Blood Sorcery

[Luna]

What would be the ideals on this? Is there any way to get over the cries of it's OP NOOOO! Or TELENUKE! People can kill your character, it happens. Let's functionally take a look at it and see what the masses would think as an ideal system.

[Luna]

Here's what's House Ruled on TR (which it does say no telenuke) -

Blood Sorcery
Duration
All spells, both Improvised and Ritual have a one month duration maximum.
Stacking
You can not stack Blood Sorcery Spells. Which means, if you cast a Protection 1 effect on yourself, you can not cast a second identical spell on yourself and have them stack. The second spell effectively over writes the first one.
Caps
All dice pool bonuses or penalties from Blood Sorcery spells will be capped at the Theme's rating which will max out at +5/-5 which is entirely in keeping with the GMC rules.
All Ritual Factors will be capped equal to the score of Discipline+Theme for non-Contested/Resisted spells.
For Contested/Resisted Spells the Ritual Factors will be capped at the Base Dice Pool of casting.

***And for kicks - ***

Threnodies
Purchased via +xpreq.
Merit cost. 2x the number of required Discipline dots.
A 'base line' Sacrifice and Song will be noted on the PC. Any over/under Sacrifices will have to be marshaled by a ST/Staff.
All Threnodies are unique. Even the printed ones will have unique sacrifices and no two will be the same.
Staff reserves the right to deny any Threnody for any reason without explanation. (So, no Telenuke submissions please.)

[ThatOneDude]

@Luna Yes, add, no telenuke

But Threnodies are awesome and everyone should use them >.>

[darksabrz]

Threnodies suck IMO, but YMMV.

At least, in looking over them, not one of them seemed appealing (at least to me), and the sacrifice cost to use them seemed prohibitively high, so that's just me.

As for the rituals themselves... the biggest problem with Blood Sorcery is that the only converted rituals are the ones from the original core book: Pangs of Proserpina/Rigor Mortis/Touch of the Morrigan, etc. for Cruac, and Vitae Reliquary/Liar's Plague/Transmutation, etc. for Theban Sorcery. Admittedly, several Theban rituals (and some custom ones, I think of lot of which were courtesy of Vinder) were added, but Cruac doesn't have a lot of that at all in comparison. So, effectively one would have to go through all the books, read over the ritual effects, and figure out the best way to recreate it via BS Themes and the like. THAT is where a lot of the work is going to have to come in.

[ThatOneDude]

@darksabrz said:

Threnodies suck.

Well, maybe not, but in looking over them, not one of them seemed appealing, and the sacrifice cost to use them seemed prohibitively high, so that's just me.

As for the rituals themselves... the biggest problem with Blood Sorcery is that the only converted rituals are the ones from the original core book: Pangs of Proserpina/Rigor Mortis/Touch of the Morrigan, etc. for Cruac, and Vitae Reliquary/Liar's Plague/Transmutation, etc. for Theban Sorcery. Admittedly, several Theban rituals (and some custom ones, I think of lot of which were courtesy of Vinder) were added, but Cruac doesn't have a lot of that at all in comparison. So, effectively one would have to go through all the books, read over the ritual effects, and figure out the best way to recreate it via BS Themes and the like. THAT is where a lot of the work is going to have to come in.

Eh? Blood Sorcery in the book is pretty cool in terms of pointing out by the dots of what can be done. If you played mage it gets fairly close to the same ideals in a lot of ways.

[darksabrz]

@ThatOneDude It is, yes -- I referred to that extensively when I submitted my conversions for many of the CotC Cruac rituals nearly two months ago. At TR, there's several submitted custom rituals and the like (many of which are Theban-oriented, since I'm pretty sure Vinder was the one who wrote them up and compiled them), but the conversions are desperately needed there.

As for Threnodies -- I just wasn't impressed at all by them. I think White Wolf should have done conversions for the Cruac/Theban rituals in other books and left Threnodies out completely, but that's just me.

