Thoughts Regarding Infamous Mouldering Grimoires Containing Lost Sorcerous Knowledge...

An idea I've been kicking around for a while (and which is relevant to "Making Magic Items Unique(r)") is one ripped off from Call of Cthulhu.

What if, instead of finding the spellbooks of individual wizards, adventurer's came across editions of (in)famous magical tomes? When the party slays the Black Enchanter of Bracken Glade, instead of finding a spellbook with 3 1st-level spell, 3 2nd-level spells and a third level spell they find a copy of "Hingarian's translation of The Puissant Jade Formulaes of Yling" or "A rare unexpurgated printing of The Seven Inscriptions from the Eldest Pit."

In a mileau with a long history of printing presses perhaps magic-user's don't have their own personal spellbooks, instead purchasing grimoires for the contained spells. Instead consulting a battered volume filled with the wizard's own notes and incantations the spellcaster chooses a book from their library.

Another use for this motif would be a way of distributing "non-Players Handbook"(or equivalent) spells, such as DM creations or "third party" spells such as those from Eldritch Weirdness, Ancient Vaults and Eldritch Secrets, Carcosa, or Beyond the Black Gate, into the gameworld. Ordinary spellbooks contain the everyday hoo-hum spells such as magic missile and fly, but if you want to learn "The Trifold Accursed Seeking of Ibnagiskang" you need to find a copy of "Cthonimonicon."

And with different translations and editions you can further complicate this matter. "Damn it, this is the abridged second edition of the Graven Plates of Yigslov that doesn't contain Freyadhin's Ultimate Transformation! It's useless to me you fools!"

I've started working on tables to randomly generate genre-appropriate tomes, grimoires, tablets and scrolls for treasure purposes, but perhaps I should instead (or as well) create a list of iconic famous volumes of spells? One think I really like about the treasure tables in Empire of the Petal Throne was the list of named crazy books/scrolls that you could roll up, although they did not contain "ordinary d&d spells."

One of the emergent effect I could see occurring with this system would be something along the lines of the players seeing a NPC spellcaster casting a rare spells and react along the lines of "He must have a copy of The Luminous Celestial Inscriptions!"

As a completely unrelated aside (aside from this blog occasionally being about music and metal music), I can't stop listening to the new Blasphemophagher LP "For Chaos, Obscurity and Desolation." Furious radioactive swarming assaults that bring to mind the masters of old Beherit and Sarcofago. Dig that pestilent apocalyptic artwork: Cthulhu-insect in a coal-scuttle helmet!