So, Ritual.  I’d love to hear examples of what Wizard characters in your games have done with it, and what costs…

So, Ritual.  I’d love to hear examples of what Wizard characters in your games have done with it, and what costs…

So, Ritual.  I’d love to hear examples of what Wizard characters in your games have done with it, and what costs they’ve paid.  The rules don’t specify much of anything, so I’m curious how other people have handled it.  I feel sure there was a thread on Barf Forth about this, but now I can’t find it.

On a related note, here’s a whacked out list (from “Jack”) of stuff and actions that could be required, most for fairly major rituals, I think.  Something like this the Wizard isn’t going to do every day!  “As you burn the incense of Zalamphel a demonic servitor will appear and demand that you sacrifice one of your senses for a year. When you have named the sense to be stripped away, the demon will vanish and you may complete the ritual.”

http://talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2013/01/carcosa-rehab-instead-of-violation.html

17 thoughts on “So, Ritual.  I’d love to hear examples of what Wizard characters in your games have done with it, and what costs…”

  2. I find that the big and epic and the strange and weird are fairly easy to manage.  Like, if you want to summon a chaos demon it’s all blood and skulls and stuff but my favourite rituals are the little ones.

    “I want to weave a spell that will help Lux get over her fear of spiders.”

    “I want to work a ritual to teach me the goblin tongue.”

  4. Right, Adam Koebel, those are cool rituals.  What were the costs?  I’d love ideas that are fun and appropriate and not lame.  I can always charge stuff abstractly (“spend a use from your components pouch”), but that’s not very fantastic.

  6. Colin Roald sometimes the cost is just simple, a sacrifice of coin or a memory or a lock of hair.  Pick the first thing you think of and ask the player why it matters.  Why would the Spirits of Magic want your first memory of kindness?

    For the fear one, the costs were time and attention.  It took place over a few session and honestly, I don’t think anyone was totally sure the ritual did anything at all, or just gave Lux the magic tap-shoes, you know?

    For the goblin one, the cost was a single tooth pulled by a goblin dentist.  Ow!

  7. Now Adam is stirring the memory of me reading some fantasy author, I can’t begin to guess who, suggesting that “first” and “last” are great for narrative purposes. The first knife used that day at the high priest’s table. The last basin of water to be drained out in the unicorn stables. Like that.

  8. Ritual is just “tell them the consequences and ask” except that the Wizard can reasonably ask for just about anything.  Depending on the nature of their magic and the flavour of the place of power, it’ll go all kinds of crazy ways.

  9. I had a player during my last session ask for a ritual to create a permanent ghost-hand effect to replace the hand he lost to an eldritch monster. My first response, as I floundered, was “Uh… it’ll… cost a lot of money?” But I’m definitely going back on that one now that I’ve had time to think. Instead, I’m going to propose the alternative of finding a ghost, and cutting its hand off. 

    Follow the fiction, and if the fiction isn’t telling you, start moving towards things that inspire though, creativity, and/or adventure. The still-beating heart of a basilisk. A happy memory. An emotion. A hair from the head of a jealous lover. The song from an angel’s lips. Borrow the thing that’s most important to them (for the wizard, perhaps their spellbook? Their intelligence?) and give them a short challenge or adventure in which they have to work without their crutch.  Ten, twenty, thirty years of aging. A kiss from a true love. Maybe instead of giving something, they have to take something: a new memory? a child? a burning hunger, literal or metaphorical? a tattoo? In my game the wizard used Ritual to drain the power from skeletons that kept reanimating. I told him he would have to drain all the power from the entire area into himself, and he would have no idea what that power would do when unleashed. Needless to say, the results of the eventual use of that power became the driving force behind the next two sessions.  Just keep in mind to scale the amount of game (and in-world) time of the cost with the benefit of the result. Don’t make my mistake and make a ritual cost that slows down the adventure. Escalate, escalate, escalate. The essence of dungeon world.

  11. Colter Hanna: “needless to say, the results of the eventual use of that power became the driving force”.  It may be needless, but I’d really love to hear how you played it!  Sounds cool.

  13. People have talked a fair bit about the ritual requirements, but I’m curious about the “Place of Power” requirement.  What counts as a place of power, is it just purely fiction related?  When I think of rituals, I think of wizard towers full of experiments, and hag-caves with bubbling cauldrons – but when I think of “Places of Power” I think of standing stones covered in moss, sacred druid glades and hidden underground caverns full of glowing crystals…

    Lots of cool imagery for a rpg game, but not necessarily ones I would combine… Am I reading it wrong?

  14. This being DW, they are of course whatever your group decides they are. Could be standing stones or ancient burial grounds or intersections of ley lines or just anywhere that has a properly inscribed pentagram. The wizard’s sanctum or the hag’s cave are totally reasonable places of power, if that’s how you want to play it.

  15. I think I prefer the idea that a wizard, given time and materials, can prepare an area into a place of power, rather than rely on finding “natural” places of power…. seems to put a lot of limitation on what is, to me at least, the key ability of the wizard.

  16. That sounds great, though you might want to consider whether you’re stepping on the L6 advanced move “Self-powered”.  Of course, you can always alter the move if you want to.

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