Rate the ritual flavor, please.

[Belial666]

OK, here's my first serious, thought-out ritual flavor that I used in an actual game and not in the dark corners of my mind. How would you rate the flavor/descriptions?

Elena goes back to the small stash under her bed to pick up her ritual tools, four objects older than herself passed down from her father. A stop in the kitchen provides a quantity of rock salt that should prove useful in the lesser circle. Going to stand close to the now closed entrance to the appartment, she deposits on the floor an iron athame, a thin golden wand no longer than her outstretched palm, a small chalice made of obsidian and an inverted silver pentacle. That done, she takes up the sack of salt and makes a circle out of it, exactly as wide as she is tall and as round as one can be made; three hundred years of practice can make a difference. She invokes the circle with her will after the empty sack disintegrates in her fingers but not with blood; she wants to only stop minor influences in her magic, not her own power. Now the ritual can begin.

Picking up the tiny golden wand, she turns to the East and chants as she traces a symbolic hourglass upon the floor;

By winds of Time and gales of Day
By Midnight Dark where all things end
By deepest thought and hidden mind
From the Whirlwind I conjure Change.

The hourglass tracing glistens red as Elena's veins feel like a freezing wind is flowing through them, the symbol written in blood.
Picking up the iron athame, Elena turns to the West and chants as she traces a symbolic set of measuring scales;

By the rain and by the blood,
By the tide and by the moon,
By our laughter and our tears,
From the Abyss I conjure Fate.

This symbol, too, glistens red when traced during the chant, Elena's heartbeat slowing as if her heart is pushing around sludge instead of blood, only moments after she'd recovered from the cold.
Picking up the obsidian chalice, the sorceress holds it towards the South as she traces a spiral - or maybe a vortex - with her other hand;

By warmth of hearth in empty home
By star-strewn sky of moonless night
By silence, will and focused calm
From endless Beyond, I conjure Void.

Pale by nature, Elena grows paler as she traces the symbol an the tiny chalice fills with her blood, drained without a cut like water from a sponge. She dips the fingers of her other hand in her own blood to do the spiral's final tracing.
The fading of the paleness quite slow as she reaches the limit of her inborn recovery powers and the taxing of her will, Elena continues on through the mounting pain of Blood Sorcery and traces a circle crossed out by a single line going through its center from lower left to upper right, holding up her silver pentacle towards the North;

By shriveled tree and mountain dark
By bone and flesh and star of north,
By our bodies, life, I call ye forth;
From outer darkness, I conjure Death.

As she holds up the pentacle, her veins feel like they're burning as the pentacle is coated with her blood. Once it is fully coated with the thick crimson fluid and about to start dripping, Elena presses it against the floor where it imprints the inverted, North-oriented pentacle in Elena's life - at least symbolically.
Leaving the four objects next to the symbols they inscribed, Elena rises from her kneeling position to her full height and begins drawing in all the Power she invoked with the incantations, shaping it to her will with the culmination of the ritual and the closing of the major circle;

Hail to the Gatekeepers of the East, powers of Knowledge and Change
Hail to the Gatekeepers of the West, powers of Emotion and Fate
Hail to the Gatekeepers of the South, powers of Will and Void
Hail to the Gatekeepers of the North, powers of Life and Death

All the elements have gathered in this circle of power.
A witch of the great knowledge;
The demands of the wronged for the doom of the damned;
The unwavering will of the powers beyond;
The end of all things dictated in the days of old.

Summon the Old Ones and open wide the Gates
as dictated by Change.
Summon the Old Ones and open wide the Gates
so Fate demands.
Summon the Old Ones and open wide the Gates
we Will it done.
Summon the Old Ones and open wide the Gates
so Nyx will touch the world and we all know no End!

A rift opens under Elena's feet as the sorceress hangs suspended over it as if by magic. Tiny by any standards - no more than a foot across - the opening does not allow creatures to pass. Energy however is another matter; darkness flows through it and embraces Elena before it swallows the symbols and the circle of salt as it spreads to suffuse the entire appartment. As the darkness seeps into the floorboards and walls and the rift vanishes, leaving Elena kneeling exhausted amid a chalice, a wand, an athame and a pentacle, you realize the sorceress has just claimed this place for the Dark Powers in general and Nyx in particular...

[newtinmpls]

To be honest, I know too many wiccans not to be annoyed at yet another "evil witch" portrayal.

