Editing Incarnation of the Black Goat: Magic (section)

== '''Rituals''' ==

Rituals tend to be used for big magic. They take hours, days, sometimes weeks to perform.

Though rituals have impressive effects, they are safer than spells by far. During a ritual, one participant must be the leader, who rolls the dice, but each other participant with Lore of Average (+1) or better adds a +1 bonus to the leader’s roll. Use of multiple participants reduces the likelihood of catastrophic failure as each person checks the work, so to speak, and the backlash is spread among them, lessening it considerably.

If a sacrifice is used, there is no backlash against those casting the spell. If there is no sacrifice, each participant in the ritual rolls to defend against backlash, but the difficulty is decreased by one step per participant. With enough people, the risk of backlash is effectively zero.

'''Sacrifice and its costs'''

If a living human sacrifice is used in the ritual, the risk drops even further as the backlash is shunted into the sacrifice. Murdering the sacrifice isn’t just some gore fetish on the part of cultists, it has a practical application. If the sacrifice becomes completely corrupted, there’s a very good chance it will end up killing all the participants. 

Each time a human sacrifice is used, the caster loses 1 point from their Empathy skill. They also acquire the aspect "Suspected Murderer," which police forces or hostile characters can invoke against them, until the caster reaches a Milestone by completing a story arc to remove the evidence or otherwise cover up the crime.