Mythos tome handouts, shelf page and study page

A book in a game of cosmic horror is two objects. One is what the investigators see when they lift it off the shelf. The other is the bill that arrives after somebody spends a month reading it. This template prints both, one page each.

The page you hand over

Title, author, language and date, a physical description of the binding, and what a glance reveals. Nothing on it says how dangerous the book is, which is the point: the investigators get an object, not a stat block, and they have to decide whether it is worth the month.

The page you keep

Study skill and difficulty, study time, the Mythos gain, the Sanity loss, other effects, the forbidden knowledge and a list of spells with their cost and effect. A field left empty prints nothing at all — its label disappears with it — so a tome that teaches no spells comes out without an empty spell list on the bottom of the page.

Both pages are A5, 148 × 210 mm, in a 1920s or an Eastern Bloc hand, and each exports separately at 300 DPI. A letter found between the pages is a Message; what the newspapers said about the author is a Newspaper.