Some knowledge is too dark.
Some ideas are too horrific to be allowed.
Some practices are just too evil to be tolerated.
Some knowledge not even the gods can erase.
Some evil men pursue wealth, and power, and rulership over their fellows. The lifespan of an evil man marks the true limits of his influence, for once death takes him, his control ends, and others’ visions, even if evil, are not the same evil. Ultimately, the flaw in the evil of men is that it is self-destructive. Covetous evil tends to eat others of covetous evil and thus cannot grow above a certain size before goodly natured men rise up to restore what should be. And thus, the gods care only passingly about the evil of men.
Arguably the most evil mortal being ever to have existed, the wizard, then archmage, then lich, Kaius, spent is human life pursuing terrible secrets, powerful rituals, filthy knowledge. 10,000 years ago, the wizard, Kaius, sought knowledge, much like wizards do. Knowledge came to him the way it does to brilliant men, and Kaius archmage, Kaius, became the lich known as Kaius. But Kaius’ evil was not in the seeking to control other men. Kaius sought to collect as much dark knowledge to himself that he
The lord of knowledge, whose name is unknown, spent his existence, wiped himself from all the knowing in the entire universe, scrubbed every last bit of himself from the world because… after the defeat of Kaius, it became important to remove the Manual from the world. No knowledge of the book must remain. And it took all the power and all the ego… every last bit of the essence of the god of knowledge to expunge the truth of this book from existence.
– dark necromancy
– soul/spirit/life-force eating
– Lich manual
– Dracolich manual
– summonings for dark terrors
– rituals for gates to the darkest places
– maps of several of those places
– True Names of several high-powered evil beings
– rumored to hold Lorbin’s True Name
– rumored to hold the secret of controlling the actual essence of evil
– rumored to be so corrupt that anything on the same plane of existence will eventually be corrupted by it
– rumored that not even the High Lord could destroy it
– rumored that the High Lord gave up direct contact with the world to exercise the power needed to banish the book
– rumored that all the forces of evil are always on the lookout for signs of the book’s location