Planar travel: Ringwalking

Work on my pocket-planes addon has gotten some core portions committed to words. Yay!

One of those is ringwalking; in other words, how all this dimensional-planar-world travel is actually happening a lot of the time.

(not all the time, of course, because there’s still plenty of place for mysterious arches and exactingly-wrought spells and magical doodads that just need twisted and poked in the right way)

Do your characters like collecting patterns and brushing up on calligraphy and illo work by any chance?

Ringwalking

To ringwalk across the planes, one must be taught; and then, one must have learned the pattern of the ring of ghostly sigils that needs to be inscribed (on a surface or even in empty air, though that’s certainly more difficult) in order to open said ring and walk on through to the other side ~

• Inscribing a ring requires two successful tests, one of Alacrity and one of Psyche. Failing the Psyche test means that the ring fails to ignite at all; failing the Alacrity test means a flaw in the pattern of sigils, and you wind up somewhere other than the intended destination, and the greater the failure of the test the farther out you find yourself.
• 1 advancement point may be spent to indicate the memorization of a specific pattern to the point that no rolls need be made barring extreme circumstances.
• Inscribing a ring will take at least a few minutes, even if the pattern has been memorized. (2d6 is a nice roll.) Conditions at the time may add to that!
• Some patterns are easy to inscribe, the plane familiar (like one’s home) or easy to reach, and give a bonus (+1 to +3) to one or both attributes; similarly, others are fiendishly tricky, or the plane is distant, tenuously connected, barricaded by gods or dragons or wards, or otherwise a complication.
• It’s possible to find patterns that have been written down! Of course, whether enough information is also there to say anything about the destination is a trickier question, and so is the accuracy of any such information — or the accuracy of the sigils themselves, for that matter. More than one ringwalker learned a broken ring from physical records and found themselves walking into very unexpected terrain indeed.