Synarchobiblaron

Title: Synarchobiblaron (in court and police records, this title was nonsensically rendered in translation to English as something like "The Identical Ruler(s)", or, in some cases "The Ultimate Science - or, On Correcting the Measurements of the Illusionary Dimensions of Reality to Objective Consistency"....)

Origin: scenario "With Malice Aforethought"

Description

At first glance, the tome appears to be an ordinary old leather-bound volume, but it was never printed or bound in this world in any conventional sense: it's a magical, illusionary construct. It is not written in any terrestrial human language, instead the illusion is constructed in such a way that anyone who reads it perceives it to have been written in the reader's own native tongue, which may be obvious to readers who compare notes on the tome's contents, and the exact nature of the contents will likewise differ depending on who reads it. There is more information encoded into the tome than can be detected by a fully-sane, untrained, casual eye. Reading the entire book is very difficult, with the text having the disconcerting habit of changing form, wording, and meaning even as it is read, with the tendency most evident to unstable, artistic, or psychically sensitive readers.

Unique Volume

• author: unknown
• Language: unknown, but will be perceived as a language familiar to the reader
• Number of known copies (if rare): one
• Last known location of surviving copies (if rare): The last known official location of the only known copy was the evidence vault of the Essex County Courthouse in Salem in the 1920s; its location after that time is unknown, and its history before it was confiscated following the famous Arkham Sanitarium Murder trial in the 1920s is unknown.

Physical Description: Old, leather-bound volume, written in a familiar terrestrial language (typically this will be anachronistically contemporary modern English in 1920s Arkham).

General Content: Varies from reader to reader depending on their experiences and expectations, but the content will generally appear to be of an occult, mythological, historical, and/or fanciful character, describing surreal, dreamlike places and times, impossible histories, unearthly mythologies, unlikely magical or technological wonders, strange beings and stranger deeds, and the like. One consistent element will be the inclusion of a single ritual spell, "Banishment of Yde' Etad".

Some Dreamlands elements might be suggested in the magical text, either implicitly or explicitly, including some recognizable to experienced dreamers, including some that might seem disturbingly identical to the more fanciful content from more "ordinary" dreams, as if the tome's author somehow had access to some of the reader's own remembered and forgotten dreams.

Depending on the reader, the tome might also contain varying amounts of veiled or sometimes explicit familiar occult references - such as to Theosophy, Spiritualism, Scientology, the Shaver Mystery, UFOlogy and other conspiracy theories, etc. - or sometimes ordinary religious content of varying orthodoxy might also be read into the tome's content, or possibly avant-garde artistic or cutting-edge scientific metaphors, such that the content might be read as an imaginative cosmic narrative written in esoteric terms familiar to the reader - terms that will likely seem incongruous to the tome's evident age and origin.

Consequently, two physicists taking turns reading the same tome might both agree that the tome is written with strikingly familiar content relating to the very latest and most complicated and poorly-understood discoveries in physics, but oneof the two physicists might be convinced that it is a book of fanciful mythology that happens to have been written by an author with a remarkably intuitive grasp on physical theories that science has only recently begun to tackle, while the other physicist might be equally convinced that the book is a work of astonishingly advanced physics written by an author who was generations ahead of his time using metaphors from an unidentifiable occult tradition that might be compared to alchemy. One comparing notes, the two physicists will agree that each saw some of the same concepts described in the volume, but will disagree on the finer points of how and where those concepts were described, and subsequent readings will show that both readers were "mistaken" on the details. The two readers might also find that they disagree on exactly how the tome is organized, what language the tome is written in, and what the text itself - the typeface, format, etc. - actually looks like, even when both are looking at it at the same time. They will both find the experience of comparing notes or re-reading the tome to be disconcerting and possibly sanity-shaking, and up to a point they may both find their own grasp on the Cthulhu Mythos to be stronger and more insightful as a result of comparing notes or rereading the tome. A failed reading, however, by one of the two physicists might leave him convinced that the book is filled with striking coincidences, but is, ultimately, a clever hoax executed in a very strange and confusing manner: it is, indeed, a very strange book and its effect on people is very difficult to explain logically, but the contents are, in the end, strikingly imaginative gibberish.

Furthermore, among the book's many inconsistencies and peculiarities, the pages cannot be clearly photographed: photographs of the book will not look precisely the same as the book appears in person to the viewer, which in turn does not look the same to all viewers, though all viewers can agree on the few details that can be discerned from the photograph, though there are few details that can be discerned: though everything else in the photograph may be clear and focused, the tome itself - such as it must surely be - will always be blurred and indistinct, with text that is smeared and unreadable in the photograph. (Investigators with the proper background and experience have been known to compare the effect to that of trying to photograph radioactive material capable of distorting natural light before it reaches the camera's lens, or perhaps distorting the photographic media itself; the effect is especially disconcerting when recorded on moving picture film or digital video, possibly triggering a loss of sanity in some sensitive viewers, and epileptic seizures in certain others.)

