Editing Tales of the Scarecrow (section)

===The Books===

The first book, ''Malleus Deus'', is a top-secret tome, known to every magic-user and cleric in the world as something that rends order and understanding from the world. It contains a huge array of spells, which magic-users can learn, and all but one of them of each level is actually a cleric spell that a magic-user can learn and cast. If a magic-user learns such a spell from the tome and uses it in the presence of a cleric who notices what it is and what they have done, that cleric must save vs. magic or lose the ability to cast that spell ever again. If they fail this save for a spell of a higher level than the cleric can currently cast, they lose the ability to cast ''any'' cleric spells ever again. And if they describe what happened to another cleric, ''that'' cleric must save or lose that spell / all spells. Probably as close to the typical "fuck you for trying" as we get.

Because of the potential of this book to unmake all clerical magic forever, every religious organization in the world has pegged owning, or even being aware of the existence of a copy of this book as a capital crime, worth any amount of horror, expense, and collateral damage to find and destroy or contain. The best thing to do is just to leave it where it is and never mention it again... but, well, while both cleric and magic-user players know the insane lengths the authorities will go to to get rid of it, they don't actually know what it does without experimenting, do they? And Richard, who knows not what he's found, paid a handsome sum for it and wants to bring it back to his mystery buyer...

The second book, ''Tales of the Scarecrow'', kicks off the game mechanic that gives this module its name. The GM / Referee stops the game, explains that it is an anthology of spooky folklore stories about scarecrows, and then lays out the mechanics of what's going to happen next. Each player will, secretly and without collaboration, propose what powers or abilities the scarecrow will have, and in the end, the most-dangerous one will receive a random experience point reward (potentially meaning they gambled giving it some deadly power for a naff payout). Said dangerous set of powers and abilities will then become true. The game recommends transparency on this point, and further lays out that it doesn't ''just'' have to be the scarecrow, but could be something to do with the cornfield or the area inside it. It also points out that such proposals should work within the context of a book of spooky tales, and not single out individual other PCs or classes for punishment.

The module then ends, with the party still stranded in a house surrounded by a cornfield full of hungry tentacles, having dropped an incredibly-important world-shattering artifact into the players' laps and instructed them to play chicken with one another and the GM regarding how hard they want to be fucked, and with how much lube.