Risk

Risk is mechanically achieved by requiring a spellcasting roll. All spells in System 8 require a roll, but not to successfully cast the spell, rather to set the DC for saves or to hit AC where appropriate. When ritually casting, failing the check causes the spell to miscast, which can mean anything from:

• Casting with incorrect parameters
• Casting a different spell altogether
• Casting successfully, with negative side effects
• Catastrophic failure leading to wild magic surge

The primary ways to decrease risk are:

• Assistants: other spellcasters who participate in the ritual, if they themselves don't fail a lower check, add a +2 bonus to your check.
• Mitigations: resources you can expend to mitigate or nullify the effects of failure, should they occur (simple example: an inscribed magic circle can contain the effects of a spell that goes out of control, sparing whatever is outside, if not you yourself)
• Patience: you can slow down the casting from a single action to minutes, hours, or even days. This is mainly done to allow more time for Energy (see below), but also gives you the opportunity to fail in small ways early in the process.
• Foci: non-consumable, valuable items that help to stabilize the spell and/or enhance your skill check result.

Cost

Cost is mechanically achieved through Energy: a resource specific to ritual casting. Much as a fighter is assumed to have enough stamina for several rounds of combat without tracking it specifically, a spellcaster has enough magical energy for a normal combat as well. But ritual casting is, by definition, abnormal.

Based on your casting ability score and the number of magical powers you have, you have a fixed Energy score. This is your reserve, the "extra" energy available without resting. Reaching 0 doesn't mean you can't cast spells anymore, but it does mean you have nothing left for ritual spell modifications. It is possible to go below 0 and put yourself in a position where you can't cast any more spells at all. In any case, Energy is partially restored with a short rest, and fully restored with a long rest.

The simplest source of energy is yours, and that of your assistants. Anyone involved in the spell can contribute any amount of their energy from zero to their maximum, as they choose. It is all pooled together to pay the spell's cost.

Another common source are consumable items that store magical energy. All magic items have energy within them, but there are also other things that aren't useful as items, but still have energy. Often, these are themselves components of magic items, but can also be drained by the ritual. Generally speaking, the exact item doesn't matter as much as the energy content within, which itself tends to scale in value linearly with the energy it provides.

A powerful, if unpleasant source of energy is ritual sacrifice. All living beings have magical energy, and if slain deliberately as part of the ritual, that energy can be released into the spell. It is an unfortunate fact of magic that sentient beings are the most powerful source of energy. Even if the PCs would never cross that moral line, they're quite likely to face an evil wizard or two who's willing to do so. Disrupting a ritual involving sacrifice is a very plausible adventure goal for the party.

Sequence of Actions

Phase 0: the Plan

Before you begin the spell proper, you need to lock in a plan. If you're going to use components, a casting circle, assistance, etc, you need to have them all in the right place before you start casting.

The physical positioning of foci and energy sources takes time, as well as the creation of magic circles. Participants (including sacrifice victims) need to be in the correct place, and informed about how to cast the spell. Only spellcasting ability is a prerequisite to assist--they need not know the specific power you're using--but you must inform them of the words, the motions, the mental state, and everything else. Naturally, this too takes time.

The plan is encapsulated into an Intelligence check made by the leader, which can be assisted (not just by participants, but anyone around who can help).

Phase 0.5: Ritual Cleansing

Optional, but very helpful, is the ritual cleansing. This is a literal and metaphorical cleansing process. The ideal process involves a thorough, head-to-toe cleansing in water (preferably running water, otherwise it itself needs to be purified first), clothing in pure (preferably virgin) fibers (removing any jewelry or accessories that are not part of the spell), and meditation to clear the mind. All of this should be done in a quiet, neutral space.

The goal is to reduce contamination. Everything alive has energy and some amount of magical will--even dust mites and bacteria. Sure, it's tiny, so much so that it never has a noticeable effect on day-to-day spellcasting. But large rituals magnify everything, and even the tiniest imbalance can throw off the spell. As the energy ramps up, tiny imperfections become a sort of magical oscillation, which amplifies multiplicatively with energy levels, possibly reaching catastrophic levels.

