RPM Rituals: Official, Semi-, Quasi- and Un-official

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Teh awesome!

This is just what I was looking for and these spells are now cool and well-defined.

Excellent.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Incidentally, I know activating Charms requires no rolls and is therefore not dependent on local Mana or consecrated space.

If I want to have the local Mana modifier (if worse than where the ritual was originally cast, this never gives a bonus) and lack of consecrated space apply to the success roll of a Charm or other Condtional Spell when it is activated, how much of a Limitation or Disadvantage is this and should I apply the theoretical Limitation to Magery?

This is how it works for all casters in setting, but it does clearly make Conditional Spells, the primary combat and adventuring utility of spellcasting, less versatile and powerful. Well, essentially, it makes the distinction between using magic in a relatively high Mana area which counts as consencrated space for you and trying to work any magic at all elsewhere, even more important.

So what I do for charms and conditionals is I note the total skill for the spell's casting (using the Q&D rules) and make the player roll when they use them.

But back on track - if something works for ALL casters in the setting then it's a feature and shouldn't be a limitation at all. Therotically? I'd peg it at about -20% - just a bit better than an all-inclusive environment limitation.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

So what I do for charms and conditionals is I note the total skill for the spell's casting (using the Q&D rules) and make the player roll when they use them.

But back on track - if something works for ALL casters in the setting then it's a feature and shouldn't be a limitation at all. Therotically? I'd peg it at about -20% - just a bit better than an all-inclusive environment limitation.

Hmmm... actually, I think I'll have to think about this.

I don't want to make it so that Charms and Conditional Spells can be activated at will, without penalties, without worrying about fluctations in local Mana Levels short of No Mana. I want to make it genuinely difficult even for magicians who can work useful magic within their Threshold in a minor Place of Power (+1), located at a ley line in a fairly historic and magic-friendly area (local Low Mana, for a -5) to do the same at a TV station (local Very Low Mana, for maybe -10, for at least a few, though others are No Mana), in an unconsecrated area (-5), while watched by a lot of Skeptic (Perk from Psionic Powers), eh, skeptical people (-5 or so).

If they can activate a Charm or Conditional Spell at only effective -4, the skill where the ritual was cast, someone would have become famous for displaying flashy magic under controlled circumstances on live TV.

I need that penalty to be the full -20, at least for any ritual that has measurable effects. Otherwise, I won't have any answers for when the PCs ask why they can't do it.

[Icelander]

I think I've seen a ritual that convinces observers that a given thing is not out of place (even if it is) and renders it unremarkable.

Can anyone suggest a Pyramid article I might have seen it in? Or was it on the forums, a blog?

A player wants to cast something like it while and it would be cool to be able to look it up.

If not, I've going to guesstimate it as just Lesser effects, giving +4 to the caster's skill (he's probably going to pick the better of Shadowing or Stealth) and -4 on the opponent's Observation.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Hmmm... actually, I think I'll have to think about this.

I don't want to make it so that Charms and Conditional Spells can be activated at will, without penalties, without worrying about fluctations in local Mana Levels short of No Mana. I want to make it genuinely difficult even for magicians who can work useful magic within their Threshold in a minor Place of Power (+1), located at a ley line in a fairly historic and magic-friendly area (local Low Mana, for a -5) to do the same at a TV station (local Very Low Mana, for maybe -10, for at least a few, though others are No Mana), in an unconsecrated area (-5), while watched by a lot of Skeptic (Perk from Psionic Powers), eh, skeptical people (-5 or so).

If they can activate a Charm or Conditional Spell at only effective -4, the skill where the ritual was cast, someone would have become famous for displaying flashy magic under controlled circumstances on live TV.

I need that penalty to be the full -20, at least for any ritual that has measurable effects. Otherwise, I won't have any answers for when the PCs ask why they can't do it.

