Thaumaturgy Rituals
“Intelligence is power. It is the flame behind innovation, a light that shows the path to the future. Without the efforts of the mind, the world is lost.” — Myrsus ibn Sharbel
Rituals are mystical formulas that create powerful magical effects. They make use of unusual and rare ingredients, and take significantly more time to cast than the simple spells of a path of Thaumaturgy. All practitioners of Thaumaturgy have the capacity to perform rituals equivalent to their mastery with that art.
Rituals must be learned and purchased separately from paths; you do not acquire them simply by purchasing a path of Thaumaturgy. Like paths, they are rated from levels 1-5, and a caster can have several rituals corresponding to each level of the progression. A thaumaturge must purchase one ritual of each level before she is able to purchase a ritual at the next-higher level. So, in order to purchase a level 2 ritual, a thaumaturge must already possess at least one level 1 ritual, or in order to purchase a level 3 ritual, she must already possess at least one level 2 ritual, and so forth.
You cannot buy a specific Thaumaturgy ritual until you have purchased the appropriate dot of Thaumaturgy to support that ritual. Learning a level 4 ritual requires you to possess 4 dots in your primary path of Thaumaturgy. The cost to purchase a ritual is equal to double the ritual’s level. Therefore, a level 3 ritual costs 6 XP to purchase.
No character can learn more thaumaturgic rituals than she possesses dots in all of her paths of Thaumaturgy. Total all your dots from all known paths of Thaumaturgy to determine the maximum number of rituals your character can possess.
For example, Regent Insolens possesses 4 dots in Thaumaturgy: Path of Blood (his primary path), 3 dots in Thaumaturgy: Path of Conjuring, and 2 dots in Thaumaturgy: The Lure of Flames, and thus can learn up to nine Thaumaturgy rituals.
Unless otherwise stated, all rituals cost 1 Blood to activate. All rituals also require five minutes of casting time per level of the ritual.
Ritual Ingredients and Targeting: If a ritual requires you to have a focus, then it can be used at range. Otherwise, it requires line of sight, unless the ritual specifically says otherwise. Ingredients that are specifically called out in the ritual’s description must be used when casting the ritual. If you do not have a point of your target’s Blood, and the ritual requires it, you cannot use the ritual on that target. A ritual’s ingredients are always consumed in the use of the ritual, unless otherwise specified in the description.
Contents
Level 1 Thaumaturgy Rituals
Blood Mastery
By destroying a small quantity of your enemy’s blood, you can leverage this symbolic act to give you power over your victim. You manifest this power over the target the next time you come into conflict.
System: By burning 1 point of Blood from your target over an open flame, you gain a limited mystical mastery over her. In the very next opposed challenge against the victim, you automatically win the initial test. If your target spends Willpower to retest, you resolve the challenge normally from that point forward. Should Blood Mastery fail to trigger by dawn, the ritual expires.
Bind the Accusing Tongue
Bind the Accusing Tongue curses a subject by forcing a mystical compulsion upon her that prevents her from speaking ill of you in any fashion. To prepare for this ritual, you must create an image of the target, such as a photograph, a sketch, or wax effigy; acquire a lock of your victim’s hair; and obtain a black silken cord. To curse your victim, wrap the cord about your victim’s hair and image while reciting the ritual’s vocal component and focusing your ire at her.
System: Once the ritual is complete, make an opposed challenge against your intended target using the Thaumaturgy test pool. If you succeed, your victim cannot speak, write down, or otherwise communicate anything negative about you. If she tries, her voice (or hand) simply cannot to do so. The effects of this ritual last until dawn.
Communicate with Kindred Sire
You are connected to your sire through chains of blood that can never be severed. This ritual allows you to communicate telepathically with your sire, no matter where the two of you are in the world.
System: You must meditate on the connection between you and your sire while intoning this ritual. Upon completion of the ritual, you establish a gentle telepathic communication with your sire from anywhere in the world. Your sire has the option to refuse the telepathic contact, and should that happen, you feel connected, but receive no reply. If your sire is in torpor or dead you receive a distinct empty feeling, rather than no sense of reply. Once established, this link lasts for an hour.
Defense of the Sacred Haven
Sunlight is a great bane of a vampire’s existence. With Defense of the Sacred Haven, you can create a temporary mystical defense against sunlight when the strength and protection of your shelter is in doubt.