Naturally, ritual cleansing is a long process, requiring hours. Not all use cases for ritual casting leave enough time for this process. It can be skipped, but it introduces risk of a failure mode that is nullified when the cleansing process is undergone.

Phase 1: The Beginning

This phase begins when you spend your first action to cast the spell. Ritual spells can be a single action, or they can last hours or days. We'll get to the middle and end later.

The moment the spell begins, the following is true:

• You are committed to the spell. It is going to have some sort of result. It is possible to "cancel" a ritual spell, but that itself is a process. If you stop casting the spell prematurely other than through that process, there will be consequences. This is true even if you are involuntarily disrupted.
• You are the leader of the spell. It is possible to "hand off" leadership, but this is itself a process. If you are incapacitated or otherwise cease casting, it is hypothetically possible for an assistant to step in and take over. In practice, this is far more difficult than it would have been for you to complete the spell, especially if the assistant doesn't actually know the power you were using.
• Energy is building up. Whether it takes one round or one day to build up to the maximum, the Energy level is ramping up the whole time. The ritual itself acts something like a vortex, sustaining itself. It won't stop consuming energy simply because you ran out. There is an art to timing the release of the spell to the moment the correct amount of Energy has been put in.
• You are concentrating. Every round of the spell, you need to maintain concentration. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the process from a human perspective. Spellcasters train for years to achieve the mental discipline to concentrate on a spell for hours without losing focus. The techniques of chanting and repetitive motion are the key to success--most long rituals aren't you reading a novel's worth of magic words, but rather something as short as a sentence or a phrase, repeated many times.

Phase 2: The Buildup

The primary goal of this phase, being the entirety of the time between when the spell begins and when the energy is released, is to build up the energy to the required level, without losing control of the spell.

Like all matter at the atomic level, magical energy is in constant motion. Energy Sources trap energy inside the way atoms of air are constantly bouncing off the walls of a balloon. Once released, that energy needs to move. The reason rituals are usually cast in a circle is because it's a simple and efficient path for magic energy to flow. Magical energy in a ritual circle is like a flywheel, spinning faster as more energy is put in. This is where the concept of balance is crucial: any imbalance in a spinning object will magnify as rotational speed increases, inducing oscillations that challenge the strength of the container--in this case, the ritual circle. No circle is infinitely strong, but some are stronger than others.

In the early stages, energy is put into the circle deliberately. As the leader, you start the process, followed by the assistants. Best practice is to retain the majority of your personal energy until the end phase, to best handle any unexpected contingencies. So after the vortex gets spinning, you and the assistants release the stored energy from sources. Usually, this isn't one by one, but rather balanced. Typically, you release two equal energy sources simultaneously on opposite sides of the circle. You could also do any other number of sources that are evenly distributed around the circle, but more sources is not only more complicated with more points of failure, but it releases more energy at a time, creating a sudden surge that can get the better of the participants' concentration.

The need to balance the energy and ramp it up in a controlled manner is the primary reason long rituals are long. It takes time and effort to release the energy from dozens or hundreds of energy sources. A fast ritual with low energy is doable, but a fast ritual requiring a ton of energy would ramp it up faster than any caster could contain.

Phase 3: The Release

Until this point, all you've done is maintain concentration while building up energy. The only thing predictable about the spell is the intensity of its output, scaling linearly with the amount of energy inside. Any chanting, gestures, symbols, etc used during the buildup are primarily about controlling the energy, not shaping it. As with all spells you cast, all of the energy is focused into a single point of consciousness, a single moment in time, whereupon you give it a shape, which determines everything that happens next.

This is the most dangerous point in the process. You've probably cast thousands of spells in your life before your adventure even began, so the process is familiar--but all that energy flowing through your mind at once will test your mental and even physical fortitude. Your mind becomes a crucible which must endure the pressure of all that energy trying to become everything all at once, as you force it into a desired shape.

At the final moment of the spell, you spend an action (which can be the same action as the beginning for a one-round spell) to form all that energy into a single spell effect. First, you roll a check to endure the pressure and strain of the shaping. Then, you roll the final spellcasting check that determines whether or not it works correctly.

After those rolls, the spell is released, one way or another.

Phase 4: The Aftermath

Two things happen at this point.

