Here is my house rule for Ritual Group Conjuring using the RAW rules for ritual spell casting. Will this work? I should mention that I am looking at this for mostly Corporations and Government agencies.

Ritual Conjuring
Ritual Conjuring works much like regular conjuring, except that it is cast over a longer period of time and a group may collaborate and combine their skills using ritual conjuring to bring forth a more potent spirit.

Requirements All members taking part in the ritual must be of the same tradition and must be able to conjure the selected spirit. In order to cast ritual conjuring, you must have a magical lodge appropriate to the tradition of those involved. The Force of the lodge limits both the number of conjurers who can successfully contribute to the ritual and the Force of the spirit conjured. A group cannot ritually conjure a spirit of a higher Force than that of the magical lodge used. The minimum size of a group conjuring a spirit is three actively participating individuals. The maximum size of a group conjuring a spirit is equal to either the Force of the lodge or the lowest Ritual Conjuring skill among the members of the group, whichever is the lowest.

Team Leader Each ritual conjuring team must have a leader. This is often the most powerful or skilled magician, but it doesn’t have to be. The leader’s Ritual Conjuring + Magic forms the basic dice pool used to determine the success of the summons. The spirits Force is limited by the leader’s Magic attribute—if the Force is higher than the leader’s Magic, then the entire team is assumed to be Overcasting (p. 182) and will be subject to Physical Drain.

Enacting a Ritual Conjuring Ritual Conjuring is carried out in the same manner as conjuring, except that the ritual requires twelve hours, minus the leader’s Magic (minimum 1 hour). Ritual Conjuring is an Opposed Test between the circle and the spirit being conjured. When the conjuring begins, the dice pool is equal to the leader’s Ritual Conjuring + Magic. Each additional member of the team makes a Ritual Conjuring + Magic test as if they were conjuring the spirit; their net hits are added as a dice pool bonus to the leader’s Ritual Conjuring dice pool (see Teamwork Tests, p. 65). Individuals may use foci to supplement their own tests.

Ritual Drain When the Drain Test begins, the dice pool is equal to the leader’s Attribute (Charisma, Intuition, Logic) + Willpower. Each additional member of the team makes a Attribute (Charisma, Intuition, Logic) + Willpower test as if they were resisting the drain; their net hits are added as a dice pool bonus to the leader’s Drain Test dice pool (see Teamwork Tests, p. 65). Individual magicians with foci or bound spirits not otherwise occupied may use them to help with the Drain Test. Any drain not soaked by the Team leaders modified dice pool is automatically suffered by each participating member. This applies whether or not a member generated any hits in the Drain Test.

Ritual Binding Ritual Binding is used to compel long-term service from a spirit the circle has already summoned. Ritual Binding requires a ritual of a number of hours equal to the force of the spirit, minus the leader’s Magic (minimum 1 hour). The ritual materials, available from a talismonger, cost 500¥ times the Force of the spirit. Magical lodges are required for ritual binding to help channel the member’s power. At the end of the ritual, the circles dice pool is equal to the leader’s Ritual Binding + Magic. Each additional member of the team makes a Ritual Binding + Magic test as if they were binding the spirit; their net hits are added as a dice pool bonus to the leader’s binding dice pool (see Teamwork Tests, p. 65). Individuals may use foci to supplement their own tests. The circle requires one net hit to bind the spirit. Additional net hits beyond the first add to the number of services the spirit owes.

The services of a bound spirit do not expire while the team leader is alive and it will wait indefinitely to perform those services. A bound spirit is tied to the circles Magic and has some impact on its member’s ability to use their other magical abilities (see Bound Spirits, p. 187). A bound spirit can perform some additional types of services (see Spirit Services, p. 180).

After the Opposed Test for the binding, the circle must resist Drain. The Drain Value is equal to twice the number of hits (not net hits) the spirit generated during the Opposed Binding Test. The Drain Test dice pool is equal to the leader’s Attribute (Charisma, Willpower, Logic) + Magic. Each additional member of the team makes a Attribute (Charisma, Willpower, Logic) + Magic test as if they were resisting the drain; their net hits are added as a dice pool bonus to the leader’s Drain Test dice pool (see Teamwork Tests, p. 65). Individual magicians with foci or bound spirits not otherwise occupied may use them to help with the Drain Test. Any drain not soaked by the Team leaders modified dice pool is automatically suffered by each participating member. This applies whether or not a member generated any hits in the Drain Test.

The spirit will go uncontrolled (see Uncontrolled Spirits, pg. 188) if the Team Leader is rendered unconscious from Drain damage. If the spirit’s Force exceeds the Team Leaders Magic, Drain damage is Physical rather than Stun. A circle may have a number of spirits bound equal to the Team Leaders Charisma +1 per member. Any attempt to bind a spirit beyond this maximum automatically fails.

