Rituals

Rituals

Rituals should consist of 60 seconds of appropriate roleplay including talking, unless otherwise noted. Some require a ref, and will say this.

Your roleplay should fit the intent of the ritual and obvious you are trying to cause some effect. You could raise a revenant by roleplaying embalming a body with a bottle full of symbolic alchemy. You could use a Knowledge ritual by drawing a big, complicated spidergram of evidence. The intent of the ritual must be clear to anyone who can hear what is going on, but a ritual may be performed quietly.

Everyone participating in a ritual spends 2 stamina to do so. More people participating makes it more likely to have a favourable outcome. Only the leader needs to have the skill. The leader controls the effect and other participants should join in with their form of roleplay to reinforce the Paradigm.

Rituals take some effort to get it going, but a lot more effort to stop. The only reliable way to stop a ritual is for all participants to stop roleplaying, be dying or suffering from DISRUPT. If interrupted, you lose any stamina that went in to the ritual.

Participating in a repeat of a successful ritual on the same target more than once a day will have unhappy consequences. So the same group can’t use Knowledge 2 to ask about the same subject twice in a day, but they can ask about 2 different subjects.

If you want to do the same ritual with any of the same participants on the same target for a second time that day, you need a ref.

Enhancements

Some rituals create enhancements. These are effects that you can activate with 5 seconds of appropriate roleplay in order to gain a bonus for the next or current encounter. You may activate them once, and then they are gone.

Self-Sacrifice and Rituals

When you harm yourself personally during a ritual, you are devoting your body to your cause or just turning all the safety features off for more power. You may take a wound and make a bead draw. On a white bead, you count as 2 participants. On a black bead, you count as 1 participant. On a red bead you take another wound and count as 1 participant.

It is possible to use every scrap of your PC’s willpower and stamina in a ritual, leaving none to keep them thinking or breathing. Such a ritual is guaranteed to have a maximised outcome and is always fatal to the leader of the ritual. Tales of the death curses of powerful beings that sacrificed themselves this way are legendary and terrifying.

To do this, you may inform a ref, or you may simply add 10 to the number of participants. Either way, your PC dies once the ritual ends. When doing this, you call RESIST to any DISRUPT that hits your PC.

Improvised Rituals

It is possible to improvise new rituals, although this is risky and unreliable. Mostly, people use the known, safe Rituals. See here for the rules for this. Improvising new rituals requires a ref.

Things Rituals Cannot Do

Rituals cannot:

• Resurrect the dead
• Teleport living beings or animated objects.
• Grant invisibility
• Anything that the refs can’t easily physrep given 5 minutes.

The refs will make it clear before you start when you are trying to do the impossible, and you will get a dangerous result if you continue.

Things That Are Really Hard

• Indirect Fire. If you can't see it, you can't directly target something painful at it.