Re: Path of Chance Ritual that Granted Destiny Points
 

Excellent!

Edward Alvin Smith and his non-Adept, energy-efficient artifice-limited magical approach thanks you.

Without Ritual Adept, in a world of Very Low Mana (-10) to Low Mana (-5), with a maximum of three levels of Magery, characters feel every point of energy they have to gather.

And firing bullet Charms at maximum RoF, while no doubt impressive, quickly became much less attractive once the players realized that each and every Charm would take 30 minutes + the time to gather energy (which is probably 30 to 60 minutes for rituals within the capabilities of PCs) to replace.

Especially when the PCs realize that Ghostkiller Bullets don't inflict any extra damage on other incorporeal spirits than ghosts and Rend the Void (Outsider Bane) bullets don't seem to affect malevolent spirits that come from unpleasant unearthly worlds that are still within a theoretical cosmology of a unified universe. Charms designed to destroy specific types of supernaturals may receive a cost reduction and certainly are Lesser effects when more generic bonus damage that works against normal, physical beings would be Greater, but that comes at a cost when shooting at unknown foes.

Chaperone from the Path of Luck (Path/Book) in RPM
 

Has anyone written up the Chaperone spell from GURPS Thaumatology in RPM form?

It's similar, but not identical to Bless, from Pyramid #3/56. It should probably come out as somewhat more expensive than Bless, but not dramatically more expensive.

Grimoire Collection: Al-Risalah al-Mawt (Path of Body)
 

Edward Alvin Smith (PC) learned alchemy- and artifice-based ritual magic in the strange Land of the Nommo, another world which he accidentally visited when lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Smith was lost for 23 years, but does not believe that more than a couple of years passed for him, though his memories of the time among the Nommo are in many ways hazy and unreliable, the result, his friends believe, of coping mechanisms that preserve his sanity.

The ultraterrestial sojourn has wrought many changes on Smith, not the least of which is that he is able to consume food and medicine meant for Nommo, but drugs and elixirs designed for humans no longer work reliably on him. Of course, his barely-noticeable gills that become visible in areas of high magic might have something to do with this.

In any event, Smith knows how to make a Nommo elixir of Minor Healing, which works well on himself. On other humans, however, there may be minor side effects, which Smith has been led to believe will not be regarded as acceptable. No matter how harmless he says that a craving for fish and invigorating baths in sea water are, it seems that other people are unwilling to roll the dice on becoming de facto Deep One hybrids, complete with unblinking fishy stare and a general air of Innsmouth.

Being an accommodating sort of eldritch abomination, Smith took this for constructive criticism and set out to obtain a more palatable formula for medical elixirs. Before the start of play, he'd been successful in obtaining a Grimoire collection for the purpose, written in medieval Arabic (a Moroccan dialect with some Berber influence), a language he understood from his studies of African archaeology.*

The Grimoire is Al-Risalah al-Mawt ('The Treatise of Death'), writtten by an otherwise unknown Moroccan physician and scholar who signed it Zahid al-Talib, which may or may not be his actual name, given that it translates to something like 'Altruistic (or Self-Abnegating) Seeker of Truth'. The work is not dated, but as best Smith and his allies can tell, it was written in the mid-9th century and from cryptic notes and hints in the work, Zahid al-Talib was probably born under the Idrisid dynasty, and seems to have traveled to the regional trade hub of Sijilmassa, where he embarked upon a career in trans-Saharan trading.

I want the grimoire collection to contain useful healing magic, but also the fruit of Zahid's secretive and illegal investigations into the nature of death, the limits of the body and the boundaries between life and death. For Science, obviously.

The rituals I've determined are in there are:

Cleanse Disease
Cure Disease
Death Touch
Diagnose
Hunger
Immobilization (Pyramid #3/43)
Minor Healing
Palliative (Pyramid #3/56)
Panacea
Restful Rest (Pyramid #3/56)
Succor (GURPS Thaumatology)

I'd like to add a couple of truly disturbing 'medical' rituals and/or alchemical formulas. Any suggestions?

*Before he disappeared, Smith was a keen amateur archaeologist of ancient African cultures, having some interesting beliefs about Ancient Astronauts, pre-historic inhuman civilizations, the influence of ultraterrestial languages on African languages of widely divergent geographic range and similar not-at-all Delusions.

Re: Grimoire Collection: Al-Risalah al-Mawt (Path of Body)
 

"Hand of Gory" has a descriptive name in Arabic, but English-speakers invariably use this one. It allows you to animate a freshly severed human hand, diverting nerve impulses from your own hand to the animated one.

"Necromancer's Eye" does the same thing with a freshly extracted human eye, which is very useful when carried by a hand.

"Clean removal" allows you to remove a human body part quickly and painlessly, closing the wound, so that there won't be in infection unless it's subsequently interfered with, and preventing shock.

Re: Grimoire Collection: Al-Risalah al-Mawt (Path of Body)
 

Creepy, but what does it do? As in, what game effects does it have?

If the hand can move fast and fight, this definitely becomes a Greater effect, which means that it's extremely energy-inefficient. Of course, that might be because Zahid al-Talib never managed to develop a very useful ritual from this tangent of his researches, which is plausible enough.

Ah!

Now this is both creepy and actually useful, providing a low-tech 'video bug' that can be hidden to spy on foes. Obviously, a version of it that works on the ear might also be developed.

An excellent and admirable medical procedure, especially at TL3, when it was written. Should it perhaps come in Ointment form, which is rubbed on the limb which is to be removed, and activated by cutting with a knife?

The less magic looks like it violates natural laws (or perhaps the relevant benchmark is rather the expectations of the majority of people), the easier it is to perform, in setting. So, subtle and mystical ritual effects are efficient, blatant and obvious ones are extremely expensive for what they do.

Also, Ointments can't really be used in combat, unless perhaps you've pinned your foe, which makes the ritual less prone to abuse as a weapon. Well, there's the old 'make a Charm from a knife, activated by using it for cutting' trick, but I figure this has to be statted so that while it does extra damage, it really requires a limb braced properly in order to automatically remove it.

I'll ponder how to write it up, unless somebody wants to take a stab (slash?) at it?

Re: Grimoire Collection: Al-Risalah al-Mawt (Path of Body)
 

It can move itself, walking on its fingers, carry small things, and do anything else you can manage with one hand without using the mass or strength of your arm. So its fighting ability is negligible, but it's excellent for small thefts, poisoning, and bugging.
Indeed.
That makes a lot of sense. Note that it can be used on an eye, ear, nose, and so on.
My knowledge of RPM is slight.

Re: Grimoire Collection: Al-Risalah al-Mawt (Path of Body)
 

Sever the root - Gives an alternate form called 'rootless' which has unhealing(total) and draining (life force).

A stronger version gives dependency(life force)

the body has been cut off from the root of its own life force, and as a result no longer heals and will begin to waste away. Under medical analysis the subject is no longer doing any restorative processes, no new blood cells are being produced, all cells no longer divide- the body runs entirely on 'reserves' with no replacements.

Obviously extremely painful, and deadly with a long duration; it seems to have been a 'development spell' that led to the following:

Root Tap - allows the temporary enchantment of a vampiric weapon as per imbuments (Notably a vampiric weapon so long as you have say a cow around it MUCH cheaper than a healing spell for equivalent healing). Normally cast upon blood transfusion equipment, if cast upon transfusion equipment it gets a -50% style bonus on the casting (IE it only costs half as much energy). If cast upon a regular weapon it warps the weapon to have a spike in the handle which must be gripped tight enough to penetrate the palm and has a blood groove that feeds into the palm spike.

Uncap Root - afflicts an alternate form containing: Instant regeneration, regrowth, lecherousness with 6 resistance, compulsive carousing with 6 resistance, gluttony with 6 resistance, increased consumption 2, OPH extreme sweating, Low pain threshold (any other 'excess' disadvantages you feel are appropriate). Ultimately this turns into a very inexpensive way to bring a person from the brink of death back to full health, but those side effects.... (Scientific analysis of an individual so afflicted will reveal all of their cells to be in an impossibly excited state, going through divisions at a blurring rate and restoring more completely then thought otherwise possible). Normally prepared as a powerful tincture or pill

Sustain Root - Afflicts unkillable 1 on the target (potentially via alternative form with side effects as per uncap root if you want to make it less expensive to cast). Even when suffering what seems to be lethal damage the subject's 'life force' never really stops acting on the body, and will start to restore them so long as they have not been completely destroyed. Normally prepared via tincture or pill, often based on a radioactive element (uranium, radium, etc)

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

For clean removal: Have it afflict the appropriate lost limb disadvantage with time spanning- this potentially means that should a particularly gifted surgeon (or one with healing magic) be able to repair the limb and reattach it before the spell's duration is up it will resume function.

