RITUALS

Additional advice on Rituals can be found in the Facilitator’s Guide of Liminal Horror Deluxe Edition (p. x).

Rituals are powerful, but unpredictable magics. They can take many forms, including somatic movement, incantations, scrolls, old tomes, or as the result of Fallout.

Most Rituals will happen automatically but some may require a Save.
Each Ritual takes up an Inventory Slot either as a physical object or metaphysical burden.
Some may be single use, while others can be used freely as long as the Investigator is willing to accept the burden.
Using a Ritual will always require a cost. Typically the user takes d6 Stress. More powerful Rituals require a greater price.
An Investigator can push themselves to bend a Ritual to affect more targets or have a more potent effect for a cost of additional Stress. Upgrade along the dice chain (d6 > d8 > d10+) in a manner proportionate to the additional effort.
While most Rituals take an action to complete, some take hours or even days depending on their complexity and intended effect.
Rituals with ongoing effects over a period of time, an Investigator takes d6 Stress every hour the Ritual is active. An Investigator is Deprived while maintaining a Ritual.
If an Investigator uses a Ritual in combat, its damage is equal to the cost of Stress (i.e., d6 Stress for d6 damage).
If the Ritual triggers Critical Stress for the Investigator, it results in Fallout or a Condition depending on the nature of the Ritual.

Open license Rituals to be used in your scenarios:

Amnesia: Obliterate the last 15 minutes of a target’s memory.
Beckon Beast: A nearby creature is summoned to your location. Upon arrival, the creature acts by its own volition.
Bond: Permanently fuse two objects together.
Curse: Alter the fate of another individual by reducing one of their Attributes by d6 for the duration.
Wither: Drain d6 years from the lifespan of the target.
Cling: Small bristly hairs sprout from your skin, allowing you to climb on any surface for the duration.
Mage’s Fail-Safe: Creates a ward that deflects the next source of incoming damage. Projectiles are redirected in a random direction.
Glamour: Bend reality to create an illusion and disguise the features of a target for the duration.
Dreamwalk: Enter the dreams of a sleeping individual, granting you limited influence over the nature of the dream.
Elastic Form: Stretch and elongate your form to stretch beyond human limits and slip through cramped spaces.
Flesh Craft: A thick tar pours from your hands, mending any external Wound. The Wound will no longer fill an Inventory Slot, but it takes an expert craft to make something unblemished.
Sublimation: Your body vaporizes into a cloud of living gas for the Ritual’s duration. You can move and are aware of your surroundings, but cannot take other actions and are stuck in this form until the Ritual’s duration has passed.
Grounding: You can shift the orientation of gravitational forces within a contained space for the duration.
Imbue Life: Give an inanimate object life for the Ritual’s duration. It can move according to simple commands.
Immolation: Flames erupt from a target, dealing blast damage equal to the cost of Stress. The target is protected from harm from the Ritual.
Refract: Bend the light around a target to make it nearly invisible for the Ritual’s duration.
Levitate: Cause a target to hover in mid-air for a short period of time, before slowly descending. Direction and speed while levitating is relative to how the target was moving when the Ritual was cast.
Mirror Image: Create an illusory duplicate of a target. The illusion is dispelled once interacted with.
Necrotic Whispers: You may speak with a dead body. They answer as many questions as the cost of Stress. You do not know if they are speaking truthfully and they can only answer what they knew when alive.
Portal: Create a hole up to 6 feet wide and 1 foot deep in any surface.
Sightseize: See and hear from the perspective of someone nearby.
Serpentine Brood: Your spilled blood transforms into snakes upon contacting the ground. The cost of the Ritual is blood instead of Stress, dealing standard damage. The number of snakes that appear is equal to damage taken.
Swap: You can make two similarly sized objects that you can see swap places.
Night Dive: You can swim through the air as if it were water.
Telekinesis: Move a small object with your mind.
Telepathy: You can connect to other individuals through thought for the Ritual’s duration.
Vermin’s Call: You summon a swarm of vermin (rats, insects, etc.) that can attempt to complete a single task for you.
Evocation: Summon a spirit or demonic entity to inhabit a living body. Make a CTRL Save. On a success you pick the target. On a failure the entity itself gets to choose which body it inhabits.
Dominate: You bend the will of a target. You cannot fully change their mind or get them to commit an irritation act but you can influence their next choice or alter their disposition.
Blood Forge: You extract your blood and coalesce it into a weapon, making your next attack Enhanced. The cost of the Ritual is blood instead of Stress, dealing standard damage.
Exsanguinate: Drain blood from a target, dealing damage equal to the cost in Stress. With it comes brief and often confusing flashes of the target’s memories.
Essence Transfer: Permanently transfer your consciousness to the body of a willing target, leaving your former body behind as a dead husk.
Living Flame: Create a small amount of elemental plasma. Beyond conventional applications of fire, the pure nature of the flame can disrupt and destroy Resonant Artifacts.
Divination: You can discern the location of a person or item. The location is clear for mundane objects and people, or those within close proximity, but vague for those involving strange energies or horrors.
Kintsugi: A golden resin flows from your fingertips to seal a target’s wounds, healing STR equal to the cost of Stress.
Apotropo: Creates a protective barrier against other Rituals for the duration.
Resurrection: Restore life to a recently deceased individual.
Threshold: The next door you open leads to the Cascade Commons Service Corridor.
Pestilence: A rot spreads outward from a chosen point of origin. Plants wither and die, wood turns to mush, and stonework cracks from eroding mycelial cords.
Be Kind, Rewind: Reverse the flow of time to travel backward up to 30 seconds.
Bind: Create an energy field to encircle a target and restrain them. The bind lasts as long as the Ritual is active, but the target can attempt to break free.
Static Shock: Energy cascades from your fingertips in multiple arcs. It is difficult to control and aim, dealing blast damage and hitting all individuals within the target area.
Fractal Duplication: Make a CTRL Save. On a success you create a perfect duplicate of an object. On failure you create d100 duplicates of the object, each less perfect than the last, and the original object is destroyed.
Mirror Step: You create a portal out of a mirror, allowing you to enter the Mirror Dimension.
Doppelganger: Fracture yourself into two forms that embody your id and ego. The Ritual lasts until both halves choose to rejoin, but the longer they are split, the greater chance that their desires will diverge from one another.
Prayer: Open communication with a known Dead God. If they choose to respond, it’s through visions, dreams, and nightmares.
Angelization: A set of horrid wings sprout from the back of a target. Afterwards the target is capable of flight, but in a limited capacity. If the target is an Investigator, mark this as Fallout.
Entropy: Your current situation gets catastrophically worse in the most chaotic manner currently possible.
Ascension: An elaborate process, transforming a human into the embodiment of a Dead God. Once completed, the transformation is permanent. The form taken is dependent on which entity is invoked.
Vice-Versa: Swap bodies with another individual. You maintain a psychic link for the duration. If one of you dies when the Ritual is active, you both die.

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