System: Defense of the Sacred Haven prevents sunlight from entering a room up to 10 steps across in size. A mystical darkness blankets the area. Sunlight reflects off windows or magically fails to pass through doors or other portals. To invoke this ritual’s protection, you must draw sigils in your own blood on all the affected windows and doors. The ritual lasts as long as you stay in the room in which you cast it.
Deflection of Wooden Doom
Deflection of Wooden Doom protects you against being staked. To cast this ritual, you must sit in a circle of wood for 10 minutes and chant the proper incantations. Once the ritual is complete, you place a tiny splinter of wood under your tongue. As long as the splinter remains there, you are protected from staking.
System: The first time someone attempts to use the Pierce the Heart combat maneuver against you, that weapon’s wood mystically crumbles to dust as it touches you, and the attack automatically misses. Once this ritual blocks one attempt to stake you, the ritual ends.
Engaging the Vessel of Transference
Engaging the Vessel of Transference enchants a glass container to mystically steal blood from any living or undead creature who touches it. The vessel replaces the blood that it steals with a volume of your blood equal to that which was taken. Once the ritual is completed, the Vessel of Transference automatically fills with your vitae and becomes inscribed with an occult sigil, which empowers the ritual.
System: A Vessel of Transference must be between the size of a small cup and a one-gallon/four-liter jug. Whenever an individual’s bare skin touches a container enchanted with Engaging the Vessel of Transference, she feels a tingling, noticeable chill against her flesh. The Vessel of Transference triggers the first time a character other than the ritual’s caster touches it. Once activated, the vessel draws out 1 point of the individual’s Blood, and then magically preserves the Blood until the vessel’s seal is broken. The ritual only switches Blood between itself and a subject if it touches bare skin — even thin cotton gloves keep it from activating. A Vessel of Transference is fragile and automatically breaks if used in an attack.
Individuals with 2 or more dots of the Occult skill recognize the sigil and the chill of discomfort, and can identify a Vessel of Transference, discerning the purpose of the container. The two most common uses of this ritual are to covertly create a blood bond and to obtain a sample of a subject’s blood for ritual or experimental purposes.
Illuminate the Trail of Prey
Your knowledge of blood magic is such that you have learned to track your enemies via the principle of identity. You invoke the spirits of the earth with the name of your enemy or an image of her face to reveal her location.
System: The primary component of Illuminate the Trail of Prey is the birth name of your target or a picture drawn of her face created by someone with 2 or more dots of the Crafts skill. You do not need to see your target to cast Illuminate the Trail of Prey, but you must cast the ritual in a location that she has visited since the last sunrise, and you must best the target in an opposed challenge using the Thaumaturgy test pool. If you fail this challenge, you cannot try again against the same target for the rest of the night.
If you succeed in the challenge, glowing footprints appear in the earth. These footprints lead to your target. Only you can perceive these footprints, and the level of brightness depends on how long it has been since she was last in this location. Old tracks burn less brightly, while fresh tracks blaze with light. Illuminate the Trail of Prey ends at sunrise.
This ritual can track your foe so long as she travels over the earth, but the route follows the exact path that the individual took — which can make following a target difficult. Illuminate the Trail of Prey can track someone walking, running, or traveling in a vehicle so long as it passes over the earth. However, if your target passes over water or flies through the air, the trail will disappear at the point she left the earth.
Principal Focus of Vitae Infusion
You have learned to freeze your blood in stasis and thaw it out for later use. This power can be very useful for a vampire who needs to feed in an emergency.
System: Through ritual concentration, you can transform 1 point of your Blood into a small red sphere the size of a common marble. Casting this ritual draws that point of Blood from your system. At a later time, you can place this sphere in your mouth, crush it between your teeth, and mentally command it to turn back into blood, thus drinking the blood and refilling your Blood pool. The entire process of reabsorbing a point of Blood requires one simple action.
If another character is present when you create a blood sphere, you can teach that character the mental command to transform the sphere into blood. If she places the blood sphere in her mouth, she can then give the mental command, allowing her to use the blood sphere in the same way you would. Of course, since your own blood is used to create the blood sphere, the subject establishes one step of a blood bond to the caster of this ritual.
