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Ritual Teams

Groups of spellcasters sometimes get together to perform a joint ritual. This provides several benefits: first, the chief caster gains Advantage on the magic check from assistance, as normal. If the chief caster chooses to quicken the spell, ze can assign up to one-half (round down) the Trauma of the spell to other members of the ritual team. Each member the chief caster uses in this manner must be a trained wizard, or else the trauma becomes a real mental injury instead of temporary.
Finally, casting as part of a ritual team lets the chief caster achieve more powerful spells. If you’re using Max Tier, increase the chief’s effective max Tier by one for every time you double the number of members on the casting team. If you’re not, use narrative logic to define what ‘more powerful’ means in a given circumstance.
Note that another member of the ritual team cannot spend Luck to affect the chief caster’s check unless ze has a special ability that allows hir to do so.
There are two real drawbacks to casting in a team. First, everything takes a lot longer. Instead of performing a magic check in a matter of seconds, a ritual team takes 5 minutes for each check. Second, if the ritual goes badly, its negative effects apply equally to every member of the team.

As an example, Rue is leading a ritual team in casting an Illusion to hide an entire town from an enemy army. She gathers up a handful of casters and they start weaving the illusion. Rue’s player pulls off the magic check with flying colors. With their combined mystical might, the casters draw a veil over the town to conceal it from the evil raiders. They pass right by without even noticing them.

If we wanted to be more mathemagical about it, the GM might estimate this town has twenty or thirty city blocks in it. The spell will need the Area form grafted onto it six times (1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, 32x). They also need the spell to mask the town’s sound as well as image, so it needs one level of the Power form. Finally, Rue wants to add a Ward to protect the city from scrying and divination. That requires a level of the Combination form. With Area 6 / Power 1 / Combination 1, that makes the spell 8th Tier. Formidable.
Rue is a trained wizard, so her max Tier is normally 4. She needs to increase it by 4 tiers to be able to cast the spell safely. That’ll take a ritual team of 16 people. (2, 4, 8, 16). She only manages to find ten, so the team’s effective max Tier is 7. She’ll just have to pull off the last graft with a bit of luck.
The GM and player agree that it would be easier to combine the casting and the first seven grafts into a single roll, then to resolve the over-Tier graft separately. Rue makes a partial success on the first roll. She can’t afford to take stress over it, so she chooses Diminished Effect: they failed to graft the Power form. They’ll have to keep the townsfolk quiet and move all the animals out of town. On her final check, Rue rolls a failure and has to spend a point of Luck to improve the check to a partial success. For this one, she also chooses Diminished Effect: the ward will make it tricky to detect the town with magic, but not impossible.
The spell is cast! To maintain an 8th Tier spell, Rue has to suffer half or 4 Trauma, a terrible amount that will render her comatose for the duration of the spell. Any more trauma would kill her, so she spreads it out to four robust members of the team to help her. Until the spell is over, they’ll each have a level of temporary Trauma as part of their minds stay with the spell to sustain it.