A Few Good Books for Joy

Joy could probably use a few good books...

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Some Good Books

1. Six heavily-annotated cook-books. All of them stiff-spined from not having been used in years.
2. A picture-book demonstrating where the wild things are, what their dens look like, and how to read tracks, sign and spoor.
3. A rolled-up poster depicting one hundred of the most common yet dangerous (or at least nuisance) forms of vermin.
4. A Child's Winter Reader. All the things a good child needs to know not to fall prey to the wolves, mobs or biters when the cold times come back.
5. Don't Let Them Get You. A child's book on how to hide and evade pursuit by nasty things including some good advice on avoiding Thumblings and fooling Todtenhilzig.
6. A Guide to learning four basic spells: Protection From Bad Dreams, Scary-Face, Trudin's Little Raft, and Red Dart. (All are First-Level).

A Few Better Books and Documents of Interest

1. Gram's personal herbal. Contains many remedies, recipes and instructions for curatives, purgatives, ointments, salves, and so on, including an extensive section on poisons and antidotes.
2. Mulberry-paper scroll detailing your great-grandfather's pact with the Moss-folk.
3. Discharge paper for some cousin who served as a corporal in the Sewer Militia nearly fifty years ago.
4. A partial genealogy that hasn't been updated in thirty years.
5. Green-Peter's Thoroughly Useful and Concise Compendium of Low-Land Lore.
6. Pact-scroll for a clan of Jentil represented by 'Vagoo the Shaggy.' Counter-signed by every head of household for the last sixteen generations.
7. Your mother's real cookbook. It's wrapped-up in a silk sack and was meant as going away present in the coming spring.
8. Every Home's Handy Reference. A guide to basic to advanced carpentry, plumbing, fortifications, siegecraft, mining, and related disciplines aimed at the self-reliant farmer.
9. Colonel Bob's Guide to Dueling, Debating and Dirty Tricks. A packet of letters, a friendly on-going correspondence between Colonel Bob and one of your uncles is bound in red thread and attached to the book. This was left for you by your uncle, just in case.
10. Schiller's Guide to Trapping, including the section on Winter Ambushes that was left out of the revised edition.
11. The first six books in the Little House on the Moors series, in Nagrothean. Each book has a secret spell that can only be learned by reading the whole thing at night, alone. The first spell grants the reader the ability to read Middle Nagrothean, which is necessary to read the rest of the series.
12. Butcher's Red Book. Suited for use with all manner of beasts. There is something perversely fascinating about this book's incredibly detailed diagrams and the reader gains a +1 bonus to all damage they inflict with bladed weapons just from casually reading through the thing. The majority of the text is in Rotsprecht--Red Speech and will cause great discomfort and worse if one attempts to continue reading it without first undergoing the proper rituals.

Special Books, Papers and Such

1. Jelly-Handler's Manual. Third edition, with copious notes in the margins.
2. A set of A-B-Cs in six languages.
3. Maps to the rat-warrens beneath Kalusha-vardo. Whomever made these used blood mixed with lamp-black as their ink.
4. An out-of-date text-book on Modern Galvanics.
5. Detailed instructions on how to assemble a fodder-golem.
6. The middle-section of an old Low-Lander's Almanack with all the moon-sign tables for about thirty years ago.
7. Mail-order catalog for scratch-paper and you know.
8. Picture-Book of exotic animals lovingly inscribed by both your parents from your eighth birthday.
9. A Child's Guide to Slumberland.
10. Your mother's first grimoire from when she was your age containing 6 first-level spells and a variety of notes, recipes and observations that might be of interest or use.
11. Tattered copy of an old Pruztian Folklore-Fieldbook (Drezdar, 1126) detailing various types of Little People known to dwell within the Low-Lands with special instruction on how best to kill each variety.
12. A fish-bone scroll-tube containing a small translucent roll of material on which is inscribed the words to a charm meant to grant one free and fair passage over an Ianalei's bridge.

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Joy in Wermspittle