• The spell's primary effect, whatever it is, happens.
• The spell's secondary effects are determined, and they happen too.

Primary Effect

If you succeeded at all the checks, the primary effect is exactly what you wanted the spell to do.

If not, the GM rolls on a series of tables, taking into account the margin of your failure, to determine what the spell becomes.

Secondary Effect

The laws of thermodynamics dominate all other natural laws--even magic is not immune. Those laws hold that no energy transformation can ever be 100% efficient.

When you cast a spell, you're channeling a dangerous amount of energy. A spell that makes a fireball was, while still in your mind, at least as energetic as the fireball. But actually, it was more so, because the spell releases light, sound, and minor magical effects as waste energy, all of which can usually be neglected mechanically.

Obviously, scaling up the energy increases the waste energy. The ratio is about the same--spellcasting is surprisingly efficient, around 90%. So every ritual spell has a side effect, logarithmically proportional to the primary. And because this energy is shaped by entropy, it cannot be predicted or controlled.

The GM rolls on various tables to determine this effect. These effects are minor, but some can be unpleasant. Very large rituals can have serious side effects.

The Skill Checks

Every ritual spell has a DC, which takes into account the seed powers, the amount of extras, all the mitigating factors, etc. This final DC is key for all checks going forward, and is called the Primary DC.

The Intelligence check during the Plan phase uses the Primary DC. Failing this check means you didn't plan correctly, possibly due to not understanding the spell well enough, but this can also encapsulate any manner of unforeseen external factors.

Wisdom checks to maintain concentration scale with the rising energy, not with the spell's Primary DC; this DC is lower and never exceeds the Primary DC. The exception is the final Wisdom check the leader makes to endure the shaping process, which is the Primary DC. This is also the only mandatory such check; others are necessarily only when something disturbs the spell.

The Charisma check during shaping uses the Primary DC.

During an ideal ritual, there are only three rolls necessary for the leader:

• Intelligence check during Plan phase
• Wisdom check during Release phase
• Charisma check during Release phase

Disturbances

Rituals rarely go off perfectly. If any external forces wish to, they can easily disrupt the ritual. The ritual circle is an ephemereal magical construct, not a literal wall. Any matter that crosses it introduces turbulence into the energy. It doesn't immediately break the circle--rather, it's as if the object protruding into the circle defines the new shape of the boundary. A simple hand or foot, even a feather straddling the circle's edge, creates a nucleus of eddy currents that rapidly amplify.

It's also quite easy to disrupt the ritual by interfering with the participants themselves, or with any of the magical foci. The smallest nudge to a focus, or the lightest poke of a participant, triggers a disturbance.

Each time this happens, every participant has to pass a Wisdom check. This starts off easy, at a DC of 10 during the first round. The DC increases proportionally to the percentage of the energy that is stored in the circle. In the final round, this DC equals the Primary DC.

A single failure doesn't automatically end the ritual. Like fumbling a dinner tray, there's a chance to recover before catastrophe. When a concentration check fails, everyone who didn't fail is allowed another Wisdom check, this time against the Primary DC. Importantly, the assitance bonus to this check provided by participants who failed the last check does not apply. Thus:

• 13 casters are casting a DC 30 spell.
• It's round 2, and the Energy is 1/2 full, so the disruption DC is 20.
• 4 casters fail. The save DC is 30, but the assistance bonus is no longer +13, but rather +9.

If anyone fails the save check, they are disconnected from the ritual. This causes a cascade, because that counts as a disruption, and everyone who didn't fail the save has to go through the whole process again. Casters who are removed cannot contribute.

If a save check is ever failed by all participants remaining, the spell ends catastrophically. If a cascade of disturbances ends instead with all remaining casters passing the save, the ritual continues. The ejected casters can re-enter the circle as a standard action on their next turn, but they remain unable to grant assistance bonuses until they do so.

Modifiers

Assistants

Assistants are useful in many ways, but perhaps none is more impactful than the bonus to skill checks. Every participant is supporting everyone else, so everyone gets the benefit.

All participants gain a bonus to all ritual skill checks equal to the number of participants, to a maximum of +13.

