Occult rituals in Pathfinder refer to a system of mystical practices and ceremonies that characters can perform to gain supernatural abilities, communicate with otherworldly entities, or alter reality. These rituals can be performed by characters with the appropriate skill set, known as occult ritualsists. In Pathfinder, occult rituals are not limited to spellcasters or divine magic users. Instead, they are available to characters from various classes and backgrounds who have acquired the necessary knowledge and expertise to perform these rituals. This allows for a diverse range of characters to engage in occult practices and harness the power of the mystical arts. Occult rituals in Pathfinder have a wide variety of effects and purposes.

Occult Rituals are being misused in later books

A)The primary caster can't take ten, twenty, or receive Aid Another on the multiple checks needed.
B)Most spells and items that grant skill bonuses don't work for this check.
C) Adding a bunch of secondary casters only grants small bonuses to the checks.
D)Backlash means even a successful check costs the primary and secondary casters something valuable, albeit temporary.
E) Failure consequences are not only incredibly high, but they usually seemed designed to specifically move the casters farther from their goal in a significant way. IE if a ritual is to make someone stronger, the failure will be a big whacking permanent strength penalty, etc.

Any kind of PC or NPC of say, 7th-10th level (the equivalent of someone looking to cast a 4th level spell) trying to hit these 28+ DCs is going to fail at least 3/4ths of the time, and be worse off than when they started.

And that's great for how the rituals originally worked, when they were either conducted by insane cultists trying to unleash great evil on the world and willing to suffer any consequences to keep trying, or heroes up against the wall with no good options.

The problem: Since the spate of Horror and Occult material, new campaign settings and player companion guides have kept including new rituals (looking at you Inner Sea Temples and Heroes of the High Court) for other casters to use in more prosaic circumstances. But of course, given the high probability of failure and horrific consequences of same, those rituals would never actually be performed by NPCs, or PCs. It doesn't add to the setting, or to any real player options this way. It feels like these books are being padded out with useless filler.

What do you guys think? Should non-horror, non-occult materials still include occult rituals, and if so, should they be changed in such a way that it's genuinely likely that NPCs at least would actually attempt them? If the problem is the occult ritual itself, should there be some kind of low-stakes ritual with a less punishing backlash and failure, but much smaller benefits?

I think the point to rituals is they should always be a temptation. " Finally the average layman can be granted great power! "

Games in a High Court and the like offer the want of such temptations. The way to put one over on a rival and some such. A need that slowly consumes them as they become desperate.

In this sense the only downside is actually knowing the difficulty in a numbers based system as a player.

It makes for a far better occult feel to simply come across the promise of power and then realize the cost far too late.

What do you guys think? Should non-horror, non-occult materials still include occult rituals, and if so, should they be changed in such a way that it's.

The fundamental mechanics are no more occult than they are anything else.

You know what Occult Rituals are based on? The Incantation rules from Unearthed Arcana for D&D 3e, which were very much general purpose, whatever the DM feels necessary kinds of magical effects.

So it's completely fine that the basic mechanics have been repurposed elsewhere.

Horrific backlash on the other hand, is more jarring the more mundane the application.

I think the point to rituals is they should always be a temptation. " Finally the average layman can be granted great power! "

Games in a High Court and the like offer the want of such temptations. The way to put one over on a rival and some such. A need that slowly consumes them as they become desperate.

In this sense the only downside is actually knowing the difficulty in a numbers based system as a player.

It makes for a far better occult feel to simply come across the promise of power and then realize the cost far too late.

That's a good point, the perspective of an NPC who doesn't know the numbers and can't calculate the probability is probably very different. That said, after a ritual has been attempted a bunch of times and its horrific failures are recorded, I think most NPCs would realize they will probably also fail. Trained knowledge skills and the like are an abstraction of a deep understanding of the subject, and anyone trained in a bunch of knowledge skills doing research on a ritual is going to learn about all those times everyone died trying to do it.

That's also a good point about occult feel, NPCs in occult stories are usually short-sighted and overconfident. That said, my complaint is that these rituals are being written for areas that don't have an occult feel, like the grand temple of Saerenrae for example, where its seems really unlikely that priests are going to attempt a ritual they know has frequently failed with devastating consequences in the past.

What do you guys think? Should non-horror, non-occult materials still include occult rituals, and if so, should they be changed in such a way that it's.

The fundamental mechanics are no more occult than they are anything else.

You know what Occult Rituals are based on? The Incantation rules from Unearthed Arcana for D&D 3e, which were very much general purpose, whatever the DM feels necessary kinds of magical effects.

So it's completely fine that the basic mechanics have been repurposed elsewhere.

Horrific backlash on the other hand, is more jarring the more mundane the application.