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

Is that legal?

Afflicting Disadvantages with RPM is not meant to Afflict permanent ones, is it, especially not if the Duration/Time-spanning modifier is only for a period which the target has until the effect becomes permanent. At least, I don't think it's legal to use Altered Trait, One Leg with a duration of 10 minutes to represent cutting off a leg that can only be reattached within ten minutes, but is otherwise permanently lost.

Re: Grimoire Collection: Al-Risalah al-Mawt (Path of Body)
 

So, somewhat less energetic than the disembodied Hand in 'Independent Body Parts' in GURPS Horror p. 15?

Maybe, instead of having Move equal to DX/2, it can have Move equal to (caster's DX + target DX) / 5. And ST figured the same way, but divided by 3, as the HP for an extremity.

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

Ghostdancer/RPK would obviously be the proper people to tell you if its legit or not; but from my understanding by making the affliciton time spanning you can effectively say 'you have always had one leg' and so the leg will come off- if the leg is not there at duration end, well, its off for good. If it is there at duration end, it goes back on.

YMMV, and your the GM obviously- so in your game your rule is law; but again by the book I believe it is accurate.

Re: Grimoire Collection: Al-Risalah al-Mawt (Path of Body)
 

Yup. That one gets "unnatural vitality" or something like that, whereas this one is working off a somewhat rationalised magic system.

Re: Grimoire Collection: Al-Risalah al-Mawt (Path of Body)
 

Just so.

I think I'll keep the Greater effect, as even a slow-moving disembodied hand is undeniably supernatural, and therefore, blatant magic and hard to perform. I suppose Altered Trait, Independent Body Part is the way to go, with some limitation to account for the fact that not only is the hand weaker than standard for that trait, but the magician needs to Concentrate in order to make it act.

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

You can heal a lost limb - for as long as the duration lasts. It says that plainly on p. 7 of GURPS Thaumatology: Ritual Path Magic. If you are afflicting the target with One Leg it lasts as long as the duration allows.

Now, you can get tricky and use Conditional Termination on p. 18 of GURPS Thaumatology: Ritual Path Magic - I have used a permanent Duration in my own campaigns as worth 60 energy. But that's not RAW.


I'd say it gets the better of caster's IQ or the target's DX.

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

Indeed.

I'm allowing 'enchantments' that are tied to the life force of a person attuned to them, i.e. "until the heart of John Thistlewaite beats no more". Haven't specified the exact energy, as this is background justification for how NPC magicians assisted PCs in making magical items they bought with character points at PC creation, but I want to make it fairly affordable. Of course, most occultists believe that tying ongoing magic to someone's life force will, at minimum, shorten their lifespan by draining vital energy every day (perhaps like smoking), and at worst, embroil those who embrace such magical workings in messy things like Destiny, Weirdness Magnet and supernatural Enemies, by making a person into an anchor or eddy in the preternatural tides of mana flow.

In 'realistic' terms, killing a person is usually simpler than getting royalty to pucker up and kissing amphibians, so while this is undoubtedly useful for adventurers (who tend not to care about their gear once dead), there is a metaphysical justification for making it reasonably energy efficient. Plus, of course, taking up a conditional magic slot and costing character points should serve as adequate balance against player abuses.

While I'm not inherently opposed to using caster IQ, I categorically do not want to allow a caster to rely on it instead of the ST, DX and HT of the body that 'donates' the hand (or other body part).

It's a lot creepier and more flavourful for the caster to covet the beatiful hands of a concert pianist, for their delicate touch in performing surreptious sleight of hand, than to be essentially indifferent to donor Attributes and just as happy to take any old arthritic hand from a dying addict.

Either an average or the lower of caster's IQ or donor's relevant physical Attribute.

Magical Grafting of Body Parts
 

Oh my God, I just realised that the amputation ritual and the independent body part rituals in the grimoire Al-Risalah al-Mawt were obviously the research toward a certain goal, the ability to heal someone who had lost a limb, with a necromantic prosthetic!

That's Restore or Transform Body, Altered Traits, Remove One Hand (One Arm, One Leg, etc.) and... well, would we use Duration?

It seems like it could count as Healing, once the donor limb or extremity has been attached. Of course, it's a hell of a lot creepier if it has a Duration and the potential for the limb to be controlled by the caster and not necessarily the subject...

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

Cool.

That's fair, but the guidelines to do something like this for RPM/RPM-like systems is p. 20 of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 19: Incantation Magic..

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

Providing a discount or penalty to the final cost of spell for the appropriateness of the reagent used can achieve this as well.

Master thief's dexterous hand give -50%, arthritic mummy hand +15%. The caster can then choose to either just enjoy the easier casting, or instead put 'gives a bonus' into the spell with the saved energy.

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

That's a good idea - I'd probably use that instead for the flavor you are attempting to achieve.

Re: Magical Grafting of Body Parts
 

I'm glad you were the first to spot it. I was actually working towards necromantic composite bodies for brains whose own body was dead, but prosthetics come out of that.

Re: Magical Grafting of Body Parts
 

It's completely in character for the long-dead Zahid al-Talib. He was a scholar, yes, but first and foremost, he was a healer, in a harsh time and place, where endemic raiding leaves many people wounded and crippled for life. Yes, Zahid was meddling with Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, but even his creepiest spells should ultimately have been developed for benign purposes.

The temptation and the tragedy is, of course, that many 'good' people might consider it acceptable to render a stranger crippled in order to give a loved one who lost a hand or leg back the ability to function again, to weave, cook, paint, cherish or stroke, to walk and run again. Especially if the stranger is someone doomed to die anyway or perhaps a criminal whose sentence is amputation.

The fact that the ritual which attaches the limb or extremity to the person receiving the prosthetic and restores it to full life and function, now connected to the new owner's nerves, muscles and ligaments, also includes a Path of Crossroads component and is much easier to cast than it should be... is surely not indicative of anything horrific in any way, shape or form.

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

What about the fact that you need a still-living, or at least ultra-fresh, limb or extremity to perform the ritual at all?

Is that a substantial Traditional Trappings discount?

Or does it just make the ritual more expensive than a pure Greater Create Body effect, by adding a Lesser Transform Matter to the Greater Restore Body effect?

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

Yeah, at least -15% - maybe -20%

You wouldn't need to do that I'd think. I've have to see a write-up of what you have in mind to be certain.

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

Well, what I want is for the caster to be able to heal One Arm, One Eye, One Hand, One Leg, etc., but only if he has a living limb, extremity or eye to graft to the patient.

Ideally, the energy cost and/or skill penalty of simply creating a new body part should be prohibitive enough so that this ritual is substantially easier, enough so that this is likely the only way a mortal magician of attainable skill levels has to fix permanent crippling of that kind.

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

For something like this, I'd use the rules for a Trigger and then halve the cost. That's how much it should give for an energy discount.

Conditional Sense Spells
 

For a caster who can only make charms and elixirs, not cast spells on the fly, I thought I'd define a few of his most common investigative rituals.

I'm looking for guidelines on how much I can legally fit under one Lesser Sense effect and when I need to add Altered Trait and/or at least another Lesser Sense effect to the ritual.

Touch the Weave

Spell Effects: Lesser Sense Magic (x3).
Inherent Modifiers:
Greater Effects: 0 (x1).

This information spell affects a 200 yard radius around the caster. It tells the caster the local mana level, whether it is aspected in any way and what modifiers this gives to spellcasting. It also picks up whether any spell effects are ongoing within its range and locates the nearest one, yielding some information on the general type of magic according to margin of success. Finally, it detects the location of all places of power within 200 yards, where they connect to (if relevant), and how powerful they are. In all cases, the caster can exclude any source he’s already aware of.

Typical Casting: Lesser Sense Magic (2) + Lesser Sense Magic (2) + Lesser Sense Magic (2). 6 energy (6×1).

or for my charm-based caster:

Lesser Control Magic (5) + Lesser Sense Magic (2) + Lesser Sense Magic (2) + Lesser Sense Magic (2). 11 energy (11×1).

Is this right? Do I need all the three Lesser Sense Magic effects (not that it breaks the bank to include them, just want to get this right)?

Sense Threshold

Spell Effects: Lesser Sense Magic (x3).
Inherent Modifiers:
Greater Effects: 0 (x1).

