Happy Halloween, part 2

We will be running previews on the just-announced The Necrotic Verses and Other Tales, but in case you are wondering exactly what this product will be, it is a follow-up to our fan-favorite Tomes of Arcane Knowledge, and will include a number of new creepological codices — not just spellbooks in the traditional sense, but all manner of strange tomes that plumb the depraved depths of matters magical and mundane — for your edification and enjoyment. Just as a foretaste, consider this an appetizer:

Sepulchral Swaths of Tanoth-Gha: Mythos Tome

This rare collection of necromantic rituals was first inscribed by the ancient Pharaonic peoples as a corrupted version of their complex mortuary rites, involving a several-month process of sequential embalming and enrobing of the honored dead in linen bands while spells of blessing and balance were pronounced to ensure a secure and sublime transit to the afterlife. The Sepulchral Swaths inverted that ancient practice, using the same rites instead to bind both body and soul into the temporal world, their spiritual energies fueling the hateful sorcery of the malevolent cultists of Tanoth-Gha. Named for an eldritch horror from the primitive prehistory of the Pharaonic lands, the forerunners of the cult were simple desert wanderers sheltering within an ancient cyclopean ruin at the desert’s heart when a rain of falling stars streaked from above. Something about this event awakened the elder thing that slumbered below the ruin, and at his appearing these unfortunates were entombed within their own bodies as their flesh withered in Tanoth-Gha’s presence into leathery desiccation even as their minds perceived with a horrific acuity the wrongness of what they had beheld. These living mummies were discovered by other desert wanderers, still terribly alive and unable to die. The whispered ravings of their unhinged minds proved infectious in their madness, and the wanderers began to worship them as living idols of a forgotten god, transcribing their anguished mutterings and inscribing them on the tattered parchment of the idols’ own skin.

What waits within these pages? Secrets man was not meant to know…