Hungry Grasp of Despair

Rules

Performing the Ritual

Performing this ritual takes at least 2 minutes of roleplaying.

Effects

At the completion of this ritual, all contributors gain the ability to cast the Weakness spell once as if they knew it and without spending any mana.

When cast with more than one contributor, this ritual always counts as a use of the coven bond and counts towards the number of rituals the coven can perform that day.

The power granted by this ritual lasts until it is used or for ten minutes, whichever comes first.

Description

The Hungry Grasp of Despair is a battlefield spell that allows a coven of Winter magicians to deny their enemies the ability to use their powers or enchanted items. It withers their ability to use mana, or to engage in heroic action. Unlike rituals such as Charge of the Rushing Wind or Ensnaring Bond of Transient Stasis, this ritual is effective only when used with care; they must be confident that their sacrifice will have sufficient impact on the enemy to make it worthwhile. A common battlefield use is to allow a coven to help demoralize and disempower an elite band, or an enemy coven. It is at its most useful when the ritualists are supported by (or are themselves) battlemages and warriors.

The ritual is more powerful the more members of the coven are present, and reaches its highest potential the more ritualists who have not personally mastered the ability to weaken their foes through spellcasting.

Among some League mountebanks and more cynical troupes it is called Fear, for the Mighty. This references the idea that it is the powerful who have the most to lose from the effect of this ritual. In Wintermark it is sometimes called Kyrop's Balance; in The Marches it is Levelling the Playing Field. In some parts of Dawn it is scurrilously called Humble the Errant Knights; a name with multiple meanings depending on who is performing the ritual.

This ritual has existed in one form or another since the earliest records, and it is possible that the weakness incantation itself began as a refinement of the power it grants.

Common Elements

When performing this ritual, the coven often invokes forces of despair, fear and hunger. Oppressive music or thundering rhythms that begin fast and become slower and slower, symbolic of the way power ebbs from those effected by this curse, are common; so are frenzied dances that reach a climax with the performers collapsing as if from exhaustion.

Other elements might include the runes Kyrop or Naeve, or a dramaturgical scene in which the Bishop slowly succumbs to weakness and frailty. An astronomancer might invoke the power of the Drowned Man constellation, while a Dawnish witch might call on the spirit of the insidious manticore or the echoing roar of the terrible chimera.