A Ritual of Identification allows the mage to determine the abilities of magic items.
It is a general knowledge ritual which takes 2 hours to complete and requires a 100 sp pearl which is crushed and used up during the ritual (this is in lieu of normal ritual components). In order to do this ritual the caster must first inscribe a pentagram which takes a 1d4 hours to complete. The base chance for ritual to be successful is 25% +3% for each rank of caster. The DM always rolls the chance of success.
| Rank | Number of items of information known |
| 0-3 | 1 item of information |
| 4-6 | 2 items of information |
| 7-9 | 3 items of information |
| 10-12 | 4 items of information |
| 13-15 | 5 items of information |
| 16-18 | 6 items of information |
| 19-21 | 7 items of information |
| 22 | 8 items of information |
| Critical | +1 item of information or bad property of the item |
| Grievous | All properties of the item |
The mage has a lot of leeway in what he can learn from the ritual. If he already knows some of the properties of the item being identified, he can call them out in the ritual so that he learns things he doesn't already know. For example, if he is identifying a magical staff, and has already learned that it can be used to cast a Light spell for 1 charge, and a Lightning Bolt for 2 charges, then when he casts the Ritual of Identification, he names these two properties so that he can learn something new, such as the number of charges and another property of the staff.
When learning a property of an item, he learns:
- How to invoke the property (i.e., power word, etc.)
- The general description of the property (e.g., lightning bolt)
- The constraints on usage of the property (i.e., number of charges that the property uses, or how often this property can be invoked, etc.)
If the item has charges that are shared among multiple powers of the item, then that is considered a separate property. If the item only has a single power that uses charges, then the number of charges are learned as part of that property.
Total number of properties of a magic item is also a property that can be learned but is not necessary. When the Ritual of Identification ends successfully, the mage will know if there are more properties that can be learned besides what is already known. The mage won't know how many more properties there are - only that there is at least one more.
Note that a single ritual can be used to identify more than one item if the mage is able to learn multiple properties. For example, if a rank 7 mage has 2 items to identify, and one item as one property and the other item as 2 properties, he can identify both with a single ritual as long as both items are near at hand when the ritual is being performed. |