You can create a number of blood spheres equal to of the number of dots you possess of the Occult skill. If you make a blood sphere that would take you above this limit, a previously existing sphere is immediately destroyed. Ritualists know that allowing another individual – particularly another thaumaturge – to have access to your blood is very dangerous. Users should consider themselves warned.
Warding Circle
You have the ability to create a circle of protection that will ward off supernatural and partially supernatural creatures.
System: During the casting of this ritual, you must use mortal blood to draw a circle on the ground (or other flat surface). This circle has a diameter of up to one step for each dot of the Occult skill that you possess. Once created, a Warding Circle cannot be moved without destroying it. You might paint a ward on a piece of plywood, but you destroy the Warding Circle if you move the wood.
By default, your Warding Circle affects partially supernatural creatures, such as ghouls or mortals with werewolf or fae blood. If you have 3 or more dots in your primary path of Thaumaturgy, your ward also affects vampires, werewolves, and fae. If you have 5 dots in your primary path of Thaumaturgy, your ward also affects ghosts, spirits, elementals, demons, and characters who are psychically projected. Affected character types who pass through your Warding Circle take 3 points of aggravated damage. When creating a ward, it is possible to exclude certain creature types. A thaumaturge with 5 dots in her primary path can make a Warding Circle that allows vampires to enter but damages the other listed creature types.
Individuals who are subject to damage from a Warding Circle can sense its presence when they approach within one step of the circle. The ward created by this ritual is spherical, making it difficult to jump over or burrow beneath the protection. A Warding Circle never affects the caster and may be tuned to exclude other individuals, so long as those individuals are present during the ward’s casting and contribute a point of Blood to the ritual. Wards cannot be tuned after casting; adding another individual to the ward after it is cast requires the caster to destroy the ward and create another in its place.
The blood used to create a Warding Circle does not fade until the ritual’s duration ends. Individuals who would be harmed by a Warding Circle cannot damage it. An individual cannot use a mop to clear away a ward that would affect her. Warding Circles can be broken by individuals who are not targeted by that ward’s protection or by the natural destruction of the environment. If you draw a circle in blood across a highway, it could be smeared by the passage of cars, washed away by rain, or broken by a mortal with a mop.
Warding Circles cannot inflict damage on a character more than once per turn.
Casting a Warding Circle takes the normal casting time, five minutes, if you only wish to establish a short-term ward, which lasts for the rest of the night. If you wish to create a long-term ward, lasting a year and a day, you must expend a downtime action to cast it.
Level 2 Thaumaturgy Rituals
Banish Big Brother
Orwell knew the future. Big Brother is everywhere. Cameras are watching your every move. This ritual allows you to have a brief respite from constant surveillance.
System: It is rumored that the Anarchs first developed this modern ritual. Banish Big Brother allows the caster to detect and potentially nullify technological eavesdropping devices within line of sight. You can turn off microphones, surveillance cameras, and so forth, but not undetectable, distant devices, such as satellite surveillance. Until the next sunrise, you always sense when you are being recorded, and you can preemptively disable the device involved, before it successfully captures a recording of you. Recording devices affected by Banish Big Brother become hopelessly inoperative until one hour passes, after which they resume normal functioning.
Burning Blade
Thaumaturges are rarely known for their martial abilities. You have an edge. You can mystically prepare your bladed weapon to ignite with a bluish flame when triggered, to literally burn your enemies.
System: To use this ritual, you must chant over a blade, typically a knife or sword. Once completed, the magic in the weapon remains dormant until triggered. To activate the weapon, you must use a standard action to slice your hand and spread your blood along the length of the blade. Only the blood of the thaumaturge who cast the ritual can activate the blade, and only she can use it. This process causes 1 point of normal damage.
Once activated, the weapon flickers with a cold, bluish flame. The weapon inflicts aggravated damage on all supernatural creatures with a successful attack. This ability lasts for one attack for each dot of the Occult skill you possess, or until the weapon leaves your possession. The weapon’s wielder cannot choose to do normal damage and reserve aggravated strikes. Each successful attack uses one aggravated strike until there are none left, at which point the weapon reverts to inflicting normal damage.
Craft Bloodstone
A Bloodstone is a small pebble that has a sympathetic link with the thaumaturge who created it, allowing her to always know its direction and general distance. To create a Bloodstone, you must place a small pebble into a vial filled with 3 points of Blood from any source and recite an invocation over the vial. The Bloodstone slowly absorbs the power of the blood, and the liquid becomes clearer and clearer, until it is as transparent as water.
