Board Thread:Midian Play-by-Post/@comment-24298986-20150225204651/@comment-24302820-20150321084626

Rather than re-write it, which would be totally impossible as well as heartbreaking, I'll just summarise the important bits. Game mechanics wise, each of these books offer a +3/one level bonus on any check that applies to the books subject matter. For example, an apprentice weaponsmith creating something out of Climbing the Scales would effectively craft that item at a journeyman level.

Climbing the Scales, by Brunhild Avisdottir: A book on mathematics showing how some things can scale up or down, and others not so much. What makes this useful for a monster hunter is that many of the examples involve hunting or butchering animals. Mostly this is to show how the subtleties of biology don't scale the same way as the more overt physics of metal. It's not hard to extract designs for weapons geared towards killing very large beasts from this text.

Malleus Immanis Leges, by Aric Stormhold: Intended as a comedy, but the humour is lost on pretty much every reader. This is a comparison of how existing laws across the Middle Lands would deal with monsters, if they were real. What makes this useful is that Mr. Stormhold is much, much better at research and writing legal briefs than he is at comedy. Every section includes not just the letter of the law, but legal precedent and cultural implementation. This book also includes a very useful concordance, organised by both the location and type of mythical beast.

Ready, Set, Whoa! by Una of Crucible: This book is a series of scary stories for older children, purported to be based on true events. It is written in a simple novel-like style. Following each story is a morality section (about half the size of the story itself, totalling a third of the book). Mostly these address what the main character did wrong regarding the primary plot, but some of them focus instead on some minor point of the story. What makes this book useful is how precisely detailed it gets as to the true bits. For example, there really was a girl named Emma who was flash-frozen and subsequently beheaded while walking down a lonely road one evening. Those that discovered her body the next morning noted the look of sheer terror preserved in fleshly ice, and the lack of blood even after she thawed. These are lovingly and luridly detailed in Ready, Set, Whoa! Her death was blamed on the Bog Beast of Hunter's Glen. While the conversation she has with herself in the book is all made up, the other details are as well researched and accurate as possible. Ms. Una notes in her introduction that she felt she owed it to the victims and families she records in these accounts.