Glitches Glitches on the Ritual Binding Test should be handled like glitches on a Ritual Summoning Test, perhaps with slightly stronger consequences. For example, a glitch may mean that the Team Leader is mystically bound to perform a service for the spirit (some spirits drive hard bargains after all). On a critical glitch, the spirit will become uncontrolled and may attack the circle.

Rebinding A circle with a bound spirit can repeat the ritual binding ritual in order to extract additional services from the spirit. The test requires another ritual binding ritual taking a number of hours equal to the current Force of the spirit, minus the leader’s Magic (minimum 1 hour) requiring the same materials as before (at 500¥ per point of the spirit’s Force). At the end of the ritual, the circle makes another Opposed Test, just as when ritually binding a new spirit. Unlike Binding, every net hit adds to the services owed. The first hit is not required to form the initial bond since the spirit is already bound. The Drain Resistance Test is the same as with a standard ritual binding, except that the spirit does not become uncontrolled if the Team Leader is rendered unconscious or dying from Drain.

Notes The Meta-magic’s “Great Ritual” and “Invoking” are applicable to Ritual Conjuring. In the case of Invoking, only the team leader need have the meta-magic for the circle to conjure “Great Form” spirits.

To me this seems fine. Your setup just produce more services with this single spirit.

But you should think about a few things.
1. Owner of the spirit. Is it always the group leader, or can he pass the services to someone else of the group?
2. Binding. If the summoning takes several hours there is the question when his services expire. The next dusk or dawn after the summoning is completed or after it started? Maybe the binding process should be included in the ritual group summoning.

It supplies more services and makes higher force spirits possible. Especially if you add in the meta-magic "Great Ritual". As for who the spirit belongs to I am assuming the ritual leader. I really can't see doing this without binding so I would include it in the initial conjuring.

In my experience the actualy limiting factor for spirit force is the possible drain. And the drain is not easyer to overcome with your rule set.
Also the force is limited by the lodge rating, which is mostly rather low (<10).

However, I like your ritual summoning and will include it in my games.

To be honest I wanted this more for the bad guys than the players. Yes the players could use it but the corporations will have the money and resources for higher level lodges 10+. As for drain being the limiting factor, the use of great ritual allows the ritual leader and one other to add their magic ratings togather for the upper limit where drain turns from stun to physical. So a group of conjurers with magic/initiate ratings of 7 would allow the group to summon up to a force 14 spirit and still only deal with stun drain. The drain being dealt with by the individsual conjurers would still be based off of the oppossed test. Can you think of any way to change that or would it cause other problems?

I'd say force of magical lodge x1.5 maybe. It makes bug shamans conjuring up horrid beasts a little more believable.

I also agree that it should help with the drain code a little bit, but maybe require more people depending on the force of the spirit.

Interesting ideas. Am just not sure what to do with the drain. The only thought I had would be to divide the overall drain Value by the indivduals participating and that is what each member resists. Kinda like that idea.

If the point of this proposal is for use by evil NPC mages, let blood magic transfer the drain to a sacrificial victim.

It is but the players should be able to use it just as well without becoming evil.

How are higher force spirits possible... you are still limited to the maximum of 2x Force of the Ritual Leader (which means that the ritually summoned spirits are not more powerful than if a single summoner just summoned them)... this does not change the functional power of spirit summonable at all... you may get more services, but that is generally not all that difficult to obtain usually anyways.

As someone else already mentioned... the drain is the biggest factor limiting the Force of the Spirit (and whether or not Spirits Spend Edge to resist the Summoning, which ups the drain obviously)... all this does is take longer (extends from a Complex Action to Hours) and spread the drain to all of the participants (everyone takes drain equally... sucks to be a weaker mage in the ritual let me tell you)... Ritual Spellcasting actually provides a functional bonus... it removes the limitations of Range for the Spell (with the caveat that you need a spotter)... I fail to see a benefit for the Ritual Conjuring in your description... maybe I missed something...

What did I miss?

First off I did make the suggested change to drain.

To answer your question on the force of the conjured spirit I am allowing the use of the meta-magic "Great Ritual" which ups the effective force of the summoned spirits by combining two initiates magic rating.

Example: The Team leader has a magic rating of 7. The initiate with the meta-magic "Great Ritual" also has a magic rating of 7, raising the effective magic rating to 14. This would allow a circle to summon spirits of Force 14 while still dealing with Stun rather than physical Drain. Doubling the effective magic rating would allow for a spirit of upto Force 28.