System: Once the Bloodstone ritual is complete, you have a mystical connection to the stone and can tell its relative position and general distance from you at all times. A caster can create a number of Bloodstones equal to the number of dots she possesses of the Occult skill. If a Bloodstone is Obfuscated or otherwise supernaturally hidden, the caster can follow the trail until she reaches the general location of the stone, but the connection becomes blurred at that point, and she can no longer feel the Bloodstone’s precise location beyond that point.
Eyes of the Night Hawk
You have the ability to project your consciousness into a predatory bird and experience the night through its senses.
System: This ritual allows you to see through the eyes of a bird and to hear through its ears. You must select a bird of prey for this ritual. After you finish the ritual’s incantation, the bird obeys your mental commands to a point. She may fly in a desired route, spy for you, and even ferry small objects. However, she cannot fight for you, unless specifically trained for said purpose. The bird returns to you after finishing its flight. Once it returns, if you do not poke out the bird’s eyes, you will suffer a three-night period of blindness. This ritual lasts until sunrise.
Illusion of Peaceful Death
The Masquerade can be difficult to maintain even under the best of circumstances, as factions of warring vampire coteries fight for dominance and resources. A bloody murder at the wrong time can draw undue attention from the police to an already complex situation. You have an ace in the hole for the little accidents that sometimes occur. To cast this ritual, you must have a carefully prepared feather soaked in the blood of a good man. You must use the feather to dust a corpse while chanting the phrase, “It must have been his time to go. At least he went out in his sleep.”
System: Once this ritual is complete, the target corpse appears to have died of natural causes, even if it was drained of all blood or horrifically mangled. This ritual does not add blood to an exsanguinated corpse or heal broken bones, but it does prevent mundane investigations from finding evidence of foul play. Supernatural investigations are capable of seeing through this illusion with some difficulty. Such investigations suffer a -3 penalty when used to investigate a corpse targeted by this ritual. The effects of Illusion of Peaceful Death last for one month.
Machine Blitz
You have the ability to introduce chaos into systems of order, forcing machines to go haywire. You must chant the proper incantations and then ritually destroy a piece of technology that you have personally used.
System: Once the ritual is complete, all machines targeted by your focused hatred start to malfunction. Spend 1 point of Blood and use your standard action to stop any machine or electronic device that you can clearly see. For the next hour, this ritual can be used to kill car engines, render flash drives inoperable, drain the battery of a cell phone, stop life-support machines, etc. Essentially, Machine Blitz stops any machine more complex than a standard firearm. This ritual only stops machines; it does not grant any control over them. The effects of this ritual are invisible and appear to be coincidental. Repairing an object targeted by Machine Blitz requires an appropriate skill, such as Computer, of 3 dots or more and roughly an hour of work.
Recure of the Homeland
Life leaves a resonance behind in the places we inhabit. We are connected to the lands of our birth. You have learned how to use this resonance and connection to heal yourself. You can call upon the power of the earth to heal your own aggravated wounds. You must gather at least a handful of dirt from the city or town of your mortal birth and recite a litany of your mortal family tree. Next, you mix the earth with 2 points of your Blood to make a healing paste.
System: The paste created by Recure of the Homeland can heal 2 aggravated wounds each night. Only you can benefit from this paste, and you must use it within one minute of completing the ritual, or the magic fades.
Level 3 Thaumaturgy Rituals
Detect the Hidden Observer
The same paranoid Anarch sorcerer who devised Banish Big Brother supposedly developed this ritual. He created it as a means of ensuring that valuable secrets wouldn’t fall into the hands of his enemies. To enact this ritual, you must cast a portion of your blood into a fire fueled by personal documents or recordings. Once the fire dies, you must anoint your forehead with the ashes that remain.
System: Until the next sunrise, you feel a sharp pain in your forehead whenever another individual uses supernatural powers to actively spy on you. This ritual’s caster also discovers the type of attempted surveillance, whether listening, watching, telepathic contact, etc. This ritual does not block these powers in any way, nor does it offer any clues about the observer’s location, nor her the identity; it only alerts you that someone is spying.
