Is it appropriate to have a greater daemon be a -60 daemonology test? Unfortunately the rituals in the book are overly brief, and really only show you how to make an insignificant lesser daemon.

What would some more fleshed out rituals look like?

I would imagine that we're talking about thousands of sacrifices at the least and rituals going on for tens of hours if not even days.

SneakySly said:

The rituals are brief because they don't actually need to be any longer - brevity in rules terms does not inherently mean that the ritual is not complex or involved, it simply means that it requires relatively few rules to describe. The rituals in the book are there mainly as examples, because there really wasn't room to include more than a few, and half the reason I asked to be able to include them was so that I could use the ritual rules as part of Daemon Weapon creation.

Summoning a Greater Daemon would be a vast and complex ritual, requiring massively rare or specific conditions and prerequisites (which are really the biggest challenge in accomplishing a ritual - performing the ritual itself is the easy bit by comparison) vast stores of arcane lore, countless sacrifices and utterly world-shaking consequences for failure and success.

After which, you might find yourself with a Greater Daemon manifest in front of you. The challenge then is either binding it to your will (Daemonic Mastery Test) or negotiating for its aid.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Or if you're more of an anarchist you can always run like hell and let the beast cause havoc. I can imiagine that could give a point or two of infamy from the choosen deity.

I dunno, personally as a GM something I learned from running andplaying in Cthulhu games, Summoning bad stuff is usually relatively easy, controlling it however...

Protip: The spell for summoning Azathoth is not the same as the spell for BINDING Azathoth.

So by rare and specific do you mean quest specifics only?

What would be a suitable sacrifice if I want players to be able to summon greater daemons when they want to and not just when on some DM railroad?

Think big.

888 warriors sacrificed across 8 points of great slaughter, all during the 88th hour of the 888th year of a hives existence.

This would have to include a way to capture and bring in that many soldiers, researching a large area's history closely. A large support network of killers and great timing would be important. Actually knowing the ritual would be important, as well as having some sort of endgame, whether a way to escape from the power of a GD, or some way to bind it.

Basically the same as the rituals for smaller daemons but much, much larger scale. The rules of symmetry could still have an effect, but maybe stronger things could help as well. Killing the sacrifices through eldritch means could be a great help for bringing in a lord of change, while brass knives and heavy bolters could well be critical for bringing in a bloodthirster.

Of course individual entities may have their own requirements, and greatly weakening the warp/materium veil would help. Something like that could be done by torturing power pskers (gamma or higher) to insanity, or simply using an area where the barrier is already weak.

There is a lot to think about, and as something like this could easily be the endgame to a whole Deathwatch story arc, should not be taken lightly.

So by rare and specific do you mean quest specifics only?

What would be a suitable sacrifice if I want players to be able to summon greater daemons when they want to and not just when on some DM railroad?

I think by "rare and specific", he means "rare" and "specific". To elaborate: To summon a Greater Daemon may IMO be considered a Compact of its own. A Bloodthirster that can be reliably invoked anytime and anyplace with a "Take 88 virgins, exsanguinate, put into the oven for 8 minutes, serve" recipe would, to me, cheapen the near-ultimate cosmic horrors.

Instead, the heretic warband would likely have to search for every scrap of occult lore they can get about the place, time and other circumstances they'd like to summon it. From that point, they'd fomulate the specific series of rituals that will ultimately result in this summoning being successful: Preparing the main sacrifices, anointing the ritual leader, consecrating the ground the ritual is cast on, eliminating adverse circumstances, divining the best time and finally enacting the summoning proper.