The problem is, that's going to create issues when you have access to a place of power where you can create your charms. The system is meant to benefit from that. By not allowing charms to keep their bonus you're basically saying only casting a spell right then will ever benefit from having access to a place of power. If that's something you want, then go for it, but most players wouldn't ever bother seeking out a place of power as a base in that case.

Originally Posted by Icelander

I think I've seen a ritual that convinces observers that a given thing is not out of place (even if it is) and renders it unremarkable.

Can anyone suggest a Pyramid article I might have seen it in? Or was it on the forums, a blog?

A player wants to cast something like it while and it would be cool to be able to look it up.

If not, I've going to guesstimate it as just Lesser effects, giving +4 to the caster's skill (he's probably going to pick the better of Shadowing or Stealth) and -4 on the opponent's Observation.

That would be a Lesser Control Mind effect.

I also have this from my Ceteri campaign:

Someone Else’s Problem
Spell Effects: Greater Control Mind.
Inherent Modifiers: Area of Effect.
Greater Effects: 1 (x3)

This spell causes any who view the area to ignore it no matter what is occurring there and viewing it with apathy and indifference. This potent spell could allow someone to be murdered in broad daylight in the middle of a crowd and passersby who fail their rolls to resist would ignore what’s occurring.

Typical Casting: Greater Control Mind (5) + Area of Effect, 10 yards, excludes 6 subjects (11) + Duration, 1 hour (3). 57 energy (19x3).

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

The problem is, that's going to create issues when you have access to a place of power where you can create your charms. The system is meant to benefit from that. By not allowing charms to keep their bonus you're basically saying only casting a spell right then will ever benefit from having access to a place of power. If that's something you want, then go for it, but most players wouldn't ever bother seeking out a place of power as a base in that case.

You're right, one of the things I'm considering is how this will interact with the importance of Places of Power.

Some thoughs I've had, in no particular order:

1) Places of Power remain very important for casting Conditional Spells or making Charms, as while the eventual success roll to cast the spell will use the Mana condtions where the spell is activated, all rolls to gather energy are still made at the modifier for the Place of Power and presumably more favorable Mana Level. You can gather a lot more energy at an effective -4 to skill than at an effective -20.

2) Under the RAW, magicians with access to one Place of Power have little reason to seek out others. They might want an upgrade, but have little use for any Place of Power matching their own, let alone a lesser one, merely based on geographic proximity to a target. If they want to cast a powerful ritual, no matter where the target is, it's game mechanically superior to cast it as a Conditional Spell in your Place of Power and just activate it in the presence of your target, without ceremony or having to pay attention to the mana level where your target is.

3) Making it necessary for occultists who enter an unfamiliar area to secure some Place of Power where they can cast rituals that affect the locals might be a feature, not a bug. The PCs became aware of the villains in my first adventure because the villains were breaking into places listed on tourist websites as haunted or spooky and trying to set up casting spaces there to perform rituals to locate, subdue and sacrifice their desired prey.

4) If casters can just carry Charms with the rituals they need to perform during the adventure, which they could have cast a continent away, and activate those Charms without the local Mana level or Places of Power mattering, any number of classic occult and esoteric plots revolving around control of local Places of Power and ideal spots for certain castings are short-circuited.

5) Even if the ritual to call the Breaker of Thought and Form to separate the Indivisible has already been cast and bound within a diamond worth millions of dollars, I really want it to be a requirement that for best results, it should be activated in a carefully prepared ritual space at midnight, in the secret study of a haunted house attraction, located in a historic housing complex where as many as 3,500 dead bodies were once laid out after the Great Hurricane of 1900, when it did duty as a makeshift morgue.

6) It just seems less dramatic, not to mention offering less scope for discovering and preventing the culmination of this dire enchantment, if the caster could activate his Charm at 11:30 AM at a McDonald's bathroom instead with the same results and much less risk.

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

That would be a Lesser Control Mind effect.

