Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia
Description: the core book itself dates anywhere from 1400 to 1925. It lists (in Latin) a variety of ‘recipes’ for curses that can be placed on objects, animals, and people. What makes every version of this book different from the others are the marginal notes: typically, a copy of the Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia will have most of its white spaces covered with notes, lists, scribbles, and in a few cases, arguments between competing sets of annotations. The book also typically reeks of evil, or at least poor life choices.
Ever wanted to lay down a good, solid curse on your enemies, but you couldn’t, because the one spell that you could use requires an ingredient that hasn’t existed in five hundred years? Well, you’re not the only one: necromancers, sorcerers, witches, and other assorted people in the magical malediction industry have been grappling with that problem since about one hundred years after people started writing down things on parchment. Or maybe longer: the records get a little disheveled when you go back that far.
The only real way to deal with the issue is to play hit-or-miss: unlike physics, conjuration and alchemy have yet to produce anything like a predictive operating theory. Everything is rule-of-thumb and there are no patterns. Which means that researchers in this field research by trying out variations in the various recipes and spell component lists and see what happens. If a substitute works consistently, it’s scribbled in books like the Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia; and if it causes everything within twenty yards to explode, well, hopefully one of the survivors can put that detail into the Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia, too.
Needless to say, every occult regulatory organization in the world – from the Vatican Templars to the Gardnerian Golden Athame Sodality – has standing orders to burn all copies of the Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia on sight. Preferably without anyone reading the copies, although that’s mostly for mundane reasons. After all, a copy of the Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia is typically going to document matter-of-fact human experimentation, with somewhat graphic analysis scribbled in on how painful or deadly the experimentation is. It can make for unpleasant reading.
Interestingly, Evil magic-users who are found in possession of this book seem to have a real problem with getting arrested or tried. Many times, they seem almost determined to get themselves killed in a mundane or magical firefight with the authorities, instead. Maybe the book is cursed, itself…
Or they just remember where and how they got their copy, and would rather die than become one of the experiments.
.
It’s amazing how often criminals imprisoned for crimes that don’t technically exist disappear before they reach general population.
And those just might be the lucky ones.
Pierre de Fermat started to write his Last Demonic Theorem in the Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia as a marginal note … Unfortunately for him, there was enough room in the margin for the whole thing, and it got him.
You should write that up and try to sell it somewhere.