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The Dresden Files => DFRPG => Topic started by: knnn on August 19, 2010, 11:45:21 AM
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I didn't see this in the books, so I thought I'd ask here.
Making small amounts of HW should be pretty easy: Wave your hands over the flask.
What about blessing a barrel of HW, or something larger - like an entire city reservoir, or Lake Michigan?
Also, how long does it stay Holy? Is there a time limit, or is it permanent once created?
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I would rule it as a tag you can place on things useing a High Concept tag. A small bottle would be a free tag. A large barrel might cause a mild menal consequence hit. Tagging a sprinkler system or a large container might be a moderate consequence and a swimming pool would cause a severe consequence, Increessed or decressed by apropreate rolls on the ladder chart.
Small things like the bottle and the barrel I would rule as permanent and larger areas I'll call as a scene aspect or if the roll was lenendary, possibly untrill the next milestone.
Have fun. :)
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Perhaps an invocation of the High Aspect of a True Believer? Say it fills up a quantity equal to a basin at the front of a church and requires a five minute ritual. The more volume that is required, more time and or priests with Fate Points it would take?
I would say it would be permanent until used or tainted in some way. Getting mixed with something or spilling out would taint it.
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As a GM, I'd rule that things like oceans, lakes, rivers, etc couldn't be turned into holy water, there's too much constant interference with the water--tides, sediment, animals, etc. One might be able to bless the contents of a water reserve, but many sprinkler systems use the water within their jurisdiction, so it'd be a little harder to bless or maintain such a blessing because the city/county/whatever's water would be immediately dispersed amongst the greater populace.
A tactic I took with clerics in my D&D days was that holy water wasn't just a blessing, it required sacred oils to help the "flow" of that blessing. It wasn't exactly chemistry, but there was a minimal amount of oil-to-water in order for the holy water to work against creatures of the night. Blessed water without the oils was used for ritualistic and spiritual purposes only.
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If you can turn a sea to blood, then surely you can make it Holy.
Of course it would require a great deal of Faith...
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i'd say maybe a taggin of your high concept or possibly a ritual that takes longer/ higher difficulty as the amount goes up
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I have to concur. The larger and more "fluid" (sorry) the water supply the more difficult and less permanent it is.
As to Red Sea...Moses didn't do that. God did. So think of that as serious Sponsored Magic. That's not a trick he does for just everybody. Your character may be a "Mean mmm mmm servant of God" (to quote Harvey Keitel in Dusk Til Dawn) but that don't make you Moses.
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Well, maybe he did, maybe he didn't. God got pissed at Moses because he wouldn't own up to his own badassitude and do things for himself. And playing Moses-like-faithworker is a workable character concept.
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Unless the direct source is a divinity, I'd say it lasts until the next sunrise or until washed away otherwise.
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It seems to me that making holy water is inline with a thaumaturgy like effect, you want to place an aspect on an object for a certain time span. This means creating a small flask of holy water (a one use weapon) might take a few moments. Magic lasts till the next sunrise but we can assume faith magic might last a bit longer perhaps 7 days or so, so 5 shifts would make it last a half a year more then long enough to move past the evaporation point, you could also assume a good to great difficulty it placing the maneuver, so all together you get 8 or 9 for the "spell's" complexity. Normal non major npcs have a fair to good score at skills relating to what they do so it would take 4 to 5 rolls to do this "spell". With the single flask as a base increase the complexity for larger containers, a barrel might be six or seven times this but a pool would become insanely hard to pull off.
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I am going to second (third?) the "it allows a call for a compel on a thing's high concept."
I really liked in the movie Constantine, where holy water shattered the fake skin/armor of half demons.
In Supernatural: Beginning's End, the New York "hunter army" maintained a daily blessing ceremony to keep the water surrounding New York as holy water in order to discourage most monsters from coming to the big city.
FYI: Father Forthill made Dresden a barrel of the stuff, and he only has Bless this House and Guide My Hand.
