Making Holy Water.

[knnn]

I didn't see this in the books, so I thought I'd ask here.

Making small amounts of HW should be pretty easy:  Wave your hands over the flask.
What about blessing a barrel of HW, or something larger - like an entire city reservoir, or Lake Michigan?

Also, how long does it stay Holy?  Is there a time limit, or is it permanent once created?

[T.R.C.C.]

I would rule it as a tag you can place on things useing a High Concept tag. A small bottle would be a free tag. A large barrel might cause a mild menal consequence hit. Tagging a sprinkler system or a large container might be a moderate consequence and a swimming pool would cause a severe consequence, Increessed or decressed by apropreate rolls on the ladder chart.

 Small things like the bottle and the barrel I would rule as permanent and larger areas I'll call as a scene aspect or if the roll was lenendary, possibly untrill the next milestone.

Have fun.  

[FangGrip]

Perhaps an invocation of the High Aspect of a True Believer?  Say it fills up a quantity equal to a basin at the front of a church and requires a five minute ritual.  The more volume that is required, more time and or priests with Fate Points it would take?

I would say it would be permanent until used or tainted in some way.  Getting mixed with something or spilling out would taint it.

[Attercap]

As a GM, I'd rule that things like oceans, lakes, rivers, etc couldn't be turned into holy water, there's too much constant interference with the water--tides, sediment, animals, etc. One might be able to bless the contents of a water reserve, but many sprinkler systems use the water within their jurisdiction, so it'd be a little harder to bless or maintain such a blessing because the city/county/whatever's water would be immediately dispersed amongst the greater populace.

A tactic I took with clerics in my D&D days was that holy water wasn't just a blessing, it required sacred oils to help the "flow" of that blessing. It wasn't exactly chemistry, but there was a minimal amount of oil-to-water in order for the holy water to work against creatures of the night. Blessed water without the oils was used for ritualistic and spiritual purposes only.

[GoldenH]

If you can turn a sea to blood, then surely you can make it Holy.

Of course it would require a great deal of Faith...

[ralexs1991]

i'd say maybe a taggin of your high concept or possibly a ritual that takes longer/ higher difficulty as the amount goes up

[finnmckool]

I have to concur. The larger and more "fluid" (sorry) the water supply the more difficult and less permanent it is.

As to Red Sea...Moses didn't do that. God did. So think of that as serious Sponsored Magic. That's not a trick he does for just everybody. Your character may be a "Mean mmm mmm servant of God" (to quote Harvey Keitel in Dusk Til Dawn) but that don't make you Moses.

[GoldenH]

Well, maybe he did, maybe he didn't. God got pissed at Moses because he wouldn't own up to his own badassitude and do things for himself. And playing Moses-like-faithworker is a workable character concept.

[Shecky]

Unless the direct source is a divinity, I'd say it lasts until the next sunrise or until washed away otherwise.

[Ranma1558]

It seems to me that making holy water is inline with a thaumaturgy like effect, you want to place an aspect on an object for a certain time span. This means creating a small flask of holy water (a one use weapon) might take a few moments. Magic lasts till the next sunrise but we can assume faith magic might last a bit longer perhaps 7 days or so, so 5 shifts would make it last a half a year more then long enough to move past the evaporation point, you could also assume a good to great difficulty it placing the maneuver, so all together you get 8 or 9 for the "spell's" complexity. Normal non major npcs have a fair to good score at skills relating to what they do so it would take 4 to 5 rolls to do this "spell". With the single flask as a base increase the complexity for larger containers, a barrel might be six or seven times this but a pool would become insanely hard to pull off.

[JosephKell]

I am going to second (third?) the "it allows a call for a compel on a thing's high concept."

I really liked in the movie Constantine, where holy water shattered the fake skin/armor of half demons.

In Supernatural: Beginning's End, the New York "hunter army" maintained a daily blessing ceremony to keep the water surrounding New York as holy water in order to discourage most monsters from coming to the big city.

FYI: Father Forthill made Dresden a barrel of the stuff, and he only has Bless this House and Guide My Hand.

[Lanir]

Personally I'd go with the high concept thing but not require a True Believer template. If you do that you're saying that normal priests bless water all the time but it does nothing because the vast majority of them would have the Pure Mortal template and be built with no powers. I probably wouldn't allow blessing bodies of water in games I ran. That would be some major working and honestly, if you want to do trippy stuff like that you should be prepared to back it up. I tend to see bodies of water as having their own identity and altering that would take significant effort.

But just about any member of a holy order should be able to pray over some water. Remember it's a catch, it works just like iron. Iron isn't magical in it's own right, the fae are just supernaturally weak against it. In the same vein, holy water isn't necessarily charged with divine power. Most of the time it would probably be a complete waste for it to be magically charged up like that.

[Valarian]

I'd limit the creation of holy water to areas of standing water. So a barrel, vat, water tank, water tower, etc. would all be fine but lakes and seas wouldn't. The motion of the water in a lake or shoreline would disperse the blessed water so that it wouldn't be effective (except to those creature susceptible to "running" water).

[Richard_Chilton]

I'd limit it to what exists in the religion.  Virtually no priest would mock his own beliefs by blessing holy water in a way that conflicts with his faith.  Try running into a church in real life and asking a priest to bless water pistols - you'll either get a lecture or be met with concern over your mental health.

Dresden needed a Knight of the Cross to introduce him to a Priest in the Know to get access to large amounts of holy water.  That sounds like a contact that a PC should have if he wants large amounts of holy water.  If small amounts will do, well, I put "buying holy water" into google and came up with pages like:
http://www.fisheaters.com/water.html - that has the quote:
-----
Where to get it
 
To get holy water to use in your home, bring a clean flask to your parish church and look for a faucet that will probably be labelled "Holy Water." If there is no faucet, it might be kept in an urn of some sort. If you can't find it, don't be shy; just ask! Unlike votive candles, there is no real cost to the church in making holy water, so there is no offering expected.
 -----

Richard

[PirateJack]

You could have it require a Font in order to be blessed, since that is traditionally where holy water is made.