4e / GSL Looking for cool situations for rituals.

[darjr]

Rituals, like any feature of a character, needs a reason to be. I've started to hunt for situations that are cool for rituals.

One of the nice ones is from an RPGA adventure. The sunken maze. Great big swaths of a dungeon were submerged, and while the players could figure a way through and swim some of it, the breathe water ritual turned it into another kind of experience altogether.

The imagery was of the adventurers walking on the bottom of this submerged maze using the subtle currents to find their way. It was really great when the players started to do a bit of a mime on being under water.

I'm looking out for those situations and trying to 'bank' some for future use.

[ardoughter]

You can have rituals as the McGuffin, a la Buffy where the goal is to find the appropiate ritual to stop the appocalypse or to research the ritual that the bad guys are using so as to stop it.

Also rituals as CSI, where you could use divinatory rituals to discover information. Or make whole to restore the broken shards of some artifact in order to accertain its use.

Is that what you had in mind?

[darjr]

Those are cool ideas.

Though what I'm looking for are specific situations, there was a thread somewhere titled 1001 uses for Tenser's Floating Disc containing posts about using the disc as a platform for the camps fire so the party could have a fire and not leave a trace of it.

Or using the disc as a sort of gun platform to shoot from.

Things like that.

[Hexmage-EN]

The PHB says that rituals must be completed without any interruptions, but I think a fun houserule would be to make it so a ritual's final step in casting it can be done at any time. With this houserule the ritual must be performed and completed at the same location.

Here's an example of what you could do with this approach: The party infiltrates the fortress and clears the courtyard of enemies. The wizard then performs most of the Passwall ritual on the fortress wall but leaves off the final component. Later when the party is trying to quickly escape they can return to the spot where the ritual was performed. The wizard then triggers the ritual and the party escapes.

[darjr]

Thats cool... and some how... Vancian. Hmmm...