I was wondering too. Okay I put it down but then I'm doing a challenge and a hero comes to take it and they do it in 5 turns? Am I supposed to stop a challenge every single time just to grab the book?

Steal from someone and put it into their inventory to get more mileage out of the tome. You're 100% guaranteed to drive someone insane, and it will last longer before being put on the ground where heroes can seal it. This is doubly effective if you can put it on a ruler of settlement with a deep one cult so you can make them like and then love deep ones.

That's what I've been doing; they still do eventually drop it tho, at which point it gets bound and then you get hit with one of the big penalties (losing all your power point is huge; the 5 menace/profile is relatively mild by comparison)

The best thing to do is prepare to take the book back. Agents can rob heroes of lower level, so if you focus on levelling at least 1 agent up you can simply go and rob the book back from the hero after it's been bound but before they do the spell. Then you can unbind it yourself.

ok you WANT people to pick up the damn thing..

Just played this one (and got the Insanity achievement).
1) Very Early game I just let it run -it is annoying that there's no way to pick up the tome yourself and whisk it away to safety but there you go. I try to have the power available.
2) A little later I will look out for opportunities to rob the binder and jailbreak it.
3) Hysterical works extremely well once you get it (and power is coming fast enough to not be a big issue) but the randomness can be annoying.

I only tried to stop the heroes binding it if Madness was close to 100 and did do the Lore boost-insanity challenge a couple of times but didn't focus on it. I think it was pretty good but you need to have Lore agent present and able to take the menace/profile hit. That definitely could be worth focusing the early game on.

I did disrupt heroes who were removing madness from a location -that steady sanity damage is extremely potent.

I didn't give the Tome directly to heroes but that might well have been a better move in some cases. I'm not sure how long it can work unbound on a hero but if you can figure out a good strategy for that you might get a hero to Insanity 4* very quick (esp with the Harvester in concert)
* where they spread madness 5%/turn to their location!

@Fantoche You want them to hold it *unbound* but when you Place it they come along and bind it which doesn't help you. You have to rob them to put it in their inventory which requires an agent of higher level than them.

Harvester is MVA.

Spreading Madness was the only Supplicant ability I thought worth picking. The other two just don't seem to be in the same league to me (especially as I had a Holy Order putting loations at 100% madness needing just 1 more)

I definitely missed a trick if the heroes just drop the Tome once they get fed up with it rather than binding it directly.
Putting it in a Treasury I was robbing I somehow forgot was a thing.

I didn't find losing half the power a big sacrifice since it comes in so quickly while the Tome is active and I do hate letting my min P/M increase: +5 to all agents seems pretty big to me unless the timing is fortunate.

[Obviously you want to use the Power to infiltrate as much as possible early on]

Yeah. It's not 100% intuitive but the way the book works for anyone still unclear is:

- If you give it to someone, they will read it until they go mad and then drop it
- If you place it, or someone drops it, it will create madness in that location over time
- Eventually, a hero will come and bind the book. This will remove the book from the location and put it in their inventory
- Usually, the hero will then attempt to use the book against you. You can either let this complete, taking a penalty but having the book escape back to you unbound, or take the book from them and then unbind it with a lore challenge.

The book getting bound is actually a good thing if you want to move it, because your agents can't pick it up themselves. Just make sure that the hero binding it is lower level than one of your agents so you can rob them immediately. Usually if you disrupt a hero binding the book they get bored and do something else so it's not hard to arrange.

Drop the Tome in the centre, guard it with the Spellbinder and the Harvester to get pure madness Iastur victory in less than 200 turns.

Originally posted by Achab:

Drop the Tome in the centre, guard it with the Spellbinder and the Harvester to get pure madness Iastur victory in less than 200 turns.

Hunh, That's a neat strat. I'll have to try that.

Alright, can confirm: Spellbinder + Harvester + Iastur is an utterly insane broken combo. I haven't pulled off the victory in <200 turns, but I can see how it'd be possible. I've got about 20 permanently disrupted heroes trapped at level 1 and going steadily insane(r).

So i agree, once you can bounce it around with hysterical i just kinda let it do its own thing at that point.

Prior to that on my victory run i hard focused on the capitol of a decent sized kingdom around my tomb. Basically my Supplicant sat there building madness/helping the deep ones along and i had the Trickster who likes to move around anyways just following the book and picking it up/returning it to the capitol until it was fairly ruined.

Once that kingdom was self sufficient in causing chaos I sent my Supplicant and Rabble Rouser to the Elves to infiltrate there and get their arrogance up then slipped the book into their kings inv since i find them easier to infiltrate. King then proceeds to genocide Dwarves and start raiding humans once i give him the book again and start pumping up his hatred of the other races. Shame i didnt have a Dark Empire that run because the elf king actually wanted to join as his top priority lol. But yah thats generally how i ♥♥♥♥♥♥ around with it until i got hysterical

Originally posted by Kalil:

Every guide/discussion I've seen of Iastur has said "just use hysterical tome to protect it from being bound", but, uh, hysterical tome is very late game (second to last seal, iirc?). What's the best way to utilise it before then?

EDIT: Third to last, per the wiki; seventh seal, turn 204.

Sometimes if the tome is on the ground somewhere I just recall it at the elder tomb, I don't usually like to do it that way though since... you'd have to go all the way back to the tomb.

Originally posted by Devin:

Sometimes if the tome is on the ground somewhere I just recall it at the elder tomb, I don't usually like to do it that way though since... you'd have to go all the way back to the tomb.

I tried to do this to pre-empt a binding and it didn't work (challenge was greyed out). Possibly it works if a hero drops it but not if you placed it?
It's also possible that a hero was in the process of binding it but I think that's something I'd have checked.