Geas (4E)

Geas

You negotiate an agreement with your enemies, then bind everyone to it with a geas. Breaking the agreement now has dire consequences.

Level: 11	Component Cost: 700 gp
Category: Binding	Market Price: 1,500 gp
Time: 10 minutes	Key Skill: Arcana (no check)
Duration: Special

Make an agreement between up to eight creatures. All must be willing, tough agreement can be coerced. Magically compelling someone to accept a geas voids the effect. The agreement can involve terms like these.

• Avoid a certain action, such as harming a certain creature or type of creatures, enter a certain area, leave a certain area, and so forth.
• Spend at least one week each month working towards a specific task or for a specific cause.
• Protect a certain creature from harm.
• Travel at least 10 miles closer to a certain destination each week.
• Serve a certain master as a vassal

Dawdling in execution of the geas, or breaking a stricture in a fashion you can recover from, means you cannot recover healing surges and lose one healing surge per day. Once out of healing surges, you are dazed until you return to fulfilling the geas. Direct, unrecoverable violation of the letter of a geas, such as killing a creature you were supposed to avoid or protect, incurs the same penalty, but after you run out of healing surges, you take 1d10 damage per day. This damage cannot be healed as long as the geas is in effect.

Geasa must contain some terms under which they break. This must be an impersonal event, such as when the Giant of Stonebridge is dead, after the passage of up to ten years or even a seemingly impossible event such as when there are two suns in the sky. It is also possible to end the geas if all the participants in the original geas or their heirs repeat the ritual. It is always the letter of the geas that matters, especially when it comes to ending them. Stories are full of seemingly impossible events brought about by trickery in order to break a geas.