Rituals and places of power
I’ve only had one wizard use a ritual and was curious about its uses in your games. First off how lenient are you with “place of power”? Secondly, what did the wizard do and at what cost? The one example I have goes like this; the party was being attacked by an animated statue. Their piercing and slashing weapons could deal no harm and none had a blunt weapon. The wizard went several rooms away to a temple devoted to death. He cast a ritual that would make the statue brittle to any attacks. The cost was the party had to keep the statue busy for awhile and then lead it into the room where the wizard had painted a sigil on the floor.
The statue was tricked onto the sigil and started to crumble. Turned to rubble by the party.
Superp ritual.
.
I always err on the side of leniency on what counts as a place of power in the interests of being a fan of the character.
I ask them to describe their pop, I’ve had spur of the moment circles of blood to consecrate an area
Ive had the wizard ask the paladin for help convincing their god to intrcede
Ive had a simple clearing under the stars at the witching hour
Or rather than place theres been specific times, or bargaining with a spirit bound to an object, if it did what the wizard asked, wizard would release it.
And so on.
In other RPG’s the question is “is it balanced?”
In DW the question is “is it awesome?”
In my view you hit the awesomeness scale fairly high with your ritual. So well done!
In a once off I GM’d almost two years ago the ritual was to banish Cthulhu. The components for the ritual were
•An old secret revealed
•Innocent blood spilled
•And I can’t remember the third.
The first component led to some of the most fun roleplaying I have ever experienced. The characters basically got involved in a game of Truth or Dare, revealing more and more outrageous secrets untill the powers were finally satisfied that the secret revealed was suffucient to banish the elder one.
Hilarious.
I think Wynand Louw nailed it when he suggested “being awesome”. Ask the Wizard what constitutes a place of power to him. If it makes sense, and it’s fun, go with it.
Trust me, you want there to be places of power. They might be guarded by fearsome beasts or clever traps, or their power might bring its own cost or temptation. I sometimes like to have the place of power have a focus that nudges the magic a certain way.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’m also curious of your wizards’ use of ritual. Like I mentioned earlier I only had a ritual used once. To be fair I tend to run dungeon crawls which are fast paced so any ritual that requires time is hard to pull off. In a campaign setting I would think the opposite. If I played a wizard, i’d be at a temple daily playing with the laws of physics and practicing Action Magic.