[Luna]

@darksabrz Care to post your conversions? I'd like to see.

[darksabrz]

Copy/pasted from my +job to Hamilton (+job 68 in the system as of today):

I'm going partially off of the ritual descriptions given, and partially from what I've read from the Blood Sorcery book, plus a peek at the ritual conversions on the wiki itself. These Cruac rituals are all in the Circle of the Crone book, pp. 204-211. Hopefully this will help.

Fires of Inspiration: Creation 1, Divination 1 (gives bonus to Crafts equal to Creation theme rating)
Visage of the Crone: Creation 1, Transmutation 1

Path of Thorns: Creation 1, Destruction 2 (+2 successes to duration to last for one scene)
Soul's Work: Creation 2, Transmutation 2
Wisdom of the Soul: Creation 2, Divination 2

Beloved Deodand: Transmutation 3 (as Biting Blade, but works with any weapon that was used to kill another)
Rain: Creation 3
Taste of Destiny: Divination 3
Tiamat's Offspring: Creation 3

Eye of the Norn: Divination 4
Mask of Blood: Transmutation 4

A Child From the Stones: Creation 4, Transmutation 5 (to create gargoyle), Destruction 4, Transmutation 5 (to destroy another gargoyle created by this ritual)
As One: Creation 5, Destruction 5, Divination 3, Protection 3, Transmutation 3
Crone's Renewal: Transmutation 5

[Saulot]

@ThatOneDude While it does copy Mage to a decent degree it suffers from the problems of mage to a magnified degree. The spells outlined in all the mages are supposed to be examples of what the various Arcana + Practices offer. Instead, in every online game I've seen you're often stuck with those, and the word "custom" is treated as anathema. With Blood Sorcery it's just plain bad with these limitations as there's only one book, and it offers nowhere near as much.

[Luna]

This is good stuff. In a bit, I'll go through and try to list all the rituals and make a list. Possibly a spreadsheet. I fucking love spreadsheets.

[Luna]

@Huzuruth Depending on the staffer, Mage was worse about it. I got told more than once that even though the Mage book gave an example of xyz being a thing, it didn't have a rote or an official 'name' therefore was not a thing.

[darksabrz]

@Huzuruth Hence, why I called the implementation of it by Hamilton "half-assed" in The Reach Vampire thread. God forbid anyone hold a pale candle to Mages, but in general, the lack of work that went into it before it was implemented (over the objections of several Crone/Sanctified players when it was pitched to them, IIRC) was eyeroll-worthy. I honestly believe Hamilton decided to implement it on a whim, with zero thought as to the consequences.

[Saulot]

I'm surprised he didn't simply copy the list outlined on CoFaB. It isn't too bad, honestly.

[Luna]

@Huzuruth Who wrote all the CoFab stuff?

[Ganymede]

Answer this question: why did anyone need to tinker with Cruac/Theban/Other?

[ThatOneDude]

@Ganymede To me, the upgrade/change in the Blood Sorcery book make it actually worth having. Before it was a discipline, now, it feels like MAGIC >.>

[Ganymede]

@ThatOneDude

Are you fucking with me?

Theban Sorcery was vicious. With my prior Vampire PC, I also had Merges Sorcery. Regardless of how they were structured, they were mean and powerful, especially on The Reach.

They didn't make it better -- they made it more powerful. You can make anything more powerful if you want, but that doesn't mean that it needed to be tinkered with in the first place.

[Bristled Thistle]

Are we talking about the same book? Where half the Cruac spells were entirely fluff, while the Carthians are running around with useful shit that actually works?

[Ganymede]

@Bristled-Thistle

Cruac is exactly as it should be. The Carthian book was a mess of twinky-ass-shit that makes absolutely no sense to anyone with half-a-brain.

[Saulot]

@Ganymede said:

Answer this question: why did anyone need to tinker with Cruac/Theban/Other?

Supplements are good for a quick buck.