Skip to content

Nine tomes of necromancy

The Books of Nagash

Nine dread tomes in which the first necromancer set down the whole black art of raising the dead and cheating true death forever.

Bound in flayed skin and inked in blood and ground bone, the Books of Nagash are the foundational texts of all necromancy in the Old World. Within their nine volumes the Great Necromancer set down every secret he had wrested from the death-priests of Nehekhara and every dark truth he had wrung from his own damnation — the raising of corpses, the binding of spirits, the withering of the living, and the terrible rites by which a mortal soul might cheat death and endure forever as a thing of dust and hunger.

After their author was first cast down, the nine tomes were scattered and hidden across the world, yet none could be truly destroyed, for the will of Nagash lingered in every page. Down the centuries they surfaced again and again in the hands of the ambitious and the mad, and each time a book was read, a new horror was loosed upon the realms of men.

It was from a single recovered volume that the doomed Arkhan and countless lesser necromancers first learned their craft, and every practitioner of the dark art since owes his damnation to these pages. The Vampire Counts prize the tomes above gold, for within them lie the deepest mysteries of undeath, while the Tomb Kings of Khemri curse them as the origin of the plague that consumed their ancient homeland. To read the Books is to invite Nagash into one's soul.