In period court transcripts of expert testimony, the title Synarchobiblaron (syn = "same", "archo" = "ruler", "biblaron" = "book") was nonsensically and variously rendered in casual translation to English as something like "The Greater Law", "The Universal Rule", or, in some cases, "The Ultimate Science - or, On Correcting Measures of the Illusionary Dimensions of Reality to Objective Consistency". Asked to clarify the inconsistency, one expert psychologist attested: "That title, like the text itself, doesn't actually mean anything at all - the whole book is nonsense, it's an Ipsum Lorem: dummy text for a meaningless hoax perpetrated by patients at the sanitarium, a testament to the broken genius of madness, the elaborate but ultimately empty cleverness of mindless and misguided fools."

Crunch

• Sanity Loss: Up to 4d3 points, 2 points at a time for each of 4 subsequent readings
• Mythos Knowledge: up to 8 points, 2 points at a time for each of 4 subsequent readings
• Occult Knowledge: none
• Spell: "Banishment of Yde' Etad", discovered on the fourth reading; possibly others

If any reading fails, no further reading is possible, and the tome on the whole will be understood to contain mostly fanciful but otherwise unremarkable gibberish, reminiscent of randomly-generated "Ipsum Lorem" filler text in modern English - "Ipsum Lorem" being a generic, more or less meaningless text used by typesetters to simulate a finished volume for demonstration purposes - which, combined with the evident age of the volume would be indicative of a well-executed but lazy and pointless hoax, if not for the volume's other peculiarities. Regardless, a failed reading will "break" the illusion, making a deeper understanding of the volume impossible.

Quotes

Row, row, row the boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.
— Synarchobiblaron

(The apparent age of the tome suggests that this epigraph, one of the few elements of the tome that most observers can agree exists in the book, seems to suggest that this might have been the oldest known instance of this anonymous rhyme in print, which in turn implies that the tome could conceivably have been the source of the rhyme, though the modernity of the English language that most readers insist the tome was written in suggests that the tome is far newer than it seems....)

Appearances

• scenario: "With Malice Aforethought"

Associated Mythos Elements

• Varies subjectively, but could typically include recognizable but veiled or occasionally explicit esoteric references to Dreamlands elements, or alternatively varying amounts of the tome might be perceived to contain:
  • Other Cthulhu Mythos elements, such as from the "Carcosan" mythos or "Daylands" mythos elements.
  • Familiar occult references, such as to Theosophy, Spiritualism, Scientology.
  • The Shaver Mystery, UFOlogy, the Hollow Earth, or other conspiracy theories, etc.
  • Sometimes ordinary religious content of varying orthodoxy might also be read into the tome's content.
  • Possibly, avant-garde artistic or cutting-edge scientific metaphors might instead be gleaned by the reader.

Heresies and Controversies

• The tome was dreamed into the "waking world" by Wrona Bors, a sorcerer from the Dreamlands, while dreaming of the "reality" of 1920s Arkham, and is thus a magical construct that defies all objective laws of physics. It does not precisely "exist" in objective reality, and despite its apparent age it never existed before the sorcerer dreamed it into existence, and it may have ceased to exist after the sorcerer's death within a year or two of the beginning of the dreams. (scenario "With Malice Aforethought"; YSDC)
• On the other hand, the tome might have survived the sorcerer's death, and may even now be waiting in the collection of some investigator or cultist or other collector for the opportunity to change hands and ultimately fall into the possession of a cultist who has been seeking it or might otherwise put it to use. (YSDC)
• Either way, the tome officially appeared suddenly in the 1920s when it was confiscated during an investigation into murders at Arkham Sanitarium, then "disappeared" with no official trace shortly afterward during the resulting, well-publicized murder trial of the investigators. This might be because the tome literally ceased to exist during/after that trial, or it might be because the investigators destroyed it, or it might be because the investigators or other cultists stole the volume and spirited it away to some secret collection, until the day that it re-emerges into official record. (YSDC)
• Even if it was destroyed, the volume is now part of the collective unconscious of whoever, or whatever, dreams of Arkham, and might reappear at any time as part of a "recurring dream" involving the tome: due to the nature of dreams, including the dream that is the "waking world" of Arkham, the tome can simultaneously be non-existent, exist in one place, or exist in multiple places at the same time, with duplicate "copies" in the hands of two or more people who are unaware of each others' existence! In such a case where the volume exists in multiple places at the same time, it is conceivable that one cultist in possession of the tome might accidentally come upon "his" tome in the library of another collector, unable to explain how it got there; when double-checking his own collection, that cultist might find that the tome "vanished" without his noticing until now, and should he question the tome's "new" owner, the new owner will insist - and may even be able to prove - that the tome was in his own possession all along, though he will be unable to explain how the "loser" knows anything about the tome, or how the "loser" might have produced any evidence that the tome was in the "loser's"possession at the same time. The surreal result would be to cast doubt in both cultists about the "reality" of the dream that is life - and the tome Synarchobiblaron itself might suddenly be found to contain unsettling, forgotten allusions to this dream-like quality of life, the uncertain reality of the tome, and the tome's own role in proving to the reader the surreal, malleable, subjective nature of this dreamlike "reality".... (YSDC)