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. The leader controls the effect and other participants should join in with their form of roleplay to reinforce the Paradigm.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.