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Personally I'd go with the high concept thing but not require a True Believer template. If you do that you're saying that normal priests bless water all the time but it does nothing because the vast majority of them would have the Pure Mortal template and be built with no powers. I probably wouldn't allow blessing bodies of water in games I ran. That would be some major working and honestly, if you want to do trippy stuff like that you should be prepared to back it up. I tend to see bodies of water as having their own identity and altering that would take significant effort.
But just about any member of a holy order should be able to pray over some water. Remember it's a catch, it works just like iron. Iron isn't magical in it's own right, the fae are just supernaturally weak against it. In the same vein, holy water isn't necessarily charged with divine power. Most of the time it would probably be a complete waste for it to be magically charged up like that.
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I'd limit the creation of holy water to areas of standing water. So a barrel, vat, water tank, water tower, etc. would all be fine but lakes and seas wouldn't. The motion of the water in a lake or shoreline would disperse the blessed water so that it wouldn't be effective (except to those creature susceptible to "running" water).
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I'd limit it to what exists in the religion. Virtually no priest would mock his own beliefs by blessing holy water in a way that conflicts with his faith. Try running into a church in real life and asking a priest to bless water pistols - you'll either get a lecture or be met with concern over your mental health.
Dresden needed a Knight of the Cross to introduce him to a Priest in the Know to get access to large amounts of holy water. That sounds like a contact that a PC should have if he wants large amounts of holy water. If small amounts will do, well, I put "buying holy water" into google and came up with pages like:
http://www.fisheaters.com/water.html (http://www.fisheaters.com/water.html) - that has the quote:
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Where to get it
To get holy water to use in your home, bring a clean flask to your parish church and look for a faucet that will probably be labelled "Holy Water." If there is no faucet, it might be kept in an urn of some sort. If you can't find it, don't be shy; just ask! Unlike votive candles, there is no real cost to the church in making holy water, so there is no offering expected.
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Richard
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You could have it require a Font in order to be blessed, since that is traditionally where holy water is made.
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Dresden needed a Knight of the Cross to introduce him to a Priest in the Know to get access to large amounts of holy water.
Point of order, but IIRC, Michael was surprised that Harry already knew Father Forthill when he attempted to introduce them to each other. I'd have to read Grave Peril again in order to be sure.
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If you need rules for it, you could probably call it a ritual and adapt the rules for conjuring. By default, Holy Water is pretty simple stuff (no moving parts and such, so perhaps the base difficulty would be a mere 1. That would be for, say, a vial of holy water. Then make up a size chart similar to the time charts, perhaps something like this:
vial - pint - gallon - basin - tub - spa - pool
Each step up the chart requires an extra shift. Base time might be the length of a typical mass or service, and the time could be reduced by paying shifts. Translate the preparation options for Thaumaturgy into more religeous trappings, such as holy places instead of ley lines, blessed fonts in place of a ritual circle, meditating on the scriptures instead of spell library research, etc.
The rolls would certainly require Conviction and possibly Scolarship or Lore, and only those with the proper Template and/or True Faith powers would be capable of creating it. There might even be room for a stunt adding an 'expertise with holy rituals' trapping to Scolarship.
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Out of curiousity, has anyone asked a priest/minister/reverend what is actually involved in making holy water?
I bring this up because as I understand it, the process to make water "holy" is essentially a ritual which the appropriate type of person, having the appropriate knowledge, is able to do. Whether or not the requirement is that someone be an ordained minister/priest/etc AND knowledge the religion-specific ritual, or if a layperson with knowledge of the appropriate ritual can do so would likely fall into the realm of GM's choice.
Something else worth thinking about, is just what exactly is it that gives holy water its 'power' as it were? Is it that due to the ritual(s) the Almighty by whatever name one choses to use empowers the water, or is it that the water is able to tap into the power stemming from the collective belief of mankind in the Almighty?
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Out of curiousity, has anyone asked a priest/minister/reverend what is actually involved in making holy water?
