The Magic of Rituals

I've found that it's hard to hit a sweet spot when it comes to designing magic systems for games. In many cases, setting rules and mechanics to what sorts of spells and magical effects can be used and how they work makes sense for the purposes of gameplay, but on the flip side, making magic follow too many rules can make it feel less...well, magical.

To me, the defining feature of magic is that it can't be explained by science. It's wondrous and exotic and strange, and the more rules are attached to it, the less magical it becomes. I find that, per rules as written, magic in D&D runs the risk of falling into mundanity if players are too accustomed to thinking of their spells as reliable tools they can fall back on. This is especially bad if you treat things like spell slots and discrete and identifiable spells as diagetic representations of how magic actually works from an in-universe perspective. It worked for Jack Vance, sure, but to me, a wizard who talks about how many spell slots he has left per day is only one step away from a Jedi throwing around his midichlorian count, and nobody wants that.

I prefer to think of magic systems in games as a way of streamlining the abstract. Magic doesn't really work exactly the way it does in the game rules; that's just a way to represent the complicated business of manipulating the fabric of reality itself. Spells taken from a list are just the sort of tricks and enchantments a particular magician has mastered and knows how to reliably perform, and spell slots are just a representation of how much mental stamina one can call upon before needing time to rest. However, all that is is reflavoring things, and that doesn't really fix the problem of magic being too defined and mechanical. I do like the 5e Sorcerer's metamagic abilities, which make magic more fluid, multifaceted, and customizable, implying there isn't a finite list of magical effects that can be achieved. And there is a part of me that's contemplated rewriting the magic system entirely to something more like Ars Magica, as some bloggers have done - but I'm not quite that insane.

But what if magic was divorced from game mechanics entirely?

The Book of Ebon Bindings is a fascinating book. Published in 1978 as part of the Empire of the Petal Throne line, it's one of the first third-party supplements for D&D. It's also one of the first system-neutral RPG materials. The book is a collection of spells revolving around summoning and controlling demons. But none of it is in the form of game rules.

That's because The Book of Ebon Bindings is written entirely in the form of an in-universe grimoire, putting it somewhere between a rulebook and a literary hoax. In order to transport yourself to another location, you don't expend a 4th-level spell slot with material, somatic, and verbal components. You have to make a circle of white ashes, draw the Symbol of the Rising Planet and write the Name of Tsu'untla in red chalk, erect a pedestal on which is placed a box of black wood, a round censer, a dagger of iron that has never tasted blood, and a wax candle, and release a drop of blood from your finger at each step taken around the circle to summon Lord Ge'en, the Eater of All. In order to cast the spell, the PCs have to go out into the world and do that stuff.

The dedication on display in Ebon Bindings is truly impressive - there's absolutely nothing that indicates it's a work of fiction or intended for gameplay; even the introduction is written as though by a translator explaining the choices they made rather than by a game designer describing its utility at the table. You could put it next to the Key of Solomon and someone unfamiliar with Empire of the Petal Throne would think that the two works belong to the same genre.

It's a fascinating concept for a book, and one I'm surprised we don't see more of. I'm amazed that something like this somehow went completely unnoticed during the Satanic Panic, and I respect the sheer audacity it must've took to publish something of the sort. But it also highlights how rituals are ripe for possibilities with gameplay.

If the PCs have to perform a ritual, it comes with its own quest hooks, necessitating that they gather the components before they can even cast the spell at all, and some of those might require expeditions of their own. Alternatively, there can be a level of resource management in keeping the components for a ritual at hand, and what might be available to the PCs might limit what options are available for spellcasting. Even determining what needs to be done for the ritual itself could be a quest, entailing poring over tomes of lost arcane knowledge and having to decode their text. The consequences of failing a ritual, or making a mistake in one step or another, could create more problems for the players. If enemy casters must perform rituals as well, it gives the PCs the chance to interfere in their efforts and stop a powerful spell from being cast before it's too late. And, above all, it restores the mystic, unknowable qualities of magic and makes those front and center in gameplay.

There's plenty of spells in 5e that can be cast as rituals. Perhaps, if a DM wants to encourage players to use rituals, they could remove the option to cast these spells on the fly, forcing players to think in terms of having the time and materials to set up the spell they want to cast. It would likely impact the pace of a campaign; rituals take time, and setting them up would take even more time, so magic-users wouldn't be able to act as quickly. I personally feel like using a mix of immediately castable spells and rituals that require a longer period of preparation (particularly for more powerful spells) is the right middle ground to circumvent this, but I suppose a DM and a group that's prepared for the challenge could run a campaign where all magic is done through rituals.

But an added benefit of using the narrative to determine if, how, and when a spell can be cast means you're not bound by game mechanics. If there's no numbers, stats, or tags associated with casting a spell, you can get them from all kinds of sources, whether they were designed for the edition you're playing or not. You can use narrative rituals from any game in any system, or even from sources outside of roleplaying games. See a neat ritual in a movie? Your PCs can cast it - all they need are the right components and the right actions.

You can even go straight to the source and have players go through the steps of setting up rituals from actual historical grimoires. Because these sorts of things tend to have fallen into the public domain, you can find plenty of texts online that can be pilfered from, and in each you'll find plenty of spells that you can have your PCs do just by performing in-universe actions. If your players want to learn who has stolen a certain object, have them suspend a sieve from a rope that was used to hang a man, spin it around a brass basin filled with water while stirring it with a laurel twig in the opposite direction, and recite the right incantations until the culprit's face appears in the water. If it worked for 14th century Italians, it'll work for your party.

It seems like such a simple solution to the problem of magic you would expect it to be proposed more often. In fact, this sort of thing was being done for almost as long as RPGs as we know them were a thing. When it comes to devising a magic system that feels more magical without throwing too many new rules at the players for them to understand, you can't go wrong with rituals - especially when you can get plenty of adventure out of them in the process.