Detect the Hidden Observer does not protect against passive uses of supernatural powers. You cannot detect a Nosferatu using Obfuscate to spy on you, but you could detect an individual using the ritual Scry or the Auspex power Clairvoyance.
Flesh of Fiery Touch
Thaumaturges often must find ways of protecting themselves in order to prepare their magic. This defensive ritual inflicts painful burns on anyone who deliberately touches your skin. This ritual darkens your skin; your skin appears similar to a mortal’s, if that mortal had experienced long-term exposure to the sun. Its tone is slightly unnatural and metallic. Some vain thaumaturges use this ritual purely for its subsidiary effect of darkening their skin to a healthy sun-bronzed hue.
System: Performing this ritual requires a great act of courage. You must swallow a small glowing ember, suffering a single point of aggravated damage. Until dawn, anyone who voluntarily touches you receives a burn. This ritual does not damage those you touch nor those who accidentally come in contact with you.
Anyone who hits you with a Brawl attack takes 1 point of aggravated damage. Anyone who attempts to Grapple you takes ever-increasing damage until they release you or until you break free of the Grapple. On the first turn of a Grapple, the character holding you takes 1 point of aggravated damage on her everyman initiative, just as she would if she’d struck you with a Brawl attack. On the second turn of the Grapple, the character holding you takes 2 points of aggravated damage. On the third turn, she takes 3 points of aggravated damage. Damage inflicted by Flesh of Fiery Touch increases by 1 point each turn until your captor lets go, dies, or loses consciousness.
Incorporeal Passage
By looking into a fragment of a mirror while intoning this ritual’s chant, you become completely incorporeal. So long as you continue to look into this mirror, you can literally walk through walls, and few places on earth can bar you from entry.
System: While under the effects of this ritual, Physical attacks pass through you. You can step unhindered through any solid barrier. The ritual lasts for five minutes, but you can end it early simply by turning away from the piece of mirror that you hold. While under the effects of Incorporeal Passage, opponents can still target you with Mental or Social attacks. Once you invoke Incorporeal Passage, you can only move forward or stand still. You cannot turn, nor go backwards. The magic involved in the ritual prevents you from engaging in any form of active attack while you are in this incorporeal state, though you can activate defensive powers. For example, you cannot use Dread Gaze, but you can activate Majesty. If Incorporeal Passage ends while you are in contact with a solid object, you take 1 to 5 points of normal damage, based on the size of the object, and your body ejects the object. If Incorporeal Passage ends while you are fully or mostly inside of a solid object, such as a wall, all of your health levels fill with damage, and you are shunted into the nearest empty space large enough to hold your body, where you immediately fall into torpor (if you are a vampire) or begin the process of bleeding to death (if you are a mortal).
Mirror of Second Sight
The Sabbat developed this ritual, taking cues from Aztec folklore and magic traditions. You must find a silver mirror and soak it in your blood over the course of three nights. Thereafter, whenever you peer into the mirror, you can see supernatural creatures’ true forms in the reflection.
System: You can enchant a mirror that reflects the true form of supernatural creatures; vampires appear pale and corpselike, werewolves appear in their half-wolf form, the fae appear in all of their wild, glamorous beauty, and ghosts are visible in the mirror, appearing as semi-transparent versions of themselves. This silver mirror must be no less than four inches wide and no more than 18 inches long. Mirror of Second Sight only functions for the caster. To all others, it is a just another mirror.
Pavis of the Foul Presence
By casting Pavis of the Foul Presence, you reflect the effects of the Presence discipline against your aggressor.
System: First, you must tie a blue silken cord around your neck while intoning the chant to activate the ritual. Once the ritual has been cast, the very next time a character targets you with a Presence power or a Presence-based technique, Pavis of the Foul Presence reflects the effect of that Presence power back upon the aggressor. Once triggered, the ribbon around your neck turns to ash, ending the effects of Pavis of the Foul Presence.
Resolve the Presence power’s opposed challenge as normal with the aggressor. If your attacker wins the challenge, the incoming Presence power simply has no effect on you. The attacker must wait at least one hour before targeting you with the same power again, although she can target you with other Presence powers. For the next hour, you are immune to the power which triggered Pavis of the Foul Presence, if the same character attempts to target you with that power again.
If you win the challenge to resist the incoming Presence power, Pavis of the Foul Presence turns the power back on the user. In this case, that power automatically affects the user, as if you had used it on her.
