We are a little bit confused about the Ritual ability of the Whisper, mostly the summoning a supernatural being.
The Whisper in my group selected this ability and has selected the spirit to be Winchester, formerly a student and class mate of Spook. Winchester was murdered and Spook has summoned his spirit to help the crew in return for finding his murderer.
The questions we have is basically how long does Winchester hang around when summoned or is he always about. If he is always about, does Spook have to cast the ritual to make him manifest so he can interact with Spook properly?
According to the Ritual rules, this is pretty much up to you guys to define! 🙂
In Rollplay Blades, Whisper character Rune has a spirit-hound, which sounds very similar to what you’re aiming for. John (GMing) and Anne (the player) agreed to make this spirit hound extremely flexible — it can appear and disappear; leave Rune’s side; become invisible. It remains permanently available — unless it gets killed, in which case Rune will need to cast the ritual again, to restore him.
Now, that’s a pretty powerful effect, all told — it’s not world-changing (like the “Portal to the Depths” example ritual is), but it’s a powerful permanent bonus. You’ll need to figure out for yourself where that lies on the kind of power spectrum you want to see in your game, and price it accordingly. Even if you take Rune’s spirit-hound as a benchmark, you can still play with several different factors here:
* How capable the spirit is.
* How vulnerable the spirit is to attack
* How helpful is the spirit — are his abilities useful constantly, or only in specific situations?
* How expensive the ritual is to perform.
But you can also impose other limits — maybe the spirit only manifests for so long (start a clock!), or only has the energy for so many things (start a clock!), or needs to stay by the Whisper until dismissed, after which the Ritual will need to be performed again.
Ultimately, it’s your call. Figure out what you want from the fiction, sanity-check that it isn’t game-breaking, and then name your price. 🙂
All the best!
I feel summoning the ghost of someone is more the Compel ability but you guys do you 😛 Ziv covered the important stuff
Antimatter Nah, Spooks player is adamant that he NOT Compel the dead, he doesn’t want to order them around rather work with a select few almost as equals.
If he’s not making the ghost do what he wants (which I agree is more like compel than ritual), I’m not sure what exactly the ritual is doing. If Winchester died, his ghost can just be around, and if you’re just asking for his help like equals then maybe just roll consort?
I agree with Mark, here. If you’re going to make it a ritual, make sure there’s some genuine benefit above and beyond what a character could normally do. One of my players said they wanted an ability to put visions inside someone’s head. My first instinct was Ritual, but when they explained their thoughts in more detail, it became clear that it was something they mainly wanted to use as an intimidation tactic.
At that point, I suggested that it sounds like the sort of thing you’d usually do with Command, but using Attune instead, to channel power from the ghost field. Alternately, it could be using Attune as a set-up action for Command. No need to spend special ability options and research rituals, just go forth and be scary motherfucker.
Thanks guys, I was originally planning on the spirit to always be available but it was the player who, after looking at the magnitude reference chart, thought that it was temporary. I’ll go back to my original thought that Winchester will act as an expert cohort for the Whisper (he hasn’t been introduced to the rest of the crew yet, that will be fun for all involved when he does 😄)
As to why a ritual for “just” a ghost. My interpretation of ghosts in Duskwall is that sooner or later they become vicious and feral, the ritual binds the ghost to the caster and prevents the mental degeneration of the spirit and if he should encounter an enemy Whisper who “kills” the ghost, he could be re summoned