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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 1388809" data-attributes="member: 5328">The thing that immediately springs to my mind is something like the sketches Leonardo da Vinci made in his note-books during dissections. They (and the accompanying notes in Greek and mirror-writing) would be valuable to the mage if a systematic knowledge of anatomy were hard to come by. The notebooks would also be valuable to an art collector, mechanician (for the mechanical inventions also found in the notebooks), alchemist, architect, military engineer, or enthusiastic admirer of the original polymathic genius. And they might incidentally include notes on a maze or other structure the da Vinci clone had built in his career as an engineer, and of the deadly traps therein. So somebody hoping to raid the complex might be interested, too.Which leads me on to the thought that if there were a special resource that was necessary or very helpful to becoming a lich, the would-be lich might have stockpiled books about getting, preparing, and using that resource. There might be partial maps and memoirs mmade by adventuring parties that had explored part of a dungeon, if some sort of lich-making artifact were in that dungeon. There might be bestiaries including the descriptions of the beasts from which essential spell-ingredients must be obtained (but also containing invaluable details on the weaknesses of many monsters). There might be books on alchemetic procedures, which the lich needs because of the recipes of emalming, but which are valuable to others because of the mmany other recipes therein.Another possibility is a big book of liches, listing the famous liches, their last known whereabouts, tactics they have used to defend themselves, methods heroes have used to circumvent these measures. If I were ambitious to become a lich, I'd want to know about the object lessons in how to prosper at it. For the same reason, any books on methods of destroying liches, memoirs or histories of heroes who have destroyed liches, books suggesting how one might protect oneself from liches, and what they might do to get around those protections, would be something that I would want to have read, even if I thought they were too dangerous to keep around for reference.Then, regarding adventures, books can be sold, stolen, collected, copied, memorised, hidden (in portable holes?), mis-shelved, lost, damaged, and destroyed. A famous mediaeval bible was  lost out of a boat and washed up on the beach three days later, undamaged except for the bindings (it is in Durham Cathedral now, having spent several centuries in a coffin witht he corpse of St Cuthbert). A certain valuable collect of Shakespeare first folios was once cut up by an illiterate servant for lining pie-tins. A huge number of JS Bach's manuscripts were lost forever when they were used by a butcher to wrap up cuts of mmeat. Back when books were written on expensive but durable parchment and vellum, it was common to scrape the writing off, apply a fresh coat of size, and to write over, producing a palimpsest. Quite a lot of invaluable ancient texts have been recovered by scraping the otiose or redundant mmediaeval writing off palimpsests and recovering the half-obliterated originals.Basically, from an adventure point of view, a book is just a McGuffin. It doesn't offer anything unique from a motivational point of view except that its contents (if that is what is important) are reproducible.Regards,Agback</blockquote>

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