Mythos tomes take on a lot of the focus of the setting. The books are like telephone lines back in time, connecting the readers with distant, pre-human era. Aside from the secrets they might transmit, books can focus a scene or adventure. Even unopened, the threat or promise of a book can affect the minds of PCs and NPCs. Sometimes, this is just overreaction - too many mythos tomes under their belts, and players are liable to get a bit skittish or greedy. Other times...books can drive a person into madness.
The library stretched to the rafters. Every shelf groaned with books with suggestive titles. Giles stared, wonderingly, at an entire shelf of notes on the Necronomicon, each as thick as one of the encyclopedia volumes hawked by door to door sellers. It was a treasure to rival lost Alexandria.
"Don't be too impressed." Earl said. "I suspect he wrote most of them himself."
Graphomania
Some people write. Some people can't stop writing. The graphomaniac is the latter. They write as a compulsion, hands crabbed and arthritic beyond their years from holding a pen too tightly for too many hours, or in these modern days and nights blunt and bloody from pounding at the typewriter. Some of them will write until the ink runs out, until the paper runs out, until they're writing on the floors, and walls, and bedsheets in their own blood...
In the mythos, graphomania can be a relatively common affliction. Broken minds faced with the indescribable may try to make sense of their terrible insight by putting them to words. Only the words don't come like they're supposed to. So they can't stop writing. Ever.
For NPCs: An NPC with graphomania is a good excuse for a massive library without handing the players dozens or hundreds of mythos tomes. A good Library Use roll or two will pan the gold from the stream of pages. Graphomania is also common for survivors of mythos events, and can be a fun work-around for otherwise uncommunicative NPCs.
For PCs: Probably the best use of this affliction in PCs is emphasizing the unconscious, uncontrollable desire to write - the PC might wake up at night to find a missive in their own handwriting, or look down and see they've scrawled out something blasphemous during a conversation. Graphomania is sometimes tied to lesser forms of kleptomania, where the PC instinctively steals pens and paper so they an write it out later.
Giles pulled a random book of the shelf, some treatise on obscure physics, and let the pages spill open. They lettering was modern black typeface, but around the margins, in the lines between the paragraphs, in every bit of open space was an unhealthy scrawl of spidery script.
Horror Vacui
The abhorrence of blank space is a common minor quirk of scholars. In its most extreme form, it's a bit like graphomania - the person scrawls notes and pictures to fill the blank parts of the page. Librarians and scholars sometimes love and sometimes hate marginalia, depending on who read it and what they've added to the text, but the person that carries around the horror vacui with them is beyond the occasional insightful jotting. It's like a disease that consumes them. Someone with this madness cannot keep themselves from defacing the book...any book.
In the mythos, the horror vacui usually takes scholarly wizards and artists, like Joseph Curwen or Richard Pickman. At it's least severe, the margins of letters and correspondence might be filled with small hand-drawn illustrations; in the extreme the text of the book may be nearly overwritten.
For NPCs: This is a great way to hide a mythos book or hook in plain sight. An NPC afflicted with this might scrawl a clue in the margins of a phone directory, or reproduce a minor mythos tome line-by-line in the margins of an otherwise innocuous copy of Shakespeare. At the Keeper's option, the marginalia of a particularly knowledgeable wizard might actually add to the value of a Mythos tome.
For PCs: This PC is up for many reprimands when the local librarian gets ahold of them, or even their fellow players. The investigator is likely to almost ruin any Mythos tome in the process of studying it, or at least leave no doubt for the next reader who has read it before.
Earl put down the spade, and wiped the earth away from the cover. The dark wooden boards with wet and moldy, and a fat pale worm crawled across the surface. With trembling hands, Earl reached down and wrenched the book free of the earth. The scuttling horrors revealed from beneath scuttled back downwards towards some unknown hell.
Bibliotaphy
Burying books is not a common occurrence, and the desire to do so doesn't come across people often. Often the practice is associated with certain occult traditions, which believe that the most potent and sinful books must be buried properly to properly dispose of it. In other cases, people bury books - and other objects - for less concrete reasons. For them, burying a book might be an instinct, a habit. Maybe they want to keep the evil lore hidden away from others, or to save and protect them in some way. The details of the belief matter little to most, only the result.
In the Mythos, books can be an albatross around a character's neck. The terrible knowledge is a burden on their sanity, and even possessing such books can be dangerous to them. For those who can't bring themselves to burn a book, burying it might be an acceptable - even attractive - alternative.
For NPCs: An NPC bibliotaph in the campaign means it's time to break out the shovels and treasure maps. Real-world bibliotaphers are usually indiscriminate in what they bury, but not always where. In a CoC campaign, the NPC might be a grave-keeper who inters frightful books in among the shelves of catacombs and stacked high in mausoleums.
For PCs: PC bibliotaphs are trickier; the Keeper should probably encourage the player to decide where they bury their books. Scholars and book-lovers are going to definitely look askance at any player should this activity manifest itself, forcing the player to invent elaborate excuses as they try to conceal their unsettling behavior.
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Half the PCs in my campaign are increasingly bibliomaniacal, and these ideas will be useful. Plus, gives me more ideas for the dozens of handouts I'm making
Originally Posted by Atoms for Peace
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