Spellbound: A Codex of Ritual Magic
May. 29th, 2011 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroSpellbound: A Codex of Ritual Magic, AKA The book of plot magic. This book contains all of the spells that evil enemy wizards and clerics should be able to pull off (or try to pull off and have the characters interrupt) but shouldn’t be actual spells that can be easily cast by PCs.
They put a ton of limitations on rituals: They require a specific ritual scroll, which acts as a focus component. They require “korma” (an expensive new material that powers rituals in standardized amounts) or rare spell components. They take a long time to cast, sometimes days. And they require a casting roll, with a change for critical failure (or at least a minor flaw, even if the ritual is successful) with every casting. So it’s insanely-powerful, plot and balance-breaking magic, but it’s very expensive, hard to come by, and hard to do right.
Despite the ostensible “balance,” this is still totally broken, from a system and mechanics perspective. A lot of the rituals cause effectively permanent (or long-term and repeatable) effects on a character or area. “Immunity to Poison” is one such example, which makes a creature immune to all forms of poison for years. If you get a critical success, it’s permanent. If you critically fail, they get a -4 penalty to saves versus poison permanently, plus a roll on the critical failure table. This deserves special note, as there’s about a 35% your character ends up dead or worse, possibly permanently unplayable on a particularly bad roll. At best, you’ll be out for the rest of the session.
So what this comes down to is that your “expected value” for casting a particular ritual is vaguely balanced, given the cost of ingredients (in money, quest items and skill ranks) and difficulty, but the standard deviation of results is exceptionally large, ranging from giving you a permanent major benefit to forcing you to roll up a new character because your current one isn’t dead, he’s just had his intelligence permanently reduced to 3.
So effectively, this is like the dire offspring of instant-kill traps and dying during character creation. It’s the Deck of Many Things (the most campaign-unbalancing artifact ever devised) in every single casting.
Obviously, then, my take is that the PCs shouldn’t be using most of these spells or any of these systems. I actually like most of what 4E has done with ritual magic (similar to this, they made it the place where plot-magic goes, like illusion traps, raise dead spells, and the like). I think you can split most of the rituals in this book into three categories: 1. Rituals that could get translated into 4E terms and given to PCs at an appropriate cost. 2. Rituals that function once (because of limited reagents, whatever) but effectively always work and bestow a particular benefit, and take the place of a magic item the characters would get. (So they get one casting of Immunity to Poison they can cast on one of the party members, instead of getting an Amulet of Poison Resistance.) 3. Rituals that are only available to villains as plot-powers, either as the source of their minions/traps/special abilities, or as a massive undertaking the PCs have to stop. (Actually, you could also have a great time reversing that: The villain is trying to stop the PCs from gathering the components to a good ritual that will thwart his plans/reign/whatever.)
I’ll note they also take the tack that all rituals should be more powerful than all magic. They repeatedly note that rituals can’t be affected by Dispel Magic, and even Mage’s Disjunction is often ineffective. They often offer saving throw DCs of 30 or higher, and overcome spell resistance with a caster level of at least 20. This keeps with the “plot magic” theme, creating unpickable magic locks, unresistable anti-gravity effect, or unbreakable scrying wards that prevent PCs from just spamming spells at every problem that comes along. This is great for dealing with some of the abuses of high-level 3.5E play, but you don’t actually need it bound into systems. If the door is “plot-locked”, don’t even create the possibility that the “Magical Dissipation” ritual can open it, just require the PCs find the key. (Some gaming groups are cool with this. Some get annoyed when their unmatchable might can’t open a door and will ignore puzzles or keys in favor of every spell they can try, every skill they have, and an adamantine greataxe. Know your players.)
An example of a4E-style adaptable ritual would be “Fervor”, which imbues a character with divine might for 24 hours, allowing them to gain a bonus of +5 to all of their attributes for 1 hour and then being fatigued afterwards. If you reduce the duration of the buff to “one encounter”, increase the fatigue to “until the next extended rest”, you’ve basically got a model for giving one character an extra daily power that makes them cooler for a single combat.
A good example of plot magic is “Planar Ward”, which allows you to ward a large area (a dungeon, basically) against outsiders of a specific alignment or against elementals, but you need to bind an outsider of that type in order to cast the ritual and freeing them ends it. This is a game plot in a single entry: The villain binds an archon to ward his fortress, and the powers of good are helpless to mount a rescue because of the wards. The party, as mortals, are immune to the ward, so they’re recruited to break in and free the archon. You can even put in too-powerful encounters that they have to flee from, because the heavenly cavalry will arrive as soon as they free the captive.
