Stack of books.

[Rodrigo Martinez]

What purpose it serves? Russian roulette with M1911?

[Tailwind]

It has a chance to give your hero a positive Quirk (20% -ish), and a recent patch added Journal Pages as its loot (10% -ish). Bookshelves have them too. See Wiki for details.

Check them if its risk (+Stress, -Torch and a negative Quirk) is negligible, which is somewhat common outside early-game.

[Rodrigo Martinez]

Thanks for info. Seems it's not for a noob party.

[Demetry842]

Originally posted by Rodrigo Martinez:

Thanks for info. Seems it's not for a noob party.

Not really...

More about... "current status" of yours party. If you have plenty of torches and you can... "clear" sterss away form yours characters... or you near to the end of a quest (and you sure, what even negative result - doesnt hurt you very much..) - in this case - why not to try?

But if yours party - allready... "at death's door" - better "skip" it,

[RopeDrink]

Seems it's not for a noob party.

It is for "every party". Considering stress meters / amounts / application / reduction doesn't change much regardless of level/dungeon, there really isn't anything 'noob party' about the game aside from raw damage numbers and maintaining your spell/armor levels when going to harder dungeons.

If you can take the hit, you check the curio. If you can't or don't want to, you don't. Just don't burn them with a torch or read too many using a 'Nervous' character or anyone with generic +Stress penalties/debuffs -- and be prepared for the need to give them some TLC if you fail checks. Considering I never use torches for dungeons anymore for any reason, failing a check and taking a simple -Torch penalty is the best "worst case scenario" ever.

[Tailwind]

Originally posted by Tailwind:

[...] Check them if its risk (+Stress, -Torch and a negative Quirk) is negligible, which is somewhat common outside early-game.

I wrote this because:
- +Stress and -Torch sometimes cause troubles for new players who don't know how to deal with Stress / how many Torches to bring into a dungeon.
- Negative Quirk is basically nothing if the hero already has 5 of them.

If you're confident, it should be okay to look into those books with a team of Seekers/Apprentices. Positive Quirks can help better if it doesn't replace something else, and Journal Pages is probably what this kind of player is searching for.

[Reedo]

It's basically Russian roulette with 5/6 bullets in the chamber.