Perfect for playing around with your group—especially if you’re inclined to break out the seasonal undead.
This ritual requires:
A spool of red silk ribbon,
A staplegun and/or duct tape
’Sand’ out of hourglasses (lots of hourglasses)
Two red bricks, preferably of an age or quality to be crumbling at the corners,
X amount* of paper ash, acquired by burning religious texts someone takes seriously. (Gathering tracts will work if you really want to avoid the books proper.)
Wine purchased by someone underage,
No-name ziplock bags, and lots of them.
Burn your paper and collect the ash; it must be ground fine, and it must be ground between the two bricks. Collect it, keep it, and fill the baggies; you’ll want it at the ready.
While the hourglass sand needs only to be collected, you’ll want it bagged and ready, as well.
Go to the area you want to ward; wet the ribbon in the wine; staple or tape it as high up on the walls as you can, to outline the perimeter. Making sure it makes a complete loop, with its ends securely fastened over each other. Directly below (or as well as one might manage) outline the perimeter again, this time using the sand. Blanket the floor space outlined with the ash, and the space defined by the ribbon, sand, and ash is now warded.
This ward is effective against demons, ghosts, entropics, nonentities, revenants, and astral parasites, although it does nothing for those undead with physical bodies. Look out for zombies, keep your garlic at hand, and remember poltergeists can still throw anything at you they’ve half a mind to.
Note: You may want to record the time it takes for each hourglass to empty itself, add these records up, and keep the final sum in mind—the area will only remain warded for that long of a time.
*Pending seeing how much space the ash from one page of looseleaf can cover.
Note: While I don’t support doing damage to any book, I do blame ‘the black spot’ in Treasure Island and the Muppet Treasure Island soundtrack for this ritual as a whole.
Love it overall. A couple of suggestions and tweaks follow, but of course it’s great as-is (and I might well put it into play myself soon.) This is just how I’d put it into my own game.
Definitely like the idea of the “timer” on the ward, though I suspect that the time limit might not be long enough to be useful given the prep time. Not sure what to do about that – timer starts at sunup/sundown, maybe?
Also, trying to *blanket* an area in ash will be very, very difficult without crates of books – paper burns pretty cleanly. I’d suggest scattering it instead and making sure it’s at least very thick at the ward’s edges. And if any ash is tracked out of the ward, the whole thing breaks down (or is severely weakened.)
Likewise, specifically using pages of a text that deals with particular entities makes the ward last longer / be much more effective against those particular foes. This explains why Chick Tracts continue to sell so well (so many of those deal with demons, spirits, etc) – and wouldn’t Scientological tracts work against astral parasites?
I’m glad you like it, and I like the points you raise; I can just see someone keeping a reserve of the wine in a mister bottle to dampen the ash and help it stay down.
(The scientology nixing astral parasites is just gold.)
As far as the prep time goes, I’ve just been imagining someone keeping this stuff sitting in their closet, ready to use when there’s reason. Considering the game, some situation’s gotta come up—who ya gonna call?
It ought to be possible to increase the amount of ash by restricting the fire’s oxygen supply or something.
Honestly I prefer the idea of collecting enough Gideon Bibles to fill a 55-gallon drum and lighting ’em. None of the ritual components are too hard to get together, really. How many charges would it use?
Never decided the charge count. Whatever works for your plans for your players, really.