Greater Path Control

The Morgan Collection

To date, this is the most advanced magic that the Baron has ever conceived of. With this ritual that has its' basis in the two rituals of Power of the Invisible Flame and Vires Aquirit Aundo, successful casting of GPC will allow the caster to add attributes to or augment existing abilities of his/her uses of thaumaturgical paths. An example of the uses to which this may be put are as follows.

Milan wishes to use Lure of Flames to demoralize a small contingent of slavering Tzmisce war ghouls. With the casting of GPC, he succeeds in accumulating 3 successes on the Int/Rituals roll, (yes, this means 3 9s or 10s. With these successes, Milan chooses to add the capacities of form, movement and volume to his lure of flames. When he activates his lure of flames, (with the normal willpower roll, blood expendature and standard difficulties associated) he may craft the appearance of the flames he conjures into whatever form he wishes, (form) with an increased volume and may move these forms of flame much more quickly than would be otherwise possible. For instance, He creates a Tyranasaurus Rex of moving flame to attack the ghouls and has the apparition chase them once they begin retreating. Other augmentations such as difficulty to use the path, duration of a path effect, damage dealt, extra soak dice, area of effect and many others may be augmented. Each augmentation or added capacity may be changed only once.

The attributes of the path to be augmented by the magus are determined before the casting of the ritual, much like a shopping list in that he lists the augmentations to the chosen path in the order in which he wishes successes to be applied. Applications of this ritual may be applied to nearly any attribute pertaining to the path in question and/or added to the path for the duration of the ritual. Such attributes or additions must actually be possible given the story tellers discretion. Such impossibilities include the aforementioned T-Rex being able to actually bite the fleeing ghouls, (after all, this is a burning apparition of flames and has no actual physical substance), enabling a stone construct, (golem, earth elemental, statue etc.) to fly or allowing transmutation to change a living being to a different physical state of matter. A clever and sneaky user of this ritual can certainly combine effects of different paths to fool onlookers in thinking that there is no limitation to the power of the augmented magus.

The main restriction of this ritual is that it may only be used on a single path once. therafter, the duration of the ritual must expire or be prematurly ended, (via counter magic or some such) before GPC may be used to augment the same path once again. Any number of paths may be augmented at a given time with multiple castings of GPC.

System: The Magus must gather materials specifically related to the path to be augmented, the attributes that he wishes to change and must be uninterrupted in the casting which lasts from exactly midnight on one of three days of the full moon untill the sun fully rises above the horizon in the east. This places quite a lot of strain on the caster and those whose path ratings are lacking may not be able to complete this ritual at all.