Ceremony & Circles

The slow magic of altars, congregations, and the year's great days. If it works while you sleep, it was a ritual.

What Ceremony Is

In ceremony the Magic Dice are set, not rolled — each die placed with about ten minutes of ritual work and a flat 1 QP. No strain, no doubles, no surges: the storm is absent, and the price is time, cost, and company. All the randomness lives in the leader's one skill roll at the climax. Failure gutters the rite out; only a natural 18 warps.

Ceremony's exclusive privileges: durations beyond sunrise; workings that run unattended; castings of M5 and M6; and targets you can only name, reached through sympathetic trappings — the lock of hair, the true name, the fistful of grave-earth.

The Circle

• The casting level can never exceed the leader's Magery. Depth is personal, always.
• The leader sets up to twice her Magery in dice (the ×2 constant).
• Gifted helpers: at most one per level of the leader's Magery, each setting up to his own Magery in dice.
• Everyone else is congregation: any number, 1 QP each — fuel and endurance, never dice. A thousand farmhands cannot conjure what one hedge-witch can.
• A gift of QP returns to the giver with the seventh day. Drawing on an unrecovered giver takes it from their body: 1 HP per point — the withering, and every passing rider sees it.

Buying Certainty

Every 5 QP contributed beyond the rite's costs gives the leader +1 to her roll, to a maximum of twice her Magery. A packed church doesn't make the rite bigger; it makes it surer — and past effective 16, roughly one great feast-day rite in eleven goes wondrously right. The floor never disappears: 17 is still flawed, 18 is still a disaster at the high altar.

Time and the Coin Ladder

Endures	Cost multiplier	Leader needs
Done when the circle opens	×1	any leader
Until sunrise	×2	Magery 2
A lunar month	×5	Magery 3
A year and a day	×10	Magery 4
Beyond	Invocation country — priced nowhere in this book

Anchored and Tended

Anchored: pay the full multiplied cost in one rite and the working stands alone until its term lapses — living in a physical anchor (boundary stones, a blessed token) whose destruction breaks it, and holding 1 QP of the leader's pool committed for its whole life. Tended: pay the base price every dawn and keep committed QP holding it in watches — vastly more over a year, never more than a devoted order can raise in a day, and it dies with the institution. Rich kingdoms anchor. Devoted orders tend. Both are correct.

Holy Days

On a tradition's lesser holy days, contributed QP counts as 1.5; on its great feasts, double. Nothing requires the great rites to wait for the great days — everyone waits anyway. That is why they are great.