Note that Pavis of the Foul Presence only reflects powers that specifically target you. This ritual does not affect powers that do not target you directly, such as Majesty or Awe.
Soul of the Homunculi
Thaumaturges often need laboratory assistants whom they can trust implicitly. You have learned how to conjure a temporary servant, called a Homunculus, which is completely loyal to you, because it is made from your blood.
System: To cast the ritual, you must slice open your arm and bleed into a mystically prepared earthen bowl. The magic of the ritual merges and animates whatever random unimportant items you happen to have lying around your workshop – glass beakers, dissection tools, pencils, crumpled papers, semiprecious stones – and it binds those materials together into a small humanoid form animated by the power of the ritual and your blood.
The main benefit of working with a Homunculus is the amount of time and energy it saves you preparing all of your ritual components and performing mundane tasks, granting you 2 additional downtime actions a month. In addition, if your servant assists you in casting a ritual, the time required to cast that ritual reduces, as if the ritual is one level lower, to a minimum of one minute when casting a level 1 ritual. For example, casting a level 3 ritual with the help of this Homunculi takes 10 minutes, instead of the standard 15 minutes.
A thaumaturge can only have one Homunculus in existence at any one time. If she creates a new one, the old one is destroyed.
Shaft of Belated Quiescence
You have the ability to enchant a stake of wood to purposefully seek out your enemy’s heart.
System: This ritual turns an ordinary stake of rowan wood into a particularly vicious weapon. When the stake penetrates a vampire’s body, the tip breaks off and begins working its way through the victim’s flesh to her heart. The trip may take several hours or several nights, depending on where the stake struck. The stake eludes attempts to remove it, burrowing further into the victim’s body to escape surgical removal. Vampires who have had their hearts removed by Serpentis (or are otherwise immune to staking) are immune to this internal attack.
The ritual takes an entire night to complete. The stake must be carved of rowan wood, coated with 3 points of the caster’s Blood, and blackened in an oak-wood fire. When the ritual is complete, the stake is enchanted to act as described below.
A wielder performs an attack with a Shaft of Belated Quiescence as she would with a normal weapon. If she inflicts at least 1 point of damage after the target’s Fortitude or similar defensive abilities reduce the incoming damage, the tip of the stake breaks off and begins burrowing. If the attack deals no damage, the stake can be used to make subsequent attacks until it strikes deep enough to activate. Once the tip of the stake is in the victim’s body, she must make an opposed challenge every hour to avoid being staked, as the wood attempts to worm through her body. The caster uses her Thaumaturgy test pool versus the victim’s Physical attribute + Survival to resolve this challenge. Each time the target succeeds in the opposed challenge, she takes 3 points of normal damage. If, at any point, the victim marks off an Incapacitated health level as a result of this damage, the tip pierces her heart.
Removing the part of the body where the tip impacted, such as by a Vicissitude user activating Blood Form, or a vampire electing to cut off her arm, may stop the tip’s progress, at the Storyteller’s discretion. A character with 3 or more dots of the Medicine skill can remove the shaft by performing a 10-minute operation. Attempts to surgically remove the tip of the shaft are made using a character’s Physical attribute + Medicine test pool against a difficulty rating of 10.
Once the tip pierces the target’s heart, it stakes a vampire and instantly kills mortals and partially supernatural creatures, such as ghouls.
You can perform the Shaft of Belated Quiescence ritual on other wooden weapons, such as spears, arrows, practice swords, and pool cues, provided that they are made of rowan wood. The ritual cannot, however, augment a bullet or a weapon that does not have the staking quality.
A thaumaturge can have one Shaft of Belated Quiescence in existence for every 2 dots she possesses of the Occult skill. If she makes a new Shaft of Belated Quiescence that exceeds this limit, a shaft created earlier is destroyed.
Level 4 Thaumaturgy Rituals
Innocence of the Child’s Heart
Innocence of the Child’s Heart masks your aura from the Auspex power Aura Perception. Any individuals who use that power on you perceive a white aura, untainted by any signs of vampirism. This ritual requires a high price: the sacrifice of a mortal child.