Thanks for showing me the incantations! You're right, that was definitely what inspired occult rituals. There's a really big difference though: You could take ten on checks in incantations. That means spellcasters could be pretty confident most of the time they could pull off these rituals and avoid a failure. It's pretty clear the designers took incantations and made them much more risky and dangerous to serve as proper occult rituals. But for non-occult rituals, for regular rituals that sane NPCs are only going to cast if they feel fairly confident in the outcome, something more like the way incantations used to be makes more sense.

I think the point to rituals is they should always be a temptation. " Finally the average layman can be granted great power! "

Games in a High Court and the like offer the want of such temptations. The way to put one over on a rival and some such. A need that slowly consumes them as they become desperate.

In this sense the only downside is actually knowing the difficulty in a numbers based system as a player.

It makes for a far better occult feel to simply come across the promise of power and then realize the cost far too late.

That's a good point, the perspective of an NPC who doesn't know the numbers and can't calculate the probability is probably very different. That said, after a ritual has been attempted a bunch of times and its horrific failures are recorded, I think most NPCs would realize they will probably also fail. Trained knowledge skills and the like are an abstraction of a deep understanding of the subject, and anyone trained in a bunch of knowledge skills doing research on a ritual is going to learn about all those times everyone died trying to do it.

That's also a good point about occult feel, NPCs in occult stories are usually short-sighted and overconfident. That said, my complaint is that these rituals are being written for areas that don't have an occult feel, like the grand temple of Saerenrae for example, where its seems really unlikely that priests are going to attempt a ritual they know has frequently failed with devastating consequences in the past.

People do foolish things. Sometimes they don't take the time to learn that doing something is foolish. Sometimes they know it's foolish and do it anyway.

B)Most spells and items that grant skill bonuses don't work for this check.

Magical items that grant skill bonuses work, it's only non-magical items that do not. Spells only grant their bonus if their duration lasts the entire length of the ritual, so some spells do and some don't. Heroism is a solid catch-all for that purpose.

Any kind of PC or NPC of say, 7th-10th level (the equivalent of someone looking to cast a 4th level spell) trying to hit these 28+ DCs is going to fail at least 3/4ths of the time, and be worse off than when they started.

Completely untrue! A 1st level NPC can be built to have a 100% chance of succeeding on a DC 28 ritual check under ideal circumstances.

1 rank + 3 class skill + 3 skill focus feat + 3 attribute bonus = +10 skill check right out the gate. Now add a +5 enhancement bonus magical item and you're at +15. Make him have a spellcaster class, which gives an extra +1 to the ritual check for +16. Now add 20 secondary casters for +5 to boost the total up to +22. Finally you can tap into a ley line of maximum power for a further +5 bonus to take you to +27, which means even on a roll of 1 you still succeed on DC 28 (natural 1 rule does not apply to skill checks). You do need to be very generous with the bonuses, but it works.

Now let's look at the 10th level NPC under more conventional circumstances: 10 ranks + 3 class skill + 5 attribute bonus + 2 heroism + 3 from CL 10 + 5 enhancement bonus item + 2 from secondary casters = +30

Even if you can't get everything on that list there, you'll still have a very high chance of succeeding on the vast majority of rituals. With a little more effort, even high-level rituals can be tackled relatively safely. High level rituals actually are safer than low level ones in some respects, since they allow for more skill failures and the DC doesn't go up that quickly. Now, where rituals become hard to pull off is when they call for unusual skills or those skills that are not commonly maxed. Skills like Heal or Climb just aren't maxed out; they're made obsolete by magic at higher levels, so they investing more than a few ranks makes little sense, meaning you'll almost never find characters qualified to attempt rituals that call for these checks. If it is a common skill that someone has maxed, though, it's not nearly as hard as it looks.

I find this entire question very odd. I see NPC use of occult rituals (and their predecessor from Unearthed Arcana) as primarily plot devices. There are only two times when a ritual is "on screen":

1) When you want the PCs to be able to do something they couldn't ordinarily do.

2) When you want mechanics for a ritual the PCs can interrupt.

The mechanics are only necessary when the PCs are interacting directly with the ritual in some way.

If an NPC is using a ritual, and the PCs aren't helping or interrupting it, then it happens "off screen" and the outcome is whatever I as the GM need in order to advance the plot. Simple as that.

I think the point to rituals is they should always be a temptation. " Finally the average layman can be granted great power! "

Games in a High Court and the like offer the want of such temptations. The way to put one over on a rival and some such. A need that slowly consumes them as they become desperate.

In this sense the only downside is actually knowing the difficulty in a numbers based system as a player.

It makes for a far better occult feel to simply come across the promise of power and then realize the cost far too late.

That's a good point, the perspective of an NPC who doesn't know the numbers and can't calculate the probability is probably very different. That said, after a ritual has been attempted a bunch of times and its horrific failures are recorded, I think most NPCs would realize they will probably also fail. Trained knowledge skills and the like are an abstraction of a deep understanding of the subject, and anyone trained in a bunch of knowledge skills doing research on a ritual is going to learn about all those times everyone died trying to do it.