Why 13? Because 13 is a magical number. Some theorize it has something to do with Iron, of all things. Iron has 26 protons, and is a cosmically significant element, as it is the element at the transition point where iron-iron fusion produces less energy than it requires. This is why supernovae collapse, and therefore vital to the existence of life. The very structure of the universe, and the existence of rocky planets bearing life, requires supernovae. Iron is magically significant as well, being a conductor of magical energy so strong that it can neutralize magic, and harm magical creatures like fey.

Of course, 26 isn't 13, but it is a prime factor of 26, along with 2, another magical number. But that's just numerology; it may just be a constant of nature like Pi.

Similar to iron fusion, there are diminishing returns to each additional participant, and beyond 13, more participants actually make the spell harder to cast, not easier. The diminishing returns aren't modeled in this system, as it would involve very difficult math that doesn't map well to a die roll, so in this system, each participant simply adds +1.

But sometimes you need more than +13. That's where the Great Circle comes in.

Great Circles

A great circle is a complex, orchestrated system, where each participant in the main circle (almost always 13), is linked to another, separate circle of 13, for a total of 169 participants. These secondary circles aren't casting the spell, per se, but rather casting a different ritual that pumps energy into the main participant.

There are several ways to accomplish this. The most geometrically simple is to expand the casting circle, with an inner circle containing the core participants, and a larger circle, typically interleaved (so that prime circle caster A has 13 supporters equally-spaced in the outer circle), which each supporter standing on a sigil linked to the main caster. Another popular method is 13 seperate circles, which can be arbitrarily remote, linked via sympathetic component to their respective prime caster.

With a full supporting circle, a participant's bonus contribution doubles. With a full great circle of 169 casters, the bonus to everyone in the prime circle is +26.

And the benefits don't stop there. Energy can be added to any of the circles. All of the 156 secondary casters can contribute their energy to the final spell.

Now, this isn't without its risks. Every one of the 169 participants is a point of failure. If a secondary circle is disrupted, and a save check is failed by all participants, the link between the secondary circle and its prime caster is severed. Unfortunately, this is not recoverable, as the energy of the secondary circle is released (with consequences, see Catastrophic Failure). Furthermore, the prime caster is now at a disadvantage, lacking the assistance of their secondary circle. Their contribution to the assistance bonus decreases to +1, and they personally have disadvantage on all checks going forward.

Now, what if +26 is not enough?

Grand Circles

For the truly ambitious, the core logic of a Great Circle can be compounded. A Grand Circle is a Great Circle, but every one of the 156 secondary casters is themselves supported by a tertiary circle of 13, for a total of 2,197 casters in 170 circles.

This compounds the bonus. When everything is working perfectly, the inner circle gets a +52 bonus, not to mention the energy of 2,197 casters.

Of course, there are now 2,197 points of failure. A single disturbance in a tertiary circle has the potential to cascade, bringing the whole spell crashing down in a series of 170 catastrophic failures. With 2,197 participants, there's an average of 1,098 natural 1s, potentially. Failure at this scale is a serious risk.

Hypothetically, this model can continue indefinitely. A four-level Hyper Circle is possible in theory, with 28,561 participants. The likelihood of failure at this level approaches 100%.

Results on Success

The Spell's Effect

obv

The Waste Energy

10% of every spell released from a ritual becomes waste energy. This is a side effect of the spellcasting process, and it is unavoidable. Roll a Wild Magic Surge to determine the effect of this energy. The more energy in the spell, the more waste energy, and therefore the more severe the side effect.

Some rituals cost thousands of energy, so the waste energy effect will itself be an epic spell indeed. So how do you survive it? Roll on the table and hope for the best? That's an option, but not a very good one.

Ideally, the waste energy is happening because you successfully cast the spell. In which case, you planned for it (hopefully). This is where Buffers come into play. These are resources you can craft in advance, with the sole purpose of containing waste energy.

The creation of Buffers is complex, but it's something you already know how to do: it's a ritual spell. A buffer that can absorb X waste energy is a ritual spell that costs X energy, which by definition is 1/10th of your primary spell. The design of a buffer is essentially a contingency (detection of magical effects) along with a large array of counterspells, along with a bit of clever timing to ensure the buffer doesn't try to counterspell the primary spell.

