river. You could convert the world’s oceans to blood if you were an exceptionally stable person.

• Enter Heaven. Creates a talisman that allows an evil person to enter Heaven, as long as they’re clutching it when they die. This deeply pisses off angels and they will come looking for the guy who made it. Worth a fortune if you can prove that it works. If the bad guy drops the talisman while partying in the afterlife, Metatron kicks him out.

White Forest Sutra. Dictated in a single breath by the enlightened master Yeshe Tsogyal at the moment of her death. Twenty-eight chapters long. Copy found among the Dunhuang manuscripts by Aurel Stein. Best known in the West as the Tibetan Book Of Life, from a badly translated and deeply abridged version published by the Theosophical Society.

Only studying the original text will get you anywhere. Trying to master the subtleties of rainbow dream yoga, using only the techniques described in the Western version, is a great way to deform your spiritual body and turn yourself into an astral hunchback. Nobody wants that.

• Prismatic Spray. Requires a crystal. Projects a cone of multicoloured light. Victims are randomly 1. blinded 2. enraged 3. sedated 4. enlarged 5. shrunk 6. body-swapped with the nearest other 6 or unaffected human. Works on animals as well. Wears off in 1d6 hours.

• Inner Heat. Attain complete control over your own body temperature. Walk comfortably in snowstorms. Make your skin hot enough to burn people who grab you. Fry eggs on your palms. Split atoms in your gut and live without oxygen or sustenance - but try not to explode. Roll Sanity per ten minutes of concentration.

• Enter Dreams. Find a quiet place to lead your party in a guided meditation session. Bring them on a journey across the oneiric dimensions - inhabited by whales, gugs, the Spiders of Leng and the shattered remnants of Vaalbara’s stromatolithic mind. You can get into other people’s dreams and Inception them, but it takes a session or two of high-fantasy adventuring.

Mantua Codex. Almost burnt by soldiers at the fall of Nojpetén, 1697. Rescued from the flames at the last moment by a meddlesome Catholic priest - disappointing the natives, who’d gleefully handed it over. Sent back to Europe by the governor as tribute to the Holy Roman Emperor.

Intercepted by pirates en route. May have played a role in the career of Edward Teach. Rediscovered in the 1860s in the collection of an Italian aristocrat, which was auctioned off by the government after his execution. Of the ten people kept in the “giant’s cage” beneath his house, two survived.

Describes the worship of the Spider Hole God, an entity recognised nowhere else in the literature. In one monthly ritual, war captives are handed agave thorns and told that the man with the most holes in his penis can go free. Other ceremonies can be repurposed by the modern practitioner of occult science, to great effect.

• Conjure Flame. Summons a fire vampire, a bouncing ball of fanged flame from the outer corona of the star Fomalhaut. Ricochets around the room, squeaking and gibbering, setting fire to everything it touches. Battens leechlike onto living things, searing spherical holes into their flesh. A Sanity roll can focus its attention for like, five seconds.

• Hungry Bloom. Makes plants grow at twenty times their normal rate. Sprouting overnight into impenetrable thickets, hung with bruise-coloured flowers, coiling tendrils and needle-sharp thorns that seek flesh. Tiny circular mouths in the stems. Bite into the fruits and they’ll bite back.

• Slime Twin. Creates an exact duplicate of the caster, who has her skills, memories and motives, but is not under her control. The duplicate melts into slime over the course of 24 hours, unless she kills the original caster first. Copies can’t be used as replacement PCs. 50% chance when cast that the player is now playing the duplicate - do not warn them of this.