Runecraft is divination by lots. The caster keeps a set of tokens — staves, tiles, pebbles, knucklebones — each cut with a rune of settled meaning, and casts them onto cloth or bare ground. Which fall face up, how they lie, and how they group is the reading. The craft is as much in the cutting and keeping of the lots as in the throw.
It is the terse art. It takes a single question, framed before the lots leave the hand, and answers it in a few words: this way and not that, the older man, before the thaw, no. It has no capacity for nuance and does not pretend to any, which is exactly why it is trusted — a caster who starts elaborating is a caster who has stopped reading the lots. It is also the most portable of the divinations, needing no sky, no cup, no sacrifice and no quiet; a caster can read on a hillside in the rain with an army coming over the ridge.
Invoking it. A cast is a Success Test like any other Mystical Ability, and the success level buys the quality of the reading: nothing on a Marginal Failure, a true but partial answer on a Marginal Success, a clear one on a Critical Success. Because the answers are so short, a Critical Failure here is correspondingly stark — a flat, confident wrong answer, with nothing in the reading to hint that it should be doubted.
What bears on the test. The lots must be the caster’s own, cut and marked by their own hand; a set inherited from a teacher serves, a set bought in a market does not. The question must be settled aloud before the cast and must be one the runes can answer — thrown for “what should we do?” they give nothing, thrown for “is the ford watched?” they answer. No divination answers under Aural Shock, none may be fated, and asking the same question of the same art again returns the first answer, however it turned out, until circumstances have materially changed.
The art, and the reading of its results, are set out under Rune Casting and Divination.