System: Innocence of the Child’s Heart requires the ritualistic sacrifice of a mortal child and the harvesting of her heart. You must dip a beloved toy that once belonged to that child in the heart’s blood. The toy quickly absorbs all of the blood until it is clean. As long as you carry the toy, your aura appears pure white, untainted by any signs of vampirism or diablerie. The ritual lasts for one week, plus an additional week for every dot of the Occult skill you possess. Naturally, this horrific ritual takes an extreme toll on the caster’s Humanity. Unless the character is on the Path of Evil Revelations, she loses a point of Morality when she enacts this ritual.
Mirror Walk
Practitioners of Psychic Projection understand that there are multiple layers to the universe. A Malkavian thaumaturge, thought to be the inspiration for the evil-stepmother archetype in all of the Grimm fairy tales, leveraged her obsession with mirrors and knowledge of the psychic plane to create a ritual that would allow her to travel from place to place in the material world. Mirror Walk creates a sympathetic link between two mirrors, allowing you to travel between them.
System: You must create two identical mirrors of the same appropriate size, made with silver. Then, soak both mirrors in 2 points of your own Blood and chant over the course of three nights to create a special resonance link between the two objects. Once completed, you can stand before either mirror and recite the mystical password to open a magical gate between the two mirrors.
Such powerful magic cannot be done swiftly. It requires three turns for the portal to open. The glass ripples and shimmers when ready, and only then can you step through the egress. You can take one willing passenger with you on this trip, but you must act swiftly, as the gateway is a crack in reality, which closes in two turns.
The mirrors created by this ritual remain functional until broken or until the thaumaturge dies. You can only enchant one pair of mirrors at a time. If the thaumaturge creates another pair, the first set is destroyed. Only the thaumaturge who created the mirrors can use them, and once used, neither mirror can be used again until 10 minutes pass.
Severed Hand
The Amir of Clan Assamite created this ritual as a means to show mercy to criminals who deserved punishment, but not the Final Death. Severed Hand allows you to permanently sever a part of a restrained vampire’s body, preventing the vampire from ever regenerating the lost body part. Although a hand is typically the most common appendage removed, this ritual can affect eyes, fingers, tongues, and other body parts.
System: The Severed Hand requires you to completely immobilize your victim, normally accomplished by causing your victim to enter torpor. This ritual takes an entire night to perform, during which time you must sever the limb you wish to curse and coat it with an alchemical compound that prevents it from decaying or from being regenerated. Any thaumaturge who holds the severed limb receives a +3 bonus when targeting the limb’s owner with Thaumaturgy powers. The damaged caused by losing a limb can be healed in the normal manner, but the severed body part cannot be restored until the original limb is recovered or destroyed, or until a year and a day has passed. The severed limb can be concealed by powers like Mask of a Thousand Faces or replaced by use of powers like Vicissitude.
Scry
Via staring into a pool of water in a silver bowl, you can see and hear what is happening around your subject.
System: Scrying is the practice of remote viewing via a reflective, translucent substance, such as water. You must fill a wide silver bowl with purified spring water mixed with a drop of owl’s blood. Next, you must concentrate on an individual or location familiar to you, gaze into the bowl, and make an opposed challenge using the Thaumaturgy test pool. If you succeed, you can see and hear what is happening around the target as though you were personally in her presence. This ritual lasts for a number of minutes equal to the number of dots you possess of the Occult skill.
If used to Scry on a location, no challenge is required. You can view those surroundings as if you were standing in the center of the area. If you target a location with Scry, the viewpoint is immobile and cannot be changed for the duration of the ritual. You cannot use supernatural powers through Scry. If you attempt to Scry on an individual, and you have an object of personal value or deep connection to the target, such as a piece of her hair, a love letter, or so forth, you do not need to be familiar with the target to use this power. The object used to establish a link to your target crumbles to dust when this ritual ends.
Scry automatically fails if the target is currently invisible, such as someone concealed by the powers of Obfuscate.
Level 5 Thaumaturgy Rituals
Blood Contract
There is power in the written word. A contract empowered with blood is said to be unbreakable. You have the knowledge to make that so.
System: Blood Contract creates an unbreakable agreement between two parties who sign it of their own free will. The contract must be written in your blood. All clauses in the contract must be understood by all parties and responsibilities must be listed explicitly. Each party referenced directly in the contract must sign her agreement to the stipulations in her own blood.
A Blood Contract must include the following three clauses:
• A clear description of the service or favor provided by the individual who is being contracted.
• A clear description of the payment provided by the individual doing the contracting.
