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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ainamacar" data-source="post: 5912740" data-attributes="member: 70709">I'm largely agreed on all these points, with the exception of the first.  I think rituals should usually have a basic version that uses only gold or other materials we assume can be easily obtained.  This is principally so the game can provide the most basic functionality without needing a sidequest to find tongue of troll every time someone wants to cast a ritual.  I'd much rather that special items have a major impact on the efficacy or operation of the ritual, but not be strictly necessary.In my point-based homebrew game Raise Dead works as follows.  The base version of the ritual takes 10 minutes, costs a fair amount of gold, costs 2 character points (roughly half the cost of learning a new spell) spent by the caster or raised creature or other participant, and can restore life to a fully intact and present corpse that has died within the last several weeks.  The creature returns to life in a weakened state, but the caster makes a skill check to determine how long the recovery takes (about a week for minimal success, only a few rounds for maximum success).The ritual has additional components that can be accessed by casters with specialized skills.  A highly skilled user of spirit magic can make a separate check to return creatures to life that have been dead far longer.  Each additional year increases the check's difficulty and increases the character point cost by 1.  The math of the game is such that raising someone dead longer than 5 or 6 years will almost certainly require even the most powerful caster to find additional help, both to make the check and to defray the CP costs.  Similarly, characters skilled in manipulation and creation of matter can help return life to a less-than-fully intact corpse.  The ritual also specifies a phoenix heart as a "quest component", which in this case supplies 2 character points and a very significant bonus to all the ritual's skill checks (equivalent to about 5 assistants participating).The PCs would be able to get by in most cases with the base version of the ritual, while in very difficult situations finding assistants or tracking down a phoenix might be necessary.  However, the ritual also scales to the bad guy who tries to gather enough resources to raise an evil king dead 500 years.  It is thus a framework on which one can hang adventuring as well as some plot duties.</blockquote>

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