Lets suppose my mage decides that he wants to be a better communicator so he decides to create an initiation for Great Communication (since he already has +3 com). This would involve random questing, meditation, and whatever else lets him self initiate with an effective cult lore of 0. So now he's sitting at com +4 and thinking... why not +5? The question is, can he just initiate himself with the same script for another 'copy' of the same minor virtue? Can a script never be reused? Can a script only be reused if it doesn't have any steps which are usable only once (like a one time bonus for going to a special place)? Thoughts?
From a mechanical perspective, it's probably possible for players to design an initiation script that could be used twice for a second copy of the same Minor Virtue.
From a story-generating perspective and also a realistic perspective, however, I think you should make two very different initiation scripts.
Yeah...that's not really the way Initiations are supposed to work...
-Ben.
I'd argue that if he did, he'd have to go on all new quests, since the old ones were used up.
A pilgrimage might be a better option, in this case.
-Albert
I'm not sure what you mean by pilgrimage Albert. That that should be what the quests are so that they're easily replaced with different pilgrimages? Or is there some way you can get a boost to stats from pilgrimages? I've only skimmed RoP: D so I could easily have missed something like that.
How do you generate an Initiation Script with an effective Cult Lore of zero? Its really quite hard creating an initation scrip unless you have really high Cult Lore, unless I am missing something?
Nope, you haven't missed anything. I just hadn't gotten to that point yet. After reading that I'm thinking that founding a cult really isn't a subplot, it's more of a saga.
It can be a theme - perhaps even the main theme - of a saga.
We're trying that right now, to see if it could serve as a common goal for us. It's going, but not very well. I just don't see much difference between this saga and all the rest. It was slow to start, but I think we're underway. We've run a lot of stories about finding lost bits of secrets from similar Cults, and this was a whole lot betetr than running the usual 'resource gathering' of a typical Spring saga.
Legends of Hermes has one of the magi described as having built her own Cult. It has some very good rules allowing the re-use and inspiration of other, similar Cults to convert scripts found rather than inventing them from scratch (because this is a pain, and very hard).
We started out with one magus having the idea of the cult who started to built a set of traditions and ceremonies for the cult, i.e. practice his newly invented Cult Lore. The aforementioned rules allow a higher Training Source Quality if tractus for other Cult Lores are read for inspiration.
By now we have two converted scripts and are working on the Quests etc. for them.
As I recall, pilgrimages are the divine equivalent of initiations - described in the Church book.
Yes. Not only is this mechanically possible, it is nearly specifically part of canon. If we look at the Inner Heartbeast variants for House Bjornaer, we can see that they all build off the same script so they all the initiations are nearly the same. Most of them are unlikely to be substantially different. I would say if you're doing the same thing several times, it's highly likely you'll end up with repeated scripts. Of course, this is quite limited in scope as it's a corner case and it still only applies to the few instances where gaining the same thing twice is useful. As it's such a corner case, I'm really not so worried about it.
Chris