Item Seed: The Insinuation Codex.

Insinuation Codex – Google Docs

 

The Insinuation Codex

 

This unpleasant tome of unsavory magical lore was first published in Charlottetown, Canada in 1793.  The publisher was Jonathan Grimsby, a Connecticut Loyalist of evil reputation, both in his old home and new one. When his house was struck repeatedly by lightning in 1802 (over a three day period), presumably killing everyone inside, no-one mourned.  No-one, in fact, bothered with a funeral.

But before then Grimsby had published the Insinuation Codex. A total of fifty copies were made, all of which promptly went into the collections of the more unpleasant sorts of occultists. It’s unknown how many copies still survive; occasionally, a page from the presumed text appears at crime scenes, invariably jammed halfway down the throat of a murder victim (who just as invariably turns out to be a bad, bad person that does bad, bad things with magic). Roughly forty pages have been recovered in this way, over the years; that appears to be about twenty percent of the original text, which is enough to give clues but also enough to be maddeningly incomplete.

 

As for the text of the Insinuation Codex itself; it’s a mind control grimoire, of course (the title is apparently meant to be ironic.).  A complete spell has yet to be extracted from anybody’s throat, but the known text makes clear that the purpose of the Codex is to teach wizards how to control other people’s thoughts and actions.  The text is also fairly brutal in its tone and viewpoint, as one might expect from a book purportedly teaching spells that break other people’s wills. Lastly, there’s also a good bit of the usual ranting sociopathy, except that apparently Grimsby had a certain felicity of style; the Codex is surprisingly well-written, as such things go.  

 

But is it really a legitimate grimoire?  Hard to say, without an actual spell to analyze. It reads like a real grimoire, and of course somebody keeps shoving pages down the throats of black magicians. That seems, at the very least, diagnostic.  Which is why you’re going to track that somebody down. Just don’t assume that he’s a good person! Evil magicians can hate other evil magicians just as much as anybody else can.