Breviarium Heresis
Description: 128 pages of vellum bound in calfskin, circa 1350 AD. Text is in indifferent Latin, with odd word choices and remarkably modern spelling. Illustrated in a remarkably anachronistic style, and one that is more evocative of pre-Raphaelite imitations of medieval artwork than anything else. The Breviarium Heresis has been kept in the Archivum Secretum Vaticanum since that archive was formed in the 17th century; documentation (including photographs) attesting to that is available upon request.
The Breviarium Heresis is an awkward book, given that it purports to be a guideline for daily prayers to a set of twelve gods and goddesses that nobody (well, nobody outside of a very privileged list of Vatican scholars) had ever heard of until a certain tabletop roleplaying game used those deities as the main pantheon for one of its more popular campaign worlds. And no, the book didn’t get leaked by the Vatican. They’ve just finished up their internal investigation on the topic, and the Inquisi… ah, ‘researchers’… are certain that informational security was preserved in this case.
Although there’s no real reason why anybody would want to bother, surely. The Breviarium Heresis is hardly pernicious, in a purely moral sense; its deities all seem to be ‘good,’ and the ethical teachings seem to have been looted wholesale from Christian and Buddhist belief systems. Someone from the 1300s would have found the book to be rank heresy, of course, but presumably they would have been much more unnerved by the fact that the Breviarium Heresis is indestructible. Toss it into a fire, the book doesn’t even get hot; the Church tried to destroy it for twenty years, then eventually gave up and stuck it in the Vatican archives. And then, in mute witness to the awesome power of bureaucracy, the Church managed to forget about the existence of an indestructible anachronistic prayer book to strange and otherwise unknown gods until six months ago, when a researcher who happened to play that certain tabletop RPG came across the Breviarium Heresis, and then promptly freaked out.
So now everything is in a tizzy, given that the aforementioned investigation has ruled out ‘practical joke.’ The team’s job? Go chat with the people who originally made the campaign world, and find out where they got the inspiration from. The goal is not to suppress, because that’s not going to happen anyway: the goal is to find out whether anything is going to explode. This is the post-Westphalian world, after all. If it’s spooky but not dangerous, please refrain from poking at it with a stick. Smarter all around.
But — and to paraphrase yet another set of heretics — whatever you do, don’t pray to those gods! You never know Who might be on the other side, listening.