Summoning rituals

How summoning rituals differ from battle summons, what one costs and brings, how commanders and troops arrive, and the Inspector's counts by school and path.

verified 6.37updated 2026-10-02 · Jake5 min read

A summoning ritual calls creatures onto the campaign map. It is the main way a nation gets monsters, elementals, undead and golems that its recruitment lists do not offer. This page covers the rules the manual states about the whole family, and the Inspector’s counts. It does not list every spell: the spell table does that. We report the manual’s account and have not re-measured any of it.

Ritual summons and battle summons

The manual separates two things. A summoning ritual is cast on the map, takes a mage’s whole month, and what it brings stays in the game. A spell that summons during a fight is a battle spell, and the creatures it brings exist only as long as that battle lasts. The manual puts the second kind among its battlefield spells and says plainly that those are not rituals.

The Inspector holds 433 non-battle spell records that summon something, out of 649 non-battle spells. It also holds 34 battle-cast spell records that summon, which are the temporary kind. The general ritual rules (a laboratory, gems from the national pool, one cast per mage per month) are on Rituals.

What a summoning ritual costs

The manual’s tables give each row a school and level, the path or paths needed, the gems it costs and the creature it produces. The gem type is the spell’s primary path, as for any ritual; see Magic gems and blood slaves. Blood summons spend blood slaves in the same way. In the Inspector the gem cost across the 433 records runs from 1 to 177.

Some rows are marked NUW, which means the spell cannot be cast underwater, and some UW, which means only underwater. Some are national: the manual says they can be cast only by the named nation’s mages, and when several nations share one it repeats the row for each.

One-off and repeated summons

A ritual summons once, when the mage casts it. If you want it again, the mage must cast it again, and the manual offers a way to set him to do so every month: the same key as other rituals, Shift and m, with the mage selected in a lab province. He keeps casting as long as he has the gems. If a summon did not happen, the manual’s likeliest reason is that the national pool lacked the right gems.

How many arrive

Each row in the manual’s tables shows a count after the creature’s name, for example x1, x10 or x10+. The manual does not say what the plus sign means. The Inspector’s own spell text does say, for the records that have it: it describes the number summoned as a base count plus a fixed amount for each path level above the requirement. Its record for Summon Fire Ants reads “10 Fire Ants, plus 1 per path level above the requirement”. The Inspector gives such a per-level term for 35 of the 433 ritual summons.

Commanders and troops

The manual draws a line between units and commanders. Troops fill squads, and commanders lead them or do other work. The manual lists several things only commanders can do: leading, carrying gems and changing equipment. Some summoning rituals bring only troops, some a single big creature, and some a leader with followers. The manual’s Contact Draconians row is an example. It names a Draconian Chief with leadership 50, and thirty Draconians.

The Inspector flags 84 of the 501 different creatures named by ritual summons as commanders. The remaining 417 carry no such flag. We have not checked whether a flag always means the creature can be ordered like any commander on arrival, and the manual does not say.

Upkeep and gold

In the manual’s income notes, each unit’s upkeep per turn is its gold cost divided by 15, and half that for sacred units and slaves. The note carves out most summoned units, so most of what a ritual brings does not pay. The manual does not name the units that do. It gives no rule for freespawn, and the word does not appear in the manual, so we do not state one. The wiki’s page on nations that get units without recruiting covers what is known about free spawn from the Inspector side.

When in the turn

Summoning rituals cast on the map resolve in step 10 of the manual’s turn sequence, with all other rituals, in random order across mages. The special order Summon Allies is a different thing, performed at step 36, and the manual notes that allies summoned that way miss that turn’s battles. A creature raised by a ritual is not covered by that note, so we do not claim it is available or not in the same turn’s fights. See Turn order.

Summoning rituals by school and path in the Inspector

By school, the 433 ritual summon records are:

• Conjuration: 301
• Blood: 62
• Enchantment: 41
• Construction: 17
• Alteration: 6
• Thaumaturgy: 5
• Evocation: 1

By the first path listed on the record:

• Death: 92
• Nature: 74
• Blood: 62
• Earth: 48
• Water: 45
• Astral: 40
• Air: 26
• Fire: 26
• Glamour: 20

Conjuration carries most of them because it is the school of calling creatures. Construction holds the golems, such as the manual’s Crusher Construction. How magic schools work says what each school is for and Spell research covers how a nation reaches the level a summon needs.

What the manual leaves out

• It does not explain the plus sign on a count.
• It does not say how a summoning ritual’s creatures are placed, or whether a summoned commander arrives with orders.
• It does not give a rule for freespawn.
• It does not say which summoned units pay upkeep.