Improvised Rituals

You can improvise a ritual to do anything of a similar level of power to a known ritual or spell. Improvised rituals are dangerous, and get more so the more power is involved. They will always do something, though this may not be particularly helpful. They work best if you research them in your downtime, so that the refs have time to decide on possible outcomes. You can improvise rituals to cause the same effect as a known ritual. These will need more power to be successful than if they were led by someone who knew the ritual.

Improvised Rituals are very taxing on the leader and a given PC may only lead one a day. Doing more than this is likely to be ineffective and dangerous.

If you perform an improvised ritual, every character involved secretly draws a bead from a bag and shows it to a ref. The ref announces the result after all beads have been drawn.

• A White bead means they do not count as a participant in the ritual.
• A Black bead means they count as one participant in the ritual.
• A Red bead means they count as two participants and the ritual suffers a dangerous overload. All participants suffer a wound.

There will usually be 4 white, 1 red and 5 black beads in the bag, as well as a red token of a distinctive shape to allow you to deliberately pick a red. If you are actively being careless IC, refs may require you to draw twice and take their choice of result. An example of this is trying to improvise a ritual that is more powerful than any your PC knows.

Enhancements and other persistent effects from improvised or combined rituals are unstable. They are unlikely to last long and ones that push the boundaries of what is possible may unravel violently. (OC explanation: If a result turns out to be horribly overpowered or not actually possible, it will not be retconned, but will likely deactivate and Wound the owner.)

Summoning Strangers

This is always an Improvised Ritual appropriate to the type of or specific Stranger that you are trying to summon. Strangers are not guaranteed to respond to a summons, and they tend to work better with advance planning (Because we need to kit someone up as the Stranger so that they can appear).

Combining Two Rituals You Know

You may attempt to combine the effect of a ritual with that of another ritual you know. For example Knowledge 2 (Subject yourself to an effect and learn about it) and Necromancy 1 (Reanimate corpse) might be combined to allow you to re-live a dead person’s last memories and find out how they died. Combining rituals requires the same bead draw as improvising them. However, any participant who knows one of the rituals may choose to draw a second time. If so, they must accept the result of the second draw.