Appearance:

A disembodied hand with an ear grafted onto its back. It understands when spoken too, and reads braille. It is surprisingly agile and vicious in battle (strangulation attacks).

Background:

The evil wizard Manola is too haughty to fetch his own books. That’s why he created the piecewise librarian cantrip. Now he has a disembodied hand which seeks out his books for him. His books’ spines have been written in braille specifically for the purpose. When he wants a book he summons the hand and tells it which book to fetch (the hand has an ear grafted onto its back so that it can hear his commands). The poor enslaved hand must then clamber through the most impenetrable shelf-passes and retrieve the requested tome. Its only guide is the braille spines and its extensive knowledge and memory of where the books are. The piecewise librarian can write (it’s a hand) but not very neatly (it can’t hold the paper still). It’s more intelligent than Manola thinks, and it’s deeply unhappy with its life.

So when a group of PCs come along to confront Manola for one of his misdemeanours the hand will endeavour to have itself rescued. This could of course be misinterpreted by narrow-minded PCs as an attack. Or if it conceals itself in the PCS’ luggage then it could be in for a nasty surprise when they find it (“What kind of sick joke is this?” ).

This poor misunderstood hand only wants to be friends.

Roleplaying Notes:

The Piecewise Librarian is basically a friendly kind of chap but is prone to periods of depression in which it looks particularly pathetic and sad. Although the gender is specified above as “Male” it is actually indeterminate (obviously).

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