You inscribe your personal rune or sigil on an object, creature, or other surface. The rune must fit within 1 sq. ft. and can be visible or invisible. If an invisible rune is made, a detect magic will cause it to glow. An arcane rune can be removed by the caster at any time by touching the rune as an action. Inscribing a rune on an unwilling creature requires a successful melee spell attack. If the rune is placed on a living being, it fades in about a month.  

You can inscribe a single rune upon a book, map, scroll or similar object bearing written information. When you place the rune, you can choose to have it harm creatures that read the text that don't meet chosen characteristics, such as a certain creature kind, an affiliation, or an alignment. Any illicit creature that starts reading the text—which requires an action in combat—must succeed on a Intelligence saving throw or take 1d4 psychic damage. On a successful saving throw, a creature takes half damage. The arcane rune then disappears. At the DM's option, you personal runes could inflict force, radiant, or necrotic damage instead of psychic damage. 

You can have an unlimited number of harmless runes, but you can only have a number of harmful runes active at a time equal to 1 + your character level. When you reach 5th level, a triggered rune also alerts you with a mental ping that a forbidden creature has tried to read the written object while it's on the same plane of existence as you.

You can choose to increase a rune's damage by 1d4 when you reach 5th level (2d4), 11th level (3d4), and 17th level (4d4).