Hello all,

HeroQuest explicitly encourages the Heroes to come up with the details of rituals they want to use in game. That's good, especially since their are few to no examples given in any source material.

As I've finally got a chance to play in HQ as opposed to narrating, I've started to think about coming up with a few rituals for my new characters. (Alas, PBEM characters, not live.)

How about your games? What do your heroes use? Why not share?

To start off, here's the ritual components associated with crossing over to begin the Butter Cow Quest, where Heortlings attempt to wrest a magical cow from the Yellow King.

These ritual components are the "mundane" components. If a clan had a solid gold magic butter churn, it would supply its own "unique item" bonus as described in the rules. Though the elders might not want it used as a drum!

Ritual to enter the Lands of the Yellow King (10W3): Mythology of Orlanth, Ernalda, Finnovan, or Uralda, Mythology of (Other Storm God) -3; inability to enter the Storm Realm. Complete defeat may attract sun-worshipping raiders or dry up the group’s cows.


+5 if one of the Heroes is a smith.This is related to the quest story.
+1 for 50 Yards of bright yellow fabric to build a ritual path (5W) Wealth, Weaving.
+1 for 1 young calf per hero, bleating for its mother (18 if borrowed, 5W if bought) Wealth, Herding (+2 if the calves are stolen from another clan without the mothers.)
+2 if each Hero eats and drinks nothing but milk, butter, cheese and biscuits for a week beforehand (19) Willpower, Stoic, Vegetarian, Tough -3.
+5 for starting the ritual at the stead of a smith (15) Relationship [appropriate community] (note that this may be less worthwhile than starting the ceremony at a temple or sanctuary.)
+1 for 2 gallons of clarified butter burned in four yellow lamps (15) Wealth.
+1 for being in sight of an ancient fort or castle not belonging to the community sponsoring the quest.

1 empty butter churn for each Hero, used as a drum (10) Relationship [appropriate community], Play Instrument, Carpentry.
A bag full of the best graze available in the local area (13) Herding, Animal Lore -3, Plant Lore -5 Local Area Knowledge -5.
A yellow or golden cow bell rung for the duration of the ceremony (8) Play Instrument.
The formal blessing of an Uralda Priestess. (15) Relationship [appropriate community.]
A herder’s cloak for each Hero. (6) Relationship Herders or Clan, Wealth.
A fine cow lead decorated with brass. (12) Craft Leather, Wealth, Herding -2.

All the unrated ritual components add a total +2 to the ritual’s chance of success. Add modifiers for the appropriate or inappropriate day and location to this total. Appropriate sanctuaries could be to Ancestors, any Orlanth Adventurous subcult, Uralda, or a clan hero cult acceptable to the Narrator. Days holy to Orlanth, Finnovan or Uralda are auspicious for this quest, as is Fire Season.

Mike Dawson

Do you also have the myth that goes with it. Posting the myths with the rituals would make them a lot more useful.

It's interesting, because I usually don't bother actually coming up with the whole myth. I think that the ritual suggests the myth in a way that's just fine for play purposes. Oh, I have no problem with having the myth there, but it's not something that I'd worry about at all, personally.


Here's one we've used a couple of times already from my Shadow World game (sorry Gloranthaphiles, I got nothin fer ya). I'd only worked out some of the details, previously, just the ones that had come up via play. But it's fun to think about more here and add details.

Enter the City of Klysus Alive (10W3)
As the name might imply, failing this ritual with a complete failure allows the persons involved to cross over into the city, they simply die in the process, instead of their bodies remaining alive to return with. I won't be listing any difficulties for obtaining things as I think these are too situation oriented to rate, personally. For example, if you're the high priest of Klysus, then the first one is probably perfunctory. If you're an elf, they'd sooner kill you than look at you, so there's likely no possibility.


