Harry Potter, it ain’t.
Cost: 3 Significant Charges
Back in the day, sometimes a mage just couldn’t trust a traditional courier to deliver a message in secret and in haste. This ritual circumvented those problems by ‘encouraging’ a wild owl to deliver your note for you. Not so useful in the days of cell phones and e-mail, but hey.
You’ll need three scraps of parchment. On the first, write the message you want delivered. On the second, write the name of the person you want it delivered to in an ink spiked with a ‘sample’ of that person. Blood, sweat, semen, urine…it all works symbolically. On the third, the location you expect them to be. Shred these three pieces of paper and feed them to three male mice caught with your bare hands on a moonless night. No traps allowed. (For those modern mages not so wise in the sexing of animals, the males have testicles.)
Feed these three mice to a wild owl. When the owl finishes the third mouse, speak the the phrase “Deliver this message safely,” in Old English, and spend the charges.
At the same time the next night, the owl will fly down in front of the intended recipient and vomit forth an owl pellet. Inside this pellet are the bones of three mice and your written message, whole and intact.
One caveat: this ritual was developed when people generally didn’t need to send messages that far away…no more than the distance an owl could fly in a night and a day. The ritual still gets the owl there in the same amount of time, but the owl actually covers the distance in between. So if you send a message from New York to LA, your California friend is going to get your note. And an owl that drops dead right after.
I wanted to make one of those rituals that wasn’t so useful any more. The kind that a GM might spring on his players when they go to hell and back for ancient, esoteric knowledge.
It might be costed too high, but back in the day it was a secret and safe method of getting a note to someone.
Yeah I would reduce this to perhapse 1-2 sigs. I could just see the look of a bunch of disapointed PCs when they find out their new sig ritual is…. useless.
I don’t know about useless. I mean, think of the psychological havoc you could wreak on a Harry Potter-obsessed Bibliomancer: an owl flies into his house and vomits up mouse skeletons and a message that reads, “I’m going to kill you just like Snape killed Dumbledore.” And then the owl keels over.
But yes, it is a bit pricey.
I’m with DM in saying this isn’t a useless ritual–just less useful than it used to be. After all, you don’t have to know the location of the recipient and it’s effectively untappable and untraceable.
This also doesn’t seem like a significant ritual to me–is it really more impressive than ‘Angel of the Animals’ or ‘Order of the Wild?’ I’d say it’s 5 minor charges.
Five minor sounds a little nicer, actually. I’d go with that. Nice suggestion, Basilisk.
Remember that it can’t be intercepted or interfered with. That makes it more useful than any modern technology in my book.