Think I got that right.

Okay... Maybe, I could see that I guess... But again, the inherent use of Ritual Conjuring you posit provides no actual bonus over normal conjuration at all... And spreading out the Drain over the Group is a non-starter for me as that would make Insanely powerful spirits common, with little to no drain to actually contend with... Even with an insane Rating 20 Spirit (with 20/40 dice to resist) all you would need is 10 members in the ritual and you would distribute the drain to 2-4 dice per ritualist... not in my game....

As for Great Ritual, I would expect it to be useabelk in any Ritual, Spellcasting or Conjuring... but yes, that would make it more useful for summoning more powerful spirits, though in practice you will probably see the NPC with average stats combining to obtain a Force 6-12 Spirit, rather than the Uberpowerful example of the 2 Magic Rating 7 Uber-God PC's using it for the Force 14-28 Spirit.

I am not sure exactly what benefit could be added to a Ritualized Summoning, But I will consider the issue a bit and see if I can come up with something appropriate...

Maybe you should make the drain resist a teamwork test, too.
Every team member makes his own drain resist roll and the hits gets the team leader additional dices for his test.
You can then rule that the remaining drain from the teamleader is applied for every member. Or that just the leader gets the benefit and thus staying awake while all team members will get knocked out by the drain.
I would prefere the last. By this you can summon higher force spirits but you maybe end up with a whole bunch of dead mages.

First off, thanks for all the feed back. Have tried some of the suggestions and kinda like what has developed.



Having not changed any other RAW it is immpossible to get ten members in the ritual. The max would be 7 as that is the highest skill rating allowed. This would mean you had seven individuals who had maxed out Ritual Conjuring while also having the quality "Legendary Skill". The reason I say you have seven individuals with maxed out skill is that you can only have as many members as the lowest ritual skill rating in the group. You are far more likely to end up with a ritual group containing between three and five members which means if you were going after the big uber spirit you are looking at drain value around five+ (my math could be off), depending on dice rolls.

Don't get me wrong. This will allow for more powerful spirits in the game but I don't think they would be that common. Other than that, no it does not give any additional bonus over normal conjuring.

The Skill Limit is very true, Forgot about that one...
I would disagree with you on the commonality of higher force spirits in game using this option. There is a vocal group here on dumpshock who already posit that the average Force of a Spirit in game for 'Runners is 8-10... with little to no drain. Giving those runners the ability to potentially double this lunacy is just vastly overpowering in my opinion, and it would be much more common, even without maximized Skills.

Since there are constant threads on the brokenness of Spirits above Force 6, why would you want to inflict something of Force 14 onto the world? Just Curious there, but it does bear looking at, in my opinion. You are summoning something that has vastly superior intellect (in more ways than one) and is completely alien. What makes you think that such an entity would even agree to the summoning, let alone to actual servitude, to something that is so far beneath its power level that it is completely insignificant? That would be like a human serving an amoeba, with its severe lack of initiative and intellect (Comparatively anyways)...

As I said, Just Curious...

Yes it is possible with some rule juggleing to get a force 10 spirit without too much trouble. However as the rules I have suggested require a. all conjurers be of the same tradition, b. there must be at least three members to the circle for ritual conjuring to work and c.all members of the circle be of the same initiate group. These requirments pretty much remove the use of ritual conjuring from Shadowrunner hands. Is it possible? Yes. Likely? No.

This allows the corps to summon larger spirits to lay the smack down on the Shadowrunners spirits and I have the rules to back it up so my players don't feel like I am pulling it out of thin air.

No Arguments on the availability of Shadowrunner Teams performing Ritual Conjuration... But you have to account for the Magical Societies that a Shadowrunner Magician/Conjurer has access to. Typically, these groups are all of the same tradition, so it is really not all that hard for a Shadowrunner to have access to this ability... and with a competent Magical Group, they will have just as much access to the high level stuff as Corps would have...

Indeed... Having Rules to back your arguments often defuses contention... Unless you are the one who wrote the rules in the first place that is...

Very true. I am lucky in that I have a group of players that are pretty laid back. They want this rule but they don't want it so that it destroys the game. So they are willing to wait while I tinker.

One of my players after reading this suggested changing the drain so that the Team Leader is the one rolling against all the drain and the other members successes simply act as a die modifier as per the conjuring mods. Anything the Team Leader fails to soak the whole team suffers. Not sure if that would be better or worse.

Hmmmmm... Interesting...

Still, I would like to see something that sets it apart from normal Conjuration a bit... still not really sure yet what that could be, and it does not have to be powerful or anything... hmmmm.......

Did another mod to my house rule. Edited it in the original post.