What would you name an occult book and what neat things would you do with it?
I'm building a setting where a collector picks up a book and it leads to all sorts of terrible adventures in body horror. In general, the book in my setting is a gateway; you write something in it, and it manifests in real life, with the cliched "monkey's paw"-style draw backs. Any help at all would be fantastic, I really don't want to call it the Necronomicon, but it's the only name I can think of.
Other urls found in this thread:
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
tvtropes.org
youtube.com
brasscockroach.com
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
Oh, and I guess I'll just post random images from my monsters folder until I get some replies.
...
...
...
>Paranormal phisology and metaphysics
With such a boring sounding name many would over look the book that had to be self published after De'oura Publishing suddenly shut down after the first printing of the book.
The text inside is very lengthy and descriptive of various phenomenon and the various rituals and forumale needed to achive some of these effects .
With the prevelence of the internet many PDF copies have begun to circulate although many of the pages and wordings have been altered in the process and many more individualized versions have begun to appear as well.
In certain circles the original hard bound edition is considered priceless.
Lament configuration.
The Diary of Ebon (hurhur)
A book where a great wizard wrote down his travels as he journeyed across countless worlds and planes. The locations he visited and the things he saw were so fantastical, so magical, and so grand that the words simply describing these events in the diary have become magic. Thus a simple diary has become an incredibly powerful tome of spells.
...
The book: Welten der endlosen Wunder (Worlds of Endless Wonder)
The Author: Johannes Quader (a small time noble whose only known accomplishment was writing this book before fading into the annals o time)
What the book does: the book itself details strange worlds that seem to elicit both joy and apprehension (think fae and the image provided). After reading the book images of what the character read shall infest their dreams. At first this is much like any other dream where images of what transpired fade as the reader lives their waking life but over time the images of the worlds become easier to remember and eventually the reader will find themselves constantly thinking of these places cataloged by the tome. Not sure where to go from here but I am stuck between the reader finds themselves transported bodily to one of these worlds or they appear to enter a coma while their consciousness wanders the alien locales.
Maybe have a few rituals that involve personal (or other types) of bodily sacrafice in the back that allow one to make contact with denizens of these other realms?
The journal of many things.
>I really don't want to call it the Necronomicon, but it's the only name I can think of.
>en.wikipedia.org
Do research m9
The King in Yellow.
That's a pretty dope list
Not bad, not bad user. I think I could work with that as a concept and use it as a container for various plots and sub-plots that the PC's interact with.
So far, all I have is that a dude buys a book from a shady dealer in the pursuit of absolute truth. He actually acquires this book second hand after his buddy, Richard, dies in a horrible accident involving the same book.
When you write a question in the book, you get an answer, but the answer itself actually manifests in real life. Richard pulled the ol' Hellraiser, wanting to have the ultimate sensual experience, and as a result gets splattered all over the walls of some strangers basement, thus becoming inseparable from his "true loves" in the ultimate sensual experience.
Now, what I want to do with this particular chapter is to resurrect Richard, From Beyond-style, and have him be the NPC quest giver that gets progressively more horrible as the players delve deeper and deeper into madness. The as-of-yet unnamed NPC who currently has the book is sort of like the frame narrative for the story, and as the players traverse his hellish dreamscape, they slowly uncover clues about his identity, eventually realizing he's become "the dreamer" and all existence is a figment of his twisted imagination.
But that's not all, I want the PC's to break the threshold and eventually enter the real world, so I can pull a mundane horror sort of deal with the whole concept, where they lose their fantastic "dream powers" and have to interact with a wholly alien presence totally disarmed in a conventional, yet twisted, setting.
That is a fantastic title user, well done.
Oh shit, I didn't even realize lovecraft had so many fictional books. Ironically enough, I own the complete lovecraft, and I probably should read it more thoroughly.
> the book in my setting is a gateway; you write something in it, and it manifests in real life
How about the opposite? A book where anything you write in it becomes impossibly untrue. Write about how the sky is blue and the sky can no longer be blue and the physics of the world change so it could never have ever been or once again become blue.
