Of all the special nodes, one of the most underused, in my opinion, is the sanctification block. Aside from “Move Mountains” and “Shatter”, “Ritual of Sanctification” is the only spell the game will recognize when cast upon a certain space. Veterans of Exile III will remember that two of the monster plagues required such actions to complete them — fireballs for the Slime plague, and a Ritual of Sanctification (ROS) for the Troglodytes. The BOE editor is unable to recognize the first, but it can recognize the second. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most complicated special nodes. A few things to keep in mind:
- The Sanctification block MUST be the first node in the stack. It would be nice if you were able to call an if then flag check before the ROS to see if the space had been sanctified before. Unfortunately, however, the game won’t recognize the spell unless the ROS is the very first node.
- If you have evil shrines in the scenario, but DON’T use ROS, inform your players of this. ROS costs a hefty 50 spell points! Little is more frustrating than discovering an evil shrine deep in a dungeon somewhere and wasting 50 spell points on a ROS only to have nothing to occur.
- On a similar vein, be consistent! If one evil shrine can be destroyed by ROS, make sure all, or at least all similar shrines, can be destroyed.
- Make sure the player knows something has happened. As a designer, my preference is to call an explosion, change the terrain to rubble, and give the party some experience along with a text message. What you do is up to you, but make sure you do something!
- You need to set a flag once the ROS has been called. Because of #1, the most logical setup — with the ROS block as the second node in the chain isn’t possible. Instead, you’ll need to have the ROS first, with the If/Then check as the second node in the block.
In my scenarios, a typical ROS block will look like this:
- ROS Block, go to 2
- If SDF X =1, then do nothing, if not then go to 3
- Set SDF X to 1, go to 4
- Do SFX burst (Explosion at the x,y of the ROS block)
- Change Terrain (Typically to the appropriate rubble)
- Affect Experience (Typically between + 25-30) — this node is where I’ll display the text message.
Finally, if you have a change terrain node in the stack, you need to account for players returning to the town. The easiest way to do this is to call a special node from the advanced town settings (town still alive/abandoned) that looks like this:
- If SDF X=1, then go to 2, if not do nothing
- Change Terrain, (x,y of the shrine to the appropriate type)
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