95102_RAA_Hasselberger2024_R1_PROOF
traveling “the void between” - an eldritch, hidden pathway that twists and winds throughout the fabric of the cosmos. When the ritual in this book is completed, it transforms the victim of the spell into a living, visceral gateway of flesh, bone and blood, splitting them open yet somehow keeping them alive in perpetual agony. Sinew and muscles warp, stretch and take new shape, literally transfiguring the unfortunate sufferer into a physical doorway which rhythmically pulses with an unholy semblance of life. The caster may then travel through this living gate to a specified location determined while intoning the ritual. Even more horrible than the ritual itself is that something from beyond the gateway might peer into our world and come here, either following the caster back from his journey or simply forcing its way through. Such beings do not conform to the laws of our universe and cannot be expected to hold to such boundaries. Surely, looking upon one of these dreadful cosmic beings would cause sanity-splintering madness to take hold and could spell doom for our reality as we understand it. The Death Pillow Appearing as little more than a finely-tailored but clean, ordinary pillow of typical size, this item has left a trail of death and misery behind it since the early 1940s. After its long and tragic history, those few who recognize it for what it actually is have given it the macabre moniker of “the Death Pillow”. The pillow originally belonged to an attorney named Wayne Bailey, who intended to leave his family and marry a local real estate developer’s wife in order to take hold of her fortune. He used the pillow to smother his family as they slept, having a pre-determined and foolproof alibi as to his whereabouts that night. A few months later, his bride-to-be used the same pillow to smother her husband after an evening of drunken debauchery. The two then re-married. Things seemed fine between the new couple for a time, but eventually the unhinged man used it to smother his new wife and was caught red-handed. He later (and quite infamously, thanks to dime store novels and detective magazines of the era) claimed that the spirits of dead family spoke to him when he laid his head on the pillow. In the decades since, the pillow has changed hands dozens upon dozens of times. Every time it lands in a new home, death and misfortune follow. Some have thrown it away while others have attempted to destroy it. Regardless of what happens to it, the pillow always seems to return to menace a new victim. Those who spend a night sleeping with the pillow have strange dreams and afterwards feel a comforting compulsion to go to sleep with it. The longer the pillow maintains contact, the stronger the dreams become and the stronger the compulsion to listen to those dreams becomes. The exact dreams and compulsions are up to the Gamemaster, but they are
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