I also have this from my Ceteri campaign:

Someone Else’s Problem
Spell Effects: Greater Control Mind.
Inherent Modifiers: Area of Effect.
Greater Effects: 1 (x3)

This spell causes any who view the area to ignore it no matter what is occurring there and viewing it with apathy and indifference. This potent spell could allow someone to be murdered in broad daylight in the middle of a crowd and passersby who fail their rolls to resist would ignore what’s occurring.

Typical Casting: Greater Control Mind (5) + Area of Effect, 10 yards, excludes 6 subjects (11) + Duration, 1 hour (3). 57 energy (19x3).

Cool!

That's exactly what I was thinking about.

They way I ended up doing it was guesstimate that affecting the caster and what he was carrying (an unconscious and hog-tied sorceress who's been sprayed with salt in the face, possessed by the Outer Void, hit with a lantern to the face, burned and finally had her legs swept from under her and knocked out with a gnarled staff) for up to 10 minutes with a +3 to Stealth and -3 to notice that they were anything remarkable was a Path of Mind ritual somewhere between 30-40 energy. The wiry old 'Nonc' Morel and his model-slender kidnap victim / villainous sorceress don't even mass 300 lbs. combined, even with full equipment.

The precise energy cost ended up being ignored, as Morel decided to tap one of the diamonds they seized, using it as an energy source. He picked one he felt contained enough juice (having used a quick Greater Sense Magic ritual on the diamonds, he had some basis to make a judgment call on that) and tapped it in the usual 1 minute for a mortal without Ritual Adept. Then he rolled a critical success to cast his Inconspicious ritual.

Morel had to walk out a door (to a pirate museum next door to the haunted house) in plain view of two uniformed cops and three SWAT guys discussing how to set up a perimeter around the haunted house he came from. Then he ambled around the bar next door and shuffled over the street to get down to the harbor, as a police vehicle was stopped at a red light. The cop driving was waving him on impatiently when his eyes narrowed briefly as he noted the odd shape the shuffling old man was carrying, but the cop then forgot about him entirely as soon as he noticed the SWAT vehicle pulling in on the other side of the building (Morel used Luck to re-roll a successful Observation check for the lone alert cop).

No one otherwise gave Morel a second thought, just one of the street light people, a passing hobo hardly distinct from the shadows in between better lit areas, carrying something unremarkable, probably his meager wordly possessions in a sad little bag, as he passed through their lives with no more ceremony than a discarded paper cup.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Icelander

1) Places of Power remain very important for casting Conditional Spells or making Charms, as while the eventual success roll to cast the spell will use the Mana condtions where the spell is activated, all rolls to gather energy are still made at the modifier for the Place of Power and presumably more favorable Mana Level. You can gather a lot more energy at an effective -4 to skill than at an effective -20.

That might work.

Originally Posted by Icelander

2) Under the RAW, magicians with access to one Place of Power have little reason to seek out others. They might want an upgrade, but have little use for any Place of Power matching their own, let alone a lesser one, merely based on geographic proximity to a target. If they want to cast a powerful ritual, no matter where the target is, it's game mechanically superior to cast it as a Conditional Spell in your Place of Power and just activate it in the presence of your target, without ceremony or having to pay attention to the mana level where your target is.

Yes. Correct.

Originally Posted by Icelander

3) Making it necessary for occultists who enter an unfamiliar area to secure some Place of Power where they can cast rituals that affect the locals might be a feature, not a bug. The PCs became aware of the villains in my first adventure because the villains were breaking into places listed on tourist websites as haunted or spooky and trying to set up casting spaces there to perform rituals to locate, subdue and sacrifice their desired prey.

Also good. This is the sort of emergent behavior you want for the most part.

Originally Posted by Icelander

4) If casters can just carry Charms with the rituals they need to perform during the adventure, which they could have cast a continent away, and activate those Charms without the local Mana level or Places of Power mattering, any number of classic occult and esoteric plots revolving around control of local Places of Power and ideal spots for certain castings are short-circuited.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. Their having spells at a higher level isn't a bad thing. Their spells can be wiped out by a single enemies Dispel Magic or be useless in a no-mana zone.

