View source for Item:Nacre-bone leviathan skull inlaid with ghostly pale asarenjan symbols

{{Item
|noun=skull
|look=The skull has about 500 uses of pearly dust remaining.  Crafted with artistic license, the miniature pearlescent head appears to be grinning despite having no muscles and empty eye sockets.
|MTag=macre-bone, asarenjan
|ptype=jewelry
|verby=No
|pcrystal=No
|atmos=No
|istone=No
|wearloc=neck
|type=ritual focus
|metal=no
|weight=2
|appcost=4,062,500
|rarity=festival
|lsize=3
|wsize=1
|hsize=1
|enchanted=No
|feature-change=No
|generator=No
|sourcetype=-
|fname=No
}}
*You focus your magical senses on a nacre-bone leviathan skull inlaid with ghostly pale asarenjan symbols.
*While the leviathan skull is nothing special, the pearly dust inside it appears to be enchanted to serve as a ritual focus.
*The focus has been enchanted with sublime care and reinforced with an Analogous Patterns sub-enchantment.  It should be compatible with any ritual.
*While the magical nature of the focus is clear enough, you will need to study it more carefully to recollect how they function.



*You recognize that the skull is a ritual focus.  It's a tool that assists in harnessing the mana required to cast ritual spells, if it is invoked while the spell is being prepared.

*In particular, this is a supply of mana-reactive pearly dust.  Mana-reactive materials are enchanted in such a way that they react to mana shortly after being exposed to the open, quickly accumulating a charge of spell energy before burning out.  Drawing on a technique the Moon Mages invented, it is possible to draw a ritual pattern that reflects the two-dimensional "shadow" of the nascent spell.  If this is done quickly and accurately, the burst of energy has been shaped to channel itself safely into the spell pattern.

*The mana manipulation done through ritual foci are crude and often sharply limited by the design of the enchantment.  Most ritual foci are limited to being useful only to a specific book of magic, though foci designed with incredible skill can be more broadly useful.  No known ritual focus is fine enough to work at a level above the blunt strokes of empowering a ritual, much to the relief of their users' job security.