Because of this quality reading the book also would induce insanity because its full of impossible lies written by previous authors.
>Secreta Profundi Reliquiarum
(big book o' secrets)
>Pandora's Box type situation, book is seemingly omniscient, can only be read by someone who devotes their life-force/whatever to it, will continually drain their life force/health unless offerings are made
>Provides extreme and unbalanced insight into whatever situation the character is in, but draws additional enemies, NPCs will sense an evil presence and distrust its owner.
>Eventually the book leads character to secret chamber/dungeon and it is revealed that it's some sort of BBEG being that must be destroyed, and upon defeating it, some of its knowledge/insight can be acclimated using the book as a Libram type item that provides a passive benefit to Insight/Religion/Perception etc etc
That's a very interesting concept, but how would you flesh it out? Are the authors aware that their concepts are lies, yet they have to suffer through the false-reality they've created? Seems like it could work, but I don't really know what sort of cool tricks you can pull without rewriting physics into an incomprehensible mess out of spite.
>They were the black, forbidden things which most sane people have never even heard of, or have heard of only in furtive, timorous whispers; the banned and dreaded repositories of equivocal secrets and immemorial formulae which have trickled down the stream of time from the days of man’s youth, and the dim, fabulous days before man was. He had himself read many of them—a Latin version of the abhorred Necronomicon, the sinister Liber Ivonis, the infamous Cultes des Goules of Comte d’Erlette, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn’s hellish De Vermis Mysteriis. But there were others he had known merely by reputation or not at all—the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Book of Dzyan, and a crumbling volume in wholly unidentifiable characters yet with certain symbols and diagrams shudderingly recognisable to the occult student.
There's a couple in there.
Something like SCP-140 could be an interesting occult book.
>SCP-140
The only SCP's I remember are the immortal crocodile that bathes in acid and the super sharp ball of hooks that can cut through anything. Also, perpetual rape-child, but I think it's been edited to oblivion and back.
Not books, but I like the style of these terror stories. It could serve as inspiration for what happens afterwards.
What am I looking at? I mean, I could google it, but I'm interested in your opinion.
This follows a slightly different direction, but historically the comprehensive manual on Witch Hunting was a book called the Malleus Maleficarum (or Hexenhammer in the original German), meaning "Hammer of Witches", that was used to identify and punish "witches".
Eldritch curses, doom, and creepy imagery in general.
Not that user but you are that manga tells a short story of mysterious body shaped holes appearing on the side of a mountain post-earthquake. Some people claim they feel drawn to these holes and that they belong in them. There is potentially some ancient ancestral component to this and the ending leaves one wondering a great many questions about the holes and the people who enter them.
>Hexenhammer
That sounds delightfully metal.
There's actually a couple of metal albums that take their name from it.
Junji Ito is a Japanese horror writer/artist, makes some really creepy manga. His focus is not on scaring you, but on unnerving you with wrongness. In the case of The Enigma of Amigara Fault, it's a story about an earthquake that reveals a number of holes in a cliff shaped like human silhouettes. Nothing inherently scary there, right? Kind of weird, but not frightening. He makes them disturbing, all the same. People find themselves drawn to the holes and compelled to enter the ones that comply to their outline. "This is my hole, it was made for me!". And then they shuffle into the mountain, unable to turn around, just always moving forward as the shape of the holes warps and distorts into something inhuman, their bodies squeezed to fit. The final scene of the story is a group of geologists who've found the other side of the holes, and take a look down them. "Something is coming this way, slowly."
SCP-140 was the book that if you pour ink or blood into it, then history gets rewritten so that this evil empire that practiced witchcraft and cannibalism survives for longer. If you poured enough blood or ink into it, then the empire would survive into the current day, and be guaranteed to survive for as long as the book said they would.
For the sake of simplicity I'd say the authors can tell when something has changed but nobody else does (maybe expand that to anyone that has touched or seen the book) but the early authors were unaware of the book's nature.
Maybe have it be a diary making the early parts of the book especially dangerous to read because they're unmaking huge swaths of what was once reality.