This spell tells the caster the power of any threshold he touches (he can stop short of physical contact if this would negatively affect him), any special effects the threshold might have and whether there are any wards or spell effects anchored in the threshold. If the threshold extends more than 200 yards away from the caster, the caster will not be able to determine anything beyond its base power, but he will be aware that the threshold extends further than he can detect.

Typical Casting: Lesser Sense Crossroads (2) + Lesser Sense Magic (2). 4 energy (4×1).

or for my charm-based caster:

Lesser Control Magic (5) + Lesser Sense Magic (2) + Lesser Sense Crossroads (2). 9 energy (9×1).

How about this? Need fine tuning, better description, some changes?

Re: Conditional Sense Spells
 

I think I discussed this upthread already - A lesser sense effect can effectively find the presence or absence of a substance, force, etc. covered by the Path skill - it works as Detect with Vague. Greater sense effects work as Detect without vague allowing you to analyze it with a follow-up roll.


This should be a single Greater Sense Magic effect, not three Lesser ones.

Ditto. This is a Greater Sense effect. Also, as I noted elsewhere the Path of Crossroads covers mundane doors and thus should also cover Thresholds.

Re: Conditional Sense Spells
 

You did mention upthread, but I suspected I was still failing to properly distinguish between the numbers of necessary effects and their status as Greater and Lesser.

I was particularily struggling with whether detecting mana levels, whether they are aspected, Places of Power, any possible aspects of those places and any ley lines connecting areas of high mana and/or Places of Power, should count as one, two, three or four effects, because is it all 'presence or absence of magic' or should each rule count as a separate substance for the purposes of sensing?

One Greater effect is simple and elegant.

As for the Sense Threshold effect, what other information than the level of the Threshold is available from a typical Threshold?

Ward spells or other magic woven into the threshold sound pretty far removed from Path of Crossroads, which is why my writeup added Sense Magic to handle that, but, of course, you are right, a Lesser effect is far too vague to be of any use for that.

Re: Conditional Sense Spells
 

For the most part, RPM does complicated easily. It's the simple stuff magic does in fiction that sometimes has problems.

Also, if you want the spell to give you everything Detect with Analyzing would give, add another Greater Sense effect. Basically, as long as you succeed on the skill roll to cast the spell you learn everything about your target that those traits would tell you.

A Lesser Sense Crossroads effect would allow you to know if a threshold protected the dwelling/area/etc. at all. For this purpose, anything of TR 6 or less is basically "no threshold."

A Greater Sense Crossroads effect with a successful follow-up roll would tell you the above as well as. . .

. . . The strength of the threshold and its rating.
. . . If the dwelling was haunted or the site of demonic forces.
. . . if the dwelling was blasphemed or blessed.
. . . if it contained a genius loci spirit.
. . . if it contained a devil's gate or dimensionally weakened area.
. . . The general past of the place (if it was a happy home or the site of murder or any other number of things).
. . . If the dwelling's threshold was recently violated by mundane or supernatural forces (I'd allow a separate roll against Occultism or Hidden Lore to tell you what it was for the latter).
. . . If the dwelling is enhanced by various apotropaic items and what they are.

Add a second Greater Sense Crossroads effect to remove the IQ roll. Add a Lesser Sense Crossroads with Bestows a Bonus if you want to roll IQ, but want to do it with a bonus.

Clear as mud?

Re: Conditional Sense Spells
 

Teh awesome!

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

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.

Re: Conditional Sense Spells
 

Excellent.

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.

Re: Conditional Sense Spells
 

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.

Somebody Else's Problem Field / Inconspicious
 

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.

Re: Somebody Else's Problem Field / Inconspicious
 

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.

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).

Re: Somebody Else's Problem Field / Inconspicious
 

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.

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.

Re: Somebody Else's Problem Field / Inconspicious
 

That might work.

Yes. Correct.

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

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.


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

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.


Very neat

Conditional Spells, Local Mana and Places of Power
 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Re: Conditional Spells, Local Mana and Places of Power
 

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.

That's fair.

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.



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.

Re: Conditional Spells, Local Mana and Places of Power
 

From Thaumatology, casting in the presence of the target fulfils any Connection requirements. Activating a condtional ritual or Charm when standing by a target seems to fall under this.

It's a device so that ordinary people are mostly useless when it comes to the occult, unless something Terrible is teaching them, giving them power and bonuses.

Also, so that a smart, prepared and educated caster can learn just enough to get into trouble, but not enough to deal with it. Basically, anyone other than servants of dark forces, chosen ones and generational super-geniuses will not be able to perform adventuring-useful magic.

And, yeah, I'm going for a feel where whole adventures revolve around amassing positive modifiers for one ritual, the way Tim Powers stories tend to work.

It is. The idea for this campaign was literally a player asking if they could play modern Monster Hunters who travel by boat.

That might not be unfair, I suppose.

Though I anticipate needing to have no worries about the PCs not desiring Places of Power. Just being able to cast rituals there, such as divinations, is well worth it. Add being able to gather energy there for charms and conditional spells and people will still kill for Places of Power.

Remember, they'll tend to be in favorable mana zones, as well. A consecrated Place of Power might be -3 to -5, as opposed to an unconsecrated spot on an average street at -13 to -15.

I'd allow the Lesser Strengthen Magic effect combined with Bestows a Bonus, sure. I'm also considering having all effects that can endure the dawn outside a Threshold need to be bound in an object or living being, metaphysically something that has a threshold-like field around it.

And creating any long duration conditional rituals calls for Greater Strengthen or Control Magic effects.

Re: Conditional Spells, Local Mana and Places of Power
 

Yes, but spells to find lost objects or people would suffer. As would things like hexing your enemies from afar.

You COULD state that targets not in your presence suffers a -10 to cast on them, with those who are in your presence requiring a -5. Then you'd add a second level of Connection for Ritual Adept. That might be help with the flavor your going for.


As a long-time GM of RPM - I probably have more experience with the system then anyone here except PK - this just rings warning bells in my head. It's your game however and it's not like I can tell you to do X anyways. Just trying to give the benefit of experience.

I agree. I like it quite a bit.


I suppose that's true. It just feels weird that you can gather the energy to cast the spell easier, but don't get it for the casting roll as well. A thought: If you're going to use the current mana level for casting a spell in a given area consider rounding up the bonus for Places of Power by 1.5 for the purposes of gathering energy. That might even it out some.

That works.

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

One thing which I have used in my games (which are notably a lot more 'high magic' than your game seems to be aiming) is that powerful magic creates echos both forward and backwards in time, like the side-lobes of a radio broadcast, and that detecting an echo does not require more than magical training or other detection ability (Empathy, oracle, danger sense, etc).

Thus if you are considering combat with someone who has a 100d doom arrow in their quiver and you have danger sense you can get a sensation of raw destruction and harm being placed within an arrow before you are committed to the fight.

Similarly this helps protect the 'state of the union' (State of the union: the concept that everything is the same as you know it, but magic/supernatural has been added) in that, even though under RPM a large cult could in theory get together, drink the magic kool-aid, and do voluntary sacrifice until death getting up to thousands of points of energy rather quickly and easily- the echos of that will stretch so far backwards in time that anyone inclined to disrupt the cult will have ample time to do so (and probably lots of someones if the ritual is for 'turn the entire world's oceans into soup').

For your lower powered, more subtle magic, game making all magic have echos (with the amount they ripple subject to scope and energy) should allow things to remain largely the same with only a few individuals 'in the know' required to 'run interference'- the classical 'slow moving bureaucracy', multiple decision makers, and arbitrary delays of large governments and organizations may actually be simple mundane defenses against mystical manipulation and anything powerful enough to circumvent such defenses creates large enough echos that the limited number of 'in the know' defenders can step in.

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

This seems reasonable enough.

Also, note that my campaign is actually quite high fantasy in scope. The PCs are 1,000 point Chosen Ones, or if not Chosen by anyone in particular, at the very least each of them has some deeply mystical significance. In a world where only one in a thousand people might know about the occult and only one out of every thousand is capable of even modest adventuring-useful magic, the PCs are mages (or the equivalent) who stand at the pinnacle of mortal potential, probably in the top 1% of adventuring occultists.

Out of the couple of dozen greatest living archmages in the world, the PCs will start out knowing one and will probably end up making enemies of a couple more before the end of the first adventure. And by Season 2 or 3, the PCs might be knocking on the door of that first tier in the rough ranking of magical puissance, once they've polished their raw (or rustic) potential.

