Sometimes you want a book real bad. You
hunt it down: you leave your details with your bookseller; you pore through
sites on the Web; you visit second-hand bookshops in parts of the city you
never even knew existed. Finally you find it and you pay what seems like an
exorbitant fee for what is basically a scuzzy, old, used book. You take it home
and then there’s the big reveal – the last page is missing.
It’s well-known that particular issues of
Mythos books are more or less effective than their original sources, but wear
and tear on an individual copy may also compromise its effectiveness.
Individual copies of books go through much heavy-handling throughout their
lives. They get dropped, written in, torn, bent and splashed on. They get
burned. Occasionally, while being produced, things go horribly wrong: the print
registration slips; the text gets set up wrongly; the paper guillotine fails to
work properly. Finally, books get broken, disbound and re-bound. Myriad
accidents happen to books and sometimes the vital information – the identity of
the killer, the secret ingredient for the perfect soufflé, the final line of code for that critical computer program
– is missing. For extra-villainous Keepers, the following is a new mechanism
that can make the search for a Mythos tome more involved and interesting (and
also frustrating).
Whenever the party discovers some
verminous volume, have them make a Luck
Roll (possibly an averaged roll from the whole group): failure means that
any of the following may apply to that copy of the book. Roll d100 to see how
messed-up the book is:
%Roll: 1-10
Ruinous Result:
The Mythos tome was accidently set on
fire at one point and then hastily tossed into a container of water or a
convenient stream to extinguish the flames. Corners of pages in the middle of
the text block are scorched and unreadable, while the ink on other pages has
run and smeared to illegibility. In a more modern book, the burning is more
even and the pages stick together: peeling them apart renders them mostly
useless.
%Roll: 11-20
Ruinous Result:
Bookworm: these larvae have a particular
fondness for older books whose paper is made with a high degree of pulped
fabric rather than vegetable cellulose. These worms act like miniature drills,
riddling their mazey way through the text block until it looks like Swiss
cheese. A somewhat similar result pertains to the ministrations of termites. In
modern books – which generally have lower quality paper – it’s silverfish which
do the damage: they love the glue with which modern books are held together
and, once they’ve eaten all of that, they start on the paper...
%Roll: 21-30
Ruinous Result:
Misbound: this copy of the book has been
stitched together by careless bindery workers. The signatures are not in the
right order (making reading difficult), the same signatures have been repeated
over and over, or some of the signatures are blank.
%Roll: 31-40
Ruinous Result:
Rough Scholarship: Some researchers have
no love for books; just for the information that they contain. In the course of
using them, they tear out passages or whole pages with which they disagree,
scribble over pages with indelible marginal notes and paste, tape, or staple in
extra notes of their own devising. They also spill food and drink on the book
and frantically scrabble through it with hands covered in God alone knows what.
It’s amazing that the book has survived at all...
%Roll: 41-50
Ruinous Result:
All of the plates, maps and diagrams
contained within the work have been sliced out with a razor, in order to be
framed, sold, or kept close for reference in the field.
%Roll: 51-60
Ruinous Result:
The spine of the binding has split and
the cords and stitching have begun to unravel: pages are beginning to come free
and some have obviously already been lost (in more modern books, the glue
holding the pages to the wrapper has dried and is cracking away, with the same
effect). Unless some method of containing what’s left is devised (a bag, or
box), every time the party hastily relocates the work, 1d4 more leaves will
have vanished.
%Roll: 61-70
Ruinous Result:
Binder’s Proof: quite often the binder
will ‘mock up’ a version of the finished volume, using a stack of blank paper
as the text block, to demonstrate to the buyer what the final result will look
like. Usually the proof will be broken back down to be re-used, but
occasionally, it is given to the purchaser as an extra gift. In effect this is
an exact double of the book but with no content whatsoever.
%Roll: 71-80
Ruinous Result:
Dessication: papyrus, parchment and all
qualities of paper dislike being in extremely cold, extremely dry environments
for long durations. When found, this volume starts to crumble into tiny flakes
of useless matter at the first breath of air...
%Roll: 81-90
Ruinous Result:
Leather Rot:-poorly prepared leather
sometimes begins to disintegrate, flaking away into a red powdery mess. This is
easily remedied by re-binding, but the powdered leather gets on everything, including
the pages, usually from the hands of the reader: the results are bright-red,
greasy stains that ineradicably obscure the text. In modern books, the same
result is gained from mould, which ruins printing by gluing pages together and
blanking out words with greenish-black fungal blooms.
%Roll: 91-00
Ruinous Result:
The binding, labels, spine and endpapers
are from the desired Mythos tome; unfortunately, the contents have been
replaced by some far more innocuous work. With a more modern volume, it may be
just the dustjacket which has been switched with another book of the same size.
On
a critically-failed Luck Roll, roll twice (ignoring results which would make
no sense).
To reflect the dangers presented by the
damaged book, reduce the Cthulhu Mythos
Knowledge score by 1d10 (or more) points; alternatively, spells from this
source are only discernible by rolling LUCKx1 for each listed spell.