This design has its flaws. Every power can counter itself, and some powers can counter other powers, but the wild surge can be any of the power seeds that exist. So you don't necessarily need to know every single power to build a buffer (an impossible feat at any level), but the more powers you know, the better your buffer, and the more likely it is to successfully counter the surge.

The good news is that every participant in the ritual to create the buffer can contribute their knowledge of powers to the design, so with enough participants, you can have a pretty good buffer without knowing every single power yourself. You can also create multiple buffers, each with a different set of participants, to cover a broader range of power seeds.

And you aren't limited to buffers made by you. Many spellcasters create and sell buffers according to their power knowledge, sometimes at various power levels. Wizarding guilds often have a free buffer exchange program: from each according to their power knowledge, to each according to their need.

You also don't have to use a buffer. If you can create contingent magic by some other means, feel free to use it. Perhaps a teleport spell whisks you away the instant the spell goes off, before the surge hits. Perhaps you pop into a Prismatic Sphere that was expertly timed by an ally who wasn't concentrating on the ritual. Buffers are a great general-purpose solution, but there are many other solutions that can work just as well in the right circumstances.

Consequences of Failure

Plan Failure

At the outset of the ritual, at some point prior to starting the actual casting, you must roll an Intelligence check against the Primary DC. You can not only gain assistance bonuses from participants, but also from anyone else who can help you plan, who can provide the Help action among other possibilities.

This check is made in secret. The ritual leader does not know the result.

But they are not doomed to fail at this point. There are two safeguards. Firstly, any other participant (or helper in the plan) who knows all of the powers used as seeds can attempt to make the same check, and if they succeed, they will notice problems with the plan. Secondly, not all of the plan consequences are fatal to the spell, with enough preparation and contingency planning.

Concentration Failure

Disturbance Failures

The only outcomes of a disturbance concentration failure are successful recovery, or Catastrophic Failure

Failure of the Wisdom checks to concentrate has been described elsewhere, but for the sake of easy lookup:

• When a Disturbance occurs, everyone in the circle (the local circle, in a Great Circle scenario) must make a Wisdom check (DC 10 in round 1, Primary DC in final round, interpolated otherwise). If everyone succeeds, the spell continues as normal with no ill effects.
• If anyone fails the previous concentration check, a Save check must be performed by all participants who didn't fail. This is a Wisdom check against the Primary DC, and the assistance bonus does not include the contribution from those who failed.
• If every save succeeds, the ritual continues as normal with no ill effects.
• If everyone fails the save, refer to Catastrophic Failure.
• If some saves succeed and some fail, the participants who failed are ejected--they are no longer participants in the ritual. They cannot contribute energy, nor do they provide an assistance bonus.
• The ejection of any number of participants is itself a Disturbance, so this process repeats (with fewer participants and a lower assistance bonus) until either every save passes, every save fails, or nobody fails the concentration check.

Final Endurance Check Failure

If you reach the final round of a ritual intact, you must pass a final Wisdom check to endure the mental stress of shaping all of the energy into a spell. The DC is the primary DC, and you get the assistance bonus.

If this check fails, this counts as a Disturbance. Effectively, you didn't force the energy to collapse, so it simply remains in the ritual. If the participants recover, the ritual continues.

But this recovery is not normal. The ritual already has enough energy, but the ritual is a machine that wants to be fed. The ritual must be given at least 1 more energy than it was given last round. It can come from any or all participants, from energy sources, or even secondary circles. But if it is not supplied, there is an Implosion.

If you avoid implosion, you can try to end the ritual again. If you succeed, you can determine what those extra energy points do. If you fail the endurance check again, this process repeats.

Implosion

If you ever supply the same or less Energy to the ritual in a given round than the previous round, an implosion occurs.

Normally, this is not possible. After round 1, the ritual automatically draws the minimum energy with no conscious action. Therefore, the only way this can happen is if the participants, energy sources, etc, are all exhausted. This is unlikely unless you, yourself, the human, really messed up the plan even before the plan phase. It could perhaps happen because a rogue snuck into a ritual and stole an energy source. It could easily happen if a secondary or tertiary circle is knocked out of a Great Circle. Doesn't matter why it happens, only that it does.