I think part of the problem is your campaign doesn't need more penalties for creating conditional spells/charms - it need LESS conditional spells/charms. In Ceteri, any given caster can only have (Thaumatology / 3 + Magery) conditional rituals “hanging” at once. For example, a character with Thaumatology-15 and Magery 3 could have up to 8 conditional rituals waiting simultaneously.

Originally Posted by Icelander

5) Even if the ritual to call the Breaker of Thought and Form to separate the Indivisible has already been cast and bound within a diamond worth millions of dollars, I really want it to be a requirement that for best results, it should be activated in a carefully prepared ritual space at midnight, in the secret study of a haunted house attraction, located in a historic housing complex where as many as 3,500 dead bodies were once laid out after the Great Hurricane of 1900, when it did duty as a makeshift morgue.

Consider the Sanctum perk from GURPS Thaumatology: Magical Styles for that.

Originally Posted by Icelander

6) It just seems less dramatic, not to mention offering less scope for discovering and preventing the culmination of this dire enchantment, if the caster could activate his Charm at 11:30 AM at a McDonald's bathroom instead with the same results and much less risk.

Consider also that charms may degrade. Maybe every day after creation means a -1 to the casting roll. That's simple and easy and captures some of the flavor you are after.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Cool!

That's exactly what I was thinking about.

They way I ended up doing it was guesstimate that affecting the caster and what he was carrying (an unconscious and hog-tied sorceress who's been sprayed with salt in the face, possessed by the Outer Void, hit with a lantern to the face, burned and finally had her legs swept from under her and knocked out with a gnarled staff) for up to 10 minutes with a +3 to Stealth and -3 to notice that they were anything remarkable was a Path of Mind ritual somewhere between 30-40 energy. The wiry old 'Nonc' Morel and his model-slender kidnap victim / villainous sorceress don't even mass 300 lbs. combined, even with full equipment.

The precise energy cost ended up being ignored, as Morel decided to tap one of the diamonds they seized, using it as an energy source. He picked one he felt contained enough juice (having used a quick Greater Sense Magic ritual on the diamonds, he had some basis to make a judgment call on that) and tapped it in the usual 1 minute for a mortal without Ritual Adept. Then he rolled a critical success to cast his Inconspicious ritual.

Morel had to walk out a door (to a pirate museum next door to the haunted house) in plain view of two uniformed cops and three SWAT guys discussing how to set up a perimeter around the haunted house he came from. Then he ambled around the bar next door and shuffled over the street to get down to the harbor, as a police vehicle was stopped at a red light. The cop driving was waving him on impatiently when his eyes narrowed briefly as he noted the odd shape the shuffling old man was carrying, but the cop then forgot about him entirely as soon as he noticed the SWAT vehicle pulling in on the other side of the building (Morel used Luck to re-roll a successful Observation check for the lone alert cop).

No one otherwise gave Morel a second thought, just one of the street light people, a passing hobo hardly distinct from the shadows in between better lit areas, carrying something unremarkable, probably his meager wordly possessions in a sad little bag, as he passed through their lives with no more ceremony than a discarded paper cup.

Very neat

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

Also good. This is the sort of emergent behavior you want for the most part.

Very much agreed.

The early Dresden Files and the early Anita Blake mysteries were a great inspiration for how to investigate supernatural mysteries. One of the central conceits of both worlds is that a powerful ritual had to have some way to have a connection to the victim (through the Laws of Magic) and that it might have to be cast at a certain time and place. Much of the investigation would have been impossible if the one-second activation of a previously cast conditional ritual in the presence of the victim could have circumvented all concerns about local mana levels, ley lines, places of power, correspondences, etc.