Overall: There are plenty of interesting plot ideas, and as a GM tool, I think this could be very useful. But the systems are not recommended in the slightest. (Another case of, “Did they actually playtest this? Did anyone find it fun? Really?)
They put a ton of limitations on rituals: They require a specific ritual scroll, which acts as a focus component. They require “korma” (an expensive new material that powers rituals in standardized amounts) or rare spell components. They take a long time to cast, sometimes days. And they require a casting roll, with a change for critical failure (or at least a minor flaw, even if the ritual is successful) with every casting. So it’s insanely-powerful, plot and balance-breaking magic, but it’s very expensive, hard to come by, and hard to do right.
Despite the ostensible “balance,” this is still totally broken, from a system and mechanics perspective. A lot of the rituals cause effectively permanent (or long-term and repeatable) effects on a character or area. “Immunity to Poison” is one such example, which makes a creature immune to all forms of poison for years. If you get a critical success, it’s permanent. If you critically fail, they get a -4 penalty to saves versus poison permanently, plus a roll on the critical failure table. This deserves special note, as there’s about a 35% your character ends up dead or worse, possibly permanently unplayable on a particularly bad roll. At best, you’ll be out for the rest of the session.
So what this comes down to is that your “expected value” for casting a particular ritual is vaguely balanced, given the cost of ingredients (in money, quest items and skill ranks) and difficulty, but the standard deviation of results is exceptionally large, ranging from giving you a permanent major benefit to forcing you to roll up a new character because your current one isn’t dead, he’s just had his intelligence permanently reduced to 3.
So effectively, this is like the dire offspring of instant-kill traps and dying during character creation. It’s the Deck of Many Things (the most campaign-unbalancing artifact ever devised) in every single casting.
Obviously, then, my take is that the PCs shouldn’t be using most of these spells or any of these systems. I actually like most of what 4E has done with ritual magic (similar to this, they made it the place where plot-magic goes, like illusion traps, raise dead spells, and the like). I think you can split most of the rituals in this book into three categories: 1. Rituals that could get translated into 4E terms and given to PCs at an appropriate cost. 2. Rituals that function once (because of limited reagents, whatever) but effectively always work and bestow a particular benefit, and take the place of a magic item the characters would get. (So they get one casting of Immunity to Poison they can cast on one of the party members, instead of getting an Amulet of Poison Resistance.) 3. Rituals that are only available to villains as plot-powers, either as the source of their minions/traps/special abilities, or as a massive undertaking the PCs have to stop. (Actually, you could also have a great time reversing that: The villain is trying to stop the PCs from gathering the components to a good ritual that will thwart his plans/reign/whatever.)
I’ll note they also take the tack that all rituals should be more powerful than all magic. They repeatedly note that rituals can’t be affected by Dispel Magic, and even Mage’s Disjunction is often ineffective. They often offer saving throw DCs of 30 or higher, and overcome spell resistance with a caster level of at least 20. This keeps with the “plot magic” theme, creating unpickable magic locks, unresistable anti-gravity effect, or unbreakable scrying wards that prevent PCs from just spamming spells at every problem that comes along. This is great for dealing with some of the abuses of high-level 3.5E play, but you don’t actually need it bound into systems. If the door is “plot-locked”, don’t even create the possibility that the “Magical Dissipation” ritual can open it, just require the PCs find the key. (Some gaming groups are cool with this. Some get annoyed when their unmatchable might can’t open a door and will ignore puzzles or keys in favor of every spell they can try, every skill they have, and an adamantine greataxe. Know your players.)
An example of a4E-style adaptable ritual would be “Fervor”, which imbues a character with divine might for 24 hours, allowing them to gain a bonus of +5 to all of their attributes for 1 hour and then being fatigued afterwards. If you reduce the duration of the buff to “one encounter”, increase the fatigue to “until the next extended rest”, you’ve basically got a model for giving one character an extra daily power that makes them cooler for a single combat.
A good example of plot magic is “Planar Ward”, which allows you to ward a large area (a dungeon, basically) against outsiders of a specific alignment or against elementals, but you need to bind an outsider of that type in order to cast the ritual and freeing them ends it. This is a game plot in a single entry: The villain binds an archon to ward his fortress, and the powers of good are helpless to mount a rescue because of the wards. The party, as mortals, are immune to the ward, so they’re recruited to break in and free the archon. You can even put in too-powerful encounters that they have to flee from, because the heavenly cavalry will arrive as soon as they free the captive.
Overall: There are plenty of interesting plot ideas, and as a GM tool, I think this could be very useful. But the systems are not recommended in the slightest. (Another case of, “Did they actually playtest this? Did anyone find it fun? Really?)
