Traitor Joe

Traitor Joe was conceived as a joke, really. The world's worst henchman, who would no doubt be misheard by my players as Trader Joe, since the homonym would make for a pun on the bougie grocery store. In reality, it's a much more sinister yet direct double entendre; Traitor Joe is meant, of course, to betray the PCs.

But I didn't have a place for him explicitly in the 5x5s. But I wonder if I can make Eoman Gast into Traitor Joe, or have Traitor Joe be Gast's companion, valet or partner, or something. 

If Traitor Joe delivers the PCs directly into the hands of the thurses, or Jareth Grym, or Eigyr Gwynn or even the Erlking. It doesn't really matter which. Or, maybe he's an independent. I had originally planned for the volume that they're recovering to be Unaussprechlichen Kulten, written I presume in Old Timischer, although maybe it's a translation Nameless Cults, or maybe it's a different book altogether, like the Parchments of Pnom or something.

Here's a ChatGPT generated list of unique alternatives... which I kind of prefer to using more Lovecraftian ones, honestly.

Grimoires & Black Manuscripts

• The Chalyth Codex
• 
  Supposedly bound in plates of green bronze recovered from a drowned city.
• Concerns the rites of beings “older than salt” who dwell beneath oceans.
• The Nargoth Fragments
• Scraps of vellum written in an angular, half-pictographic script.
• Said to predate human tongues, perhaps copied from the glyphs of subterranean races.
• Xylographica Obscura
• A block-printed work from Old Normaund, destroyed in inquisitorial burnings; only a few impressions survive.
• Its woodcuts depict monstrous geometries that induce vertigo in the viewer.
• The Golothic Seraphron
• Written in spidery Kinzassal by an unnamed scholar of Drabeskos, the city that later became Mittermarkt.
• Describes angelic beings whose wings are formed of knives and shadows, likely not of Heaven.
• Zycran’s Testament
• Purportedly found near Burlharrow by the half-mad magus Zycran before the downfall of the culture that used to be there.
• Contains invocations to “the Sleeper Beneath the Clay” — perhaps Orridathis under another name.
• The Veyrholm Catechism (regional to your Ashen Circle)
• A cycle of heretical hymns and questions, preserved in charcoal-stained folios.
• Local legends insist the book rearranges itself when read aloud.
• Phoridex Maleficarum
• A 400 year old treatise, ostensibly on witchcraft, but rife with sigils not found in any known tradition.
• The name “Phoridex” may refer to a demon or an author — no one knows.
• The Scoriac Palimpsest
• Layers of overwritten parchment, each scraped thin and written upon anew.
• The older layers bleed faintly through, so readers glimpse multiple texts at once, none wholly legible.
• Annals of the Ashen Circle
• A folkloric compilation by the antiquarian Jothan Wraike (burned at the stake, 350 years ago).
• Interweaves rural customs with invocations that may be more than metaphor.
• Canticles of Zhulgrithan
• A set of damp, mildew-rotted scrolls preserved in reed cases.
• Their chants, when sounded, create bubbles in stagnant water even when no wind stirs.

At least half of those are useable to me. And here's Traitor Joe again off to the side...