I'm not going to eliminate conditional spells or Charms, but I do, very much, want to make their activation depend on the local magical conditions in some way, as this provides a crucial way for PCs to investigate occult mysteries, as well as limitations on the ability of villains to accomplish their nefarious goals without ever giving the PCs or anyone like the PCs a plausible chance to hinder them.

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. Their having spells at a higher level isn't a bad thing. Their spells can be wiped out by a single enemies Dispel Magic or be useless in a no-mana zone.

I think part of the problem is your campaign doesn't need more penalties for creating conditional spells/charms - it need LESS conditional spells/charms. In Ceteri, any given caster can only have (Thaumatology / 3 + Magery) conditional rituals “hanging” at once. For example, a character with Thaumatology-15 and Magery 3 could have up to 8 conditional rituals waiting simultaneously.

Actually, what I'm specifically worried about generally involves an NPC villain (or perhaps some poor deluded fool) with only a single Charm or other conditional spell.

I want many important people and places in the mundane world kept safe, deliberately or just through a natural consequence of how magic works, by the simple factor of never being in an area where magic is easy to perform. It's not plausible many people would always be in a No Magic Zone, even though some in the occult-aware Deep State probably want to make sure that this is done for Presidents, the most important Secretaries of Deparments like Homeland Security, Defense, Justice, etc., as well as Supreme Court Justices and the like.

Realistically, however, it's all but impossible in the setting to predict whether every place an active politician will visit will always be No Mana or whether he might occasionally slip into Very Low Mana, for example.

It becomes a lot more plausible for there to exist any authority figures in the world who are both unaware of the supernatural, but still not enslaved by a powerful ritual to some supernatural force, if it is necessary for those who are trying to affect them with magic to consider not only the spellcasting modifiers of their own Places of Power, but also the local mana where they activate the conditional ritual which is meant to secure them a tame President (or Secretary, Governor, Mayor, Police Chief, etc., adjust for ambition).

That way, the attempt to influence the Supreme Court through magic is an adventure where the villainous faction needs to manipulate events so as to catch their target within a relatively high mana area, instead of their customary mundane homes (also protected by Threshold), workplaces (not always so) or just walking to their car (rarely protected), and the PCs can actually disrupt some ritual worked locally, instead of any required ritual being worked on another continent and then sent with minion-mail to the target and activated just anywhere the minion can see a Supreme Court Justice, without any time for the PCs to learn anything about a conspiracy.

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

Consider the Sanctum perk from GURPS Thaumatology: Magical Styles for that.

Indeed so. It's common to most magicians and a central part of the approach J.R. Kessler, the PCs Patron, takes to the practice of the occult.

He lives on his yacht, his most beloved possession, which he participated in building with his own hands in the 1960s, and after he learned about the existence of magic in the 1980s, he's had various items from his childhood home, including the wood of the walls and some stones from its foundation, incorporated into the furniture of the ritual space on the Penemue. He nurtures the Threshold aboard with infinite care and science, making sure that those who live there are his family, household and court, as well as his employees.

The movements of the Penemue might appear driven by caprice, mood-swings and eccentricities, but are actually calibrated to follow preternatural tides and shifts in mana patterns, sailing along ley lines and mooring in various Places of Power.

Any of the inevitable damage to the Threshold onboard from the incursions of dark forces, as well as the occasional need to transport a dark artifact or a sorcerer in league with dark powers, is repaired through patient tellurgic rituals, which sometimes require a visit to an area of appropriately aspected mana, like, say, the island of Domincia, which is outside the Vile Vortex of the Bermuda 'Triangle' and not, apparently, infested with any dark powers, but it is both close enough for the mana level there to be exceptionally high and aspected towards magic of life and positive energy.

Might Kessler be an occultist of modest personal gifts who simply happens to have Sanctum 5 [5] and almost four decades after becoming aware of the return of supernatural energies to accumulate lore of of Hidden Lore (Ley Lines) and Hidden Lore (Places of Power)? It's not impossible.

