Books And Spells 4

Last set of books and spells for becoming a wizard with. First post here, second post here, third post here.

Stanzas Of Dzyan. Describes the formation of the universe. Recovered by Ulugh Beg’s astronomers from a Graeco-Bactrian tomb in the lost city of Ai-Khanoum, on the banks of the Amu Darya, around 1437. Used by Ulugh to construct an early crystal radio, able to receive transmissions from Saturn’s moons.

Thought to originate from the Great Library of Celaeno, in the Pleiades, and to have inspired the Hymn of Creation from the tenth mandala of the Rigveda. Studied by Helena Blavatsky in a Ladakh monastery in 1856. Written in Senzar glyphs. Text is highly magnetic - attracts iron filings, deflects bullets, can affect radio waves.

• Gamma Ray. Projects a green laser from the palm of the hand that can inflict radiation sickness on a living subject. Trees lose their leaves. Animals vomit, grow dizzy, suffer burns, lose their skin and hair. Prolonged exposure causes cancer and unpredictable mutations. Works through walls.

• Speak With Trees. Allows you to identify which trees have secret messages in Senzar written under their bark. First decide what to ask - the spell will guide you unerringly through the forest to your answer. No guarantee the tree will be nearby or accessible. Risks incurring the wrath of the vegetable kingdom.

• Bend Metal. Temporarily increases ductility of any metal object, letting you reshape it with your hands. No heat required. More Sanity checks needed for larger objects. Fine, detailed work still requires dexterity and craftsman’s tools. Less effective on harder metals - copper easier than steel.

De Ratio Vermis. Universal system of combinatorial logic. Precursor of 21st-century computer science. Formulated in 1308 by the Catalonian polymath Ramon Llull.

Supposedly derived from the teachings of the paladin Roland, who took shelter from Basque irregulars in a cave under the Cantabrian Mountains after the disastrous Battle of Roncevaux Pass in 778. Burned by Llull’s friends after his death. Copies were preserved by the Ifriqiya caliphs and the wonder-workers of old Carthage.

Discreetly referenced in the Mundus Subterraneus of Athanasius Kircher. Thought to have informed Kircher’s trip into the crater of Vesuvius in 1638. Manuscript found in Tlemcen in 1889 was the basis for Max and Alma Theon’s Cosmic Tradition, and their ill-fated Algerian desert expedition of 1908.

Describes in an appendix a fabulous “brass city”, deep in the Sahara, ruled by a mummified queen, inhabited by djinn and dancing automata whose every footstep is a calculation and whose rhythm is said to “please the worms”. Llull seems to believe this city is engaged in developing a rigorous mathematical proof of the existence of Heaven, though not of God.

• Speak With Worms. Hammer on the earth to call worms to the surface. The bigger the hammer, the bigger the worms. Worms have squeaky chorus voices, love gossip and can tell a lot about what’s happening on the surface from the taste of the soil. Especially useful for locating underground chambers.

• Flesh To Stone. Converts a living creature to a black granite statue - vaguely Egyptian-looking and difficult to break. Unwilling targets get a Dex saving throw. Transformation is slow and painful - can be arrested halfway through if the caster’s concentration lapses. Statues whisper at night.

• Stone To Flesh. Converts rock to meat. Greater amounts of rock demand more Sanity checks. Meat type derived from rock type - default is vaguely purple beef. Can be used to make statues into living creatures with functioning biology. They retain memories from when they were stone.

Unaussprechliche Kulte. Encyclopedia of cults. Published in Düsseldorf in 1839 by the German theology student Conrad von Junzt.

Borrows freely from Remy’s Daemonolatreiae, Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus and d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules. Some entries adapted by Junzt from half-remembered gypsy folktales, overhead in filthy Bavarian inns. Section on aristocratic “bone eaters” of Paris catacombs copied verbatim from Revolution-era propaganda pamphlets.

Result of six weeks’ frantic work. Rejected as a doctoral dissertation by the University of Berlin, on the grounds that large proportions of it were clearly fabricated from whole cloth. Junzt’s subsequent demise ruled a suicide by the medical examiner, on the grounds that his mutilated body was found in a locked room.

Describes, among other things, an octagonal Hungarian monolith venerated by the descendants of Attilla, and a race of flat-faced lisping toad-men said to interbreed with certain Scottish highland clans. Chapter on the Jews later repurposed by the Paris forger who constructed the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion.

