With regard to the discussion about ritual magic requiring "space" in the casters mind (i.e. no more in points than the character has int). It has always been my impression that this was only true of ritual spells, not of ritual itself. In certain instances, the dividing line is a bit murky, but I had always felt that spirit magic spell rituals were learned from spirits, divine magic spell rituals were learned by sacrificing points of pow for uses of certain rituals, sorcerous spell rituals were learned through arcane study and research, and cultural and cultic Non-spell rituals are learned from the community which keeps the knowledge of these rituals alive.
This latter category is what we are discussing. There are several
rituals that every adult who belongs to a cult is familiar with: holy day
ceremonial ritual, sacred time ritual, small rituals to ward off bad luck,
rituals of hospitality, and other similar ones which all fulfill very real
purposes. Other examples of these rituals are the Lhankor Mhy ritual that
releases spirits bound in Thanatari heads, the ritual which summons the
ghosts with no fingers to defend Sartarites against zombies (KOS), and those
needed to begin hero quests. None of these require the user to use up Int
nor do they necessarily require the user to sacrifice Pow to learn initially
- -- they just take training. The way we handle this in our games is that the
person (or spirit) that knows the ritual trains the student in the process.
This is handled as Ceremony training (or research if the teacher isn't a
master). If the student increases his/her ceremony then he/she has
successfully learned the ritual and may write it down with the other rituals
he/she knows.
In one of our games the Wind Lord leading us was taught a ritual which would start us off on a hero quest. It was performed with seven small stones placed in a circle around us. Unfortunately, the player had been told exactly what needed to be done and he promptly forgot all of the details. Rather than travelling to the Hero Plane, he merely succeeded in causing all seven stones to fly away from us simultaneously. After retrieval he tried this several times before he managed to remember what else he needed to do. My "ignorant" Praxian was entranced with the initial "Ritual of the Seven Flying Rocks" and made sure that he memorized exactly how this was done. Several adventures later it made for great bar bets -- "I bet I can throw these seven rocks and hit these seven mugs all at the same time -- without ever touching them!"
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