Edit: Actually didn't address the specific issue, i.e. the Haunted Mayfield Manor, which actually is where some of the thousands of dead were laid out after the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. The point is that the villains have access to Places of Power within a Vile Vortex, where working magic is much easier than elsewhere on Earth, and they have homes attuned to them with the Sanctum Perk, but they were in the Haunted Mayfield Manor because it was the closest place with suitable aspected mana and least relative penalties for working magic.

If local mana were irrelevant for rituals bound in Charms or otherwise cast as conditional spells, and casters had no reason to consencrate an area for a ritual which they already had as a conditional spell, there wouldn't have been any dramatic final confrontation between PCs and villains. The villains would have finished what they needed in one second and never had to learn a thing about local mana conditions or Places of Power.

As it was, the villains used an elixir in powder form to subdue Ms. Talbot at the McDonald's bathroom at 11:30 AM, but didn't activate the major ritual at that time, as while they didn't worry about the mousy assistant librarian resisting the powder, even in a place with inferior casting conditions which made the margin of success fairly modest, they did worry about the margin of success for the ritual they planned to use at midnight of New Year's Eve, in a prepared Place of Power, milking every possible bonus.

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

Consider also that charms may degrade. Maybe every day after creation means a -1 to the casting roll. That's simple and easy and captures some of the flavor you are after.

Yes.

I've informed players that outside a Threshold that is either your personal sanctum or a friendly sanctum where you have permission to attune yourself and your magic, conditional rituals and Charms will deteriorate. Binding them in items of personal significance or high natural magic can help with this, as can attuning them with your life force, but for 'normal' conditional rituals, do not expect them to survive many sunrises, as the rising sun is a powerful symbol of renewal and will tend to dissipate any ongoing magical effects and banish all spirits.

Game effects to be determined, but a HT check for the conditional ritual every dawn would be a part of it. A cumulative -1 to the effects of the spell might as well be added on it, at least for conditional rituals that aren't bound in suitably expensive or personally significant vessels.

I'll want to allow spending some time and energy on maintaining pre-made Charms and conditonal rituals. Perhaps spending about 10-20% of the total energy cost every day and rolling a successful Path of Magic check will stave off these effects. Of course, doing so requires access to a place that you are confident that you can work magic in, so you'll only need to do this when you, for some reason, are away from your Sanctum and any friendly Thresholds, but still have access to a fairly high-mana Place of Power.

And, hey presto, we have villainous occultists who must secure a local Place of Power as part of any nefarious schemes they have.

[dcarson]

If the sunrise also breaks or weakens things like mind control then getting the President or a Supreme Court judge is useful but you need them to do what you want quickly. Even without adventurers interfering things can take longer then you want. With interference you can easily get nothing out of it. Just calling in a bomb threat to the Supreme Court building could give a days delay before they give a ruling.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by dcarson

If the sunrise also breaks or weakens things like mind control then getting the President or a Supreme Court judge is useful but you need them to do what you want quickly. Even without adventurers interfering things can take longer then you want. With interference you can easily get nothing out of it. Just calling in a bomb threat to the Supreme Court building could give a days delay before they give a ruling.

Indeed so.

Nevertheless, if you can activate any conditional ritual in 1 second, without limitations on how much energy you can have as conditional rituals even without a charm object and without local mana level mattering in any way, it becomes uncomfortably cheap and easy for someone with access to a Place of Power in the middle of a Vile Vortex to replace important people (who never go anywhere with local mana levels higher than Very Low Mana, at -8 or even -10) with disguised magicians or changelings summoned for the purpose, simply by activating the ritual near them.

Or, even if the ritual is specifically mind control, it could involve mind control that forced the victim to put on a previously prepared Charm powerful enough to resist dissipating and then allow someone to bind that Charm to their life force and attune it to any Thresholds where you lived.

