Ritual Projects

Starfox's Blades in the Dark fan page

A ritual Protocol has a Complexity, which is the maximum stress cost that the Protocol will support. Long-term projects involving rituals need to be repeated again and again, each time the clock is full, the maximum complexity your Protocol increases by one. To actually cast the ritual, you must have a Protocol of enough complexity to satisfy the minimum stress cost of the ritual. Completing additional clocks allows the casting of a more powerful version of the ritual, which is sometimes but not always useful.

Ritual Research—Eight Tick Clock A ritual can be created from scratch as a long-term project. This requires the Ritualist special ability, available from several playbooks.

• To do so, you need resources requirements you and the GM agree on. Examples include

an occult library, magical laboratory, special site, or ancient artifact. Higher-complexity research require more resources. This means you may be able to complete the first two rounds of a long-term project with only a single resource, such as an arcane library or magical laboratory, but higher complexities may require more, adding another requirement for every two complexities.

Copying Rituals—Three Tick Clock It is possible to create a copy of a ritual Protocol. A ritual protocol is a text and may hold some arcane diagrams, but it is nor inherently supernatural. It can be copied and even printed. A copy of the ritual cannot have a higher complexity than the original.

Using Tinker, the same rules can be used to create a printing forme that can be used to print multiple copies. However, printing rituals will often have side effects, creating consequences typical of casting the ritual or just spreading the knowledge so widely that you lose control of the information.

Learning Rituals—Six Tick Clock' A character can learn a ritual by heart, avoiding the need for carrying a protocol around.

Translating Rituals—Six Tick Clock' Translating a ritual from one language to another is complex, and some complexity might be lost.