It's just that to most people living in the campaign world, the supernatural is superstition, not reality. Even those who know differently mostly just know to use Thresholds, salt, bells, horseshoes, garlic and othef apotropes to protect themselves. At best, a skilled practisioner might be able to make protective amulets and good luck charms, but those would not last long outside his Sanctum.

The ability to stand toe-to-toe with what exists in other worlds and defeat paranormal predators with stronger magic than their own, that makes the PCs superheroes in a world where most people, even very high point budget people (world-champion athletes, special operators, rich and powerful elites, etc.), are simply potential victims.

Only by avoiding areas of the Vile Vortices and any other higher mana zones caused by ley lines and Places of Power can anyone hope to avoid becoming a statistic and a cautionary tale. Most mortals don't even realize it, but they'll unconsciously shiver and feel a desire to go home, inside their safe Threshold, when they sense areas of higher mana, where there might be monsters.

I'm aware that using one set of rules for PCs and another for everyone else accomplishes roughly the same goal, but I'm a fan of character sheets actually spelling out, in concrete terms, what makes the character different from the norm.

Think Anita Blake (probably with less sex), Harry Dresden and Owen Pitt from Monster Hunters International. Just realise that the named characters in those stories and the PCs in mine, they aren't representative of typical people in the setting. Or even typical animators, wizards or monster hunters. All of the above, along with allies of a similar power level, eventually defeat cosmically powerful, deity-level threats and save the world.

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

Ah, ok- so the '-20 in penalties' is not 'there are basically no casters' its 'you 1000 point paragons can cast like how a 150 point witch sidekick casts in monster hunters' instead of 'every spell you cast could shake the world at its core'

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

You've got it.

With the extremely important flourish of:

"Magic is still superstition in most of the well-lit modern cities of the world, where even archmages have a hard time producing noticeable effects, even from pre-prepared charms, but in certain mystically significant places, along ley lines and in locations of historical significance, shadowy figures of the occult underground exchange subtle curses and you may need protective charms to be safe from monsters. If you enter the Vile Vortices, you may find yourself in an area where other realities bleed into ours and the mana levels rise enough to make the magic of myth and stories possible. Watch out, then, as such concentrations of magical energy are a sure sign of an incursion by something powerful and if it is not sent back whence it it came, the tear in reality will grow stronger and eventually, the Earth we know will be no more."

Magic isn't a 'natural' part of the setting, it's a symptom of the approaching apocalypse that the PCs are supposed to stop. And while they fight fire with fire, by mastering the use of magical forces to use against the paranormal creatures from other worlds, the PCs should never forget that magic is an alien, invasive energy, one with unpredictable effects and frightening implications. There are areas where any magic should work poorly, if at all, and these areas, rather than being annoyances and areas where the PCs are weak, should be viewed as islands of safety from the supernatural.

Re: Conditional Spells, Local Mana and Places of Power
 

Yes, where they pinpoint their location or show them from a distance, which would both count the sought object or person as the target/subject of the spell. General divination and information spells, even if they gave hints that could be used to narrow down the location of someone, I would count as not targeted on anyone in particular and thus not penalized any more.

Such rituals, of course, could not give you any specific directions toward an object or person who was in a less magical area. But it could exclude areas of higher mana from your search, give cryptic prophetic answers, suggest that what you search for is occluded from the spirits by bright lights and technology, etc.

Things like: "What Place of Power did X last visit?", I would count as targeted on the impression left in that Place of Power, with maybe an effective -3 to cast, and not on X, presently sleeping in a normal suburban home with a local mana of -10.

Feature, not a bug. In setting, all magicians know that one of the sacrifices you make, if you choose to make your home where magic is easier to perform, is that your enemies can also hex you more easily. This is why they generally expend a lot of power ensuring that their homes are Sanctums, with powerful protective Thresholds holding various wards interwoven with the matrix of the Threshold, if such magicians choose to make their home within an area with a higher mana level at all.

It's why people who live within the areas of one of the Vile Vortices worry constantly about being cursed and great numbers of people in places like Haiti or Mali have learned enough to mess with the supernatural, but people who live in 'normal' modern cities don't really have to consider the subject, being able to disbelieve the whole thing and usually not suffer for it.

It might. I'll consider it.

You should talk to my players. :-)

They want to be able to teleport, raise armies of undead, throw fireballs and all that fine stuff. I've told them that I want to be able to have a world which still resembles our world enough so that I can use detail from our world in worldbuilding, so no one can be able to do anything which would blow the lid of the status quo in the world forever.

There being areas of the world where monsters break the rules of physics and magic can work in at least a moderately flashly manner, even if subtle effects are still favored, but with most of the modern life we take for granted occurring in areas where even Merlin might struggle to prove that he's not a fraud, was a compromise.

Traveling by ley lines and sailing the occult tides will also allow the PCs to be in the right places at the right times, aided by the arcane prognostications of adepts on board, and most especially, by the advanced tellurgic workings of their Patron.

Note that you absolutely do get the Place of Power bonus on casting the spell. It's just that determining the effects of a spell uses the lower modifier of your local mana level and your target's.

Yes, I want to consider how, for the purposes of an adventure, a ritual magician could somehow affect a target who lived in 'normal' society, almost, but not quite, in a No Mana Zone. An area where mana was present, but only in minuscule amounts, making affecting anything there extremely hard. And yes, such areas are actually most of the world, at least most of the urban, Western world that I know. The occult underworld impinging on the world of the normal is cool and it will happen, from time to time.

But the places where PCs will mostly face the supernatural and use magic are in the Vile Vortices and at confluences of ley lines and mystical tides where the mana level rises to levels similar to those found within the Vile Vortices.

And Charms and Conditional Spells that you prepared at a fairly safe Place of Power with a friendly Threshold and an effective modifier of -4 will work just fine when you cast them in an area where the world of Faerie has bled into our world and the local mana level is Normal Mana (+0), which even with an unconsecrated modifier is merely -5, and just -1 after a quick consecration.

Added to that, I do allow one part of Ritual Adept to mortals, and that is a limited version of Ritual Adept (Space), such as Druidic Turf, for example, which allows someone casting in a druidic tradition to treat areas of pristine nature as consecrated.

Wondering how conditional spells would work in front of an audience of scientists on live television is important from a setting-building point of view, but the PCs hopefully won't be trying to prove the existence of magic to the world, they'll be too busy using it against monsters in areas where the natural laws are closer to suggestions.

Re: Conditional Spells, Local Mana and Places of Power
 

That could work, sure.


Ok. If that's the flavor you're seeking, cool. I was just worried it might be a bit too much. In my own campaign I simply gave every one the Mundane Background and Enlightened so only certain folks can cast spells, then gave a penalty to everyone but those who possessed a certain UB to do it well.


Spiffy.

Heh. I hate teleportation for the most part outside a few campaigns. And when I say I hate it what I mean is I don't like PCs to have it. Ruins too much.


On Stranger Tides as it were.


Hmmm. Interesting. Not quite the way I'd do it to seek the flavor you're going for, but not bad either. I'm not a fan of inflation on skills to combat artificial penalties in a setting-wide thing. I am a fan of features working like that because it makes the PCs special without having to give them a skill of 30 to cast in a NMZ (or similiar).

Re: Conditional Spells, Local Mana and Places of Power
 

That's another way to do it, but a sliding scale of penalties is more useful in distinguishing between people who have all the requisite knowledge, but are unable to effectively cast adventuring-type spells while in mana levels that are typical for most of Earth, and people who simply can't cast spells at all.

Plenty of occultists can't really go around casting spells on the well-lit streets of modern cities, but would be extremely competent at it if they dared to enter a Vile Vortex and found a confluence of much higher mana than exists in the rest of the world, around a Place of Power.

Not to mention the possibility of spirits or other preternatural beings granting power and guiding low-powered occultists to higher mana areas. Hell, it seems every other cultist and crazy person is wielding magic at much higher levels than friendly occultists can manage, but that's because if you take the easier path to power, you can get around the problems of a) Not actually having the talent for Magery, b) Needing a lot of bonuses to even be able to contemplate using magic, and c) Not having the discipline to actually study magic.

There are always plenty of spirits and other beings ready to make a Pact. It's just that if you do, you might regret it.

As the PCs probably won't dare to get on airplanes*, the issue of fast travel is something the players are very concerned with.

Penemue will be able to cruise at speeds that would be extremely impressive for a modern superyacht** and the fuel efficiency will be (supernaturally) good despite running the engines at near full power, but that's still 'only' 35-40 knots cruising speed, with max speed maybe around 50 knots. Damn impressive for a luxury yacht of mostly traditional hull design, ponderous indeed for long distance travel for people used to airplanes.