This might be of interest, though I couldn't tell you if this is 'authentic' or not. Regarding your last point, I think that certainly in the Dresden 'Verse, the creation of 'true' holy water would basically amount to the channeling of divine energy through a person of true faith (or perhaps more specifically a cleric of true faith) into the water. In spellcasting, the specific rituals are not integral to the spells, rather they are mechanical constructs to make it easier for the caster to focus his will. I suspect that holy water creation is much the same: God is unlikely to care about the words that are said, rather the rituals help focus the mind of the cleric on his holy task.
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This might be of interest, though I couldn't tell you if this is 'authentic' or not. Regarding your last point, I think that certainly in the Dresden 'Verse, the creation of 'true' holy water would basically amount to the channeling of divine energy through a person of true faith (or perhaps more specifically a cleric of true faith) into the water. In spellcasting, the specific rituals are not integral to the spells, rather they are mechanical constructs to make it easier for the caster to focus his will. I suspect that holy water creation is much the same: God is unlikely to care about the words that are said, rather the rituals help focus the mind of the cleric on his holy task.
Actually, some rituals are able to be used by anyone. That is one of the reasons why the White Council's publishing arm can be so active in printing some occult material, since demon/Outsider being XYZ has a finite amount of power, and if there are many people (attempting) to call upon that power, there isn't sufficient power to go around... Now in the case of someone doing something to attract the attention of the Almighty (the rite/ritual to make holy water) I suppose people can assume that there is always enough power to go around. At least to make holy water anyway.
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Ummm a priest blessed my first rosary. Took him about half a minute. He wasn't kiddin' around about it either. It's a prayer and a sign of the cross. That's it. You wanna get fancy? five minutes and some incense for Holy water. However, I DO know that they keep a big tureen of it in the back, so at least it LOOKS like they don't just get it out of the tap. For appearances sake they probably get it from a spring (because the Church likes appearances).
Now, if you wanna get super awesome, people send out Lourdes Water all the time. Like from Our Lady of Lourdes, and the healing spring there, etc etc. THAT I would rule as being awesome holy water and give it a bump in the effectiveness department. Catholic charities send out little plastic bottles of it all the time.
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Heh, I realized that in my previous post I had cleverly managed to leave out the link that I thought might be helpful. Here it is:
http://www.daytonlatinmass.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/blessing-of-water.pdf (http://www.daytonlatinmass.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/blessing-of-water.pdf)
Looks fairly short (maybe 5-10 minutes?) plus some additional time prior to the rite itself to prepare the salt water.
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Thanks! That's the sort of thing I was looking for when I searched for "buying holy water".
I'd say any priest that performed that service would make holy water, regardless of whether the priest had any Faith powers.
Richard
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Thanks! That's the sort of thing I was looking for when I searched for "buying holy water".
I'd say any priest that performed that service would make holy water, regardless of whether the priest had any Faith powers.
Richard
I'd take a bit of a different approach. Any priest (or, for that matter anyone at all) can make holy water. Just mix salt and fresh water, say some mystic mumbo-jumbo, and presto! You now have some holy water. But if, on the other hand, you are loking for Holy Water ... well, for that you need someone with some True Faith backing them up. For purposes of The Catch, holy water is just a mixture of salt and water; it takes Holy Water to mess with a supernature creature!
Another way to approach this might be to say (as you did) that any annointed priest could make holy water that was good enough to satisfy a Catch, but that Holy Water made by a priest with True Faith is extra-potent. Perhaps it gains Holy Touch-like abilities, granting an extra stress point or a free compel in addition to satisfying The Catch.
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Another way to approach this might be to say (as you did) that any annointed priest could make holy water that was good enough to satisfy a Catch, but that Holy Water made by a priest with True Faith is extra-potent. Perhaps it gains Holy Touch-like abilities, granting an extra stress point or a free compel in addition to satisfying The Catch.
This is how we use it in our game. We have a character who is Wiccan and her parents have True Faith. They make Holy Water for us to use if needed.