Ritual Skill

This skill represents a character's understanding of ritualistic magic.  Unlike normal methods of magic, rituals are both time consuming and costly but without a guarantee of success.  Rituals may be used to emulate existing spells, or they may be used to create a completely unique magical effect that surpasses the laws of normal magic.  Rituals range from the healing of disease in a village to attaining immortality.  The difficulty and cost of a ritual coincides with the relative power of the ritual.

This skill may also be used by characters to determine the purpose of any rituals that they watch.  The character makes a ritual check (DC 15) to discern the goal of any rituals that they watch.  Once the goal is learned, the character may attempt to interact with the ritual, making another ritual check to see if they can disrupt the ritual sufficiently without "direct" action.  This sometimes can be done by sneaking into a ritual area and messing up drawings in the sand or tampering with some key component before the time for its usage.

Although this skill gives characters knowledge of rituals, they lack the ability to direct the energies to power the rituals.  Characters need the Cast Ritual feat in order to actually perform these rituals.  This skill can be used unskilled.