Rituals

What a ritual is, how it is ordered and paid for, where it can reach, and when in the turn it resolves, with the Inspector's counts of rituals by school.

verified 6.37updated 2026-10-02 · Jake7 min read

A ritual is a spell cast on the campaign map and not in a battle. It takes a mage’s whole month. What it does ranges from raising a monster in a province to burning a distant enemy camp, and some rituals change the whole world. This page explains the common rules. We report the manual’s account and have not re-measured any of it.

What marks a ritual

The manual splits all spells in two. Battle magic works only inside a tactical fight. Rituals work only outside one. Because a ritual takes a full month, the mage must be given the cast as part of his turn orders.

The manual’s own tables sort rituals into summoning, global enchantments and a catch-all it calls “Other Rituals”. It says outright that this split is only for the book. In play, every ritual follows the same rules, summoning or not.

Spells that call creatures into a fight are not rituals. The manual lists them with battlefield spells.

Where and by whom

Rituals need a laboratory. The mage has to stand in a province that has one, and the manual says so in both the buildings chapter and the magic chapter. The lab is also the only place a ritual can draw gems from, so a mage in a lab province with an empty pool cannot cast a ritual that costs any.

What a ritual costs

The cost is gems of the spell’s primary path, taken from the national pool when the ritual is cast. Nobody needs to move them by hand. A Blood ritual spends blood slaves in the same way. Where gems come from, and what extra ones buy, is on Magic gems and blood slaves.

If a ritual you ordered did not happen, the manual says the likeliest cause is a lack of the right gem type in the pool. A mage can be set to repeat the same ritual each month, and he keeps going for as long as the gems last. The manual gives the shortcut as Shift and m while he is selected in a lab province.

Casting rituals during a cataclysm can draw horrors to the caster, and more gems means a stronger horror may come.

The paths and levels a ritual needs are the same as for any spell. See How magic paths work for them and Spell research for how a nation reaches the school level.

Local enchantments

Some rituals work on the province where they are cast. Of these, some last past the turn they were cast, and the manual calls those local enchantments. Its example is Dome of Air, which stays until it is dispelled.

• If the caster dies, the enchantment is dispelled.
• Most are also dispelled when an enemy conquers the province.
• Some have a limited life, and extra gems buy more of it. Most last one month for each extra gem. A few last up to three months for each.

The manual’s entry for Vafur Flames reads “1 turn + 3 turns / extra gem”, which is an example of the longer kind.

Reach and remote rituals

The Other Rituals tables have a range column, counted in provinces. A blank range means the ritual takes effect where it is cast. A number means the mage can aim it at a province that many steps away. Some of the manual’s examples:

• Fires from Afar hurls fire at an enemy camp three provinces off. A crowded camp is easier to hit. Besiegers and castle defenders are valid targets too. The caster needs a scout or a scrying spell to find out what happened.
• Volcanic Eruption has a range of 6 and kills about a third of a distant province’s people.
• Breath of the Desert has range 5, raises the target’s heat and cuts its population a little.
• Cloud Trapeze carries the caster himself to a province up to 5 away. The manual says this is fast flying and not true teleportation, so impassable mountains and the Sea of Ice enchantment can block it.
• Carrier Birds takes up to 15 gems to a commander elsewhere, and blood slaves are too heavy for it.

Two tags in the tables matter for aimed rituals. A ritual marked anonymous does not tell the target who cast it, and sometimes the target cannot tell whether it was a random event at all. One marked limited can be cast only once at each target province, though it may be cast at different provinces.

The manual does not say how a range is measured across seas, borders or fog, nor whether the target must be known to the caster. Do not assume it follows ordinary movement.

The map has a display toggle for remote rituals (Ctrl and 0), which shows them. It changes no rule.

Summoning rituals

Most rituals in the tables call something up. The manual’s summoning chapter opens by saying that all those spells are rituals, and it gives the summoned creature’s statistics under each. A row names the school and level, the path and gem cost, the range (blank for nearly all), and tags such as NUW (cannot be cast underwater) and UW (only underwater). Some summons are national, so only a named nation’s mages can cast them.

Many rows show a count after the creature’s name, such as x10+. The manual does not explain the plus sign, so we do not either.

The Inspector marks 433 of its non-battle spells as summoning something.

Global enchantments

The manual states that global enchantments are rituals, and all the general rules above apply to them. They are the most powerful kind: they affect the whole world, they tend to cost many gems, and only a set number can be active at once (3, 5, 7 or 9, chosen in game setup). The F6 screen lists what is active.

Casting one lets the caster add extra gems, which makes it harder to dispel. A mage may add up to 100 per level of his path skill. Like local enchantments, a global ends when its caster dies, and extra gems do not guard the caster against assassination. A global tied to a province is dispelled when that province is conquered.

The mechanics of replacing and dispelling globals have their own page: Global enchantments.

Where it falls in the turn

Orders resolve for every nation at once when a turn is hosted. The manual’s sequence puts rituals in step 10, after research, recruitment, empowerment, forging, preaching, throne claims and the quick special orders. Within the step, every mage casts in a random order. That order does not respect nations, which matters when two nations cast the same global or fill the last global slot.

• Step 11 resolves rituals that strike enemy armies in distant provinces, such as Fires from Afar.
• Step 12 resolves battles caused by magic, for example by a commander carried into an enemy province.
• Step 28 is when global enchantments take effect on the world. The cast is step 10 and the effect is felt at 28.
• Step 31 resolves item and monster effects. Rituals cast with an item’s help still resolve at step 10.
• Labs are built later in the turn than rituals are cast (see turn order). The manual does not say whether a lab finished this turn can host this turn’s rituals.

The full list is on Turn order.

Rituals by school in the Inspector

The Dom6 Inspector lists 649 spells as not usable in battle, which is how the manual describes rituals. By school they are:

• Conjuration: 331
• Enchantment: 89
• Blood: 85
• Thaumaturgy: 61
• Alteration: 36
• Evocation: 27
• Construction: 20

Conjuration is about half of them because it holds the summons. How magic schools work says what each school is for. The Inspector gives each of these a gem cost, and for Blood it is stored in the same field, which we read as blood slaves.

What the manual leaves out

• It says “usually” five global slots in one place and 3, 5, 7 or 9 in another. We take five as the common default.
• It does not say how range is counted, or what a target must be.
• It gives no order for mages of one nation beyond “random”.
• It does not say whether a ritual that lacks gems is kept in the order list or dropped. It says only that an uncast ritual most likely lacked gems.