The constant supply of greater energy than the last round creates a centrifugal pressure on the energy. Magical energy does not obey all of the laws of physics. It isn't swirling around the inner edge of the circle because of momentum or inertia--it doesn't have those. It is only pressed to the outer edge by the pressure of new energy joining it every round.

Therefore, when that fails to happen, implosion begins. The swirling energy collapses inward, threatening the very participants themselves with its torrent of power. However, while the energy doesn't have traditional momentum, it doesn't contract to the center in an instant. The flow becomes turbulent, with some energy pushing other energy in every direction all at once. It's not accurate to call it an implosion per se--it's literally an explosion--but it sure feels like one to the participants inside, since half the energy has a net vector in their direction, and the other half goes the other way, bounces off the circle, and rejoins the first half.

But this delay presents a last chance for salvation. The leader can either accept the inevitable, or break the circle, allowing the energy to explode outward, dissipating the majority of it outward. If they elect to do this, the GM will handle two things:

• The outer catastrophe, with 90% of the energy.
• The inner catastrophe, with 10% of the energy.

Both of these are Catastrophic Failures.

Shaping Failure

When you shape the spell in the final moment of casting, you roll a Charisma check to determine whether or not the spell is what you intended. You have already powered it, and you've successfully endured the strain of focusing it into a single point of consciousness, so the spell is going to happen. The question is, what spell happens?

If you meet the Primary DC (with assistance bonus), the spell is exactly what you intended. If you fail, the GM rolls on a table to determine what the spell becomes. The worse your failure, the more severe the consequences.

Roll a d20, and subtract from it the amount by which you missed the Primary DC. For example, if the Primary DC is 30, and you rolled a 25, you missed by 5, so you would roll a d20 and subtract 5 from the result to determine the outcome.

Controlled Wind-down

This isn't a failure mode in truth, but a careful, controlled winding down, in the event you wish to cancel the ritual after it has begun. This only occurs if the participants all will it so.

The basic idea is to dissipate the energy in a controlled and safe manner, without causing an implosion. This is done by effectively casting several spells in a row, with a portion of the energy going into each spell. As long as each spell costs more energy than the required input to avoid implosion (plus 10% -- see below), the ritual can be safely wound down. For instance, if last round you put in 10 energy, you need to put in 11 to avoid implosion. You could cast a 13 energy spell, and then you'd be down 2 points (actually 1--see below). This is a very slow wind-down, probably impractical at high energy levels, but it's the safest.

Why not just cast it all? That's an option. You can just change the spell. You haven't shaped the energy yet, after all. In many cases, that's probably the move. But a controlled wind-down avoids the the waste energy that comes with all releases. In a controlled wind-down, the ritual isn't ending, so the waste energy is re-absorbed into the ritual with no side effects. In the 12 energy example below, 1.2 (rounded down to 1) energy is fed back into the ritual.

As long as you have the energy to sustain the wind-down, you will inevitably get to a point where you only have 1 point left, or some lower number that you feel safe casting. Such low-energy spells likely have very minor waste effects.

Mathematical modeling suggests the ideal plan, which is also the quickest safe one, is simply this:

• In the first round of wind-down, cast a harmless spell with all of the spell's energy but 1. This keeps the vortex intact, so it can absorb the waste energy.
• Next round, put in the minimum energy and repeat.
• Even at 1000 energy, 3 rounds of this process gets you down to about 15, which is probably a safe jumping-off point.

Catastrophic Failure

Catastrophic Failure is an unfortunately common failure mode for any ritual, though despite the name, it's not actually the worst outcome in most cases (that would be an Abject Failure). It is essentially an uncontrolled, random spell effect, with a magnitude proportional to the energy in the ritual.

This is not the same thing as a Wild Magic Surge. A surge is a much more minor effect; at low intensity, they are mere nuisances, or even helpful. A catastrophic failure is a spell every bit as powerful as the original spell, but with a random effect and random targeting, making it quite likely to be harmful to the casters and their allies.

TODO: implement in-browser JS code to generate a catastrophic failure.