• Preserve Memory. Gives the caster access to the memories stored in any brain they eat. Brains must be fresh, ideally still living. Memories experienced just as if they were the caster’s own. The confusion of identity this leads to can be mitigated through ancient Roman “memory palace” techniques.

• Despise. Smear grease on the target. He becomes a pariah - automatically despised by all other living creatures. Rejected by his family, driven out of shops, spat on in the street. At risk of being hung as a scapegoat for someone else’s crime. Passing a hard Connections roll or saving a child’s life breaks the curse.

• Speak With Toads. Works on all amphibians. Frogs are happy liars. Salamanders have the personalities of rabid dogs, slowed down 100x. Toads are enormously wise but reluctant to share - will give you quests to perform squalid, evil deeds. One in a hundred is a king with a poison-curing stone in his head.

Book Of Eibon. Diary of a Hyperborean wizard.

Provides formulas for the acquisition of earth-shattering occult power, leavened by sly marginal digs at Eibon’s persistent rival Morghi the Inquisitor. Transcribes genetic data from the tablets of Ubbo-Sathla, progenitor of eukaryotic life. Written in what’s now Greenland during the Eocene. Preserved on metal rods in ruined subglacial libraries. Rediscovered by the Dorset culture around 500 BC.

Influenced the Old Norse volva seers, and the Poetic Edda. Copied down by the 9th-century Finnish shaman king Väinämöinen, who spent his life trying to win the heart of Loviatar, blind priestess of Tsathoggua and Mother of the Nine Diseases. Used to create the Sampo, the atomic cornucopia, able to manufacture anything from zero-point energy, currently churning out salt on the floor of the White Sea.

Best modern translation made by Gaspard du Nord in 13th-century Auvergne. Most Latin versions are fake.

• Green Decay. Slowly corrupts flesh and makes the target rot into an unidentifiable, foul-smelling mass. Horrible to look at - anyone who sees it makes a Sanity check. Requires caster to familiarise themselves with the taste and texture of decay. Leaves bones intact and weirdly pristine.

• Animate Dead. Raises a corpse under the caster’s command. Corpse is obedient but stupid. Can’t talk. Misunderstands even simple instructions. Can protect itself against decay by eating living flesh. No limit to how many you can raise at once, but each requires its own Sanity check.

• Saturn Gate. Opens a wormhole to any point in time and space. Distance between entry and exit points must be at least 1 billion km and 1 billion years. Attracts curious aliens. Difficult to close. Universe can only hold four or five of them at a time. Eibon notes that humans can live on Noachian Mars.

Regnum Congo. Narrative of twelve years spent exploring the Congo. Transcribed by the Italian mathematician Filippo Pigafetta, on behalf of Pope Sixtus V, from an oral account given by the 16th-century Portuguese trader Duarte Lopez, who returned from Lisbon to Africa shortly after telling his story, and was never seen again.

Depicts slave raids, cannibals, pygmies, four-foot child-snatching chameleons, ivory traders, sharp-toothed Zappo Zap mercenaries wielding battle-axes, and the miraculous apparition of Saint James the Great at the court of Afonso I. Concludes with a voyage to the lost city Opar, founded by renegade Atlanteans, where women marry apes.

The East African coffee magnate Lord Greystoke, heir to the Jermyn fortune, is known for bringing libel suits against anyone who tries to publish an edition of the text. The original, unexpurgated version - describing a global conspiracy, run from Zermatt, Switzerland, to replace humanity with white ape hybrid children - is stored in the deepest Vatican archives, watched over by suspiciously simian Swiss Guards.

• Leopardise. Transforms caster into a leopard. Lasts as long as you like. Make a Sanity check every hour to keep your human intelligence and remember you can transform back. Leopards are fast, strong, hard to spot in foliage, easily able to kill any unarmed man. Prepare to deal with hunting parties.

• Vow Fetish. Lets any number of willing subjects bind themselves to a spoken promise by hammering nails into a wooden fetish doll. Evil nganga spirits inflict horrible pain, and eventual death, on promise breakers. Removing the nails or burning the doll will dispel the spirits and undo the commitment.

• Speak With Ants. Ants are instinctively obedient and will do as they’re told, as long as you use a sufficiently commanding tone of voice. One ant in a thousand is a skeptic and will question your authority - best to get the other ants to eat him alive. To govern a colony for any length of time you’ll need ant secret police.