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Intermediate Necromantic Rituals
By chanting hideous paeans while melting a wax figure of your victim over a three-hour ritual, you cause the subject to lose all semblance of life. The mortal subject of this spell becomes much like a vampire, with a weak pulse, cool skin and a pale countenance. As long as the wax is melted without boiling off or solidifying, the ritual keeps the victim in such a pallid state. The mortal subject of Cadaver's Touch gains the Negative Trait Repugnant for the duration of the ritual, as he literally resembles a walking corpse. However, this ritual can be very useful for sending a mortal unnoticed among vampires, or causing hunters to mistake a mortal for a Cainite.
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| Call On the Shadow's Grace |
After casting this potent ritual, you become able to peer through the veil obscuring the Shadowlands, and to detect the dark side of every wraith. You can speak directly to the Shadows of ghosts, conversing with their dark sides and learning their secrets. Furthermore, you can coax deadly plots and treacheries from the recesses of the living or undead, simply by communing with their shadowy sides. Casting Call On the Shadow's Grace on a living or vampire target requires that you best your opponent in a Mental Challenge. If you win, one of the victim's Haws or Negative Traits is immediately revealed to you. To cast this ritual on a ghost, perform the same Mental Challenge with your target. If you win, the wraith enters Catharsis, bringing his Shadow boiling to the surface. For more information on the Shadow, see Oblivion.
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Din of the Damned |
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| This ritual bears some similarities to Call of the Hungry Dead (Laws of the Night, p. 157) in that it makes the sounds of the Underworld audible in the physical realm. However, Dm of the Damned affects an enclosed chamber, not an individual. Some necromancers use it to ensure privacy while others simply cast it for the psychological effect it has on those who encounter it. To ward a room in this manner, draw an unbroken line of crematorium ash around its perimeter (you may go over doors and windows to allow entrance). Until dawn, any attempt to eavesdrop on events inside the room, be it mundane, technologically-enhanced or supernatural, requires a Static Mental Challenge against a nine-Trait difficulty. Failure means the listener is partially deafened by an unholy cacophony of ghostly screams and howling winds and receives the Negative Mental Traits Oblivious x 2 for the rest of the night. |
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| Ergot is a black mold that grows on unharvested grain in cold, damp weather. In its natural form, it is poisonous and can cause hallucinations. This ritual allows you to enchant a handful of ergot to create a small amount of a substance that allows limited second sight. A successful ritual transforms a handful of ergot into three doses of a fine black powder. An individual who consumes one dose of this powder gains the benefits of Shroudsight (Basic Ash Path Necromancy, Laws of the Night, p. 154) for three hours. If you fail your initial Mental Challenge to cast the ritual and subsequently fail a retest, the ergot becomes highly poisonous. Any character (even a vampire) who ingests the product of such a critically failed ritual takes four levels of lethal damage. This cannot be used to create large amounts of toxin (in other words, no, you can't deliberately fail in order to manufacture poison; those who try may find themselves with large batches of inert sludge). |
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| Ritual of the Unearthed Fetter |
This three-hour ritual is most often used by skilled necromancers of the Sepulchre Path. By casting this ritual with the finger bone of a corpse, you attune the bone to any material objects, people or places that may have significance to the finger bone's owner - specifically, to the ghost of the dead individual. You take a chip of a grave marker, crush it and sprinkle it over the bone while intoning the ritual. When complete, the finger bone acts as a sort of spiritual compass, pointing toward objects of vital importance to its wraithly owner. Once you have attuned a finger bone with this ritual, you can use it to find Fetters of a particular wraith, assuming that the remains in question are of an individual who became a ghost. You can therefore determine whether a particular place, object or person is a Fetter for a wraith. By spending a turn testing a suspect item with the finger bone, you can ask a ghost or Narrator whether it is a Fetter to that particular ghost. Remember, though, that the finger bone only finds Fetters of its owner.
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