WorldbuildingWednesday - Legendary Items of Trothguard (Part 3)

Welcome to today's #WorldbuildingWednesday post! For those of you new to this series, I'm @oblivioncubed. In this series of posts, I break down what Worldbuilding means to me, how I build a setting, why I choose to build what I do, and hopefully provide you some inspiration to use in your Worldbuilding.

My world - Trothguard - is a setting I've created as a catch-all location for any tabletop RPG games I run, so everything I build is filtered through a lens of 'how will this improve the game for myself and my players?'.

Today we're going to look at the final post in my series of Legendary Items of Trothguard!

Well, we're finally here! The last set of Legendary Books of Power that exist in my world. As with the previous set, these are items that are tied to my world's story and my tabletop game's history.

Let's start our last group of books today with Gregor's Red Book of Automatons. This book is the work of a toymaker-turned-wizard whos obsession with automatons drove him to create detailed schematics and instruction guides for assembling a staggering array of golems, mechanical automatons, and other various constructs. The book begins with fairly minor constructs - little toy-like spiders and animals that have a variety of single functions - but ends with instructions on how to bind elementals to constructs or merge elementals with golems. The last instructional is an incomplete section detailing binding souls themselves to automatons.

While Gregor's Red Book of Automatons is not itself inherently magical, it is considered the most complete and exhaustive compendium in Trothguard on creating constructs, golems, and other types of automaton. There are some copies of the book that are generally accurate, but the original book is the one that is most sought out. At some point in the past, an owner of the book wisely enchanted it to prevent damage or destruction to its pages.

Next up, we have Aster's Folly - A powerful druidic book of knowledge, spells, and rituals.
Aster's folly is presented as a story following the adventures of a young druid named Aster. The tale weaves druidic knowledge, spells, and rituals into the narrative of the stories it tells. It's thought that this book was either transcribed from oral traditions or was a device meant to make passing this knowledge through oral traditions easier by memorizing the various stories of Aster. The book has recently resurfaced in the hands of a fallen druid who stole the book from their Circle in an attempt to profit off of it by manipulating weather, plant growth, and other various spells and rituals it contains. The few people who have read or been told the stories often remark on how appropriate it is that this young druid is "Following Aster's Folly".

The last of these books is The Teller's Tale. Writing in this book is said to be akin to using the 9th level 'Wish' spell. Whatever written in the book's pages comes true, but with a steep personal price to the writer. The book was originally created by an angry and spiteful Djinn, and has found its way into the hands of wizards, kings, and collectors the world over. One and all sooner or later part with the cursed object as they reach the limits of what they're willing to lose.

These nine books are not the only powerful scrolls, books, and compendium's in the world, but they are certainly some of the most well-known and well-researched. As I mentioned previously - each has played a role in events in the world's history. The ebb and flow of many cults and groups revolve around these (and other) powerful relics. Alone, each is problematic but ultimately manageable. When a group collects several of these, however, or pairs them with other legendary artifacts, they can be extremely dangerous and difficult to control if the group is not benevolent.

There are semi-secret groups dedicated purely to finding, procuring, and managing these kinds of items. With many of the books on this list, this is a particularly difficult feat, however, given their propensity to somehow manage to appear in new locations suddenly... which is a mechanic that has been long studied and which remains an elusive mystery to all who have tried to unlock how this happens.

Thank you for reading today's #WorldbuildingWednesday! I hope this has provided you with some inspiration!

If there's something else you'd like to ask me about, please do so! I will make every effort to answer it next Wednesday.

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