• +20 ritual performed on on of the three pyramids of Kenezan (these are the unique center of the Klysus religion worldwide).
• +10 channeling energy from the "Gifts of Klysus" (huge pointy pyrimidal magic glass "antenae" on top of the pyriamids). These, too, are unique in the religion.
• +10 Wearing the Sun Torc (property of the High Priest, also unique) On the Pyramid of the Sun.
• +10 Wearing the King's Torc (property of the Khurtum, or emperor of Lankanok), on the Pyramid of the King.
• +10 Wearing the Snake Torc (property of the High Priest of Akalatan - son of Klysus) on the Pyramid of the Snake.
• +5 Character is a priest - ritually representing Akaal, first priest of Lankanok, and first to cross.
• +5 The Priest kills a human sacrifice - ritually representing Akaal's father, who he slew to consecrate the pyramids.
• +2 Per additional human sacrifice (yes, life is cheap in the Lankan Empire).
• +1 A large reptile present.
• +2 A very large reptile present (quarnak, or gartyl, for instance)
• +5 Giant reptile present (big dinosaur size, dragon, etc).
• +1 Something for the reptile to eat.
• +1 if the hero drinks blood during the ritual
• +2 Breaking a fine staff during the ritual.
• +2 A bowl of blessed sand from far upriver.
• +1 Chanting in the quadrangle each day for a full cycle of Char'on, the red moon (21 days).
• +1 for a Charon Full Moon (the City of Klysus is on the red moon).
• +1 for Charon Ascendant (polar orbit).
• +5 for both simultaneously.
• +1 during the season of the sun.
• +1 Midnight, or midday.


One may note that for the high priests, typically a +45 is nigh automatic. Add this to the ability level of, say, the last high priest (Morphus), who had Myths of Klysus at 15W2 to start, and his 20W4 blows through the standard resistance without difficulty. He can actually ignore the channeling (bringing the total down to 10W4) and still get through without much problem the vast majority of the time.

Most any priest will have at least a 12W2, and even common worshippers will have upwards of 20W.

Mike

The whole, quite long myth is available at

http://differentgames.onestop.net/cowmyths.html

Mike Dawson

I tried this once on the HQ-rules list without luck, but this might actually be a better venue for it....

In the HQ rules it mentions that rituals are powerful, and implies that rituals can DO things.

Certain key words include "X ritual" where X is not a "gain a bonus to do something else" ability (at least not apparently, such as X= "enchant silver").

In one of the Sartar rising books, a tribal king has the ability to, the night before a battle, define a field as Barntars Acre, so that any magic to get rid of weeds helps against enemies on it.

BUT, in the HQ rules, there are no rules on how to use rituals except to power up something else directly. i.e. rituals as super-augments are covered, but not rituals as "active magic."

Given that there are no rules, what should the rules be like? What do you see as the important aspect of rituals as opposed to "regular" magic? (obviously they are longer and make good use of regalia, but beyond at that, what should make something "ritual magic" as opposed to normal magic (for example, one of the band guardians in MoLaD has an ability "make prey" that allows band members to use hunting magic on foes, this is anlagous to the Barntar's Acre magic, but is not ritual. Should there be something distinct about how these work?)

Yes, this is selfishly motivated, I made a hero for a PBEM mail game (we are so far through "you figure that something has entered the tula from the north-east" so I can say we've actually begun play! Even if it is all moving very slowly still) who has, due to whim, an ambiguously named ritual. So I'm trying to wrap my head around what it should mean that a magic is a ritual.

-Bryan

Excellent question. I've been wondering that myself. Aside from the obvious task of getting to the other side, the Ritual section does imply that you can do other things, but doesn't say much beyond that.

The simplest way to interperet this, it seems to me, is simply that the ritual section is a huge example of how to apply the idea of situational bonuses to normal contests. That is, they're just an extension of all of the other rules, applied to rituals. As such, it's basically no different than any other contest. From this POV, there really is no difference between rituals and "normal" magic. That is, a ritual is simply a normal magic ability given a lot of augments.

