Paths and Rituals

Sorcerer Paths

• Spend a willpower
• Make your "Path Roll" - Roll Attribute + Path Ability diff <Path rank> +4
• Casting Time - Small Spells take 1 turn, Rituals take 10 min per level

Aspects

Area	1-foot radius	3-foot radius	6-foot radius	12-foot radius	25-foot radius
Damage/Healing # of dice of lethal damage can be healed or caused. An additional two successes spent on this Aspect converts the damage healed or caused to aggravated.	max +2 dice	max +4 dice	max +6 dice	max +8 dice	max +10 dice
Distance guidelines for populated regions. For less populated ones, the numbers may be doubled or even tripled, Storyteller discretion. Distance is used for travel, movement, and remote effects. For effects emanating directly from the hedge wizard, such as combat spells, use Range instead.	Only a few feet	Up to around 20 feet	Up to 100 feet	Up to half a mile	Up to five miles
Duration	A few minutes	One scene	A day or two	A couple of weeks	Several months
Number of Targets	A single target	Two targets	Up to 10	Up to 50	Hundreds
Metaphysical Weight	Simple creatures such as small, unintelligent animals, most minor Gafflings and the smallest beings in the hosts of a heaven or hell	Larger creatures such as bears or wolves, more powerful Gafflings, ghosts that have begun to learn to navigate their existence but have no experience	Humans and truly intelligent beings, like most Jagglings, ghosts who can navigate the underworld effectively, minor angels, servitor demons, and notable elementals	Enhanced humans like ghouls, kinfolk, and other sorcerers, as well as powerful Jagglings, Umbrood Preceptors, and infernal tempters	Powerful beings such as the truly supernatural (vampires, werewolves, mages, fae, etc.), Incarnae, the barons of hell and the generals of the heavenly host
Passengers	Yourself, but no clothing or equipment	Yourself, your clothing, and a small amount of stuff	Yourself and one extra person or equivalent weight in stuff	Two passengers	Three passengers
Range	Touch only (requires a successful Brawl attack if the target is unwilling)	Less than 10 feet	Less than 25 feet	About 50 feet	Within 150 feet
Sympathetic Connection	Direct physical contact	True Name	Body part, including blood, nail clippings, etc.	Prized possession	Any possession
Travel Speed	About three times faster than foot	Roughly driving speed	Driving without speed limits or red lights	Miles are covered in seconds	Instantaneous travel
Weight	Less than an ounce	A few pounds	Up to 100 pounds	Up to 1000 pounds	Large objects such as cars or elephants can be moved

Witnesses

Hedge magic is easiest to accomplish far from prying eyes. Obvious spells and rituals generally fail when performed in public, preventing a hedge magician with the Path of Conjuration from throwing a city bus at someone in the middle of town. It’s possible to overcome this effect, but the larger the number of witnesses to a spell, the more challenging it is to manifest the magic.

For the purposes of this chart, witnesses include anyone considered a Sleeper. Remove successes when calculating the final result of the spell or ritual as indicated on the chart.