That's also a good point about occult feel, NPCs in occult stories are usually short-sighted and overconfident. That said, my complaint is that these rituals are being written for areas that don't have an occult feel, like the grand temple of Saerenrae for example, where its seems really unlikely that priests are going to attempt a ritual they know has frequently failed with devastating consequences in the past. People do foolish things. Sometimes they don't take the time to learn that doing something is foolish. Sometimes they know it's foolish and do it anyway.

"[Norman Osborn] thought about the number of times he'd seen movies with mad scientists trying out some sort of formula on themselves, transforming themselves into human guinea pigs. And he'd always shaken his head and wondered, how could any scientist ever be that dumb? It was like the old advice about never investing with your own money; use someone else's. Same thing. Never test formulae on yourself. Always use volunteers, cat's-paws. whatever is available.

Yet here he was, realizing that for such a scenario to play out, one didn't need to be a scientist, or stupid. Just someone who was desperate. And as he checked the latest printouts for the fourth time, he realized that he, himself, was just that desperate."

- Chapter VIII, "The Test," Spider-Man: The Movie: The Novel.

B)Most spells and items that grant skill bonuses don't work for this check.

Magical items that grant skill bonuses work, it's only non-magical items that do not. Spells only grant their bonus if their duration lasts the entire length of the ritual, so some spells do and some don't. Heroism is a solid catch-all for that purpose.

Any kind of PC or NPC of say, 7th-10th level (the equivalent of someone looking to cast a 4th level spell) trying to hit these 28+ DCs is going to fail at least 3/4ths of the time, and be worse off than when they started.

Completely untrue! A 1st level NPC can be built to have a 100% chance of succeeding on a DC 28 ritual check under ideal circumstances.

1 rank + 3 class skill + 3 skill focus feat + 3 attribute bonus = +10 skill check right out the gate. Now add a +5 enhancement bonus magical item and you're at +15. Make him have a spellcaster class, which gives an extra +1 to the ritual check for +16. Now add 20 secondary casters for +5 to boost the total up to +22. Finally you can tap into a ley line of maximum power for a further +5 bonus to take you to +27, which means even on a roll of 1 you still succeed on DC 28 (natural 1 rule does not apply to skill checks). You do need to be very generous with the bonuses, but it works.

Now let's look at the 10th level NPC under more conventional circumstances: 10 ranks + 3 class skill + 5 attribute bonus + 2 heroism + 3 from CL 10 + 5 enhancement bonus item + 2 from secondary casters = +30

Even if you can't get everything on that list there, you'll still have a very high chance of succeeding on the vast majority of rituals. With a little more effort, even high-level rituals can be tackled relatively safely. High level rituals actually are safer than low level ones in some respects, since they allow for more skill failures and the DC doesn't go up that quickly. Now, where rituals become hard to pull off is when they call for unusual skills or those skills that are not.

Unless we're talking about custom-built NPCs that were created solely to cast that ritual, I feel like those skill builds are pretty unlikely. Occult rituals are specifically supposed to be for non-spellcasters to be able to cast powerful spells. Sure, the ranks and make sense, but for non-spellcasters it's rare to see class skills in Knowledge Arcana or Knowledge Planes. If they're not a Wizard are they really going to have an Int skill of 20 though? Heroism makes sense, but how many NPCs do you know that actually carry around a Mossy Disk Ioun stone? I think getting to a +18 bonus with a 7-10th level NPC (the equivalent of someone casting a 4th level spell) would be exceedingly unlikely, unless the NPC is named Ritually McRitualson or a highly potent Wizard who could just craft a regular spell to achieve the same result without the backlash.

I think the point to rituals is they should always be a temptation. " Finally the average layman can be granted great power! "

Games in a High Court and the like offer the want of such temptations. The way to put one over on a rival and some such. A need that slowly consumes them as they become desperate.

In this sense the only downside is actually knowing the difficulty in a numbers based system as a player.

It makes for a far better occult feel to simply come across the promise of power and then realize the cost far too late.

That's a good point, the perspective of an NPC who doesn't know the numbers and can't calculate the probability is probably very different. That said, after a ritual has been attempted a bunch of times and its horrific failures are recorded, I think most NPCs would realize they will probably also fail. Trained knowledge skills and the like are an abstraction of a deep understanding of the subject, and anyone trained in a bunch of knowledge skills doing research on a ritual is going to learn about all those times everyone died trying to do it.

