Image: N. Roerich, The Great Sacrifice: Setting for I.F. Stravinsky's Ballet "Sacred Spring", 1910. Public domain source.

Recently, rituals have been coming up a lot on Shattered Coast. Whether it's one of my characters attempting to contact the Queen of Air and Darkness (using a hybrid of my skill challenge sessions structure and CatDragon's excellent unpublished rules for spirit contracting), a druid attempting to call animal companions, or a BARD attempting to cure petrification - folks are trying to perform elaborate magical feats beyond the direct scope of features on their character sheet.

Rituals are a pillar of pulp fantasy. Adventurers are constantly disrupting a cult in the midst of summoning their elder god or consulting an oracle who gives them a prognostic decree. All of this suggests that having a robust system for creating new, gameable rituals would be useful, and that such a system should be equally operable for PCs and NPCs alike.

Due credit to CatDragon for GMing the ongoing game that has me thinking about this.

Anatomy of a Ritual

A ritual has the following components:

Name: Some rituals might be known by many names, depending on the practitioners that use it.

Goal: The desired outcome of the ritual.

Rite: The action performed by the practitioner. More powerful rituals require multiple steps and may only be practicable under certain conditions.

Tools: Objects used as foci or aids to the rite.

Doom: What happens if the ritual is begun, but spins out of control or fails to conclude.

Not all of these components need to be hard to access, but I suggest that a few of them ought to be. Otherwise, why don't folks just perform the ritual all the time?

For example, to spoil Stravinsky's 1913 ballet:

Name: The Rite of Spring

Objective: To change the season from Winter to Spring.

Rite: A group of young women walk in dizzying circles until one of them is fully enclosed by the others. This woman then dances until exhaustion or death.

Tools: A "swarm of spring pipes" used to orchestrate the ritual.

Doom: Winter remains for another full year.

Or the end of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind:

Name: Kagrenac's Plans

Objective: Become an immortal, divine being.

Rite: Strike the heart of the god Lorkhan with specially prepared tools (see below) producing a pure tone, then strike that tone to shatter it into a prism of tone-shades. These divine tone-shades are imprinted on the practitioner, giving them immortality.

Tools: Sunder, an enchanted hammer used for the first blow. Keening, an enchanted shortsword used for the second blow. Wraithguard, a gauntlet that allows the practitioner to handle the two weapons without being incinerated.

Doom: The enchantment of the Heart is undone. It disappears from the material plane along with any who have previously used it to become divine.

At the Table

There are a couple types of sessions I could see spinning off of a ritual like this. For an open-table / oneshot format, I'd recommend pursuing one of these, but for a longer form campaign, developing and performing a ritual might involve all of them.

Fact-Finding

The player's witnessed a ritual being performed by cultists in the sewers beneath the city. They know the rite, but they don't know what it does. Who can they ask to put a name to the ritual? What do they require in return?

If the PCs have any individual component of the ritual, they might attempt to reverse engineer the others. This might require access to esoteric libraries, the expertise of sages, or a heist to recover the ritual tools. You could shorthand this with an Intelligence test (the classic Study roll of Call of Cthulhu fame), handle each component as a vignette, or spin recovering an individual component out into a session of its own.

If time is of the essence, tempt the players with the opportunity to perform the ritual without full knowledge. You really only need the rite and the tools. The name, the doom, and even the exact nature of the goal can be discovered through practice.

Performing the Ritual

I suggest running this as a skill challenge. The player's know the rite, let them lead the show. Simply set a number of successes required equal to the number of steps in the rite, then draft a list of encounters that might interrupt or interfere with that ritual.

If you can't think of any, then the ritual might not actually be interesting enough to fill a session by itself. You might need to add a rival group of practitioners, officers of the law, or other complications that could interfere.

If the party fails the skill challenge, the doom occurs. If the party doesn't do their due diligence to find out the doom (via Fact-Finding) this might come as a big surprise. It's critical though, that something big happens, such that the ritual cannot immediately be repeated. Rituals aren't something to be pursued lightly.

Disrupting a Ritual

Countering a ritual can be as difficult as performing one. Simply interrupting a ritual in progress risks invoking the ritual's doom. That might be a preferable outcome or, if it's unknown, a risk the PC's are willing to take.

Alternatively, the interlopers can attempt to unwind the ritual by performing the inverse of the rite using the same tools. Start a second skill challenge, this one representing the unwinding ritual. If it succeeds before the original ritual, then that ritual is safely dissipated. If either skill challenge fails, the original ritual's doom occurs.

Either party might seek to slow the opposing ritual, but doing so risks the other party accumulating failures and eventually triggering both their dooms. Savvy practitioners should be aware of these risks, but a well-meaning novice might not.

A Note On Sacrifices

I don't intend to end all my blogposts with moral handwringing, but I am extremely leery of including human sacrifices as either rites or tools in your rituals. I think it will have deleterious results in your game, even if folks are hamming it up and having a good time in the process.

1. Human sacrifice in fiction frequently remediates racist tropes. I'm not an expert on this topic, but ritual sacrifice is frequently insinuated as the signature feature of "uncivilized" cultures prior to contact with European colonists. The Aztec culture is frequently introduced in textbooks first (and sometimes only) as practitioners of human sacrifice [1]. In the 19th century, white antebellum anxiety created an objectified image of Voodoo and Creole culture as strictly a practice of hyper-sexualized, violent sacrifice. [2]. This image goes on to directly inform pulp horror fiction and, later, zombie fiction that we have today.
2. Your players will absolutely get involved in it. A common division I see is that certain practices can be okay for villains, but off-limits for players. For example, a torture chamber is a common trope of a Victorian-style villain's castle, but player's rarely engage in more than a light threatening of physical harm. The issue here is that in order for these rules to be symmetrical and comprehensible to the player, they must be, to some degree, available to the player. Do you really want to be telling stories of the players gathering enough sacrifices to increase their mystical power? Check out Save Vs. Total Party Kill's review of Carcosa for a glimpse down this path.

Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't create rituals for your game that involve human sacrifice or violence. What I am saying is that if you do, you should take specific steps to consider or respond to these two issues. Handle with care!