Number of Witnesses	Successes Removed
1	1
2-5	2
6-10	3
20-100	4
100+	5

Paths

Alchemy

Details

Attribute: Intelligence Suggested Ability: Crafts (Alchemy), Herbalism, Science (you must choose one and +note it) Modifier: After the same ritual is completed 3 times, the diff drops by -1. Duration: 1 scene Notes: - No spells in this path. Everything is ritual. Time: Each dot of Ability higher than ritual level reduces casting by 1 day, if reduced to less than 1 day it takes 3 hours Effects: This path has no Aspects. Instead, each dot increases the practitioner’s power and control. Except for the most potent recipes, they only require a single success to make. Additional successes are split between providing additional doses and keeping those doses potent for one day per success spent. Mundane Distillation - Distillations at this level do not appear magical in any way. These recipes are simply more advanced versions of extant chemicals and concoctions, producing more potent painkillers, poisons, glues, solvents, etc., and increasing the Toxin Rating of the chemical by one. Sample Recipes: *A powder that enhances alcohol. The drinker must roll Stamina (difficulty 8) or spend a point of Willpower or else fall asleep immediately. They must try again (at a difficulty of one less than the prior roll) each turn until they fail, or the difficulty drops below 3. Those affected sleep for (10- Stamina) hours. Vampires are resistant, rolling at –2 difficulty and rolling Stamina + Fortitude. Even if they fail, they sleep for only ten minutes, minus one for each dot of Stamina or Fortitude they possess. Werewolves in their natural form, however, are more susceptible (difficulty +1). *A cure for the common cold or flu, at least for 24 hours. It can also halve the recovery time for the illness. *A drug that lets the user ignore wound penalties up to the Injured level until wounded again. *A tonic that instantly sobers the drinker up, no matter how drunk they are *A mirror that is nigh impossible to chip or break Enhance Attribute (within Human Limits) - May temporarily raise an Attribute by +1, to a max of +5, for 1 scene. Not to exceed 5 dots total in one Attribute. Potions to expand mystical awareness come as weak dreams or hallucinations at the Storyteller's discretion and narrative. Sample Recipes: *An enhanced form of LSD that lets the taker either see a vision of the future or discover connections between disparate elements within the story. These relationships always appear in symbolic form, making the visions difficult to interpret. *A potion that doubles the running speed of anyone who takes it. At the end of the scene, the user rolls Stamina (difficulty 6) or feels out of breath for the next hour, suffering a +2 difficulty on all physical rolls. *An energy drink that lets the user go an entire week sleeping one hour per night. Enhance Attribute (superhuman) - Same as above but Attribute may exceed 5 dots. May also grant low-level psychic abilities for 2 hours. These psychic abilities begin at a single dot, but every additional two successes provides an additional dot, to a maximum of the alchemist’s Path rating. Sample Recipes: *An extremely strong, light, and easy to work with metal alloy. It can retain an edge forever; melee weapons made from it do an extra die of damage and have –1 difficulty to hit. Armor made with it soaks an extra die of bashing and lethal damage. *A dust that reveals invisible objects or creatures and disrupts illusions. Advanced Enhancement - Increase a single Attribute or Ability by +2, or increase 2 Attribute or abilties by +1. May exceed normal human limits(5). Sample Recipes: *A metabolic accelerator that raises Strength and Stamina by one each. Anyone who takes it will be hungry during the time to fuel the change. This may increase Attributes above 5. *A regimen of drugs or potions that slows aging. For each year of life on this regimen, the user only ages one month. If they ever go off of it, however, their age catches up at a rate of one month per day until they die or resume the regimen. *A salve that can be applied to the eyes to allow the user to see through the Shroud for one night. *A bullet that bursts into flames on impact. It does an additional two dice of fire damage and ignites anything it hits. *A powder that, when inhaled by mouth, gives an extra dot of Manipulation and Expression. Mastery Enhancements - Each ritual/recipe produces up to 3 dots of supernatural powers. Each dot reproduced this way mimics a single effect — chosen when the recipe is crafted — even if the replicated power offers multiple effects. *HR* May be required to have relevant lore as well. Sample Recipes: *A pungent chemical that drives back werewolves (and most humans, simply due to the smell). When worn, any sort of shapeshifter cannot approach within ten feet of the user. Of course, this only protects against melee combat, they can still throw things, as some alchemists learn when they start taunting. Similar recipes exist for other Night-Folk. *A potion that mimics the physical prowess of a vampire. The user gains an extra action, an automatic success on Strength rolls, and an extra soak die for the scene. They also have quite a temper and thirst for blood. Resisting provocation or the opportunity to feed on an open wound requires a Willpower roll (difficulty 8). * More directly, an elixir can be made using at least five points of vampire blood to simulate three dots of Potence for three hours. It leaves the user desperately hungry and suffering from bloodlust as above. *A powder that allows the consumer to heal bashing and lethal damage at a rate of one level every other turn for the duration of a story. This requires some werewolf fur and causes the user to sweat heavily and smell like an animal in a cage, giving +1 difficulty to all social rolls. Price of Failure: Working with volatile compounds is dangerous in and of itself. Even mere failure results in broken equipment and ruined reagents, requiring expensive replacements. In the best-case scenario with an actual botch, the alchemical product explodes, potentially damaging the magician (as well as their neighbors). More commonly, though, the botched recipe appears to come together perfectly, but produces undesirable, and possibly harmful, effects. Even an unexpected but benign effect can be catastrophic at the wrong time.

