Wizardry: Book of Vile Darkness Spells I
The Book of Vile Darkness (for D&D 3.0) is a rather infamous book. I recall writing a review of it a year ago or so, pointing out its shortcomings and praising certain parts. But that aside, let's focus on the chapter with spells. The book has a surprising amount of pretty damn cool spells (and some of them aren't vile at all). However, I will say that the author was quite lazy here. There are many spells that are simply duplicates of innate abilities of fiends (for example, Dance of Ruin is based on the vrock's ability, Dancing Chain is based on the kyton's ability, etc.) Some spells wouldn't be out of place in any other book if you ignore material components, such as a heart of a dwarven child, or a bone of a small child that still lives. These components feel like something tacked on just to make the spell edgy.
Also, the book introduces a whole bunch of new "components" for spells. There are some spells that are limited to demons, devils, fiends, or undead. There are also spells that require the caster to be suffering from a specific disease, which sounds really hard to pull off (especially when 99% of GMs ignore disease rules). Spells that can be cast only under the influence of a specific drug are easier. There are also spells that require the caster to be in a specific evil location - also fine. Certain spells require a captured soul as a component - nothing against this. Finally, there are "Corrupt" spells that deal ability score damage to the caster. In GURPS, you could represent that with the Corrupting, -20% limitation, but I'm not a big fan of that. Instead, I will use a massively extended Backlash, even though that won't be RAW.
Now to the spells themselves:
Absorb Mind is an interesting spell. If one were to translate it 1-to-1 from the original source (like I initially did), one would arrive at a more expensive and limited form of Speak with Dead. Thus, I had to step away and make it work slightly differently. I didn't want to skip this spell, because the fluff is cool.
Addiction is a vile spell with a catch - the caster must be drugged too. Addiction can be either a physical or mental disadvantage, so by RAW, you can only use Mind Control to impose addictions to drugs with a psychological dependency. I decided to ignore this fact as a special feature.
Angry Ache is a simple pain debuff.
Befoul poisons water in a large area.
