This has probably been done to death before, but here’s my take on the idea…
(Yes, this is a nod to both Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Sandman’ and the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett.)
There’s a giant library somewhere within those pesky Otherspaces that you can reach if you get locked into a major national library overnight when there is a full moon in Libra, or something like that. It is full of books, I mean, really full – more books than an infinity of libraries could possibly ever contain, and then some. It appears to be built in the Classical Greek style, much like the so-called lost Library of Alexandria, with big open halls and capped columns and masses of shelves full of codices and scrolls and books and stuff. And not a PC or Mac in sight. I doubt they have even got a card file or Dewey system implemented, let alone any modern stuff.
Anyway, this library is full of all the books that were never written. There’s whole codices of stuff that Sappho never wrote down or were lost, unpublished tales by Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, Epistles that Saint Paul scrapped, and that novel you have been thinking about for years but never got around to writing.
So what’s the use of such a place? Well, not a lot unless you’re a Biblomancer. And believe me, the few Biblomancers who are in the know would give their eyes teeth to get in there. You see, these books have value. For a start, having such a book in your library, if you’re a Biblomancer, could be worth some major charges right there. If you are not a Biblomancer, I guess you could make your fame and fortune by bringing one back and exposing it as the lost work of some dead guy like Charles Dickens or H.G. Wells.
Better be bloody careful, though. Rumour has it there’s loads of dead Librarians haunting the place, and they do get rather pissed if you try to remove a book from there. Yeah, the place is guarded by demons. You can read all you want, but don’t you dare try to remove a book. Demons are mighty nasty when they get pissed, especially Librarian Demons. One is even rumoured to be a big orange ball of hell and fury…
General Mechanics of the Library of Forgotten Books
To get into the Library of Forgotten Books you must get your players into a major national library (the British Library in London, England, the National Library of the USA, etc.) on the night of the full moon when Libra is in ascendancy (not necessarily in the month of Libra, but when the sign is ascendant within another zodiac month will do). They will have to hide in the library until it closes and get to a particular stack of books at midnight. This is your choice, but possibly where all their occult tomes are stored – this could even be in the basement of the library, which means even more sneaking around to get in there. Once they get there the stack of books will start glowing a eerie shade of green and turn into a portal into the Otherspace.
This will put them at an entrance to the Library of Forgotten Books corresponding to the geographic location of their entry. If they got in through the British Library, this entrance into the Library of Forgotten Books will look much like the lobby of the British Library. You would hope that your players would notice this for when they have to get out again, especially if it is in a hurry…
To get out again, they have to find the entrance they got into the library through if they want to return to their home city. Otherwise any library entrance will do, but they can end up anywhere in the modern world. For example, they could leave by a lobby that is like the lobby of the Japanese National Library in Tokyo, and therefore, end up in Tokyo. Clever Biblomancers who wish to travel could use this as a quick means of getting from New York to Moscow, but if they get it wrong they could end up in Shanghai, China.
The demon librarians will ignore the characters for the most part, as their obsession is to catalogue and arrange all the books into some kind of order. This is not without conflict, as one demon librarian will have a totally different idea on how books should be catalogued from another.
A demon would only notice and attack a player character if he or she tries to remove a tome, or if their actions are considered dangerous to the precious cargo this Otherspace holds, namely, the books. Fighting within the Library of Forgotten Books will get a whole host of demon librarians laying the big smack down on the player characters, and they don’t pick sides. They just beat to a pulp anyone they catch fighting, and remember, player characters can die just as easily in an Otherspace as anywhere else…
If a player character tries to smuggle a tome out of the library and fails any dice rolls needed to do this without any demons noticing, then the whole troupe will be chased by all demons within a 50 meter radius. It is better to copy the material down than try to steal a book, unless you are really desperate.
For the demons use the standard template provided in Unknown Armies second edition. Use your own judgement for power levels. Just make sure that their obsession is the collecting, cataloguing and protection of books. “Librarian from Hell” sounds like a good obsession title…
Intriguing, but kind of bland.
I think a really good inspiration for an Otherspace library would be the story “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges, which posits a library “composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.” No two book is the same, and it is inferred that the library contains all “books” (knowledge) that ever existed, even from previous incarnations of existence and great knowledge of the Invisible College could be gleaned, if only the books could be located. No demon librarians, the only danger is being lost forever in the corridors and starving to death, or madness. Spending more than a few hours in the Library itself might be worth Isolation or Helplessness stress checks (particularly once people try to find their way out). For knowledge obsessed Bibliomancers, the library represents the impossibility of learning everything, let alone collecting it.
I think the mistake is in seeing the walls at all. The library starts off as carpet and walls but eventually you come to a stairwell where some idiot has left books strewn over the stairs. Then you come to a point where there are stacks of books slowly increasing in height yet still the stairs descend. Eventually you come to the cave. Held aloft by a series of hard cover books on engineering and mining stack upon stack of books surround the stairwell with a just squeezable space to crawl in. Once inside the cave expands to a 4 foot gap the roof a series of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels overlapping and held up by a single column of dictionaries on top of the L-Z of the Yellow pages. Crooked Tunnels run off from this central room. Columns of hardbacks, floors of newspaper and occasional sink holes of self help books litter the maze of crude tunnels . Occasionally a strange wind sets the entire cavern rustling and creaking as if it might fall only to have a book fall at your feet revealing hidden works further in the walls.
I love that one RoseStCabal…