They are eager for the setting to allow some form of dimensional travel. I might, might consider letting sailing along ley lines, at the appropriate times and with the preternatural tides just right, allow the Penemue to make a long trip in half the time or something like that, by entering another ocean, adjacent to our own. But such doings would be a desperation maneuver.

That being said, maybe a subtle effect could allow travel times to be slightly shortened from what the physical speed would indicate. Magic that made it more sea-kindly and allowed the hull to glide more effortlessly through waves would minimize the effects of bad weather on travel times (though they'd still get seasick, no doubt) and allow every trip to be made in good time, with fortunate conditions.

That way, what should be at least a two or three day trip for a yacht at full steam, from Galveston to the Windward Islands at the far side of the Caribbean, might be made in less than 30 hours. It's not physically impossible, magic is just aiding their passage enough to net them a trip where everything goes just right.

*Even though I've told them that despite their powers no doubt increasing the chance of catastrophe dramatically, they can afford an increase of a few orders of magnitude before flying becomes really dangerous.
**I found real 1960s vintage yachts with speeds that still beat most modern yachts. Modern engines are more efficient and it's easier to get the high top speeds now, but 1960s technology still allows for extremely powerful diesel engines.

I'm not gonna lie, Tim Powers is always a huge influence on any secret magic campaign I contemplate.

He is the Ideal and Ken Hite is his Prophet.

I do this for most adventuring skills. Apply the harshest penalties possible to doing stuff that in the real world is almost impossible, outside of some extremely talented people under controlled conditions, and then allow PCs to be one of the few people who can, if the players choose to spend enough of their points in that area.

Cinematic results, without actually using cinematic rules. The 25 point normal people and the PCs are using all the same rules, it's just the PCs will be at the top of human potential in many, many things.

Re: Conditional Spells, Local Mana and Places of Power
 

I'm ruthless when it comes to deals with the devil (literally or figuratively). My article "How Very Tempting" was based in a system I used for my games for just that purpose.


I have some more Tellurgy spells you might like in the coming months. :-)

That said, you may wish to allow ley tunnels as a method of travel. In Ceteri I have the Autumn Road - which is a fae-created network of ley tunnels to allow rapid travel - if you know what you are doing. Teleportation is also possible for spirits and those not made of flesh - the living end up greasy stains when they try.

Heh.


I mean, I see where you are going. It just seems weird to me. If you want to run a cinematic game then do it - the PCs are the special ones, no one else is. No need to jack up point totals or penalties in that case. Though I suspect we're coming at the same problem in two different ways.

Re: Conditional Spells, Local Mana and Places of Power
 

I actually allow Pacts and contracts with supernatural beings that are surprisingly reasonable.

The point being that the temptation to take the easy path to power is a powerful temptation to players. And it doesn't have to transform them into ravenous monsters or mindless slaves. But it does mean being obligated to a being that might, ultimately, have other interests than what is best for you, your loved ones, your friends or even the fate of humanity as a whole.

Interesting stories about temptation don't necessarily need to have the decision to deal with the Devil be indubitably wrong. In fact, it's more interesting when no answer is clearly and indisputably right.

Great.

Fair enough.

Traveling through other realities, especially the parts that some humans have dubbed Faerie/Feywild, is absolutely a thing. It's just usually a hell of a lot riskier than traveling by airplane, even if you're a magic-user.

But I expect that the players will still accept the risks of meeting terrible, inhuman Things and having to heroically fight them, over the risks of their plane suffering some kind of electronic malfunction that leads to the pilot being fatally deceived about the altitude and their lives ending in a mysterious crash into the dark ocean. It think it's about agency, they can fight monsters, even the most horrific ones, but plane crashes might kill them without them ever knowing what is going on or having any chance of averting it.

Well, I am weird.

I'm trying to avoid binary constructions; where characters are either Illuminated [Vile Donkeys] or Mundane Squabs. Having the use of supernatural powers depend on the ability to overcome massive situational penalties that applies in many, but not all cases allows for fairly low point characters who have arranged a special situation where their modest skills are effective and it also allows for awesome high point value types who might know a lot about the supernatural, but are not going to be able to cast spells in a typical city (but might still be able to kick monster posterior). And the true master mages, of course. And anything in between.

Re: Conditional Spells, Local Mana and Places of Power
 

So more Doctor Strange less Doctor Faustus.


Probably end up a total of 5 separate posts. Maybe 6.

Cool. Inglorious sessions tend to make player's eyes twitch. Even if they are funny to do sometimes.

So I'm starting to see. It's different - not something I would do, but that doesn't mean it's badwrongfun.

The (Secret) Vatican View of the Supernatural in the Setting
 

Here's some background on how magic and the supernatural might work in the setting. It goes some way of explaining the feel I want, even if the Vatican gives shorter shrift to various 'primitive' traditions than the PCs know to be true.

This proposed historical background may or may not be true, but it is the more or less accepted theory among those in the Vatican who know about magic (and believe in it). Their certainties about how difficult magic is to perform are constantly under attack, however.

The Vatican consensus is that at some time back in the unimaginably ancient past, things we would regard as supernatural were present in the physical world. Monsters, spirits, fey and other beings appear to have coexisted with humanity. Most of this happened before recorded history and there is even a school of thought that maintains that once a culture became complex enough for its own written language that records daily events (as opposed to runes, pictographs or hieroglyphs with mostly a ritual purpose), such beings were less likely to interact with it.

The theory goes that the various magical traditions in the world were learned from supernatural beings or developed in cooperation with them.

In the land of Sumer and Akkad, humanity consorted with what the Catholic Church considers demons*. They learned to bind these creatures into their service and command them to use their powers on their behalf. These demon-spirits or ekimmu were hungry for sacrifices and are drawn to strong negative emotions, such as fear, anger, shame and disgust. Blood and various bodily fluids solidify their connection to the world and may even allow them to take physical form in the world. Adepts in this style of magic have been called diabolists, necromancers, blood mages or conjurers.

Egypt is theorized to have been colonized by ultraterrestials, who may even have interbred with the population. Alchemy and much of the ritual magic the Church has documented ultimately appears to derive from such ultraterrestial interactions. The study of ultraterrestial archaeology before recorded human history and philological reconstructions of their ritual languages (in Egypt and elsewhere) are fields with much promise. Those who use magic derived from Egyptian roots may be dubbed alchemists, sorcerers, magi or magicians.

The Church regards ultraterrestials as physical beings and has at points during its history viewed them as without souls or free will. The progressive view, espoused by Pope John Paul II, was that they were simply pagans who had the same opportunities as human beings for good and evil and with faith could also be saved.

Ultraterrestials appear to fall into several groups. In Egypt and in other places around the Mediterranean, they lived in human society as rulers and were worshiped as gods. These groups of ultraterrestials may have had a different origin than the more reclusive groups who lived in magical places that appeared to straddle the boundaries between the physical world and some other place where Nature** reigned supreme. That world was dubbed Faerie by many and the beings from it the fey.

The fey are conjectured to be the origin for Celtic magic as well as Nordic rune magic. Those who study Ogham or Rune magic are convinced that fey are beings entirely separate from the ultraterrestials of Egypt, pointing to the very different magical traditions, but others claim that cultural differences among the fey account for these and that all 'human-like' ultraterrestials ultimately come from one place, which is Faerie, merely at different times in its history and with different attitudes towards humanity.

In any event, the beings who were called the fey, faeries, Hidden People, Lords and Ladies and many other things had direct contact with humanity after it developed writing. As a result, far more is known about them. It is known, for example, that some of them preferred to live on Earth over Faerie, but that nearly all of them wanted nothing to do with human society. Over time, the fey retreated from human expansion on Earth. Some were content to go back to Faerie, others lived in Hidden Places where humans did not wander and still others attempted to find areas on Earth where the wilderness was beautiful to them and no humans lived.

Some faeries, however, felt that meek acceptance of human supremacy on Earth was vile and unacceptable. They wanted to slay humans and carve out their own kingdoms there. The fey races*** were bitterly divided. Those who were cautious and feared the consequences of a war with the humans were more numerous and more powerful, but in their caution, they failed to see the danger of disunity among their own people. Centuries of civil strife took place, among those humanity would dub Seelie and Unseelie Courts, the 'friendly' or neutral fey against those who would destroy all humans.