Wild Magic Surge

Wild Magic Surges happen when uncontrolled chaotic magical energy spontaneously collapses into magical effects. It is distinct from a Catastrophic Failure in an important regard: in those failures, all of the energy forms a single effect. In a wild surge, random portions of the energy of various sizes collapse into separate random effects. Many of these effects cancel each other out, so the final intensity is much lower.

List of Wild Surges

The wild surge affects all targets within a burst centered on the point the ritual spell was completed, in a radius of 1 square per 10 energy cost.

Ritual Circles

just people vs chalk vs metal

Great Circles

Permanent Circles

Energy Sources

Foci

Foci are objects that can be used to channel magical energy. They are not strictly necessary for ritual casting, but they can be very helpful in controlling the energy and shaping the spell.

A given focus is specific to one participant, as an attunement is required. Once attuned, a focus within the inner circle grants that participant a +1 bonus to all ritual skill checks per level of the focus, which in turn determines its crafting cost.

Energy Sources

Energy sources are objects that can be used to store and release magical energy. They are not strictly necessary for ritual casting, but they are essential for any ritual that requires more energy than the participants can provide on their own.

They come in many forms, but they are always an object, from which energy can be released by any participant as a swift action. Like foci, they must be inside the inner circle in order to be accessed.

The value of an energy source is determined by its energy capacity, which is in turn based on item level. More rare items are more efficient than sourcing the equivalent energy from more common items.

Spell Seeds

Spell seeds are the core building blocks of a ritual spell. They are the fundamental powers that are being harnessed and shaped by the ritual. The spell seeds you choose determine the nature of the spell you're casting, and they also contribute to the spell's DC.

The list of spell seeds is simple: it is the list of all spellcasting powers in the game.

Every ritual spell has at least one seed, but it can have more. A ritual spell can combine multiple spell seeds to produce an effect that involves both, but is novel in some way.

Spell seeds chosen for the spell contribute to the spell's DC, and the energy cost to some extent.

Seed DC

For the base seed (the most important one, determined by how high rank the effect is), the DC contribution is based the rank of the effect. That is, if a power allows for a specific type of effect, but only at a minimum rank of x, then the DC contribution is based on x.

For any additional seeds, add to the DC based on the rank of the effect.

Energy Cost

Most of the energy cost of a ritual spell is determined by the modifiers, not the seeds. But any power with multiple seeds requires 1 more energy per extra seed.

Action Cost

The minimum action cost for the ritual is one standard action per seed. Modifiers can add more, but this is the starting point.

Modifiers

Spell Parameters

One of the most common use cases for ritual casting is to scale the parameters of a spell beyond what is normally possible. For instance, you might want to cast a Fireball with a radius of 100 feet, or a Teleport that can target anywhere in the world.

Range

The default range of all ranged spells in System 8 is "ranged": shorthand for an abstract range that is essentially the size of a battle map. For the purposes of ritual spells, we need a more specific unit, so we'll start with 100 feet as the maximum range without ritual casting.

Targeting and Area

For targeted spells, you can add more targets at 2 energy per target.

For area spells, it depends on the shape:

• Line 1 square wide: +10 squares per 1 energy.
• Line 2 squares wide: +5 squares per 1 energy.
• Cone: +4 squares per 1 energy.
• Burst/Circle: +1 square per 1 energy.

Action Cost

It is not practical to use ritual casting to reduce the action cost of a standard-action spell, as the ritual would take at least one action regardless. However, you can use ritual casting to increase the action cost of a spell, which decreases the DC. When making particularly long casting times, take care not to make it so long that you reach the energy cost early and are forced to put in extra energy to keep the ritual active.

Duration

Spells with a duration, including concentration, can be made to last without concentration for a fixed time.

Intensity

Intensity is the damage of a damaging spell, the healing of a healing spell, or any numeric parameter not already covered that can theoretically scale up without limit.

The formula is quite simple: for each +100% intensity, add 10 energy. This scales linearly, so +200% is +20 energy, etc.

Bespoke Spell

As mentioned, it is possible to use ritual casting to create a spell that doesn't exist in the game. It can be a single seed or a combination of seeds, but the key is that the effect is not already described by any existing power.

The GM will determine the required seeds, given the described effect, and the additional DC added to the spell for being a bespoke spell, with these guidelines: