Occult Text
Description: Secret letters, occult revelations, arcane grimoires and forbidden recipes all require mystical safeguards to prevent the unwary, uninitiated and the unwelcome from perusing them; even for the necromancer there are ways of achieving a modicum of encryption.
Origin: Benesj the Black
Ingredients: A fair number of ingredients are required, but nothing really arcane is needed for success: as many sheets of paper, papyri or velum as the caster wishes, a dram of Rosemary, the black blood of a dead man, the spittle of a lunatic, a reed pen and purified sand (sand left in the sun for a day).
Casting: The necromancer begins by offering a prayer for success to Hekate (Hek-a-te) and then starts chanting nonsense rhymes in Greek. Then he burns the Rosemary as incense, for forgetfulness and mixes the dead blood and lunatic's spittle into a dark ink. Thereafter, he prefaces his work with the known name of the person meant to read it and follows that with the secret text. Finally, he seals it with his personal sigil and sprinkles the purified sand over the pages to blot them.
When the ritual is done, the dark ink will vanish from the pages and be mystically absorbed by the sand, leaving behind a blank page or pages. The pages are blank only to the living, those who have died
(Wraiths, Vampires, the Reborn, mortals who have died and been brought back ) can see the text, but unless they are the person for whom the text was meant they see only a page of alien nonsense text that swims before their eyes and changes every time the look upon it.
System: Intelligence + Rituals = difficulty four (4). Successes equate to pages of successfully occulted text. The occultation is permanent and whole volumes could be hidden in this way.
Reference: A parallel is “Encrypt Missive”, a thaumaturgic ritual found on pg.87 of Blood Magic – Secrets of Thaumaturgy. Both rituals are the same level and do essentially the same thing.
