The Three Tombs of Words

There are three Great Books, artifacts of prodigious power that are hidden and protected in three corners of the world. Each one is capable of changing the world.

 

Book of Void by AppleSin

  

The Book of Names

The book contains the three names of every being that lives, lived and will live.

• Given name is the first name that a creature was ever granted or referred to with. It holds a mystical significance in many rituals. Especially magic users are careful to keep their given name a secret, while devils and the Folk will gleefully buy them.
• Taken names are any names, nicknames or titles that a creature is/has/will use, no matter how obscure.
• True name is the cornerstone of one's identity, the true self. Mastering one's true name unlocks great power, but if anyone else finds one's true name, they gain power over them.

Not only can the Book be used to learn the names of any being, it can also be used to erase names. When a given or taken name is erased, it fades from the memories of the whole world. All deeds and misdeeds will be forgotten. But when a true name is erased, that person's identity will fade. They will, slowly and torturously, become a Blank, a being without history, purpose or fate. An unperson.

The Book is located in a great underground library in the Steel Mountains. A lost dwarven dynasty had dug deep halls into the mountains and filled them with endless knowledge in the form of books and scrolls and tablets from all over the world. The dwarves have mostly disappeared, but the scholars they invited to their library remain. And deep within the library, hundreds of floors below where any normal scholar dares to delve, where the books cease and only endless wards and traps and guardian golems are present, is a vault of curse-rock holding the Book of Names.

The Book of Years

The book contains the whole of the past, the present and the future of the world. It can all be changed. A change in the future becomes a prophecy, a fixed point in time that will come to pass. But changing the present or the past is more complicated. The minds of people are rarely completely changed, and many historical events have a lot of inertia, so things will happen similarly anyway. But if the change is large enough, a bit of the world might change without the rest of the world following suit, resulting in paradoxes like ancient civilisations who were always there but no one remembers, or an event that everyone remembers but there are no physical signs of it, or people who have no parents, etc.

The book is found in a small shrine in a beautiful oasis deep within Utabi, the Red Desert. A magic circle around the oasis displaces it to infinity, making any journey to the oasis impossible.

The Book of Laws

The book contains all the Laws of the universe, physical and metaphysical. Rewriting it can fundamentally change the world, or destroy it with a single stroke of a quill.

The book is said to be protected by a whole pantheon of forgotten gods somewhere in the sunken continent of Kal Cher. Maybe.

 

How do you actually use these books in your game? You don't, or at least not the whole books, unless you wish to destroy the setting. But a single page, somehow stolen and lost?

d6 Book Hooks

1. The old king is dead and his heir is about to be crowned. The heir is the last one of the dynasty, the only royal remaining in the country... Wait, but what about all the cities that had been ruled by... nobody for years? And the statues that depict people no one remembers? And who is this guy in lavish clothes, begging you to help him, because he doesn't know who he is and why does he have this signet ring?
2. A single page from the Book of Names is available at the next Black Auction. It contains true names of the four most powerful gods of this continent, among others.
3. The Loyalists have been running the kingdom ever since the unsuccessful uprising. The Rebels have fought failed to ensure prosperity for all, but there is still a long way to go before the rightful powers could even begin to be threatened by the Rebel scum.
4. A rumour about a "scroll of prophecy", in fact a page from the Book of Years, sends every faction into a deadly race to find it first and write their own bright future.
5. A lich is looking for a scrap of paper that apparently contains one clause of the Laws of Magic. She wants to change them to suit her whims.
6. A benefactor of the party has fallen into a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories that claim that a Law has been recently rewritten and reality was changed. Why? By whom? And while some of the conspirators want to change everything back as it was before, a growing portion of them want to keep the changed Law...