Ritual Tracking, Bringing it back? Options

[Eyeless Blond]

Anyone have rules to bring back ritual tracking? How about the reverse ritual tracking from that SOTA book? I always thought those were terrific rules, and a good way to make ritual sorcery less the completely illegal boom-dropping skill that it is now.

[Dashifen]

See page 185 under Astral Tracking (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Following an astral link requires an Extended Assensing + Intuition (5) Test (interval: 1 hour), modified as noted on the Astral Tracking Modifiers table (p. 184).

This has led some to notice that if you can get your Ritual Spellcasting completed in 1 hour, you're effectively invulnerable to tracking. Even 2 hours might be a good window since you'll get tracked back at about the same moment your spell potentially obliterates your target.

[Eyeless Blond]

Okay, I'm just blind. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/embarrassed.gif)

[Backgammon]

Okay, I'm just blind. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/embarrassed.gif)

Well, you are eyeless.

*ba-dam ching!*

[ToreadorVampire]

And on a related note: A certain prison that is being used in my campaign at the moment has the following practice:

If a convict escapes, a ritual team picks up the convict's DNA sample (taken as soon as they are transferred in, and kept in cold storage) and casts a clairvoyance at them via the material link. As soon as they have a fix on their location, they ritually stunbolt them into the ground, and dispatch a recovery team to go pick 'em up. In the case of certain inmates (high-risk ones) they don't use stunbolt, favouring something a bit more lethal.

Don't try to escape without stealing/destroying your filed DNA sample (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

I wonder how my team will manage it ...

[nathanross]

This has led some to notice that if you can get your Ritual Spellcasting completed in 1 hour, you're effectively invulnerable to tracking. Even 2 hours might be a good window since you'll get tracked back at about the same moment your spell potentially obliterates your target.

That seems quite foolish. I remember when they were presenting the fluff for sympathetic linking in SOTA2063, the guy noticed the mana building around him and instantly projected and was there. Maybe another example of fluff not matching the rules.

And on a related note: A certain prison that is being used in my campaign at the moment has the following practice:

If a convict escapes, a ritual team picks up the convict's DNA sample (taken as soon as they are transferred in, and kept in cold storage) and casts a clairvoyance at them via the material link. As soon as they have a fix on their location, they ritually stunbolt them into the ground, and dispatch a recovery team to go pick 'em up. In the case of certain inmates (high-risk ones) they don't use stunbolt, favouring something a bit more lethal.

This reminds me of some things that were said in the Lone Star sourcebook.

When you join LS, you have to give a mandatory "pound of flesh" which is stored in a secure vault. Some of the mages commenting said that the astral link is worthless after a week, month tops, no matter how well preserved, since it was the magic nature of it that mattered, not the DNA sequence. Has this changed? Can anyone point me to some more recent fluff in which this has changed?

[Particle_Beam]

And on a related note: A certain prison that is being used in my campaign at the moment has the following practice:

If a convict escapes, a ritual team picks up the convict's DNA sample (taken as soon as they are transferred in, and kept in cold storage) and casts a clairvoyance at them via the material link. As soon as they have a fix on their location, they ritually stunbolt them into the ground, and dispatch a recovery team to go pick 'em up. In the case of certain inmates (high-risk ones) they don't use stunbolt, favouring something a bit more lethal.

Don't try to escape without stealing/destroying your filed DNA sample (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

I wonder how my team will manage it ...

Why don't they simply stunbolt him from the beginning? Why do they even waste a clairvoyance-spell? The Astral Tracker (in most cases a spirit) will find the track anyway.

[ToreadorVampire]

Why don't they simply stunbolt him from the beginning? Why do they even waste a clairvoyance-spell? The Astral Tracker (in most cases a spirit) will find the track anyway.

Oh, that's just about finding out where the prisoner is, so they can dispatch a crew to retrieve them - sure they can cast that stunbolt without knowing where they are, but they need to get the body back.