Seeded Doom
System: Pathfinder | SRD
Level: 8
School: transmutation
Casting time: 8 hours
Components: V, S, M (internal organs of an aberration), F (the crystallized brain of an aberration worth at least 7,500 gp and a book, painting, or section of sheet music), SC (up to 12)
Skill checks: Knowledge (arcana or history) DC 37, 2 successes; Knowledge (planes or religion) DC 37, 2 successes; Spellcraft DC 37, 4 successes
Range: close
Duration: instantaneous; see text
Saving throw: see text
Spell resistance: see text
Backlash: The primary caster is reduced to –1 hit point and is exhausted, and all secondary casters are exhausted.
Failure: The ritual fails to affect the object, and all casters are afflicted by the seed’s effect with no saving throw.
The casters grind the organs into paste and use it to paint their lips and tongue. Anointed by madness, they chant profane blasphemies into the focus brain, causing it to throb and glow. The primary caster releases this energy as a foul sludge, which trickles onto the other focus before seeping into the paper or paint. A successful ritual corrupts the targeted piece of art, planting a metaphysical seed into it, which propagates itself into any copies of the work later created based on the corrupted original; this includes book copies or matched painting duplicates, but not art, literature, or music that is merely derivative. A living creature subjected to the seeded piece of art, typically by hearing or seeing it, must succeed at a Will save or be afflicted by the seed (SR applies).
By default, the seed causes insanity or a madness (see page 182), but numerous types of seeds exist, from different variants on this ritual with slightly different components, foci, and ritual DC. A few examples include becoming blind or deaf, contracting a disease, or rising as a zombie after death.
Source: Horror Adventures pg. 133