I would shy away from trying "cool tricks" since the thing is basically a "butterfly effect" generator. Trying to use it to get rid of some jerk causing you trouble may accidentally cause the extinction of mankind if you don't word things correctly.
I would use it as an end game prop. A thing that some organization has locked up to the good of the universe that some lunatic or fool is trying to get to play god
That sounds surprisingly awesome, I'll probably have to read it. Thanks, in return, I guess I have Bokurano.
There are two things about that manga I particularly enjoy; the idea that children need to sacrifice themselves to satisfy a multiversal battle-royal, and existential mutiversal mecha destruction. In case you haven't heard of it, a group of kids get selected to fight in a giant mech suit for their lives. If they lose, the world they live in is destroyed, and there are a series of fights they have to go through to survive. Of course, the children are terrible at it because they're children, and need to sacrifice themselves in the end, so the manga was all about how they interpreted the existential crisis. Alternatively, Blassrieter is about "what if people are infected with a virus that turns them into mechs, and how do we be as depressing as possible?"
Jesus christ, that made me uncomfortable just to read it. Does he have a lot of work I can read? Any decent translations?
I like you. We should hang out
DRR DRR DRR
user, you've given me the best idea I've ever had: after you write in the book, you become aware of the true nature of reality, as altered by anyone who has ever encountered the book. You write that the sky's green, the sky is green for literally everyone else in the world, but you suddenly become aware of everything that everyone else has written, like what we think beef tastes like is actually the taste of human, or that things were meant to fall up. I bet that could be pretty cool, even as a bit of fluff for the setting.
Any time buddy, I have remarkably few friends, and a surprising amount of free time that's usually spent on Veeky Forums.
made me think of youtube.com
But in all seriousness thats creepy as fuck
The Terracotta Bible.
It's an ancient holy book for a long dead religion. After the priests were massacred and ritualistically sacrificed to their "devil", out of spite by a neighbour tribe, it became a conduit for the paranormal. Spells inside are varied and powerful, but the most revered was the "Quatta Ma'dib", which is used to control someone else's mind. Now, in return, that person's memories slowly become entangled with your own until you become functionally aware of exactly how the other person felt to be mind-raped by you, but the entire process takes a couple of months, so you can do horrible things with the other person's body, only to suffer the consequences months later.
brasscockroach.com
There you go user.
user, you just made my day. I know exactly what I'm doing tomorrow while I get day drunk.
was waiting for someone to post that.
>brasscockroach.com
That was terrifying. Holy fuck on toast.
...
Thanks bro, I totally wasn't needing to sleep ever again.
Still doesn't answer the question of how cavemen dug the holes.
I did not need to see that last image. No sir. Nope.
Here a couple idea for names for your book
>The Rim of Desire
> An Unsought Passport
>Sepia Hymnals Vol. XII
> Memoirs of a Dead Djinn
>Book of the Smoke
>Hunger Extrapolated
>A Fool's Want
Just some I pulled out of my ass. I can't Latin to save my life.
Not to mention what the questions of what crime led to such punishment, why exactly do people feel drawn to these holes, and are the punished still alive at the end.
Honestly the world presented in The Enigma of Amigara Fault seems like one that would be great for a horror campaign.
How old is the book meant to? for stuff from, printing press to early 20th century I'm always partial to archaic author names and that sort of mix of scientifically descriptive and flowery prose that physics books and sociology/psychology essays went for at the time.
stuff like "maslows hierarchy of needs" and "Darwin's On the origin of species"
if it's mostly body horror stuff you want
call it something like " On the Aplied dis-morphia of man and other Arcana uses." or
"transmutation Biologica and other foul necessities"
mundane names that have people who know something about it react in very un-mundane ways are always good for building atmosphere. Also having something odd about the book to give as a discription is good, but like, mundanely odd, not scary evil odd. like the ink is blue or it smells faintly of damsons. If it's just known as something like " Calahan's book" or "the book with the green print" or "the scented text" but everyone who they speaks to responds as if they just asked for something like Azathoths diary or the big eldritch book of soul fucking, it has more weight.
uzumaki is another good one to read. Its a little longer