Ritual Rules (4E)

4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons

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Using Rituals

Participants

Many rituals mention participants. A participant is someone who tried to support the success of the ritual, whether successful or not.

Rituals and Resting

Rituals with a cast time of 10 minutes can be performed during a short rest.

Deception Rituals & Disbelief

The disbelief difficulty on deception rituals in the original rule varies too widely. With a good caster check supported by ritual assistants, disbelief is impossible even on an Insight roll of 20. This becomes especially important with illusions that cannot merely be ignored, such Hallucinatory Terrain, Sympathy, and Fairy Debt.

A proposed way to resolve this is that the Insight DC is 10 + the Arcana skill bonus of the caster, regardless of the ritual check result. In extreme cases, it is still impossible to disbelieve, but this comes up much more rarely.

Rituals as Skill Challenges

In certain cases, it might be necessary to perform a ritual in an action scene, usually because of time constraints or because the opposition interrupted the ritual casting. In such circumstances, one minute of cast time is equal to one success during a skill challenge. The key skill of the ritual is the primary skill of the skill challenge, and other skills can be used depending on the situation and type of ritual. The listed secondary skills generally work, in addition to any creative skill uses players can come up with.

The DC of these checks is 15 +2/3 level of the ritual. One character able to cast the ritual must always try and use the key skill each round. Record each such roll; the highest such attempt is used as the ritual check, with a +2 for each other character who contributed at least one success to the ritual.

If the ritual is performed in combat, there is no time limit. If it is performed out of combat, the usual three-round limit on skill challenges applies.

Key Skill	Secondary Skills
Arcana	Bluff
Religion	Diplomacy
Nature	Athletics
Heal	Endurance
Ritual Type	Secondary Skills
Binding	Intimidation
Creation	History
Deception	Diplomacy
Divination	Perception
Exploration	Stealth
Restoration	Insight
Scrying	Dungeoneering
Travel	Acrobatics
Warding	Thievery

Acquiring Rituals

It is personal knowledge, not a ritual book, that enables you to cast a ritual. Some form of handbook or description is needed to actually cast the ritual, but the magic is in you, not in the prop. The market price of the ritual is the cost to learn it, generally in materials needed to practice with the ritual until you have mastered it, but it also includes tutor or book expenses.

You can only learn rituals if you have the Ritual Caster feat and is trained in the governing skill of the ritual.

Free Rituals

A character with the Ritual Casting feat (or class ability) gains one ritual at each level for free. This ritual must be of your level or lower. This represents research and understanding gained as a part of the advancement in power. You still need a ritual book or other ritual focus item to record these rituals in. A character that takes the Ritual Casting feat later than level 1 gets these rituals retroactively.

This is meant to compensate for the personal nature of rituals; that they cannot be sold or shared under this system.

Ritual Focus

When you learn a ritual you also create a ritual focus. This is generally a ritual book, but can take other forms; fetiches, medicine bags, sculpture, sacred vestments and so on. The cost of such items is 4 sp per level of the ritual they are to contain. If you lose your ritual focus item, you can create a new one in the same time it takes to initially master the ritual.

Rituals as Loot

Ritual books are no longer valid loot in most cases, being worth just the standard 50 gp each. However, another ritual casters ritual book (or other ritual focus item) can be used to reverse-engineer the ritual and learn it, which can be very valuable in the case of unusual or secret rituals. The cost to learn a ritual this way is the same as learning it from a friendly teacher or library.

Creating Rituals

Creating a new ritual from scratch is a long, hard, expensive process. It is generally best to see if one can be found somewhere in the world before endeavoring to research it from scratch. Developing high-level rituals is an especially daunting task.

To make a new ritual you need to go trough the following steps.

• Design the ritual rules, making a complete writeup and have the GM agree to it.
• Research the ritual for one day per level of ritual, paying five times the market price.
• Make a roll using the key skill, with a difficulty of 10 + the level of the ritual.
  • If this roll fails, it can be attempted again, at the cost of one week and the casting cost of the ritual in components.
• Once created, decide if you want to keep the ritual secret, or spread it and gain profit. If you choose the later, you earn back four times the Market Price of the ritual.