New Eldritch Artifact for Realms of Crawling Chaos

I had a lot of fun contributing to Realms of Crawling Chaos, and I’m deeply indebted to Dan Proctor for allowing me to add a little bit to his most excellent supplement. The opportunity to revel in Lovecraft and Labyrinth Lord simultaneously was the most fun I’ve had in some time—even if it did hurt the old noggin at times.

Dan had the book pretty much together when I came aboard and he deserves all the credit for turning out such a horrific, wondrous creation. I merely helped patch a few holes and made sure that we didn’t miss anything obvious along the way. My biggest contribution was what became Appendix One and Two: the rules for deciphering eldritch tomes and creating Lovecraftian artifacts that didn’t suffer from a surfeit of tentacles. I’m pretty proud of both systems and I hope readers get both some use and a kick out of them. Of course, as with any book, not everything makes it to the final draft. Dan’s given me permission to post one of the mystical items that was sidelined during the writing process.

As a myopic reader of strange texts, and most certainly as an undergrad tackling the classics, I could have used a pair of these spectacles. For those of you whose characters dare to peruse the pages of tomes uncovered in a Realms of Crawling Chaos campaign, the following could literally save your soul.

Lenses of Blasphemous Comprehension: This object is usually encountered as a pair of rectangular spectacles with smoked glass lenses or as a prism made of the same colored glass. When used to read eldritch tomes, the lenses grant their user a +2 bonus to all his rolls against a book’s complexity or potency.