Add a system for casting ritual spells: more powerful and more expensive
spells which have some esoteric effects you can’t get otherwise. The main
differences between ritual and normal spellcasting are that they consume
valuable, hopefully non-renewable components, take a number of turns to cast
instead of taking effect instantly, and may require you to be in or set up
certain circumstances.
Various ritual spells that have been proposed:
- Ball spells which consume a gem as focus and create a ball of elemental power
that hits surrounding squares but not you. (Long casting times would probably
make rituals infeasible for combat though.)
- Temporarily increase your carry cap by a great amount. (Other new intrinsics as required.)
- Resurrect a corpse as a tame monster (necromancy).
- Grant temporary intrinsic life saving.
- Single controlled polymorph with a greatly increased duration.
- Summon a demon, demon lord, or demon prince. Requires 5 cursed candles and a
marker (to draw the classic pentagram). If summoning a named demon lord, it’s
either random or there’s some expensive way to control who shows up. The demon
lord could be peaceful, but with current behavior this is useless. Possibly
summoning them allows you to make a pact with them.
- Remove the graveyard status from a level (would need to be expensive, and
perhaps involve the Book of the Dead, and multiple different headstones).
- Grow a tree. This consumes at least a piece of fruit. For anti-farming the
tree should probably not produce fruit or bees when kicked.
- Create a portal between two levels of your choice (doesn’t work with the
Amulet obviously, but otherwise works)
- Create an artifact (that is, you somehow imbue an item with properties it
can’t normally get).
- Bless items. Consumes a blessed scroll of remove curse.
- Genocide a genocidable monster. Consumes a figurine of that monster plus other
costly things.
- Reverse genocide a monster. The monster may or may not have to be normally
reverse-genocidable. Consumes a figurine of that monster plus other moderately
expensive things.
- Charge something. Requires a rare ingredient - perhaps a dilithium crystal.
- Summon tame elemental(s). Among other things, ingredients include: a potion of
water, any beatitude (water); a rock (earth); lit candles, a lit oil lamp, or
a lit potion of oil (fire); an amulet of magical breathing (air).
- Create a magic lamp. Needs an oil lamp (of course) and a figurine or mask of a
djinni (or possibly a nearby live djinni).
- Make the current level non-teleport. Requires a scroll of teleportation and
that the caster be standing on an anti-magic field at (?) either the start or
the end of the ritual.
- Create a fountain. Requires a statue of a medium-sized or larger monster,
which gets destroyed (by turning it into the centerpiece of the fountain).
There may be potential for wishing abuse; perhaps the fountain should be
flagged so that it can’t produce a wish-granting water demon.
- Turn a regular knife into an athame. Components include other bladed weapons
with positive enchantments adding up to 20 or something; all of these charges
will be drained to +0 in the creation of the athame. The resulting athame is
+0, regardless of the charges on the component weapons or original knife.
- Create a tame golem or golems. Requires a large amount of total weight of
objects made out of the golem’s material.
- Summon a coaligned angel or other minion of your deity as a pet.
- Create a tame wood nymph from a tree (only once per tree).
Ritual spells come in spellbooks like usual, but aren’t stored in your spell
list. Instead, reading the spellbook prompts you if you want to begin its ritual
and tells you the necessary ingredients and circumstances you need to satisfy as
preconditions. If you meet all the conditions and answer yes, you initiate the
ritual. (For simplicity, this should probably burn up / expend all the
components instantly.) You cannot begin a ritual while in the process of casting
another ritual; this should probably be implemented as a precondition.
Apart from the component cost, rituals act as a constant drain on your Pw until
the ritual is complete. If something distracts you in the middle of the ritual,
you can go take care of it and then resume the ritual as long as you have the Pw
left to finish it. (You could also drink gain energy during the ritual.) The
only way for a ritual to fail, possibly backfiring with bad effects, is for you
to run out of Pw while it is incomplete.
In addition to its preconditions, each ritual also has some postconditions:
common to all rituals is that you have been casting the ritual for at least some
length of time, but there may be others, such as standing on the square where
you began the ritual, or have another item, or kill a monster, or something.
There may also be other conditions such as “moving off the space where the
ritual started breaks and halts the ritual”.
Every time you stop casting a ritual (whether it succeeded or failed), it
increments the spellbook’s spestudied field; the book will eventually
disintegrate after casting it a certain number of times.