Conjuration

Details

Modifiers: For any application that can be played off as — or described similarly enough to — stage magic, keep one success that would’ve otherwise been removed by witnesses. Even rational consensus is primed by pop culture to believe conjuring an elephant from nowhere is possible with clever visual trickery. Note that actions causing obvious physical harm can’t be explained in this manner. Using Conjuration on an object in the grasp of someone actively resisting incurs a +1 difficulty. Attempting Conjuration to move a resisting target incurs a +2 difficulty. Apply a –1 difficulty for an object well-known to the sorcerer (see also Object Permanence below). Aspects: Distance, Number of Targets, and Weight. Conjuration doesn’t use Speed. The summoned target appears instantaneously on the successful completion of a spell or ritual. The sorcerer may also choose to buy the following effects with additional successes: • 1 success to be able to use Conjuration to clumsily attack without touching the weapon (–1 die penalty to attack). • 2 successes to attack as above but without penalty, or to give fine motor control to any object conjured, such as using a set of lock picks from a distance. • 1 success for each additional round the sorcerer wishes to maintain the effect. The Sorcerer can’t drastically change the effect, such as throwing a puppet to strike someone after making the puppet dance, without rolling Conjuration again. Price of Failure: Simple failure means no item is transported, a Conjuration botch runs the gamut from highly inconvenient to gruesome. A sorcerer might send an object to the wrong place, such as sending an item further out of reach or conjuring a prepared weapon directly to their own hand. Sometimes the sorcerer summons the wrong object entirely. Alternatively, a sorcerer might only conjure part of the intended item, and one only needs to imagine the horror of botching the Conjuration of a living being. Sample Rituals: Object Permanence - The hedge magician forces a supernatural connection to objects for future summoning. This treats the target as “well-known to the sorcerer,” even if the sorcerer found it in a dumpster an hour ago. The sorcerer meditates within 10 feet of the target and spends a point of Willpower. Every success represents a day the target maintains the supernatural connection to the sorcerer. A hedge magician may have a maximum number of targets bound this way at once as they have dots in Conjuration. Always Armed - The sorcerer doesn’t have to appear armed to have a weapon at the ready. Due to the nature of this ritual, it’s nearly always hung before the sorcerer enters a potentially dangerous situation. If they need to access the weapon, the sorcerer completes the ritual by reaching into their trenchcoat or a convenient shadow to summon it. Traditionally, sorcerers used this ritual to conjure swords, but in modern times it’s most common for a sorcerer to summon a shotgun or rifle. The summoned weapon can’t be larger than a shotgun or long sword. Shitstorm - The hedge magician surrounds themself and companions within 25 feet of them with a swirling shell of small inanimate objects. This adds +1 difficulty to hit anyone covered by the effect with a ranged attack for every 2 activation successes. Additionally, anyone attempting close combat against those affected by the ritual must soak [activation successes] in damage. This is usually bashing, unless the sorcerer was in a room filled with broken glass, small knives, or other sharp objects, in which case the damage is lethal. The sorcerer doesn’t have to target any enemy in particular for this to occur. Anyone, friend or foe, who gets too close to the flying debris is hit and must soak the damage. Extraction - Another ritual commonly hung “just in case”, Extraction allows the sorcerer to take fallen or overwhelmed companions out of battle and to safety. The sorcerer first moves out of range of combat, typically behind cover, and pulls their companions out of a shadow. There isn’t a difficulty increase or success penalty if the companions aren’t resisting and aren’t immediately being targeted — the chaos of combat can hide this ritual’s use. Once the sorcerer and their companions are out of range, they aren’t counted as being in combat unless a combatant finds them and attacks. This powerful ritual can work on up to 10 companions, who the sorcerer must define when initially performing the ritual.