I absolutely want such plots to be a feature of the setting. I just need them to require social manipulation and occult maneuvering over local ley lines and Place of Power, not simply the brute force approach of a sufficiently powerful ritual or two cast at a distant Place of Power as a conditional spell.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Very much agreed.

The early Dresden Files and the early Anita Blake mysteries were a great inspiration for how to investigate supernatural mysteries. One of the central conceits of both worlds is that a powerful ritual had to have some way to have a connection to the victim (through the Laws of Magic) and that it might have to be cast at a certain time and place. Much of the investigation would have been impossible if the one-second activation of a previously cast conditional ritual in the presence of the victim could have circumvented all concerns about local mana levels, ley lines, places of power, correspondences, etc.

I'm not going to eliminate conditional spells or Charms, but I do, very much, want to make their activation depend on the local magical conditions in some way, as this provides a crucial way for PCs to investigate occult mysteries, as well as limitations on the ability of villains to accomplish their nefarious goals without ever giving the PCs or anyone like the PCs a plausible chance to hinder them.

If that's what you're going for then retool Ritual Adept - remove the Connection part for those who have it. Done. Since it seems like no one has Ritual Adept anyways aren't you already emulating this? From what I've read it just seems like you're artificially building up skill levels to compensate for penalties you're adding on. If you want to remove massive bonuses I'd suggest you kill the bonuses (halve them for instance) and bring skill levels back to norm. Unless you are literally going for the idea of "skill 15 + bazillion for foci, place of power, etc." If you only allow +1 or +2 bonuses for things in the first place you won't need to worry about stacking penalties so skills become sub-base.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Actually, what I'm specifically worried about generally involves an NPC villain (or perhaps some poor deluded fool) with only a single Charm or other conditional spell.

I want many important people and places in the mundane world kept safe, deliberately or just through a natural consequence of how magic works, by the simple factor of never being in an area where magic is easy to perform. It's not plausible many people would always be in a No Magic Zone, even though some in the occult-aware Deep State probably want to make sure that this is done for Presidents, the most important Secretaries of Deparments like Homeland Security, Defense, Justice, etc., as well as Supreme Court Justices and the like.

Realistically, however, it's all but impossible in the setting to predict whether every place an active politician will visit will always be No Mana or whether he might occasionally slip into Very Low Mana, for example.

It becomes a lot more plausible for there to exist any authority figures in the world who are both unaware of the supernatural, but still not enslaved by a powerful ritual to some supernatural force, if it is necessary for those who are trying to affect them with magic to consider not only the spellcasting modifiers of their own Places of Power, but also the local mana where they activate the conditional ritual which is meant to secure them a tame President (or Secretary, Governor, Mayor, Police Chief, etc., adjust for ambition).

That way, the attempt to influence the Supreme Court through magic is an adventure where the villainous faction needs to manipulate events so as to catch their target within a relatively high mana area, instead of their customary mundane homes (also protected by Threshold), workplaces (not always so) or just walking to their car (rarely protected), and the PCs can actually disrupt some ritual worked locally, instead of any required ritual being worked on another continent and then sent with minion-mail to the target and activated just anywhere the minion can see a Supreme Court Justice, without any time for the PCs to learn anything about a conspiracy.

That's fair.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Indeed so. It's common to most magicians and a central part of the approach J.R. Kessler, the PCs Patron, takes to the practice of the occult.

He lives on his yacht, his most beloved possession, which he participated in building with his own hands in the 1960s, and after he learned about the existence of magic in the 1980s, he's had various items from his childhood home, including the wood of the walls and some stones from its foundation, incorporated into the furniture of the ritual space on the Penemue. He nurtures the Threshold aboard with infinite care and science, making sure that those who live there are his family, household and court, as well as his employees.

The movements of the Penemue might appear driven by caprice, mood-swings and eccentricities, but are actually calibrated to follow preternatural tides and shifts in mana patterns, sailing along ley lines and mooring in various Places of Power.

