Does exactly what it says on the cover.

You’d never guess by looking that this was a magical artifact at all. It’s a book. Not a giant tome with flaking hardbinding and gold-inlaid titles, but an (albiet rather thick) A5 book in modern perfect binding, with pastel-coloured abstract art on the front, and random blurbs on the back. Exactly like any other random pop-psych book.

What’s different is the content. As the name implies, the book is about how to talk to people – social skills, persuasion, seduction, that kind of thing.

What’s different is that the book contains absolutely no abstraction.

That’s right. None. The rules contained in the book describe exactly what to say and do, down to specific moves and muscle motions. Furthermore, they always seem to be appropriate to the personality that the person reading it wants to project – unless some part of that personality would have to be changed in order for them to be socially popular, in which case they reflect the actions of someone with that changed personality. Likewise, at least some of the decisions that the reader would make in particular situations are automatically allowed for by the book adjusting its own text; for decisions that the reader would make “on-the-fly”, the book covers both options and also when each would be appropriate.

As you’d expect, the book as such is rather big and rather heavy going. But if you can read it, it tells you exactly how to talk to people. And it’ll work. Every time. Your behaviour will always be exactly that that a social butterfly would have performed in your place. So now, your math geek self can use that geekiness to learn these rules, be the most popular in class, and date the head cheerleader. Neat, right?

Ok, game terms. Anyone can leaf through the book and realise what it is at no effect. If sometimes decides to actually read and study the book right through, they need to make a significant Mind check using any skill that’s related to understanding books, memorisation, logical skills, and similar. If they fail, they just couldn’t get their head around the book.

If they succeed, they effectively gain a universal “social skill” at a particular percentage. If they rolled under their mind stat, their skill level is whatever the rolled; if they had an understanding skill and rolled under that, their skill level is equal to their Mind stat. They get this skill even if their Soul isn’t high enough to permit it normally. Furthermore, they never need to roll this skill; anytime they’re in a social situation, they automatically are considered to have rolled a value equal to their skill level, and thus to have succeeded (in the absense of other factors, such as minimum rolls).

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Sure, but for one small thing. Socialisation is ideally an expressive and creative process – one of the most important processes of that type. If you choose not to make it creative, but to follow book rules instead, then there’s a problem. Since the book rules in this case will always deliver the same result that the creative process of a skilled person would have delivered, nobody else will notice; but your brain still knows what process it’s doing, and it will.

Which means that, in short, any socialisation that a person performs using this skill is not counted as socialisation for the purpose of making Isolation checks. Even if they’re hanging out with their 20 friends before starting on the first of the week’s 4 dates, as far as their brain’s concerned they may as well have sat indoors staring at the wall. It hasn’t gotten to do any of the creative processes it wants to do; it hasn’t really gotten to connect with other people. It’s just gotten to run playback.

Of course, this means that anyone who’s read the book and uses it is doomed to an ever-increasing series of Isolation checks. How to break the cycle? It’s difficult. Once you’ve read the book, you can’t choose not to use the skill – the result from the book is always the ‘best’ action for you to take an any given social situation, and you can’t force your brain to engage in a creative process to come up with a result that it already knows. Having your memory damaged, supernaturally or whatever, might manage to free you from the cycle. That said, you were desperate enough to use the book in the first place and now you’re voluntarily burning away those skills that were getting you what you always wanted externally at least – watch out for that Self check…

Of course, if any of those friends, or that head cheerleader, happens to find the book, read through it, and find the script you used to make them date you, that’s a pretty big Helplessness check too. (Yes, the book should have changed to match their desires, but sometimes it doesn’t – in particular when the reader wants to use it to find someone else’s secrets out of interest, rather than knowledge to apply themselves.)

Exactly how this book was created isn’t quite known. The current theory is that an isolated, loner Adapt took out his jealousy on a popular person by somehow trapping that person’s mind, and decision process, within the book. When you read the book, all of your physical properties and similar are plugged into the “inputs” of that captured brain; the book then pumps the remaining inputs full of social stimuli, sees what decisions the trapped brain comes up with, captures the “outputs” that would have gone to mouth and muscle motions, and translates them into text instead (which is why they contain no abstraction). That said, nobody has any idea how such a thing could have been achieved without multiple effects that would be beyond the power of any current Adept, so the theory is controversial.