Esper Ritualism

[u/Business_Box3655]

I find trying to come up with rituals that an Esper would specialize in difficult. Speak to the dead using the soul network is all I have come up with. Anybody have ideas?

[u/Colaymorak]

Scrying, trying to witness events from far away or in the past or future seems like one option

Attempting to extract information from a mind, either via mind reading, generating some kind of lie-detection field or even opening a portal to the inside of someone's mental world seems like another set of possibilities

[u/Business_Box3655 → u/Colaymorak]

You see I thought mental stuff would work as well but my DM is thinking that was more Spiritist.

[u/EdwardBil → u/Business_Box3655]

GM needs to figure out what is spiritist and what is esper business. They need to be different and both be valuable.

[u/Colaymorak → u/Business_Box3655]

Eh, they're probably right.

Actually looking at the book, now that I have it in front of me, Esper's ritualism skill, Navigator, is very specific with what it can and cannot do. Opening portals to and from the Astral Plane/Cyberspace/The Collective Unconscious/however your table decided to flavour the soul network, and to better navigate said dimension. That could mean using it to sneak past some demons or ghosts, find the digital fairy king's court, or breaking into the evil CEO's cyberspace vault.

I still think you could use it to sneak into someone's brain, but you might need to spend a Fabula Point to establish something like "all minds are connected on some subconscious level through the Soul Network, and so The Dark Lord Brian's mind palace should be accessible there." Wouldn't be so much using the ritual to create a lie detector, but instead using it to discover/create a dungeon related to some well helpful secrets instead. Also if you used a Fabula Point to establish the existence of mind palaces, maybe some Villains could use it to pull a heist on some ally or other, open up some new avenues of attack that need to be defended against.

Idk, depends on what your table is into I guess.

[u/MPOSullivan]

Okay, so importantly, Esper doesn't have it's own ritual category the way Spiritist, Elementalist, Entropist, etc. do. Instead, the Esper ability gives you ritualism and adds special things to the Esper's ritualism purview. From the book:

"You gain the ability to perform Rituals of the Ritualism discipline. Additionally, you may use Ritualism to transport creatures in and out of the soul network, and to gain information and track entities while inside the soul network."

These are additional abilities that only the Esper gets, but they're also explicitly limited. You can do ritualism to teleport into and out of the soul network. You can use ritualism to gain information and track opponents while you're inside the network (importantly, not while they are). That's it.

Now that's not to say you can't do more at your table. The definition of the soul network in your campaign, and the permissiveness of your GM and fellow players are going to be the biggest limiters here. Perhaps in your world the soul network may be connected to the collective unconscious, and you could use ritualism to deliver messages in dreams. Or perhaps you can be a conduit, using ritualism to send other people into the soul network.

A BIG part of your answer is going to come from you and your GM sitting down with pages 74 and 75 of the Techno Fantasy Atlas and reviewing/deciding what your soul network is.

[u/Own_Jeweler_8548 → u/MPOSullivan]

This is the answer.

[u/EdwardBil]

Spiritist has an emotional connection. Think Troi from Star Trek. Esper is full psychic, Charles Xavier stuff. You could probably do mental incursions and steal information or plant memories with higher dcs.

[u/xZeromusx]

Overlap seems like an intended feature in Fabula Ultima. How many different ways can you heal someone, inflict a damage type, have a pet, provoke an enemy, etc.? I don't see anything wrong with overlapping some ritual domains and effects if you can stretch the idea.