Lost Pages loves grimoires. The Book of Gaub (2021) is their most ambitious grimoire to date. It’s an expansion of the systemless magic system initially laid out in Wonder & Wickedness and Marvels & Malisons. Casters can cast one of these spells for every level they are; they can ignore the casting rules as well, as the risk of catastrophes (of which the book provides 100 horrific examples that serve as both a warning and an invitation). There is also a bunch of monsters, adventure hooks and magic items as well.

The main attraction, though, is the hand of Gaub, or, more accurately, the seven fingers of Gaub, which amount to seven different collections of seven magic spells. Gaub is not really defined, but we can intuit from the awful nature of the magic here that whatever it is, it isn’t pleasant. So we have the Finger Under the Floorboards and the Finger That is Not There and the Finger Gnawed to the Bone and so on. Each is written by a different author — I don’t recognize most of the names aside of Lost Pages’ own Paolo Greco and Charlie Ferguson-Avery (Into the Wyrd and Wild), but that’s OK since there is no clear credit for who wrote what anyway.

The result is extremely grimoire-ish. The names of spells are deeply obscure:  “Deartuate,” “Filodictate,” “Visamnesium.” Most are accompanied by an evocative micro-fiction. The spell descriptions, however, cut through the foggy obfuscation with clear prose. That last spell, for instance, creates, after a week of labor, a fixed sigil within a building or structure that will erase all memory of the place and what happens there when a person sets eyes on it. That’s not super horrible, though. But “Pamphagous” is: that causes the victim to have a ceaseless hunger for the duration of the spell, and to eat anything within reach, even if it would kill them; they’ll rise as hungry undead if they die while under the spell. Now that’s nasty.