A a few things I came up with for a ritual magic system I'm working on.
The "ritual kit" referenced below is a simple toolkit consisting of candles, magical paints, dyes, paintbrushes and small chisels/awls for engraving runes, incense, fetishes, and other occult paraphernelia. It's not "magical" in itself, and costs twice as much as thieves tools.
Illuminate The Things That Should Not Be
Petty ritual. Casting time: 10 minutes Requirements: a torch, a ritual kit.
The ritualist engraves a few runes into the handle of the torch and sprinkles incense onto the head of the torch while chanting an arcane liturgy. After the ritual is complete, the torch ignites. The magic of the ritual remains active until the torch is extinguished or burns out, typically 2 hours later.
While the torch remains lit, its light causes all extradimensional beings– substantial or not, disguised or not– to glow the color ulfire, which does not normally exist in this dimension.
Anyone who views the color ulfire must save vs magic or suffer d4 temporary wisdom/perception damage. Each person only needs to make this safe once per use of the ritual.
The Conjoined Dreaming of Distant Planes
Potent ritual. Casting time: 4 hours. Requirements: ritual kit, a sapient subject, somewhere comfortable for them to sleep. A relic or body part of a dead person who had contact with the same type of entity you're trying to contact.
Before performing this ritual, the subject of the ritual must spend a day neither speaking, reading, writing nor hearing any language in order to cleanse the mind of human (or humanoid) thought patterns. Once the ritual begins, they must not be spoken to, other than the chants that are actually part of the ritual.
The subject of the ritual lies down and closes their eyes. The ritualist paints a third eye on their forehead, drugs them and lights incense, then recites an occult chant to lull the subject to sleep. The ritualist must declare what being or type of being they wish to contact, from what plane– an elemental from the plane of fire, the demon Bal-Korok, etc.
While the subject sleeps, the ritualist speaks to the, using subliminal messages to guide their mind to a distant plan where the dreamer makes contact with the desired being– or at least, something like it. The ritualist then chants the questions or type of information he wants to know. The contacted being provides answers in the form of dreams– these dreams are always abstract and symbolic, conveying the desired information through metaphor and allegory rather than plan language.
Upon waking, the dreamer suffers d10 damage to a random mental attribute, but can save for half damage. They must then write down everything they dreamt before they forget it. After that, the dreams must be analyzed and deciphered to figure out their meaning.
Cast Down the Reaching Arms of the Earth
Mighty ritual. Casting time: 3 days Requirements: ritual kit, an isolated location within 6 miles of the target area, stones taken from the perimeter of the target area, and a person who lives in the targeted area. That person must either be sacrificed as part of the ritual, or participate in it without knowing its true purpose. Before performing the ritual, all participants must spend a week consuming only food from the targeted area.
This ritual lowers the elevation of a region of several square miles– up to one square mile times the level of the ritual leader. At the end of the ritual, the land within the target area is lowered. Mountains may be flattened, valleys created, but the land may only be lowered as low as the elevation at which the ritual is being conducted, and it may be lowered by no more than the ritual leader's level times 50 meters.
The ritual may be conducted underground, however. Mighty mountain fortresses have been pulled below sea level with this ritual, vibrant ecosystems destroyed by the heat and pressure of low altitudes.
The lowering takes the better part of a day– it causes an earthquake, but it's slow enough that well-built edifices won't be toppled. Just lowered. Usually.
Steal the Fortune of the Summer Court
Casting time: ten minutes. Requirement: ritual kit, one live fae.
The ritualist sacrifices a fae creature and gains some small portion of the luck of faerie. She gains a pool of three re-rolls which can be used whenever she fails a roll. These re-rolls must be used within one lunar cycle.
This. I like this. Those requirements are heavy, but then again so are the effects. Good stuff!
ReplyDeleteEvocative and lore building stuff.
ReplyDelete"Cast down" is a nicely specific ritual- slow incoming environmental change is IMO one of the best Powerful Things(tm) that you can grant players in OSR-ish low level dungeon crawls without totally unbalancing or trivializing the game. It feels strong and powerful and gives them a heavy negotiation tool vs large structure-based organizations (like cities), but doesn't stop them from being ganked by a goblin in a tomb or let them beat down an army.
Yeah, Cast Down is very powerful so it can be used a couple of different ways. In higher level play it can simply be a normal part of the player's arsenal, to be used sparingly but basically usable whenever they feel like it.
ReplyDeleteOr at lower levels, it could actually be the object of a campaign arc– either you're trying to stop someone from performing it, or acquire the grimoire with the ritual and then perform it yourself.
Some of the really powerful rituals I'm writing are meant solely to be used that way, as major plot devices. But Cast Down is sort of on the borderline where it could be used either way.