Any of the inevitable damage to the Threshold onboard from the incursions of dark forces, as well as the occasional need to transport a dark artifact or a sorcerer in league with dark powers, is repaired through patient tellurgic rituals, which sometimes require a visit to an area of appropriately aspected mana, like, say, the island of Domincia, which is outside the Vile Vortex of the Bermuda 'Triangle' and not, apparently, infested with any dark powers, but it is both close enough for the mana level there to be exceptionally high and aspected towards magic of life and positive energy.

Might Kessler be an occultist of modest personal gifts who simply happens to have Sanctum 5 [5] and almost four decades after becoming aware of the return of supernatural energies to accumulate lore of of Hidden Lore (Ley Lines) and Hidden Lore (Places of Power)? It's not impossible.

Edit: Actually didn't address the specific issue, i.e. the Haunted Mayfield Manor, which actually is where some of the thousands of dead were laid out after the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. The point is that the villains have access to Places of Power within a Vile Vortex, where working magic is much easier than elsewhere on Earth, and they have homes attuned to them with the Sanctum Perk, but they were in the Haunted Mayfield Manor because it was the closest place with suitable aspected mana and least relative penalties for working magic.

If local mana were irrelevant for rituals bound in Charms or otherwise cast as conditional spells, and casters had no reason to consencrate an area for a ritual which they already had as a conditional spell, there wouldn't have been any dramatic final confrontation between PCs and villains. The villains would have finished what they needed in one second and never had to learn a thing about local mana conditions or Places of Power.

As it was, the villains used an elixir in powder form to subdue Ms. Talbot at the McDonald's bathroom at 11:30 AM, but didn't activate the major ritual at that time, as while they didn't worry about the mousy assistant librarian resisting the powder, even in a place with inferior casting conditions which made the margin of success fairly modest, they did worry about the margin of success for the ritual they planned to use at midnight of New Year's Eve, in a prepared Place of Power, milking every possible bonus.

I like the idea of a boat with a threshold. That's just cool. But on topic - consider allowing the mana bonus to stay, but add a seperate roll to make it "stick." This gets you the flavor you want and means PCs still will seek out places of power to use. For example:

After the casting roll make a Will-based roll against your base skill or effective skill, whichever is less. Each two points by which you succeed lets you keep the a +1 bonus from the local mana. Any failure or success of one or less results in the bonus fading outside of the higher mana level.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Yes.

I've informed players that outside a Threshold that is either your personal sanctum or a friendly sanctum where you have permission to attune yourself and your magic, conditional rituals and Charms will deteriorate. Binding them in items of personal significance or high natural magic can help with this, as can attuning them with your life force, but for 'normal' conditional rituals, do not expect them to survive many sunrises, as the rising sun is a powerful symbol of renewal and will tend to dissipate any ongoing magical effects and banish all spirits.

Game effects to be determined, but a HT check for the conditional ritual every dawn would be a part of it. A cumulative -1 to the effects of the spell might as well be added on it, at least for conditional rituals that aren't bound in suitably expensive or personally significant vessels.

I'll want to allow spending some time and energy on maintaining pre-made Charms and conditonal rituals. Perhaps spending about 10-20% of the total energy cost every day and rolling a successful Path of Magic check will stave off these effects. Of course, doing so requires access to a place that you are confident that you can work magic in, so you'll only need to do this when you, for some reason, are away from your Sanctum and any friendly Thresholds, but still have access to a fairly high-mana Place of Power.

And, hey presto, we have villainous occultists who must secure a local Place of Power as part of any nefarious schemes they have.

Why not just add a special variation of duration instead of spending time on it. Or maybe in addition to it. Just double the cost of the Duration and that's how long the spell in the charm lasts without an HT roll. Or perhaps allow a Lesser Strengthen Magic effect + Bestows a Bonus to get a bonus versus weakening.