Everything

Summoning, Binding, and Warding

Sorcerers in both fiction and legend are well-known for their ability to summon and control others, both living and ephemeral. With these powers, the magician can summon animals, spirits, ghosts, demons, and other strange beings. They can also defend against these beings, bind them, and compel them to obey the magician. Though overlap exists with the Path of Ephemera, this Path focuses on methods of compulsion, rather than cooperation, with the beings being called and dealt with.

All Summoning, Binding, and Warding magics are rituals, and rituals exist for reaching individual beings or classes of beings. There are separate rituals to sum­ mon, bind, and ward each target. This has led many magicians to their doom. Though summoning a being may intrigue it, attempting to bind them tends to incur hostility, and magicians who either don’t know or fail at casting the warding ritual often find themselves in a great deal of trouble.

In addition to the complications of each specific being or type of being the hedge magician intends to work with, there are several versions of this Path which are learned completely separately. Variants exist for summoning material creatures (like animals and people), angels and demons, ghosts, spirits of nature, and other sentient beings. There are even reports of variants focused on inanimate objects and virtual creations, allowing some magicians to ward their computers against viruses or summon their cars at need.

System

Aspects: The three distinct parts of the Path have separate Aspects. Warding has Duration and Strength, each level of which subtracts one die from all actions the summoned being takes against the magician. For three successes, Warding Strength allows the creation of a Warding Circle, which the being cannot cross without a Willpower roll (difficulty 6) where they achieve more successes than the magician.

Summoning has Duration as an Aspect. Additionally, it has Number of summoned beings (or swarms) and Metaphysical Weight for the summoned being. The summoned being is compelled to appear before the magician but must still transport themself there. Only the most powerful beings can truly travel instantaneously.

Binding similarly has the aspects of Duration and Metaphysical Weight, as well as Binding Intensity. A being may spend a point of Willpower to resist a binding, but the binding can be recast. Some beings, especially those with Metaphysical Weight 5, are powerful enough to require binding rituals with large thresholds in addi­ tion to the usual requirements — sometimes as high as 20 or more successes.

Binding Intensity

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The creature cannot directly act against the magician.

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Any single question must be answered truthfully.

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All questions for the duration must be answered truthfully, and the being may be compelled to perform one service, though they may interpret the command liberally so long as they literally satisfy it.

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A single task is performed as directed, following the orders closely.

••••• The magician may transfer limited control of the binding to another person. The being performs one task for them and answers any questions the summoner asks of it.

Price of Failure: The Path of Summoning, Binding, and Warding has no need for special failure or botch costs. Instead, the consequences of failures and botches are visited upon the magician by the being summoned. The biggest source of these problems is that, on a botch, the magician often ends up under the mistaken impres­ sion they have succeeded.

49 Chapter One: Hedge Magic