Rituals

Rituals

Rituals should consist of 60 seconds of appropriate roleplay including talking, unless otherwise noted. Improvising new Rituals requires a Ref. If you are trying to get more than the basic effect by putting in more Stamina, you require a Ref. Appropriate roleplay is not necessarily shouting about magic for a minute, but it must be appropriate to 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. Some Rituals create Enhancements. These are Effects that you can activate with 5 seconds of appropriate roleplaying in order to gain a bonus for the next or current Encounter. You may activate them once, and then they are gone.

Rituals are not fancy unstable magical twiddling that is easily interrupted. They are more like pushing a rock downhill. It takes some effort to get it going, but when it’s rolling, it takes a lot more effort to make it stop. The only reliable way to stop a ritual is for all Participants to be Incapacitated 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.

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 known Rituals. These will need more power to be successful than if they were led by someone who knew the Ritual.

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 red bead means they count as one Participant in the Ritual.
• A black 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 black and 5 red beads in the bag, as well as a black token of a distinctive shape to allow you to deliberately pick a black. 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.

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.

Things rituals cannot do

Rituals cannot resurrect the dead, teleport living beings, grant invisibility, or do 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.