Book: The Von Valden Effect
This is (or, at least, claims to be) a book of magical theory written by a wizard or sorcerer named Ernen Kebble before the Great Disaster. It is a comprehensive book containing an examination of a complex subject. The book is impossible to date as even the research notes of Kebble's research notes do not use any recognised date sequences.
The book is not a spell book but is a research text. It contains new magical theory, a method for using magical energy sources in a previously unused way. This new method appears to circumvent the normal 'spell' approach to magic, and allows the user to tap into these energy sources using routes eschewed by normal wizardry, thus allow the energy to be controlled using the power of the wielder's imagination.
Being 15x9 inches in size and over an inch deep, the book has over two hundred heavy vellum pages, neatly and carefully written. It seems to be thorough, but without properly understanding its contents this cannot be verified. It is also possible that the Great Disaster may have affected the way in which these magical sources can be used - and that the methods or practices proposed in the text may not be valid any more, or may function in a different way.
The content of the book is very dry and somewhat specialised. A good understanding of magical theory and advanced mathematics is required before attempting to decode the tome's contents, but even that would not provide much knowledge unless the reader were able to use the methods proposed. The level of knowledge assumed by the writer is considerable, and there would be much learning needed before any of the practical theories proposed could be attempted.
In the introduction the whole book is claimed by the author to be the result of many years hard study, experimentation and proof, and there are sections in the book that are clearly marked as untested theory. This becomes more frequent towards the end of the volume. The credit for much of the work in this book is handed to a man named Otmar von Valden, who seems to have been a mentor or master to Kebble. Other than in this book there appears to be no record whatsoever of the existence of these two men.
The author claims this to be the first book of an intended series, but nowhere does it mention the titles or the locations of further books. Looking towards the end of the book shows that the subject matter is still being uncovered and understood; there is clearly much more work that was required on this subject at the time the book was completed.