The precise start date of this conflict is hard to ascertain. The Catholic Church can trace Unseelie sentiment, in attacks against humans, back to the earliest records of interaction with the fey, but most scholars believe that large-scale warfare between fey didn't start under well after the year 1000 and probably not until after 1100. What is known that Seelie nobles came to leading human adepts in secrecy and asked for their assistance if the conflict should spread to Earth. As a consequence of this, the Unseelie were put on the defensive**** and mostly forced to stage their war from their fastnesses in Faerie.

Most scholars believe that the eventual closing of the way between Faerie and Earth was related to the war. The theories of precisely why it happened are legion, but as no fey appear to be left on Earth, there are none to confirm or refute them.

Scholars of magic note that supernatural occurrences appear to have been waning on Earth for all of recorded history. Yes, it is true that many of the magical traditions were preserved throughout the ages, but the effectiveness of the rituals, when experimented with by these scholars, was always much less than in the ancient sources they had access to.

Finally, at some point after the Industrial Revolution and before the First World War, all supernatural charms, rituals and spells ceased to work. No confirmed and proven working of magic or sighting of supernatural phenomena exists in the Vatican after the date of 1901 (there is dispute among some even about those events).

As a result, even with the wealth of occult materials in the vaults of the Vatican, most people born after this time ceased to believe in the supernatural. Those who had access to the secret files usually believed that it had once existed, but if so, it was irrelevant now. Where there had once been a strong organisation of Christian priests educated in the occult and dedicated to eradicating all magic that conflicted with their faith, there were now only a few scholars who theorized endlessly about a subject no longer relevant to the world.

The story among other adepts, less centralized and with access to less information, was similar. Rituals were passed on down as part of religions or culture, but most people did not remember a time when they truly worked. Ever since scientific study of magic began, with the rebirth of science in the Renaissance, even the smallest magical effects required the flawless knowledge of truly ancient languages and a complex working where nothing could go wrong. Folk magic was mostly superstition, even during times when magic did work*****.

The game is set at the end of 2018 (it's the 28th of December, 2018). At some point past 1980, or at any rate before 1990, credible reports of supernatural phenomena again began to surface. In 1989, the Catholic Church took official (albeit secret) steps to investigate and confirm these reports. In the modern day, the Jesuits and the Knights of Malta oppose supernatural evil in the world, but despite the desire of Pope John Paul II and the early plans of Pope Benedict XVI to go public with what the Church knows, it remains official Vatican policy to act only in secret.

*Some more secularly-minded Jesuits theorise that these beings only appear demonic to our sensibilities, but are natural creatures who fit into God's creation in a way that is not currently understood. Theories include a race of pure physic energy from another plane (ultraterrestials), spirits of fierce animals and angry ghosts of humans who fail to find their way to the afterlife or simply mental projections of the worst things about humanity.
**In all senses, that is, breathtaking beauty, serenity, wholesomeness and oneness with all living things and the Nature that is red in tooth and claw.
***For the inhabitants of Faerie are not all alike, with some being small and sprite-like, others being tall and majestic humanoids and still others having stranger forms.
****Well, over a period of some centuries. Time in Faerie probably passes at a very different rate than it does on Earth, as recorded interviews with named fey take place with centuries between them and the fey appears to have changed little and is still engaged in much the same events on his home plane.
*****This is due to the massive penalties to magic in the setting. At no point in recorded history has the Earth as a whole been more than Low Magic and non-mages (the vast majority of people) have a further -5 penalty to work magic. Trying to cast spells in 'common' languages, as most people did, is a further -5. So, only scholar-mages with encyclopedic knowledge of the theory of magic as well as the ancient cultures from whence it sprang have a realistic chance of using it safely and effectively (or so the scholar-mages of the Vatican believe). It does not help that working magic in the presence of skeptics is at a penalty as well.

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

I don't really have anything to add here except that is very cool. :-)

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

In GURPS terms, RPM magic is fairly new in the setting. In the 1980s, mostly only those with Advantages like Channeler, Medium, Postcognition, Precognition and similar could experience supernatural phenomena.

By the 1990s, it was possible to work ancient rituals or rituals from still living traditions. There was little flexibility and heavily penalised effect-shapingPath/Book magic fits it best, with only minor rituals having a chance of working.

Only around 2000 or so had study of Thaumatology progressed to the point that RPM rules could be used, but even then, the massive penalties involved meant that few rituals produced useful or even detectable effect.

You may feel that it's far too difficult to cast spells at 2018, but compared to the past couple of centuries, the world is awash in magic.

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

So my question then becomes did they use another system of magic before this awakening or did they use RPM? Maybe whatever magical block that was functioning temporarily enhanced magic - like water escaping a bottle - until an equilibrium was reached. That could be interesting as a GM - a sudden outpouring of magic in the early years allowed someone to do something that can't be done today even with the world being "awash in magic."

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

Well, the way that it was done in play was that spellcasters who'd started their studies before 2000 and, indeed, their apprentices, were using a fairly limited list of possible effects and, indeed, for one of them, almost exclusively involved effects that a particular powerful spirit with whom he had a pact could accomplish (or, well, any number of smaller ones he could convince), with his 'magic' consisting of giving the spirit enough energy and sacrifice for him to accomplish the task.

That villainous spellcaster, however, was explicitly growing in power and skill, with events in play making clear that he'd acquired more powerful spirits and was able to perform many more types of rituals. By 2012-213, he was almost certainly an RPM caster of some power, but where, in his history, we should draw the line between Path/Book and Ritual Path Magic, is pretty unclear. He had Thaumatology skill all along and he still has Ritual Magic (Sumer and Akkad), but the precise function of each skill has altered slightly.

For PCs, the only PC caster seen so far, who was played in 2010-2011, got access to Path/Book magic, but as he and the GM were building the Paths of an as yet undefined Zoroastrian magical tradition and adding new spells according to what we believed should fit, he might as well have been an RPM caster.

The character started play as an expert in Zoroastrian influences on major Abrahamic religions, as well as a comparative study of various Ancient Near East beliefs about magic and the supernatural, as well as specific practices and to what extent influence of them can be discerned in later Hermetic thought or qabalistic teachings in magic.

When he found out the supernatural existed, he discovered that he was already one of the most knowledgeable people in the world about at least one magical tradition and he had a very good working knowledge of several others. He started trying to develop Thaumatology skill, using various tomes, as well as forming relationships with academics involved in the British and Vatican conspiracies, who already had Thaumatology.

As the season ended, I think it would have been fair to convert him from a Path/Book caster to an RPM one.

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

Or maybe it was RPM the whole time and magic only started getting more mutable as your ontoclysm began. I did this for one of my campaigns (Aersalus) where it began as RPM and then became standard GURPS magic. It actually worked out very well. Just a thought.

So... First Adventure, the PCs Are Dream Projecting to Stop Ragnarök
 

The utility of the diamonds full of arcane energy continues, as I do not have to work out exactly how much energy a given ritual requires, but just state that they need to tap one or more of the 34 stones.

When they received them, six medium sized ones were empty of energy. They've tapped five now, one moderate size and the four they judged to be the most powerful.

The rituals powered are designed to astrally/dream project them into a rift between worlds created within the mind or soul of the Girl with the Kaleidoscope Eyes, following the Cold One spirit to its master and gird their astral bodies for war in order to defeat what they find. Then they'll use an Obsidian Athame of immense power to cut the link between Earth and the Thing that is trying to enter through the Girl.

Simple. And they expect to tap the rest of the stones to close the Doorway behind them. You know, to prevent drafts or Ragnarök.

The ritual to gird their thought bodies for dream combat in the Otherworld is actually a druidic brew of hallucinogenic tea, incorporating some truly mind-boggling mushrooms.

I ruled that nothing that was not ritually purified clothing or Signature Gear magically attuned to their personal identities could travel with them. Naturally, even without considering that the characters could ever astrally or dream project, every PC has Signature Gear and all of them have at least one Signature Gear weapon with Weapon Bond and Named Possession.

Teddy Smith is naked, except for a belt made of seaweed to carry his Elder Sign, Browning pistol, Leatherman, alchemical supplies and mixing bowl, as well as a necklace of huge teeth around his neck. He's also carrying a shaman's thigh bone covered in otherworldly runic sigils and an A-Square Hannibal rifle in .577 Tyrannosaur.

Lucien Lacoste is wearing a long duster, waistcoat, nice suit, gun belt and cowboy hat, as well as carrying a stockless, sawed-off shotgun inside his duster. He's also got a huge Bowie knife.

'Nonc' Morel is dressed like the swamp hobo he is and carrying his gnarled druid's staff and an honest-to-God hatchet. Also a sling. He had a Colt Peacemaker revolver, but is probably going to leave it behind, as it's not attuned to him in the way his lower tech gear is.

