How to Guide:
Flashy Magic: Rituals

For a mage, looking good in the Circle and outside it is important, and doesn't need to take huge wads of cash.

The Ritual Circle

I crewed two ritual circles and I've been a ritualist a few times, but only at the Gatherings I attended and in the Curious Pastimes system since - some of this will be portable to other places, but some won't be. Take what's useful and adapt what makes sense.

The biggest thing to take into consideration is the circle itself. What OOC arrangements will there be? Common rules include 'no fire' and 'your slot is fifteen minutes', but some events have lighting and sound and people to work the special effects, and if you can work with them things go so much better it's not funny. Also, if your ritual team is fifty people but the circle will only fit ten, you've got a problem. Get a rough idea of the space you have to play with, and try to find out in advance whether there'll be anything in there - an altar, a set of doors, or anything else that could affect your show.

Also, if there's an in-game effect that'll stop people getting into and out of the circle while a ritual's ongoing, it helps to know about it - and about any other similar in-game effects, too.

Basic Principles

The Grand Ritual is generally a set-piece, a few minutes of planned theatre in a wash of surrounding improvisation. In my experience you usually get points for looking good, being original and being believable, which isn't quite the same thing as being serious. People go to the ritual circle to be entertained, and while lots of people standing around chanting can be impressive, when you've seen it ten times in one weekend you start wishing someone would actually do something fun. So, do something. Have a nice big staged fight. Do some stage magic. Get possessed by angels/deities/demons. Make it big and make it shouty, because you've got an audience and they probably want to know why that bint just stabbed that bloke with that really ornate black dagger, and why they shouldn't get all angry about it when she gets out from behind the wards.

The Grand Ritual also has to make sense to the characters performing it, and in the world as a whole. A knight calling for a taxi in a medieval setting isn't going to get you far, but a demonologist summoning the demon of transportation, Ataxi, was quite funny. A werewolf pack should probably include howling and the occasional bit of fake blood, a priest should be calling upon his or her deities and doing things said deities approve of, and so on.