Which is not the same thing as the ritual being for giving augments. In fact, I think that your assumption about rituals being for giving augments is incorrect. I don't read that anywhere (but correct me if this is an oversight on my part). The augments listed seem to me simply to be bonuses to get big things done. In any case, this interpretation works.

Take your example of the Barntar ritual. The conflict is that there's a field that there's going to be a battle, upon, and the weed magic will do nothing upon it currently to enemies. But with a success on the ritual, the magic will work. So you roll your most appropriate Barntar Affinity augmented with the ritual bonuses, and see if the field is now changed to where the weed magic can be used as active magic against the enemies.

So why bother with the ritual? Well, presumably the difficulty is very high. Basically, if the difficulty is similar to that of opening up the otherworld, 10W3, then it's unlikely that any member of a clan or whatever, can do this successfully without help. The ritual exists as a way to enable the community to get together, and overcome the high difficulty. Given a powerful enough individual, then perhaps the ritual is unneccessary, and they can, in fact, do the ritual without all of the ritual elements.

Another way to look at it is that without the ritual being enacted, that particular magical thing just won't happen, or is much harder. Basically, doing something that is said to require a ritual without the ritual might get an improv penalty of -10 or more. That's up to the individual narrator. If one used this, the penalty goes away as long as one takes the time to do the ritual - the augments in the ritual are only

But otherwise I really like the idea that Rituals simply exist to enable people to do greater magic than they would otherwise be able to do. Normally your character might only have, say, a Rain 2W affinity, which might not be enough to slow an oncoming army because the narrator says that's a 5W2 difficulty to create such an effect. But if the character uses his deity's "Rain them Out" ritual, and gets all the augments from the ritual elements, and maybe a community support bonus, then maybe they can make it rain hard enough so that the army will arrive after the reinforcements arrive.

I see this as a lot of fun. It allows the narrator to set some really high bars for heroes, so that they have to think about long-term preparation and magic rituals as the solution.

BTW, I'd generally assume that rituals are "tested," meaning that they're known to the people of the religion, generally, and that they work in part because they've been tried before, and they've learned over time what works. What's interesting here, is that heroes will bring their own augments to a ritual. For example, one character might have a particularly appropriate personality trait. What I assume happens is that the wise watching the ritual note the effect that this individual's participation has in helping the ritual be successful. Then next time, this becomes another thing on the "list" of augments. That is, now "A Person Acting Happy" might be added to the list.

Generally it makes sense that this is how rituals are developed over time. Meaning that they probably started out as very simple re-enactments of myth, and got more complicated over time. Meaning further that I think one can make up a ritual for anything that fits what they know about their gods, or spirits, or whathaveyou. They may not be particularly effective rituals, but it's certainly plausible to give bonuses for holy places, or high days, etc, and anything that seems to make particular sense to the ritual.

The "invented" Ritual may or may not become remembered by a people, and become something done regularly. Anyhow, given the relative ineffectiveness of a newly constructed ritual, it makes sense for a character performing the ritual to "overdo" it, by ploughing in as many extra augments as they can. This explains the sacrifices that must have gone on before, say, the massive ritual to raise the red moon. This obviously had never been done before by the people who did it, and it obviously had a massive difficulty (I'm guessing in about the 13 masteries range). So their massive preparations make a lot of sense.

Now, to what extent does some of this overlap with heroquesting? Probably quite a bit. Rituals can give bonuses to heroquests, and I think that the subject of many heroquests are to get some bonus to accomplish some ritual back in the mundane world.

In any case, I think that if you play pretty loose with this, that it allows for all sorts of fun play. For example, in my game, like in the ritual I listed above, I allowed a bonus +20 to any use of appropriate magic to the religion when one was on the pyramids. The bonus for place not requiring much at all in the way of extra time to activate. Again, if you just think of the augments for rituals just as interesting bonuses to use normal magic, then I think it all makes sense.

Mike