by: Don Lara for Sanguinus Curae
Tabletop cost: 10 experience points
MET cost: 6 experience points
Lasombra fortunate enough to come across an Elder, schooled in the Abyssal arts, can potentially learn this rare ritual that allows a Keeper to temporarily ease their ability in summoning manifestations of the void.
By first surrounding themselves in the dark enclosure of the Shroud of Night and meditating for one hour, concentrating uninterrupted on the nature of the Abyss, the Lasombra can form a certain "synergy" with the darkness, allowing better control of it.
Character must call forth a Shroud of Night, and sit within it for a full hour of meditation. Player rolls Occult + (character's rating in Obtenebration), difficulty 7. (Optional: If the character possesses the Abyssal Occultism ability, she may use that score in place of Occult, and reduce the difficulty of the roll to 6) Two successes are required.
If successful, all Obtenebration roll difficulties are reduced by 2 for the remainder of the night.
This is a difficult ritual to convert to MET, since using Obtenebration in LARP is more just a matter of spending the requisite Blood and Social/Mental traits, rather than it being a matter of a "difficulty."
The only alternatives that spring to my mind are:
After performing this ritual, Arms of the Abyss cost one Social trait for two arms, rather than the standard 1 for 1.
The regular three rounds it takes to change into Tenebrous Form can be reduced to one round.
In the end, it will be up to the Storyteller to determine what might be a fair trade off, but this ritual really only makes sense in the tabletop system.
(Note: This should not be an easy bit of knowledge to discover. Abyssal Occultism itself is a rare and hard to discover thing; a ritual dealing with it should be even more difficult to uncover, let alone "invent" on one's own. Storytellers are encouraged to make the attainment of this ritual a hard-fought one, as only a handful of Lasombra Elders would know of this rite.)