@Rafin maybe I'm just tried but you're making zero sense to me. In order to even attempt to cast the ritual, you have to have the required ingredients and perform the necessary steps. If you fail to perform the ritual, you suffer the consequences that the person who made the ritual decides you have to suffer, because that's part of the creation process. You may also suffer additional consequences if you miscast. I don't see what's complicated about this.
Could it be that you are talking about OOC mechanics that go into ritual creation and consequences according to the RPG rules, while I am trying to wrap my head around it from an IC viewpoint? Like, I feel that the actual mages developing these rituals did not themselves decide on the consequences (even if the players did). No Vampire sat down beforehand and said "and if I fail, may there rain holy water" before studying and experimenting with various hearts of various worshippers. Because that would just be SoD breakingly silly.
I am not disputing how it works in the RPG. I am agreeing with those that think that for verisimilitude it should work differently in the world of Warhammer, and thus hopefully also in this Quest.
It does not strike me as strange because I believe that it is in fact, a part of the in setting creation process. All magic has a price, and in order to perform such a powerful magical process such as a ritual, providing a consequence in case you fail sounds like an intriguing way to give yourself more power. "If I fail, this will happen" could be a method to give the ritual more oomph, because it stacks on top of the already existing risks of casting regular magic, which is a miscast. Nothing happens if you fail to cast a spell and don't miscast. Rituals will punish you for failing even if you don't miscast.
To be clear, this is my personal interpretation.
You might be right and me not finding it aesthetically pleasing may just be my subjective issue, but at the very least nothing like this was mentioned when Mathilde and Max learned ritualism.
As for the reason I don't find it aesthetically pleasing, it makes it feel too much like a religious ritual. Like bargain with some form of intelligent entity. And in the Warhammer universe that entity can't just be "the World Spirit" or "the spirits surrounding me" or "the mysteries beyond". No, it would either be a very specific selected deity that fits the ritual and yet wants you to do weird stuff and be ready to risk it all for its help, holding you to your word with your own designed punishment if you fail your silly dance, or it has to be the one deity for whom all rituals fit and who would have the most fun doing this shit. Tzeentch.
In my interpretation Warhammer is not a world where reality acts like some mystical and impersonal entity of balance and bargains. Warhammer is a world where reality is a small ball trying to follow the laws of physics while a bunch of entities try their best to mold it to their liking and four larger entities are shitting all over the place for shits and giggles. All magic that is not Divine magic either uses the conveniently packaged Winds and conceptual connections to them for spectacular effects, or uses a mix of forceful poking and blind programming to coax the non-sentient parts of the Aethyr to do stuff, hoping that the stuff it does is the stuff they want it to do. And the perfected version of this kind of magic is Runesmithing, where they actually have found access to a minimalized and sanitized programming language.
And yes, I know that I am still ignoring Elementalism. Teclis did too and I'm no Teclis.
I think this is the core of the issue- it's a common sense point about physical things that we can't actually say applies to magic. It also requires thinking of magic as a reactive tool than something having it's own personality, which is what consistent failure results from inconsistent failure conditions implies to me: a personality judging and handing out "failed" stamps rather than a tower collapsing or something mechanical from the inputs.
As I said above, in Warhammer such a personality either comes from a shortlist of possible entities or is a minor being vulnerable to the Four.
The Empire doesn't have very many wizards but it has enough that you might have trouble sourcing judge's blood or stillborn lambs.
Those don't seem hard ingredients to mass produce.
Boney stated that Grey memory packets are not actually a spell.
He did? I missed that. What are they then?
Man, could you just imagine having every single book on the ancestor gods in existence. Not that useful (unless you are an ice dragon I guess?) but kinda fun.
Every non-secret book. I can't possibly imagine that all the Cults would suddenly dump their secret scrolls on us when getting even one Guild to do it seemed like a massive longshot during the discussions where we voted in what the Library should specialize.
Aren't you glad I made this post?
I definitely am. Thank you.
