What would you do with a spell book / Horcrux?

[WhiteLily]

I liked the Horcrux concept from Harry Potter whereby an evil mage could portion a part of their soul into an object to allow themselves to return from the dead.

I was thinking, what if you slay the evil wizard, only to find their spell book / diary also serves as a repository for a piece of their soul?

If it starts to exert metal influence to make the party wizard more like the slain BBEG, but gives access to a ton of magic spells, would you keep it?

[ericthered]

ooh, that's great drama.

As a player, I'd start researching and brainstorming ways to have my cake and eat it too. Can we periodically cleanse the party wizard of evil influence? can we mind control the evil book's soul? What happens if its carried and not used?

[Polkageist]

Definitely putting this into my bag of tricks for my current game. It's all based on eldritch horror as far as the baddies go, so having something corrupt a valuable object that the party wants to keep is on point.

I think the question of whether or not they keep it depends on how deeply into the roleplaying the players are. DF is very heady and the players are almost assumed to be thinking outside their characters so I think that most would either use it the once or twice that they need and then discard or sell it, or immediately burn the sucker as not worth the price of admission.

To avoid the latter, I would hide the drawbacks for as long as I could without being a toot about it. Give them one or two bites at the power apple before cluing them in to the drawbacks, and then ramp those up quickly because the likelihood of them ditching the item gets BIG.

In addition to (or instead of) that, making disposal difficult is also another good strategy for keeping something interesting like that floating around. Simply hucking it into the ocean won't keep it away, nobody will buy it off them, it won't smash/burn/break, so disposal becomes a task in and of itself, and as carrying it around has issues it'll be a race against time to get to the evil-item grinder and hit the on-switch. I think for something like this the ill effects should be strong and immediate, because I could totally see the party burying it at the dungeon entrance (or other storage spot), clearing the dungeon, and then making a sprint for the goal. Don't let 'em, put obstacles in the path even if they pre-clear the dungeon.

[WhiteLily]

I agree that they should not be able to sell it for a decent price.

And, you can also frame the thing in game terms that a player would understand.

"As you study the book, you find details of a spell casting technique that allows you to focus rage energy to have deadly effect on opponents. You can opt to increase one level of Magery while taking on the additional disadvantage of Bloodlust (12)."

That would be a net of zero character points and most power gamers would delight at being able to increase the amount of disadvantages their character possesses. Frame in this way, your party's wizard can start to willingly take on the persona of the evil wizard in bite sized pieces.

Old musty tomes of evil are the mainstay of horror system.

[Rolando]

this is good stuff.

I would track everything they got with the book and to be cleansed they have to loose those extra advantages and spells. The corruption is in the knowledge, as long as they have them in their heads they are less clean.

[WhiteLily]

I'm so glad you like it.

[SolemnGolem]

First of all, great idea for WhiteLily - giving the PCs a moral quandary in exchange for defeating a big boss is a fantastic narrative reward! (Plus if one of the PCs starts becoming corrupted and ends up just like another version of the dead big boss, it makes it even more poetic.)

Originally Posted by Rolando

I would track everything they got with the book and to be cleansed they have to loose those extra advantages and spells. The corruption is in the knowledge, as long as they have them in their heads they are less clean.

This is very close to the Spirit-Assisted Spellcasting in Thaumatology. The idea is that you can buy spells etc. very cheaply, but then if the spirit ever abandons you, the cheaply-bought spells now no longer function unless you buy them back up for proper cost.

Other such Faustian Pacts you find in gaming include:

Ultima 4: The big baddie of Ultima 1, Mondain, is dead. However, his skull remains and the player is encouraged to destroy it by throwing it into a volcano. While the player carries the skull, you can "use" the skull to hold it aloft, which then immediately casts an Earthquake spell, harming or killing most enemies around you. The payoff: each time you use it, you lose points in all your Virtues, meaning you cannot complete the game until you raise them up again.

Dungeons and Dragons: The horcrux mechanic is closely related to the idea of a lich's phylactery - a soul jar where the lich can retreat to if its physical body is destroyed. In order to kill the lich permanently, the phylactery must also be destroyed. Some liches enchant their phylacteries with powerful warding magics, or alternatively obscure the phylacteries so it's not clear what the object is (if your enemy never realizes its importance, they won't think to destroy it). One lich in a DnD campaign I encountered had given its phylactery a powerful healing magic, so that the PCs would be more inclined to preserve the item once found. (This same lich also had a pet dragon, which sometimes flew into battle protected by the healing phylactery.)

Just a few ideas.

[ravenfish]

The solution that comes to my mind is "go to a no-mana zone, copy the contents, destroy the original". While this loses any value it had as an enchanted item, the mere information contained is likely to be worth keeping, and is likely to be a lot less dangerous (unless you are playing Call of Cthulhu, of course).

[Rolando]

I like lovecraftian themes, if I make the knowledge the origin of the corruption, reading and copying it in a no mana area will make no difference, the moment you get to a mana area you get the corruption.

It's like code, you may write/copy it at an isolated terminal but can't use it unless you connect to the web (a mana area) and at that moment the harmful code is released and makes its harmful deeds.

I think it may be interesting to keep the corruption at bay in a no mana area though. It may create a situation in that to look for a cure the characters must travel to a far, harsh, land of no mana to find a hermit, allegedly a once powerful wizard that overcame the curse in the past...

[Mercator]

Originally Posted by WhiteLily

I liked the Horcrux concept from Harry Potter whereby an evil mage could portion a part of their soul into an object to allow themselves to return from the dead.

I was thinking, what if you slay the evil wizard, only to find their spell book / diary also serves as a repository for a piece of their soul?

If it starts to exert metal influence to make the party wizard more like the slain BBEG, but gives access to a ton of magic spells, would you keep it?

You are going to like GURPS Horror a lot. It has detailed rules for modeling corruptive powers for all the power mechanics in the rules, so you can have supernatural skills, Advantages, spells, etc. (and also mundane acts like killing someone, spending cursed gold coins, etc.) marked as Corruptive, the use of which gives you Corruption points that quicky turn into Disadvantages. You can make the corruption process as harsh or forgiving as you want. It's pretty neat.

M.