Ritual spells

[TippetsTX]

Originally Posted by Sinanju

I played a TFT game (long, long ago) in which you could summon demons into statues crafted specifically for that purpose.

Ooo, now I'm thinking about rules for rune-inscribed constructs to contain demonic spirits... walking pentagrams.

[JLV]

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

Getting back on topic now... another cost that I have considered for truly powerful ritual spells (none that exist in the current rules, however) is the permanent sacrifice of certain number of attribute points.

I like this idea, and Mark Tabyanan suggested it as a way to make Magic Item creation a lot more significant -- and dangerous.

To provide some tentative thoughts on "rules" possibly describing this:

1) Effectively, to enchant an item, you have to sacrifice an attribute point per enchantment. (So enchanting Armor to +3 hits stopped costs 3 attribute points in addition to everything else.) This is in addition to all the other costs in time, fatigue/mana, and ingredients required.

2) Which Attribute point is lost is rolled for randomly (roll a die; 1,2 = ST, 3,4 = DX, 5,6 = IQ). (Or, you could tie a specified Attribute Point to each enchantment; though that would take a lot of work on the GM's part before starting the game.)

Suddenly that whole "enchant every arrow as a Brand" idea goes right out the window -- unless you can figure out a source of Attribute points other than yourself (or a way to recover your lost Attribute points quickly) -- which maybe implies another, truly evil, ritual where a creature is sacrificed to allow recovery. Perhaps a strong creature can be sacrificed for ST (a bull, or a horse, say); a quick creature can be sacrificed for DX (a weasel or a monkey perhaps?); and a sentient creature can be sacrificed for IQ ("too bad about Henry, but I needed his IQ"). Such a sacrifice should provide a very limited number of Attribute points -- perhaps only a single one; but you could say that sacrificing the victim provides the needed Attribute point (regardless of type) DIRECTLY, and the Wizard is thus not required to give up one of his own. Note that if you tied a specified Attribute Point to each Enchantment type, you could also specify what kind of creature has to be sacrificed to MAKE that item...and suddenly the Wizard who wants to make something that requires an IQ point to be burned is out hunting for a suitable "victim" to make his item... Oh my yes, that leads to some VERY dark magical issues for those who like their Conan the Barbarian or Solomon Kane stories...

It also occurs to me that this might work for the issue of enchanting a weapon against a particular target (the topic of another thread). Perhaps you need to sacrifice the particular target creature in order to imbue the weapon against that particular target type; e.g., in order to create a Sword +1 against Orcs, you'll have to physically sacrifice an Orc as part of the enchantment process.

Clearly all of this is highly evil, pretty much by anyone's definition, and as a result, you can easily picture enchanted items being really dangerous to use and acquire, and having one might well brand YOU as evil, regardless of how you got it or the use you put it to.

I don't think anything like this will EVER be a part of the official rules (that whole "Demonic Panic" thing seems to weigh heavily against the possibility), but as you can see, it would be easy enough to construct some very simple rules to employ such a method, and it would simultaneously sharply decrease that "magical item production industry" that some people seem to want, and brand anyone who was making such things as an "enemy of the people." Which creates all sorts of new adventure hooks and opportunities, if you think about it...