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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9735548" data-attributes="member: 8461">So I recently picked up d20 Modern supplement <a href="https://paizo.com/products/btpy7fki?Modern-Collection-1-PDF" target="_blank">Modern Collection 1</a> from Ronin Arts, being pleasantly surprised to find that Paizo still had a number of products from that company for sale (veterans of the d20 System era will remember that Phil Reed made the decision to pull pretty much all of their stuff from RPGNow, which was the premiere pay-for-download place for RPGs until it merged with DriveThruRPG; why he removed them I've never been clear on).I got this because I'd been looking for a copy of 13 Conspiracies, having stumbled across another old product (recently acquired in Gun Metal Games' <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/rpg-sales-of-2025.709364/post-9731755" target="_blank">twentieth anniversary sale</a>) that used a particular stat block which I wasn't familiar with for organizations. While it turns out that the stat block format came from Mongoose Publishing's OGL Horror (which I've since purchased a used copy of, and is currently in the mail), some Googling turned up that none other than James Maliszewski (of <a href="https://grognardia.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Grognardia</a> fame) wrote a supplement with those rules (and reiterating how they work, so you don't need OGL Horror to use it) for thirteen organizations which are the focus of a lot of modern conspiracies, including the Knights Templar, the Illuminati, Majestic 12, and quite a few others.Maliszewski deserves a lot of credit here, as the book was everything I was hoping it would be. But ironically, it was outshone by another product in this bundle (Modern Collection 1 being five PDFs bundled together), which was 101 Occult Books.Each tome in this book lists its title, author, year it was created, language that it's in, and benefits you get from reading it. The latter is typically a bonus rank in a particular skill (usually some form of Knowledge), and possibly access to a particular spell (if you're a spellcaster).What makes this supplement stand out for me, though, is that the books listed here are all real (or based on real works), which makes it a treasure trove of obscure tidbits of lore. I'd never heard of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picatrix" target="_blank">Picatrix</a>, for instance, or the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyranides" target="_blank">Cyranides</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_d%27Abano#Writings" target="_blank">Heptameron</a>, or even the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Ripley_(alchemist)#The_%22Ripley_Scroll%22" target="_blank">Ripley Scroll</a>, believe it or not. This sort of thing absolutely stokes the imagination for any sort of paranormal game set in the modern day.</blockquote>

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