"Welcome to the Iron Fury." The leader of the guild passes you a soft leather tome. The pages are blank, save for the first page, which contains each of your names, and a drop of your blood. "You'll get to use the beds once you've got a couple of pages filled"
Practical Rivalry
The Slayers Journal was initially crafted by two rival adventuring parties who wanted a fair way to see which party had hunted more monsters over the course of a year.
The book was fairly simple to create, and adventuring guilds quickly copied the idea, using them as a way to confirm that contracted monsters had indeed been slain, and to encourage some friendly competition between their members.
The Journal.
This small soft leather journal magically records the details of every monster slain by a creature whose name is written in it's first page. A creature must write their name on the first page of the book and add a drop of their blood in order to be included.
When one of the listed creatures lands the killing blow on another creature within 200ft of the book, the slayers name, the date and the name of the slain creature will be added to it. If the specific name of the creature was known to the slayer, such as "Uvaaran, The Poison Fang" or "Araxish the Dark", that is the name that will appear, otherwise it will be entered as the type of creature. Eg. "Green Dragon" or "Pit Fiend".
The book is warded against tampering, and cannot be written in except for the first page, where new slayers can be added. If a page is damaged, or torn out, the lost details will rewrite themselves on the next blank page.
As always, you can find this item on DnDBeyond here.
Using The Slayers Journal.
This item is a great inclusion for adventuring guilds, rivalling parties, or even rivalling characters in the same party. It was in part inspired by one of my own players who has kept an in-character log of every creature he has slain in the two years we have been playing the campaign. If you do give this item to your players, I recommend allowing them to keep the log themselves to keep them engaged with it.
I'll leave you with an adventure hook for the item: A powerful devil has returned to the material plane after 50 years in the hells. The previous group to defeat him had learned his true name before doing so, and that record exists in their old Slayers Journal. The party must track down the old journal before the devils followers can destroy it, and use the devils true name to banish him back to the hells.
This post is part 5 of my series for Whumptober 2021. The prompt for this post is "There's Red In My Ledger"
View other parts here.
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