Alice Talbot, meanwhile, is wearing a One-Punch Man t-shirt and sweatpants, because she's too old to sleep in fluffy pajamas, or so she told herself. She's wielding the obsidian athame that looks like a tear in reality into an infinite black void and tucked inside her sweatpants is an IWB holster with a Walther PPK that she was recently given as a Christmas present, complete with ritual enchantment and attunement to her.

I'm wondering what benefits the druidic drink ought to give?

The ritual to transport them there was cast by Alice, using the energy from the diamonds and the athame as a focuser. But what does 'Nonc' Morel's ritual do?

It was meant to facilitate their immersion in the dream world and allow them to control it, make them more powerful there and protect them from dangers. So... in game terms, what would that mean?

Obviously, they'll all be high as balls. But within the dream reality or whatever apparent reality they visit, what would be cool stat modifications?

Thoughts on the rituals
 

Ok, so we broke up the session for the evening as the PCs were swirling through a kaleidoscope of colours as they entered the dreams of 'Gwen Delvano', a.k.a. 'The Girl with the Kaleidoscope Eyes', a.k.a. (unknown to the PCs), the sorceress whose botched spell had touched the Void and given the Cold Ones a toehold in this world.

I hadn't defined the effects of the rituals involved in any way, just that the main one, which all the PCs cooperated on, but Alice Talbot acted as the lead caster, was meant to take the PCs in some kind of avatar form into the dreams of Ms. Delvano, where they could not only obtain answers*, but also confront the Lord of the Last Waste whose Ineffable Form had extended a fraction of Its consciousness into Ms. Delvano, and by extension, the world.

Metaphysically, by defeating the dream representations of the Being or beings inhabiting the Dreamlands of Ms. Delvano's mind, the PCs are supposed to be able to close the gates of reality and prevent any attempt to widen the entrance, say, at the New Year's in three days, when the veil between the worlds is weakest.

It was not specified, but I'm thinking that the ritual was bound into an object which they must use not only to enter Ms. Delvano's Dreamlands, but also to come back. This object can be nothing else than a Silver Key, especially as the ritual they are using was reconstructed and theorized by Dr. Alfred L. Lapointe, a long-time gamer and GM with an encyclopedic knowledge of geek lore.

I'd like the PCs to have appropriate equipment for their Dream-Quest. They'll be able to take their Signature Gear with them, of course, which actually serves them as a fairly decent start, including as it does at least one magical weapon for each of them and, in the case of Lucien Lacoste, his somewhat idiosyncratic outfit of a business suit, fancy waistcoat, gun belt, long duster, nice black leather shoes and a black leather hat with a vague cowboy-ish look.

I'm wondering if the ritual they used to travel there should include some extra equipment for them or if the hallucinogenic tea 'Nonc' Morel made them drink, to give them power and protection in the Dreamlands, ought to cover that part.

Also, the PCs will appear somewhat differently than they might in the real world. They'll have some dream-self that they appear as. That might actually be a good hook to use for dream equipment which awaits them in the antechamber to the Dreamlands.

Edward Alvin Smith, for example, no longer looks entirely human and has flaring gills and apparently, his mustache now resembles some kind of aquatic feelers. Lucien Lacoste's player shouted that his character now appears as his character's player character in the in-game campaign of D&D that the PCs are playing with several NPCs, one Glorn the Barbarian (Glorn Smash!!!) I expect that 'Nonc' Morel's disheveled look will get even earthier and greener, with his beard apparently having some kind of flora growing in it. Alice Talbot will probably appear much as she always does, but, if possible, even less prepossessing.

Hmmm... perhaps the antechamber ought to be the result of Morel's spell and contain some greenery, including water, fruit and other supplies (as well as a beautiful spring of high-proof moonshine), for them to load up on. As Morel started play without any prepared Charms, whereas the other PCs did, it might be fair to rule that the antechamber contains a selection of dream-versions of Charms and Elixirs he might have at his grove at home, up to what he could have chosen to start with, but didn't.

Any other thoughts?

What should be the equivalent to Papa Legba as Lord of the Crossroads for a Cajun druid who has studied rural Louisiana 'hoodoo' or 'root work', but not actually voudon religion. I'm thinking a black rooster, but what might one call him in Cajun French or English?

*The original purpose of 'Nonc' Morel when he proposed a vision quest into her dreams.

Re: So... First Adventure, the PCs Are Dream Projecting to Stop Ragnarök
 

I decided that the hallucinogenic mushroom tea gave the PCs Ritual Adept and +5 to Awareness skill, but only within the Dreamlands.

I'm thinking that this does not violate the rule that magic can't make you better at magic, as all it does is allow you to realise that in the dreamscape, everything is metaphorical representations, not plain old reality, and that the rules which make blatant magical effect difficult to impossible in reality do not apply. In other words, there is no spoon.

The Dreamlands are also Normal Mana, instead of the No Mana to Very Low Mana (-10 to -8) that the PCs are used to in the real world. And in Ms. Delvona's Dreamlands, magical effects that rely on frost, ice and draining energy (and possibly Path of Non-Existence) are at +5 and can be attempted even by those who lack Magery (or whose Magery is normally Limited so that they can't cast rituals they don't already know or have in a Grimoire).

A slight drawback with that easy access to certain types of power is that all failures when dealing with such effects are critical failures. Of course, that also holds true with the Nasty Bad Aspected energy contained in the diamonds, but that has stopped precisely zero PCs from making use of them, when they feel the need is dire enough.

For Lucien Lacoste, of course, with his Impulsive, Overconfidence and On the Edge, being momentarily bored was sufficiently dire to dowse up the nearest horribly dangerous spirit, expend a diamond to power a ritual to become a spirit-mauling powerhouse, wrestle the incorporeal Shoggoth into submission, expend a diamond to Bind it and expend the third diamond on a ritual to entrap it in his magical double-headed waraxe, where the shoggoth would give some appropriately awesome bonuses.

Then he mounted his Mi-Go/yeti and rode off again, adjusting the barbaric horns fitted over his cowboy hat.

The verdict of 'Nonc' Morel's player, after effortlessly casting ritual after ritual like a Gandalf who actually does something, was that they ought to stay in the Dreamlands forever, because the real world sucked.

The two other players point out that their theoretically awesome power might not mean much against the true powers of Ms. Delvona's mindscape, which could be as arbitrarily powerful as she could imagine. Or worse, in the case of what had apparently invaded her mind as she botched her ritual and opened herself up to the Lords of the Last Waste.

And while monsters overpowered, critters slain or awesome feats accomplished in the Dreamlands were ultimately of little real significance on Earth, failure while playing around with the energies that Ms. Delvona had been involved with would certainly have repercussions across both worlds. As in, the sort of repercussions prophecies warn against.

RPM and Air Pirates
 

So. It's finally happened. You're run away to sail the skies. An Air Pirate. Sky Reaver.

And you're the ship's mage, of course. Responsible for ensuring good weather, avoiding storms and keeping the barky together through shantak collisions and lightning strikes.

Maybe the ship levitates magically, maybe it's made out of something exotic by the Men of Leng and their vile Moon Beasts masters, maybe it's a TL5 or TL5+1 Steampunk airship, maybe it's a nuclear-powered zeppelin made by Antarctic Space Nazis. It's all possible.

But what kind of RPM rituals are you doing as ship's mage?

How have you enchanted the various parts of the vessel?

Can you provide some extremely valuable service with RPM, aside from predicting the weather, that technology just can't match? Or, at least, that is a lot more efficient in terms of energy and difficulty when done with RPM rituals rather than technology?

Does anyone have ideas? Suggestions for rituals all airships mages need to know?

An idea for how to make a mundane vessel into a skyship using RPM?

Or how to enchant a TL6 or TL7 zeppelin to make it much more effective than any non-magical airship could be?

Tracking Magic
 

I'm looking for the least energy-intenssive way to track someone who is in your presence now, but looks to be escaping you.

It doesn't have to be perfectly precise, you shouldn't get any more information than necessary to point your companions in the right direction and correct course as you go, but it needs a range of up to 100 miles and a duration of 'until dawn', which means ca 12 hours.

Can I use just Lesser Detect + Range + Duration?

Or do I need to add other modifiers, including, but maybe not limited to, Subject Weight?

Re: Tracking Magic
 

Yes, and the range is with Long-Range Modifiers, which costs you 6 for 100 miles. You don't need subject weight for spells that "have a purely mental effect" (Thaumatology: RPM, p. 18).

