Dustwright
Stitched from the bindings of a hundred ruined volumes, the Dustwright gloves are said to carry the residual intent of every scholar who ever pressed a desperate hand against a page in search of answers. The haunted library where they were found had no surviving staff, only shelves that rearranged themselves each midnight and a persistent smell of candle smoke with no source. Librarians of the Collegium Obscura believe the gloves learned to listen long before any ghost thought to speak.
Mechanics
When you touch a written text, you can pull the knowledge of its original author into your mind, temporarily gaining their expertise.
Borrowed Mastery
Once per long rest, when you touch a written document, book, inscription, or manuscript and spend 1 minute reading it, you may absorb the professional expertise embedded in its text. Choose one skill or tool proficiency that is meaningfully related to the subject matter of the text. For the next hour, you gain proficiency in that skill or tool. If you are already proficient, you instead gain expertise, doubling your proficiency bonus for checks with it. The DM determines whether the chosen proficiency is sufficiently related to the text's content.
DM Notes
Balance consideration: the once-per-long-rest restriction and the requirement to spend a minute reading keeps this from being abusable in combat. The DM adjudication clause on subject-matter relevance is important to enforce, as players may attempt to claim that any text grants any proficiency. A thieves' guild ledger granting thieves' tools proficiency is valid; a cookbook granting Arcana is not. The gloves reward players who engage with in-world documents, making them excellent loot in investigation or dungeon-crawl contexts where written materials are present. In a haunted library setting they become particularly powerful, and the DM may want to seed texts whose subject matter fills gaps in the party's skill coverage as a form of environmental puzzle-solving.
Generated with: Level 5 · Haunted library · Heroic · Rare