Prayers consist of three major elements, a spoken or sung passage, instructions on gestures, movements, tunes, and intonation, and physical components required for the use of the prayer. Without knowledge of all three a prayer cannot be used. These three items together are known as the ephemera of the prayer.
Although written copies of many prayers are available as scrolls, or in the Cannons and other holy works, these cannot be used to learn a prayer from. To learn a prayer from a written copy that copy must contain the full ephemera of the prayer, and instruct the priest in all the necessary mental preparation, intonation, gestures and components to use the prayer. Such ephemeral copies are not usually available outside seminaries, major churches, or the Cathedral. Although such institutions may make such copies availabe to preists to learn from they usually do so only on a shirt term loan.
To learn a prayer from an ephemeral copy a priest must study it for at least 10 hours (or 20 for a very hard prayer) or for 50 hours if the prayer is a ritual (100 hours for a very hard ritual). They must then make a successful IQ and ritual roll. If these are both passed then they may put 1 point into the prayer to learn it. If either roll is failed then they may try again after another period of study, but with a -1 to the rolls and so forth. The quality of the copy (see below) is added (or subtracted) to these rolls.
It is also possible to learn a prayer from a teacher who knows it and has the training skill. This is handled as normal GURPS training.
Naturally a priest who knows a prayer may attempt to write their own ephemeral copy. Any priest can do so, but their skill with the prayer and their writing ability may limit how comprehensible the resulting instructions are to someone trying to learn the prayer using the ephemera.
Each ephemera has a quality, dependant on quality of writing, knowledge of the priest, and condition. The base quality is 0.
When writing instructions the priest makes a roll against his effective ephemera skill. This skill is the lowest of the priest's ritual, writing or skill with the prayer. For example a priest with the following skills, Ritual 13, Writing 11, Blessing of Fire 15, has an ephemera skill of 11 when writing a Blessing of Fire ephemera. If the priest passes his ephemera skill then 1/2 of the difference (rounded down) between roll and skill is added to the quality of the ephemera. If he fails the roll, but still rolls under his skill with the prayer then 1/2 of the difference (rounded up) is subtracted from the quality. If the roll also fails the prayer skill then the attempt to make the ephemera fails and the priest cannot try again until he has raised the skill.
For example, the priest above rolls to create a blessing of fire ephemera
roll modifier to quality 6 +2 7 +2 8 +1 9 +1 10 0 11 0 12 -1 13 -1 14 -2 15 -2 16+ Fail The quality of the copy can also effect the quality rating. If the copy is damaged, aged or only partially complete then the quality should be lowered.