[Sitrein]

To be honest, I know too many wiccans not to be annoyed at yet another "evil witch" portrayal.

I know a annoying number of wiccans and I scoff at them just as much as I scoff at myself (and everyone else for that matter) so, personally, I'm inclined to find your annoyance irrelevant. Besides, the difference between witches and wizards is that wizard has a "Z." Given that, and that we're playing DFRPG, if you're going to get annoyed at an ill-aligned caster, you might be playing the wrong game.

Belial666, Well you got across the point that this character is evil, old and a ritual using caster of some flavor or another (maybe blueberry? Kind of tart but enjoyable all the same?).

Question, though. Are you the DM or a player? I mean, is this an NPC or are you playing the blueberry? If you're dming then when will the players see all of this happen and not... well, do what they do best and screw up your story? Personally, in my games, I can't even get a half decent evil monologue out without a wannabe Dresden player interrupting with something he/she thinks is witty (sometimes they are and others... just sad...).

If you're playing an PC doing this, however, then practice it first. Hell, don't be afraid to have notes in front of you when you say it. Why? Because it's pretty long and with PLENTY of opportunities for derailment of your session. #1 problem in any tabletop game I've ever been in is ALWAYS derailment. To prevent that, have things rehearsed, ready, and keep things fluid as can be. If people start to interrupt out of character, talk over them and make it clear that you're going to recite this to completion and take questions after. If people interrupt /in character/... well... then just good luck.

Anyway, other than that, flavor wise it's cool. A bit dramatic but I think that's what you were going for, unless I'm mistaken.

[newtinmpls]

"Personally, in my games, I can't even get a half decent evil monologue out without a wannabe Dresden player interrupting with something he/she thinks is witty (sometimes they are and others... just sad...)."

Wow, good point.

Isn't there some rule (maybe I'm thinking of original FATE here), about being able to fork over a fate point in order to have monologue space? I'm thinking it would only apply to PC's.

Looking at the monologue idea as far as flavor goes - my first reaction is that it's way too long. If you are the GM, I'd encourage you to steal a line or two to be overheard/psychometry/repeated by a ghost to an ectomancer or some such.

It's an easy trap to fall into as GM to want to have fancy stuff for the PC's and let it go on too long.

Dian

[Sitrein]

Isn't there some rule (maybe I'm thinking of original FATE here), about being able to fork over a fate point in order to have monologue space? I'm thinking it would only apply to PC's.

I've never played original FATE but dear god I LIKE that idea! That's actually really awesome. I think I'll use it. maybe 1 fate point buys you 3-5 minutes of real world time to monologue/explain what's happening while you monologue. If you run over, cough up an extra fate point or risk being interrupted.

[JesterOC]

The following is my opinion with my experience with my group, and other groups I have played with... your mileage will vary.

Sorry but it looks way too long. Fate point or not I would not want to be listening to box text for that long. I have been in several games where the GM starts off on something this long, and it always ends in bored politeness or rude comments. Plus if that was beginning to happen in front of any able bodied player, they would intervene to try to stop the ritual.  To not let them without a damn good reason will make the situation worse.

Perhaps you can have the PC's find the ritual and you can hand them a copy of it, but to act it out will kill the game. Then when they do happen to come across her start describing what she is saying.."Summon the Old Ones and open wide the Gates so Fate demands." They will realize they have but seconds to try to stop the spell!

JesterOC

[devonapple]

Is this perhaps a flashback? Will the party be watching this via scrying?

Is this something that is doomed to happen without the players' intervention (precognitively revealed, perhaps)?

Or is this something which already happened that they need to study in order to fix what is happening now (researched via retrocognition)?

[HobbitGuy1420]

in the books, Dresden himself has interrupted a monologuing villain.  I'd say if you *really* want to finish the monologue, figure out a way to Compel each character to silence 'til you're done.  otherwise, they're free to pull a "I shoot him while he's yakking" on you.

[Sanctaphrax]

The ritual looks good to me. I look forward to seeing it in action.

Now, for context, Elena is Belial's player character in the Enduring The Apocalypse game on the PbP forums of this site. The concerns that the respondents of this thread have brought up are therefore mostly invalid. Monologues work much better in PbP, and this is the sort of campaign where players can get away with a lot morality-wise.

That should probably have been made clear in the first post.

PS: I have no proof that the Elena here is the one in Enduring The Apocalypse. But I will be absolutely shocked if she isn't.