Author Topic: Thaumaturgy Ritual: Awakening Objects  (Read 1475 times)

Offline Dastion

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Thaumaturgy Ritual: Awakening Objects
« on: October 21, 2012, 10:11:30 AM »
I'm looking for a ritual which mimics one of the magical systems in the book Warbringer by Brandon Sanderson.  A quick overview of the system is called Awakening.  Each individual has one 'Breath' which is essentially the vibrancy of life within them.  A person can choose to pass on all of Breaths to someone else with a special phrase.  Awakeners are people who have gathered many Breaths and know the commands to infuse them into an object and command it (awakening a rug and telling it to wrap up an enemy, or telling your cloak to protect you).  In order awaken something they also have to draw color from something, so a cell for an awakener is usually an area already voided of color.


Anyhow, basically I'm just looking for a ritual that applies the 'Animated X' to the target object, lasts the scene, and allows it to compliment or inhibit a specified action that the object could reasonable do.  That seems the best translation of the system to this ritual. My questions are:

1) How would you assign the complexity/target power?
2) Can the caster gain something towards the role by declaring he'll sap the color from an object? (I.e a colored scarf)
3) Now let's say I wanted to make this into an enchanted item that let you animate objects.  Assuming you have sufficient lore to do so, can you link things like the above declaration to the enchanted item in order to make it easier to craft?  As I understand it, I think Enchanted Items are limited purely to Lore + Specialties + Additional Slots for their power, so you even if you're having the item perform a thaumaturgical effect you can't build in inflicting a consequence, declarations, etc. to the item to boost your base complexity attainable.

Example of ritual use: Animate a string and tell it to pick a lock.  The string makes itself rigid enough to pick the lock (rigid, but not necessarily stronger - so it can still be broken, cut, etc) and complements your burglary role with a +1

Offline Tedronai

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Re: Thaumaturgy Ritual: Awakening Objects
« Reply #1 on: October 21, 2012, 10:43:20 AM »
Base the complexity of the ritual on the task to be accomplished.
For your example, I'd suggest a simple skill replacement ritual with a complexity equal to the difficulty someone would face using Burglary to pick the lock +/- situational modifiers (such as shifts on the time chart if the ritual is going to be substantially faster than a mundane lockpicking).
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Offline Mrmdubois

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Re: Thaumaturgy Ritual: Awakening Objects
« Reply #2 on: October 21, 2012, 01:32:06 PM »
As for question 2 that's a working of the impossible task thaumaturgy.  Transformation specifically and involves inflicting consequences on the object to be decolored.

Question three, an enchanted item can control a number of shifts equal to twice your Lore, so yeah you can't get higher than that unless you specifically have crafting Power specializations, or are willing to sacriice enchanted item slots to the goal.

An enchanted item might be kind of unwieldy or this though.  I'm not sure, but I believe that you would only be able to craft an enchanted item to, "animate a piece of string" or "animate something to pick locks." The first limits what you can animate, the second what you can accomplish with your enchanted item animation spell.

A simple IoP that bestowed a reskinned Living Dead power would be how I would go about it if I wanted that ability encapsulated in an item, off the top of my head.  Of course that would also cost a FP.