D20x5 Grimoires of Forbidden Lore

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The tool I used to automate generating the tables can be found here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D20	This grimoire
1	is bound with a cover made from human teeth and nails.
2	was inked with the discoloured blood of inhuman beasts.
3	is a mere fragment of a greater work, all that could be preserved from a purge.
4	is, or has become, a living creature. Its pages pulse with a faint heartbeat, and absorb unwary worms for sustenance.
5	has synaesthetic text, words that are smelled or felt more than read.
6	changes its exact wording each time it’s read.
7	always appears in the dreams of those who’ve read it before, where it remains perfectly legible.
8	will pluck at the strings of fate to place itself in the possession of ambitious sorts if it’s sealed away for too long.
9	is a glass puzzlebox which projects its text when a light is shone through it. Rearranging it reveals another segment of text.
10	has increasingly deranged marginalia scribbled in a dozen different hands in its open spaces.
11	makes you speak its words aloud as you read it, someone else’s voice coming from your throat.
12	appears to be written in gibberish until you add your signature to the many that fill its otherwise blank front page.
13	glows with a sickly light, so that it is legible even in total darkness.
14	seems fated to injure its readers. One can scarcely turn a page without getting a papercut.
15	has a section of actual human spine as its spine.
16	is fireproof, and can only be read in full by immolating it.
17	causes its reader’s eyes to bleed. Reading it too much inflicts blindness, as readers become unable to see anything but the grimoire.
18	is a stack of clay tablets. There’s more tablets in the stack than it seems there should be based on its size and weight, and any tablets removed or destroyed inexplicably return to the stack.
19	heals any damage done to it, leaving a mottled scar.
20	is written in a code that takes sustained effort to crack. Without this effort, it seems to be a mundane cookbook.

D20	This grimoire was written
1	by a doomed poet who dove deep into a mystery cult for inspiration.
2	by a scholar who claimed to have tapped into the Akashic Records, where all knowledge is stored.
3	by a popular medium while in a trance, shortly before their mysterious disappearance.
4	by a priest who became obsessed with dubious apocrypha.
5	by an unknown authour. It simply appeared in history one day.
6	by an entire village, one page to a person, before they walked together into the night, never to be seen again.
7	by a thousand deranged monkeys.
8	by the head doctor of an asylum, based on the rantings of their patients.
9	by the hands of an infamous thief, after they were cut off as punishment.
10	by a historian based on their collated research on several lost civilizations.
11	by a child who claimed to have been inspired by their imaginary friend.
12	some time in the future. What you might find of it now is an imperfect, backwards copy anticipating its own original.
13	shamefully, by a secret heresiarch.
14	apparently long before any other example of written language.
15	by a self-proclaimed prophet who claimed to have received its text in a god-granted vision.
16	by a hermit best known for throwing their feces at visitors.
17	by a jaded noble who brought ruin to their estate in pursuit of limit-experiences.
18	by a professor and their closest students, who barricaded their university and slaughtered the rest of the inhabitants.
19	as a bowdlerization of a yet more dreadful tome.
20	by the hands of the true creator of the world, allegedly.

D20	The lore which this grimoire contains
1	is rituals to summon demons, though not to control or banish them.
2	is how to mix potions which induce mutation.
3	is the secret names of angels, which allow them to be bound against their will.
4	is the location of a dormant undead army and the means to command it.
5	is how to open portals to inchoate realms beyond the conventional cosmos.
6	is knowledge of how to enslave human souls to animate fell golems.
7	is rituals to transform oneself into a kind of intelligent undead: a vampire, a ghoul, a lich, and stranger sorts besides.
8	is a tragically flawed ritual to resurrect the dead.
9	is spells to cook together living things into hybrid monsters.
10	is rites to commune with a banished and vengeful divinity.
11	is a rite to shuck one’s own dooms, curses, and misfortunes onto a more innocent scapegoat.
12	describes how to slip one’s soul away from just punishment in the hereafter, or damn another to far worse than they deserve.
13	is rituals to transfer your mind into another’s body, consuming their self in the process, or to splinter off pieces of your mind to fester and infect another’s.
14	is how to call up plagues, but not how to cure them.
15	is the method to create a sphere of annihilation.
16	can be used to immanentize the eschaton.
17	is knowledge of how to remove human organs and replace them with empowering alien substitutes.
18	is how to steal life-force from others to enhance and extend one’s own.
19	is charms to bend the minds of others.
20	is how to steal and pervert divine magic.

D20	This grimoire was forbidden
1	so that its temptation to prospective seekers would be increased.
2	not for the lore it contained, but rather for its satirical preface which offended a political leader.
3	because hidden in its text is a memetic weapon that drives readers mad.
4	because its cover forms a seal that unleashes a malign spirit while it is open.
5	because it’s a failed attempt at a phylactery, and so its writer(s)’s ghost(s) can haunt anyone who’s read it.
6	because it was used to facilitate an atrocity.
7	due to the blasphemous ideas its text promulgates.
8	because none of its lore is accurate, and is in fact a trick for an even darker purpose.
9	because reading it is a spiritual hazard that dooms one’s soul to a truly unfortunate afterlife.
10	because it’s proof of the limits of safe, sane magic.
11	because of the machinations of a sorcerer who thought it plagiarized their own work.
12	because it was once the key element in a plot to hasten the apocalypse.
13	because the lore it contains could destabilize the natural order of things.
14	because prophecy held that great evil would follow if it were not kept out of sight of perusing eyes.
15	because the gods have a habit of smiting indiscriminately around it.
16	by a tyrant who didn’t want anyone else to be able to tap its power.
17	due to popular demand.
18	because as it’s read it refines and expands on itself by reading in turn the minds of its readers.
19	because the publishing house that owns the rights to it gets violently litigious if there’s any chance it might be copied.
20	as an excuse to seize it for an authority’s use.

D20	This grimoire might be found
1	locked up in the archives of a scholastic monastery.
2	in the hoard of a dragon who gathers knowledge rather than gold.
3	in a parasitic, paradimensional library that siphons the collection and readers of other libraries.
4	in the study of a libertine aristocrat.
5	as the centrepiece of a mystery cult.
6	in a sealed chest in a mermaid’s sea-cave, looted from a shipwreck.
7	chained to the wrist of a cenobite-censor.
8	within the wooden shell of a filing-golem.
9	in the possession of a cult transcribing it onto woodblocks for printing and widespread distribution.
10	through a map encoded in an occultist’s notes.
11	clutched in a dead wizard’s desiccated claws.
12	in the lab of a researcher trying to extract insights palatable to conventional magical practice.
13	in a revolutionary’s hideout, as a weapon of last resort.
14	as the heirloom of a clan of backwoods hedge-witches.
15	in a tower on a barren island, its garrison all dead of simultaneous suicide.
16	sorted among mundane codexes by a senile bureaucrat.
17	locked in a safe in an inquisitor’s office.
18	in the possession of an orphan being groomed by a loose familiar to become an obedient archmage.
19	in a decrepit sanctum, guarded by a vampire awaiting the return of their master’s reincarnation to claim it.
20	in the ash-piles of a failed book burning.