This is a fairly easy working with RPM; I'm becoming quite fond of simple-but-effective spells like this. Note that this is entirely detectable by anyone who can detect magic on the subject. My way of dealing with this is the +25% enhancement "No Magical Signature", which is "No Psionic Signature" from Psionic Powers, re-skinned for magic.

Re: Tracking Magic
 

Cool.

That means that 'Nonc' Morel can cast, in 36 seconds, this tracking ritual that costs 19 energy. It's Lesser Sense Body + Duration (6) + Range (6).

Morel will get a single Quirk* on his ritual, but successfully cast the spell (because he used Luck). In narrative terms, what he's doing is smelling/tasting the blood oozing from the wounded pishtaco into the ocean. My roll for the Quirk is that he gains 'Unluckiness' for a single misfortune, which... okay, sounds good to me.

Hmm... one of the examples given for 'Unluckiness' is that enemies show up at an unfortunate time. So, whatever kind of shark or other carnivorous piscine type that might be swimming near the waters of Galveston Bay will suddenly find themselves attracted to the smell/taste of that same blood and arrive looking for it.

Of course, most sharks are not much of a threat to humans, but I'm assuming that once they are on scene, He Who Hungers in the Deep will have the requisite abilities to turn them against any PCs 'brave' enough to be in the water and possibly, if he can get some magical energy anywhere, enhance them with his Outsider powers so that they'll be less mundane sharks and more baby luscas.

I can even find news articles talking about the increase in shark sightings around Galveston in 2018, blaming it on a 'vortex' of some kind. Bull sharks, tiger sharks and hammerheads. Yay!

*Player won't be able to make it to the session today, so I rolled for him. Looks like he'll be acting as the quest-giving NPC for today.

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

Create Dragon (Lesser Destroy Nonexistence)

You destroy the laws that prevent a gigantic dragon from existing, preferably from far away, allowing it to come into existence. While the dragon is not under your control, it understands that it owes it's existence to you and will avoid irritating you unless it has no choice.

Typical Casting: Lesser Destroy Nonexistence (5) + Duration (1 year; 21) + Range (10 miles; 24) + Subject Mass (50 tons; 8). 58 energy.

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

That's Lesser?

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

Yes, Greater rituals are retroactive.

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

... so, Greater Create Nonexistence could cause a target to never have been?

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

Yes, though that can cause major paradoxes.

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

I would assume so, though I wonder how the paradoxes would be dealt with. Is there a system, or is it all up to the GM?

One idea that occurred to me that I might use in such a setting (if I even allowed the Path of Nonexistence at all, which I'd prefer not to) is that someone is gathering energy for a global Greater Create Nonexistence ritual that would retroactively cause the setting to have need a no mana worldline all along, thus removing most or all of the monsters (assuming a Monster Hunters-style setting) and potentially turning it into a Homeline echo.

(If the PCs fail, I'd inform the players that they're all sitting around a table at the end of their latest GURPS game...)

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

Well, one thing to remember about the Path of Nonexistence is that every failure is treated as a critical failure and critical failures are even worse (reality prefers to keep things the way that they are). Global changes would probably result in the practitioners being unwritten from existence. For example, removing Napoleon from history would likely require 1000s of points of energy, meaning that even the most skilled magicians would die horribly before they got halfway.

One possibility is that the Path of Nonexistence was the first magical Path and the rest of the Paths came about because magicians erased the rules that forbade them. In order to prevent infinite recursions and other paradoxes, the Path of Nonexistence should not be able to remove the effects of the Path of Nonexistence from reality or remove the Path of Nonexistence from reality. In any case, it is a really powerful Path that is really dangerous.

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

Agreed.
That's a really interesting theory!

I will certainly have an occultist propose this once the PCs start investigating and researching the Path of Nonexistence.

Olvido ('Oblivion' or 'Ending of Memory') Ritual
 

A cultist of the Keepers of the Last Hearth recently had occasion to use a ritual that removes all traces of herself and her friends from memory. The twist is that she's using a version of this ritual (which is a specialty of hers) that works on external memory, i.e. storage media.

The metaphysical explanation of how the ritual works is that it intensifies the interference between magic and technology and causes this interference to destroy any parts of the record that contain 'memory' of the caster or other chosen things.

What Path do you use for this ritual? It's very closely related to a Path of Mind ritual that does the same to living people, but it's also clearly not exactly the same thing.

I'm envisioning this as something that people who are good at Path of Magic are good at, because this is fundamentally taking an aspect of how magic works in the setting and turning it to your benefit, by deliberately triggering a technological malfunction (which will all too often be an accidental side-effect of magic anyway). But is just using Path of Magic enough? Or do you need to use another path with it?

Would that be Path of Energy or Path of Matter?

I don't want to have to roll against the worst of three Paths or something, as this is not supposed to be all that major, as rituals go.

Indeed, I imagine that this should not be too difficult to perform, given that the first thing most ritual magicians in the setting tend to notice is how their magic can cause technology to start malfunctioning, so intensifying and controlling that effect should be a fairly modest trick.

Would anyone care to essay a try to write this up in ritual terms?

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

It would probably either be a Path of Matter and Path of Mind (impacting both machines and people) or a Path of Nonexistence (removing the impressions that the individuals made). In the former case, it is likely a Greater Effect. In the latter case, it is likely a Lesser Effect, as they are removing current memory rather than retroactively removing past memory.

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

This is an area where the division into Paths doesn't really provide an exact fit to my metaphysical conception. Ideally, I'd want this to fit within the same Path as other effects that deal with knowledge, memory and psychic residue.

In GURPS Magic terms, I see this as being a Knowledge spell. In Path/Book terms, it's definitely both Path of Cunning and Path of Knowledge.

The problem with having it be Path of Matter is that I can see occultists who never perform any of the other rituals that might fall under Path of Matter who are good at this spell. Those who are good at this spell should be good at Path of Mind and Path of Magic, because that's mostly what I see them doing here, they are manipulating an innate property of magic in the setting and releasing it to destroy only parts of a technological device, specifically those parts which Path of Mind discovers as having come in contact with the psychic residue of the targets, i.e. having recorded the things that you want removed.

It's a metamagical trick to use a Path of Mind trick on something which can't directly be affected by Path of Mind.

Ideally, of course, this would fall under a hypothetical 'Path of Knowledge' , but I don't really want to rework the entire RPM system.

Edit: Ooh, I could use an Attribute Substitution Perk to allow the use of Path of Mind for affecting digital memory!

Yes, I know that would work.

However, given the potential disastrous effects of using the Path of Nonexistence, I was hoping there was a reasonable alternative using the ritual magic that various occultists with the cult may have known before they were initiated.

To maintain setting integrity, I would like to interpret the RPM rules so that effects that run in the face of a secular, scientific worldview are extremely difficult and expensive to create with magic, but effects that take advantage of the Facade and serve to conceal the supernatural are as easy as possible.

Basically, for unknown reasons, the universe (or at any rate some relevant part of it) seems to be reacting against magic that violates the worldview of the majority (theories differ on how that majority is figured, whether that's global or local, etc.). People who encounter evidence of the paranormal or even directly see supernatural things will often prefer any rationalization over believing their own eyes.

Also, technological complexity, artificial materials and artifacts made in any process where they are alienated from the personal craftsmanship of the maker (e.g. factory-manufactured goods) appear to interfere with magic and magic seems to cause malfunctions in complex technological devices.

Rituals that make use of these setting features should, if at all possible, be interpreted as Lesser Effects, while any magic that cannot be explained as coincidence, natural occurrence, psychosomatic or with another mundane explanation should require one or more Greater Effects.

Magical Zeroed Ritual
 

Ok, Teddy Smith wants to tattoo the Girl with the Kaleidoscope Eyes (Gisella Esther Cortèz Rojas, a.k.a. 'Gwen Delvano') so that her fellow cultists can't find her with magical means. In metaphysical terms, we're removing any magical residue of her (and moving it to the ringer pig, but that's a totally different ritual).

I guessed that changing the way something responds to magical divinations was just Path of Magic. Call it Lesser Transform Magic + Altered Traits: Zeroed + Subject Weight + Duration. Should come to about 30 energy.

Does that sound right?

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

Is this a continuing effect?

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

Supposed to work until the next dawn.

For setting reasons, any magical effect with a longer duration is a Greater Effect.

Oh, probably should have mentioned that for the temporary effect, the 'tattoo' is painted on. Teddy is going to prepare further before making a permanent tattoo, because that is going to be a lot more difficult to do.

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

That could work. You could also add Altered Traits, Obscure too I suppose.