I just had a horrible thought: trying to write up a Basilisk's petrifying gaze in this system (note: I'm letting my longtime D&D background factor into my base assumptions about how powers like this work).

Would it be as simple as a maneuver placing a Compellable Aspect on a target? Folks seem to agree that's enough for a sleep effect, but for petrification? I think a "taken out" result makes more sense.

How would one differentiate, within the DFRPG rules, between the Basilisk's petrifying gaze (which normally just has to touch a target, with no eye contact needed) and a Medusa's gaze (which requires mutual eye contact)? A Medusa's gaze attack is usually a challenge of the target averting its gaze successfully, so it might work like avoiding a Soulgaze, or perhaps pitting the Medusa's Alertness against the target's Alertness.

Whatever it is, it would be cool to make it a Spray-enabled maneuver, allowing the creature with the petrifying gaze to split shifts between multiple targets.

Would it attack the Physical stress track, or would this qualify as a Mental attack?

Does it make sense to use a target's Alertness as the defense skill? Or would that imply the target knows enough about the creature to avoid the attack?

If we use Alertness as the monster's targeting skill, the monster would want a ridiculously high Alertness check to ensure enough shifts to take out a target, and that has other game implications, such as the monster almost invariably going first (excepting opponents with supernatural Speed powers) and being nigh impossible to surprise.

One could buy the monster levels of refinement: for -1 Refresh, the monster could get +3 to its Alertness for the purposes of resolving gaze attacks.

Here is a start, but it's only barely a start.

Petrifying Gaze [-3]
This monster's gaze can turn other creatures to stone. Roll Alertness versus the target's Alertness. The monster must generate enough shifts in one glance to take out the target's Physical Stress track (if a nameless NPC), as well as all available consequences (if a PC or named NPC), and spend a Fate point to ensure petrification.

Accurate Gaze [-1 to -3] for each Refresh spend, the monster gains +3 to its Alertness solely to resolve gaze attacks.

For Thaumaturgy, one can make Declarations to provide taggable Aspects which will help a ritualist build up enough bonuses to their Lore check to prepare the spell construct for a ritual.

After that, they then have to start feeding shifts into the ritual construct to make it work, using Discipline checks to determine success (and taking Fallout/Backlash on failed Discipline checks) for each exchange.

Would the ritualist also be able to make (or have made prior to the ritual) Declarations to provide taggable Aspects which will help with those Discipline checks? It seems like a legitimate option, but I may have missed something in the rules forbidding that.

A ritualist in our game successfully set up an 8-shift ritual, and started dribbling one shift per exchange into the construct, which should have been the easiest way to go. But he rolled poorly on several of those supposedly easy Discipline checks, bringing down stress and consequences on their heads (and with rituals, you bring down stress equal to ALL of the currently amassed shifts!). Had they been able to set up some Aspects to help with those Discipline checks things may have been a lot less hairy.