That's also a good point about occult feel, NPCs in occult stories are usually short-sighted and overconfident. That said, my complaint is that these rituals are being written for areas that don't have an occult feel, like the grand temple of Saerenrae for example, where its seems really unlikely that priests are going to attempt a ritual they know has frequently failed with devastating consequences in the past. People do foolish things. Sometimes they don't take the time to learn that doing something is foolish. Sometimes they know it's foolish and do it anyway. "[Norman Osborn] thought about the number of times he'd seen movies with mad scientists trying out some sort of formula on themselves, transforming themselves into human guinea pigs. And he'd always shaken his head and wondered, how could any scientist ever be that dumb? It was like.

Yes, that's a fantastic example! Norman Osborn, brilliant but desperate and completely insane. He would totally do an occult ritual, and arguably the Green Goblin is a lot like the outcome of a failed occult ritual.

My complaint isn't with occult rituals for things like turning yourself into a monster to get revenge on your enemies, it's risking all the defenders of a Saerenrite temple being horribly cursed for a year just to give them a minor bonus to their combat abilities, or a tea ceremony among visiting diplomats. Neither group of casters is insane, and neither is that desperate.

Ritual magic

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Ritual magic (also known as an occult ritual) is a powerful form of occult magic that holds a prominent role in Golarion's history. While less common in modern times, it remains one of the easiest—and dangerous—ways for people to achieve feats of great magical power. Its dangerous nature inspires groups of all types to hunt and control or destroy ritual instructions. 1

Occult rituals in Pathfinder have a wide variety of effects and purposes. They can be used to summon creatures from other dimensions, communicate with spirits or deities, understand ancient texts or symbols, perform divination, create magical artifacts or items, or even alter the fabric of reality itself. Performing occult rituals often requires specific components or materials, such as rare herbs, gemstones, or arcane symbols.

Description

Most believe that there are only three types of spellcasting: divine, arcane, and psychic, and that all spellcasting requires either innate ability (such as that possessed by a sorcerer), or years of study (like that of a wizard). There is, however, a fourth type of magic that is buried in forgotten libraries or heard in the ramblings of the insane, and which can be practiced by anyone: occult rituals. Most traditional spellcasters fear occult rituals, and see them as the last refuge of the foolish, as they are hard to control, can grant incredible power, and allow anyone to tinker with the underlying fabric of magic. 2

Additionally, characters must possess the appropriate skill ranks and knowledge in order to successfully perform a ritual, making them a unique and specialized aspect of character development. Occult rituals can be learned through various means, such as studying ancient texts, receiving teachings from a master occult ritualsist, or discovering hidden knowledge in forgotten places. These rituals can also be modified or customized to suit the needs and desires of the character, allowing for a personalized approach to the occult arts. While occult rituals can provide characters with great power and abilities, they also come with risks and consequences. Performing a ritual incorrectly or without the appropriate precautions can result in unintended consequences or attract the attention of malevolent entities. This adds an element of danger and suspense to the practice of occult rituals in Pathfinder. Overall, occult rituals in Pathfinder are a fascinating and intricate system that adds depth and complexity to the game. They provide players with the opportunity to explore the mystical arts, tap into otherworldly powers, and shape the world around them through their occult knowledge and abilities..

Reviews for "Tales of the Occult: Unveiling the Mysteries of Rituals in Pathfinder"

1. John - 2 stars - I was really excited to try out "Occult Rituals Pathfinder" as I am a fan of occult and supernatural themes. However, I was extremely disappointed with this game. The rituals felt overly complicated and tedious to perform, and the instructions provided were confusing and not helpful at all. The game did not have a clear progression or objective, making it hard for me to stay engaged. Overall, it felt like a poorly executed concept and not worth the time and effort.

2. Emily - 1 star - I have played many Pathfinder games before and loved them, but "Occult Rituals Pathfinder" was a total letdown. The rituals seemed forced and did not blend well with the overall game mechanics. It felt like a separate addition rather than an integrated part of the game. The lack of proper explanations and guidance made it frustrating to even attempt the rituals. I quickly lost interest and ended up quitting the game altogether. I would not recommend it to any fans of Pathfinder or occult themes.

3. Mike - 3 stars - While "Occult Rituals Pathfinder" had an interesting concept, I found it quite lacking in execution. The rituals felt repetitive and mundane, and there was little variation or excitement in performing them. The game also lacked engaging storytelling or character development, making it hard for me to connect with the game world. While it may appeal to some niche audience, I personally did not find it enjoyable or worth the investment of time and effort.

4. Sarah - 2 stars - I was drawn to "Occult Rituals Pathfinder" because of its unique theme, but unfortunately, it failed to deliver. The rituals were overly complex and difficult to understand, even for an experienced player like me. The game did not provide adequate guidance or explanations, leaving me frustrated and confused. The lack of a clear objective or purpose made it hard to stay engaged, and I quickly lost interest. In my opinion, this game needs significant improvements before it can be considered enjoyable for most players.

The Secrets Within: Discovering the Power of Occult Rituals in Pathfinder