Tuesday Magic Item – Book of Withered Souls

“Funny how the duke just took sick,” said Voddick, slicing onions for the stew.

“And so soon after his brother’s death too,” said Gollaon peeling carrots.

“A tragedy for the family it is,” agreed the old cook, unconsciously patting her book of recipes in her apron pocket.

The Book of Withered Souls

The origins of this most sinister tome are much debated but it seems to be an artifact of the darkness within people rather than from some outside power.  The book itself is surprisingly nondescript, looking more like an overstuffed recipe book, which to some extent it is, perhaps formerly owned by the cook employed by a merchant or petty nobility.  The recipes within are a bit strange but they do product tasty food.  It is when someone with ill-thoughts looks through it, they will find . . . other recipes those for curses.

As a cookbook, it provides a +2 competence bonus to craft (cooking) or profession (chief) checks.  But once the true nature of the book has been revealed to someone, they cannot escape that knowledge that it has the key to solve all their troubles.  The book will communicate to them, through dreams, visions or even whispered words, what curses they can use and how they help the person achieve their goals

With the book, they can cast any curse equal to their level or lower, if they can already cast spells, they have access to all curses and can spontaneously cast them treating their caster level as if were higher by the level of the spell.  However, each time the book is used to cast a curse, the person who does so suffers a negative level but these negative levels only apply when the person attempts to act against the book (say, in an attempt to destroy it) or when they equal or exceed the person’s level, at which point they sicken and die within a day and their soul (what is left of it) is consumed by the book.

The book can only be destroyed by someone who has both been a victim and caster of the curses within and even then, only with great effort.

This is a minor artifact
Slot none; CL 17th; Weight 1 lb.; Aura strong necrourgy (only detectable when it is being used)

Notes:  Entirely built around the name which came from a discussion with my wife.  There are several interesting curse spells in earlier entries here as well.

Photo by alexanderward12 and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.