Pallencia Codex
Description: 48 vellum pages bound in black leather and wood. Each page (one-sided) shows a naked human form, drawn in rather good style, with one of a set of intricate multi-colored patterns (24 in all) superimposed on top. Interestingly, each pattern is seen twice; once for a male figure, and again for a female one. There is no text, but suggestive, half-meaningful patterns appear if a page is viewed under an ultraviolet light. Unlabeled, and tentatively dated as being from the 13th century AD, but the book is in almost unbelievably good condition to be that old.
The Pallencia Codex would be considered a fake, if only it hadn’t happened to have been discovered last year in an archeological dig run by a team of unquestioned professionalism and sterling reputation. Still, it’s in far too good shape to have been buried for over eight centuries. The leather even smells kind of new.
Nonetheless, the Pallencia Codex was an anomaly, and archeology has its little ways of getting such things out of the public eye and to a place where more intellectually flexible people can take a look at them. In this case, it didn’t take long for the evaluation team to start getting very cheerful; they had an actual grimoire on their hands! One that would even work.
Well, it’s a grimoire of a sort. The Pallencia Codex is a collection of magical medical diagrams that visually describe the effects of various forms of healing magic on regular human bodies. The diagrams have been filtered through the medieval mindset, of course; but anybody who knows anything about both early medical theories and medieval magic would be able to quickly enough work out how a particular spell was generated, what the ritual processes were, relevant elements, that sort of thing. In fact, having Sheets #35 and #36 available has already allowed one researcher to finally figure out the spell that medieval magicians used to cure tuberculosis. They’re hoping to reverse-engineer the effect into a mundane version within five years.
As the above might suggest, there is a lot of money available for researching how magic spells produce their effects, particularly in the field of healing. Medieval mages simply pumped energy into the system, using a brute force method; but their modern descendants can pair up with trained doctors and researchers and observe the specific changes that a spell produces. Once they have those, either the spell can be made extremely efficient, or a conventional alternative can be produced. It all depends on what’s more cost effective…
But back to the point. The point is that there was at least one grimoire out there that nobody knew about, and it maybe was part of a hitherto unknown magical tradition. There was some kind of university in Pallencia in the 13th century that disappeared under what are now perhaps suspicious circumstances. Perhaps tracking down what happened to it is in order? There may be quite a lot of money in it. Arcane-corporate money, which is honestly the most fun kind. You can buy the really cool toys with that stuff.
PS: Please don’t blow up the city of Pallencia in the process. Regular people live there.