Find the Best Path

Rules

Performing the Ritual

Performing this ritual takes at least 10 minutes of roleplaying. During the ritual the casters must be in a strong Autumn regio. This ritual targets an Imperial army. The general responsible for the army must be present throughout.

This ritual is an enchantment. A target may only be under one enchantment effect at a time.

Effects

While under the effect of this enchantment, the general of the target campaign army can issue the forced march or desperate reinforcement order. However, while the magic persists they lose any existing army quality - they cannot use any special orders or passive abilities granted by those qualities.

While the enchantment persists, the general responsible for the army experiences a roleplaying effect: you feel a strong affinity for maps, feeling driven to collect them and to spend your spare moments studying and memorizing them.

The effect lasts until the start of the next Profound Decisions Empire event.

Options

Any caster who has mastered the ritual may choose to substitute orichalcum for crystal mana when contributing to it. Every 2 ingots of orichalcum spent counts as 1 crystal mana when contributing to the ritual.

We spent the better part of a year and a half beating our heads against this ritual. We studied the trods in detail, wasted nearly six months with the vates trying to find a way to separate the energy the trods granted from the trods themselves. It was Lydia of Cantiarch's Hold who spotted the most obvious flaw – that while the under- and over-growth caused by the trods was easy enough for the sole traveller to circumvent it played havoc with the ability of a large body of men to travel.

In the end we realised our error – this was not about making the army “faster” or giving them more energy to march – it was about finding the best route to travel. As soon as we made that realisation we knew it must fall within the perview of Day – although Ramis i Ezmara I Erigo claimed it would be much more suited to the Realm of Night. I disagreed – perhaps it was my upbringing but I disliked the idea of guiding five thousand soldiers through dangerous terrain using “intuition” rather than solid intelligence.

It was a Marcher landskeeper, Julia Whitestaff, a merrow, who solved the logical problems presented by the ritual – rather than try to make decisions, the magic presented the scouts and officers of the army each morning with a series of projections from which they were able to pick the projection offering the best time to their next camping spot. The ritual was not infallible – no prognostication is – but over the course of several weeks we achieved a quite satisfactory level of success.

I was a little disappointed with the reception we received – we had created an elegant and potent ritual and all those arses in the Golden Pyramid did was whine that it was “to expensive.” I was a little surprised, but heartened, but the outrage this caused in the Shuttered Lantern who actually shouted the grandmaster down when he was expressing his “disappointment.” Trust the spies to realise the value of moving an army to a place the enemy believes it cannot reach ...

Callus Stratgos, from Meditations

Description

This ritual was entered into Imperial lore during the Autumn Equinox 382YE by Marcus of Endsmeet, the Autumn archmage. The text that provided the ritual was pat of the book Meditations, penned by a former Dean of the Lyceum from the reign of Empress Brannan. Callus Strategos, the author of the book, was known to be a particularly cynical critic of the Imperial Conclave during his life, and made it a point of principle not to allow many of the rituals he codified during his tenure as Dean to be added to Imperial lore.

I have only performed this ritual once – it is no easy matter to perform, but it allowed the Citadel Guard to cross the Empire from east to west in three months. I draw on the Door predominantly – this is a ritual provisionally about positioning and the four stars are an excellent metaphor for a unit of soldiers. I use the Chain to bind the army together and make help the soldiers work out where their brothers and sisters at arms are even when they cannot quite see them; the Key to reveal the best route; and break down the Mountain to disprove “things are hard” which is the riskiest part.

I have seen it performed once, by Ricolla de Tassato, who used twenty tiny soldiers made from bars of weltsilver; he melted them down and poured them like a river across a map of the Empire. It was very effective – and, obviously, expensive!

Callus Stratgos, from Meditations