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The Power and Price of Knowledge

Source Occult Adventures pg. 219
The quest for knowledge features prominently in occult adventures. Knowledge and power invariably come at a price, however, even if the cost isn’t immediately evident. Calamity strikes when mortals rush blindly in, throwing open the doors to powers that they do not yet comprehend.

As the characters begin to perceive the occult world that surrounds them, consider the dreadful fates and terrible sacrifices that they might face as they immerse themselves ever deeper into the occult. The price of knowledge or power may seem cheap at first—the memory of a PC’s first kiss or the smell of a spring rain—but in the end, these snippets of humanity are a terrible price to pay, and the characters’ own desires or desperation may prove their undoing.

In the depths of the occult underworld, initiates barter for the true names of demon princes, exchange rare formulae for the creation of artificial life, and broker in corpses that conceal terrible secrets. Such mystical bargains are rarely fair trades of power, and hermetic orders and cults manipulate these exchanges to devalue the knowledge traded away and inflate the value of the knowledge earned.

Archives of Nethys

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The Power and Price of Knowledge