Campaign of the Month: January 2013
DANgerous Kalamar 4
“Indescribable Horrors” comes in all shapes and sizes. Covers tend to be adorned with engravings or embossing of shrunken heads and other grotesque imagery. The pages themselves vary in type, quantity and size. Illustrated versions show fearful subject matter and various plants and herbs.
Indescribable Horrors (or often simply “Horrors”) appears in so many formats and with such different content that it is almost not a canon at all. In fact, the title itself often differs from book to book (Indescribable Horrors is the most common). Its chapters are called Terrors, Dreads, Shivers and the like, depending on the author or transcriber.
The book itself, while quite random, somehow entices the reader further and further. The descriptive prose ranges from the macabre to the downright harrowing. Nightmares are virtually guaranteed to reign down upon anyone merely perusing the text, let alone studying it.
The one constant topic (though it varies in description and methodology) is the War of Intangibles. Horrors makes it clear that it is the duty of the Temple of Sleepless Nights and all its followers to advance the waging of this war. Other topics include the art of shrinking heads and other body parts, mummification, tattooing and cruel methods of disfiguration. Indescribable Horrors teaches psychology for use on sacrifices, creation, effects and suggested uses for an impressive number of hallucinogens, tips for effective illusion-based arcane magic and the formulae for creating the Fellowship’s magically hued robes.
This manual, depending on content, can be quite useful to healers because of its medicinal component. Wizards, especially illusionists, find the magic descriptions informative, if not brilliant. The Temple of Sleepless Nights makes this book readily available, although not always directly, for a mere 25 gp.