Bearer of the Black Book

The Black Book holds dark wisdom within its pages, for any who dare open it and read the ever-changing ink scrawl within. The Black Book is an artifact, and it’s your duty—or curse—to carry it with you and add to its eldritch lore. You were chosen at an early age by a mentor to bear the Black Book with you throughout your life and add your experience to its pages. The last owner of the Black Book was maddeningly vague about what to write in the book—“when the time comes, you’ll know what the book expects you to write down.” Previous bearers of the Black Book have led lives as monster hunters, court alchemists, learned sages, and royal wizards, just to name a few. From time to time, you page through the Black Book and read some of the hundreds of pages already filled. Bookmarks seem to fall out of the Black Book, however, and you swear the pages may be magically rearranging themselves. Technically, the Black Book is an artifact. It can’t be destroyed through ordinary means, and a simple detect magic spell will reveal its overwhelming power. But the book doesn’t directly make the bearer a more powerful spellcaster, or aid the bearer in combat … at least so far as you know. Wizards can use the Black Book as a spellbook if they like (those pages don’t rearrange themselves and can easily be found), and any bearer can use the Black Book as a alchemical workbook, a reference for ritual magic, or a notebook for the strange and wondrous things they encounter as they travel across Thule. Beyond its indestructibility, the book’s only obvious magical feature is how the pages rearrange themselves from time to time. With their predilection for spellbooks, wizards are natural bearers of the Black Book, but they aren’t the only ones. Any character interested in ancient lore or powerful magic could be interested in the Black Book. More to the point, adventurers are interesting to the Black Book itself, assuming that there’s some sort of sentience that controls or influences it. Each bearer is supposed to carry the Black Book with them at all times and record key events—some of which may aid subsequent bearers of the Black Book centuries in the future.