Ritual

Rituals are the powerful spells that take a challenge over multiple turns to cast. Powerful rituals that can change the course of battle require time to cast, much like challenges - even the false threat of a powerful ritual being cast might lure the enemy into a costly attack. There are many types of rituals, see Magic for more information.

How to cast a ritual!
First thing first you need an Agent. If you select the Rake you'll see his options based on his POI at the bottom of the screen.



This screen hasn't changed much from it's original incarnation - it displays the relevant challenge types that are available and shows the relative strength you possess versus it. It also offers the current health and profile of this agent - if you want to see the rest of the Agent's stats you'd need to either click on the portrait or just click on the agent one more time.

Different governments interact differently with challenges, for instance Magocracies have a bonus to stopping Rituals, but you gain a bonus to your Infiltration equal to your Arcana when performing infiltration.

Once you've clicked on Ritual and gone to the challenge screen, you select your Ritual (mouseovers provide a lot of essential information for your decision making) and are presented with a ritual screen.



You'll notice this is the same general encounter screen used for regular challenges, events, and opportunities. Side bars will emerge if Agents/Heroes are present which provide additional informational relevant to the current event, and further information can be had by clicking on the relevant individual. Special actions will appear as buttons at the bottom if present. This consistent approach, as well as the copious amounts of tooltips and the encyclopaedia hyperlinks, should help make the game more friendly.

The ritual shown here is simple so we can run through the basics. The centre of the screen has the name of the ritual being cast as well as the type - the numbers below the description represent the complexity which is the value you need to achieve to complete the ritual. The green + value shows how much you add per turn, and it estimates the total turns needed to finish the ritual. You will also see a small indicator for Opportunity Chance. It's important to note that the ritual specifies this "location" which indicates the entire POI is going to be effected not just the region/district you are in.

Moving down you see the "Effect" of the spell, the icon for the modifier is shown on the left which is what will appear on the POI or district. The blue text indicates a hyperlink letting you jump into the encyclopaedia or you can just view the tooltip. The "Malison" entry tells you that this is an effect created by the spell itself not by any alteration or augmentation. The value on the right is the complexity which is reflected in the 0 / 15 above - since there is only one effect currently the single effect is the total value. At the bottom is a flavour quote.

That's it to your basic ritual castings, you click on the effect and it begins (or right click to jump back to Ritual Challenges screen). Once the ritual is being cast you are free to go back to blissfully passing turns.



If you mouse over/click on the Agent while he is performing the ritual you'll see this small screen at the bottom showing what he is currently doing and the progress. The map icon indicates someone is investigating this action. You can also look at the quick indicator...



which will flash a colour depending on the status. Green indicates smooth sailing, yellow indicates that someone is investigating your actions or you are now going slower at the challenge, while red indicates that a hero will very soon discover you or that you are no longer making progress on this challenge. Clicking on the challenge icon will bring you right to the challenge progress screen.



Here you can see that a mysterious hero is not only looking into this ritual but is so skilled that he/she is slowing down our ritual challenge. You can see that this mysterious hero (or group of heroes) will find us just as we complete the ritual which actually requires us to beat the heroes to be able to finish the ritual. Also notice the "investigate" button at the bottom of the Hero Panel, this is present because we have Infiltration in the city that we are in - using that button will let us discover the identify of the Heroes in a few turns but at the cost of raising the threat/profile of our infiltration. This means that a hero or member of the government may investigate our infiltration and remove it, possibly getting a clue on our identity in the process. Using your infiltration to identify/arrest heroes always comes with a risk.

With the heroes closing in your options are try and raise your ability to finish faster, cut and run (leaving some clues but not as many as if they found you), distract the heroes, or battle them to finish your ritual.

Let's take a look at some other paradigms for rituals.



If you find yourself facing a Sage Chosen One you will find magical barricades and spells of protection constantly getting in your way. One of the ways to handle this is to use your own magic to pull down the spell, and the Unravel ritual is the bluntest tool in your arsenal. When you target another mage, his spell, or an area guarded by a wizard you will find that they act against you with their arcana in addition to the security of the POI making it even harder to finish your ritual. As for Unravel itself, it targets the original complexity of the ritual and you need to hit that number before the spell completes.

Unraveling with low magic is a terrible time waster, and other mages may come to help keep the spell strong, but your more powerful casters can rip apart spells in just a few turns which, if you time it right, can allow another caster to land a powerful ritual or for one of your more murderous agents to bloody their hands. You may also find yourself on the receiving end of this indirect magical conflict - remember that even if you are losing you can always just kill or distract the attacking wizard(s).

I think at this point you see how rituals work, so let's look at a more complex example.



Here we have a newly begun challenge with several options available. You'll see below the Rake there are several options - the ones with icons next to them are derived from Necromancy traits and allow you to add new effects to the ritual but at the cost of Death Power and complexity, the trait below them costs only Complexity. You can add two additional effects to a ritual and the combined effects can be very diverse. In this example the Rake has selected to add Cycle of Rebirth to this spell which changes the Poison Harvest modifier such that 25% of the casualties it causes add to the Strength of the Restless Dead status modifier (creating it if it doesn't exist). You can see that the two points of death power are being used and the total complexity of the ritual has increased. Also at the bottom you can see an artifact available, like everything a tooltip will give you the details and help you decide if you wish to use it in this ritual.



This Artifact is the Dreamwalker's Mantle, incredibly powerful in the hands of the Alliance but of some use to you as well. Dreamcast makes a Ritual much harder to discover and dispel but it does draw Dreamers to it, but it is the unique ability that gives this Artifact it's power. Most artifacts in That Which Sleeps have unique powers as we wanted the game to be less about gradual powering up through acquiring better equipment and more about the strategic importance of key items.

I think you should all have a good idea of how rituals work, most resolve simply assigning their effects though some have global significance and these get events in one of three formats.