• The terms under which the Blood Contract can be terminated.
These clauses do not have to be fair, but they must exist for the Blood Contract to function. Attempts to add clauses that forbid the destroying of the contract, override the required clauses, or absolve an individual from the consequences of breaching the contract, cause the ritual to immediately fail.
Anyone who signs said contract is now mystically bound and must follow it to the letter, including the thaumaturge, if she is one of the signing parties. Violators automatically suffer enough damage to cause them to enter into torpor. Should someone be foolish enough to violate the contract, both parties sense it immediately.
The Blood Contract lasts until one party dies, until its completion cause is triggered, or until the document itself is destroyed.
It is possible to coerce an individual into signing a Blood Contract with threats, but if a character is compelled to sign a contract with a supernatural power, the ritual fails.
Sample Blood Contract: Percival (the target) must do his best to ensure that no one discovers that Dominic (the caster) killed Prince Leon. In return, Dominic will teach Percival four powers of Dominate over the next six months. This contract shall be nullified if the circumstances of Prince Leon’s death become publicly known without Percival’s involvement.
Cobra’s Favor
Cobra’s Favor manipulates your vitae to burn with a toxin that causes horrific damage to any creature that consumes it. You must acquire an herbal poultice and the venom of a snake, and then mix these components with a point of your Blood. At the end of the ritual, you must spill the mixture into a prepared container, while reciting an incantation to transmute the concoction into a jet-black liquid.
System: You must ingest the elixir for the ritual to take effect, suffering 1 level of aggravated damage, which cannot be reduced or negated. Afterwards, anyone who consumes your blood suffers a point of aggravated damage per point of Blood ingested. This damage cannot be reduced or negated. Cobra’s Favor remains in effect for one month.
Paper Flesh
This dreadful ritual enfeebles the subject, making her skin brittle and weak. Humors rise to the surface, and flesh tightens around bones and scales away at the slightest touch. Used against tough opponents, this ritual strips away the inherent resilience of the vampiric body, leaving it a fragile, dry husk. You must inscribe your target’s birth name and image on a piece of paper. Then you must burn it to cinders while cursing the victim’s name.
System: If you succeed in an opposed challenge against your target, she loses her highest 3 dots of Fortitude, starting with any elder Fortitude powers she possesses. If the target has more than three elder Fortitude powers, she may choose which powers are lost. If your target is Stamina-focused, she loses two Fortitude powers, rather than three. Should the target survive until sunrise, this ritual ends and all of her Fortitude returns. If Paper Flesh removes the prerequisites for your character’s Fortitude-based techniques, you lose access to those techniques until your Fortitude returns.
Any character who loses Fortitude automatically realizes that she has been affected by a power, and realizes the manner in which she is more physically vulnerable. Unless you know the victim’s birth name, you must target someone who is physically present when you cast the ritual.
If you know the victim’s birth name, you can target her at a range of up to 10 miles.
Stone of the True Form
To create a Stone of the True Form, you must acquire a small stone and coat it with a mixture made from a point of your Blood and other eldritch compounds. Once the ritual is complete, the stone serves as an anchor to metaphorically connect the material world with Plato’s world of idealized forms. If you have the will, you can force others to assume their natural shape.
System: Anyone touching your Stone of the True Form reverts to her normal shape, deactivating all transformative powers. Further, individuals cannot activate transformative powers for the remainder of this turn and for the next full turn after having touched the stone. Stone of the True Form can also temporarily undo physical changes made by uses of Vicissitude.
Stone of the True Form is effective even if the target is not solid. A cloud of mist can be “touched” by a Stone of the True Form by passing the stone through the mist. This movement does not affect targets who are completely insubstantial, such as those in the psychic plane.
With a Stone of the True Form, you can strike an individual within 10 steps by throwing the stone at her, if you succeed in an opposed challenge using your Physical attribute + Athletics versus your target’s Physical attribute + Dodge. Alternately, you can hold a Stone of True Form in your hand and use the Disarm combat maneuver to touch your target with the stone. When used in this way, the Disarm combat maneuver doesn’t disarm your opponent, but does bring the stone into contact long enough to affect the target.
A Stone of the True Form lasts indefinitely, but you can only have one Stone of the True Form in existence at a time. If you create a new Stone of the True Form, the first one is destroyed.
