The practice of obtaining hidden knowledge or foreknowledge by mystical means — reading signs, casting lots, scrying, or otherwise drawing aside the veil to foretell what is hidden or to come. Divination most often sits in the arcane tradition, but diviners appear among the divine and the spirit-touched as well. The Fate invocation — drawing on a character’s Fate mystery — is a form of Divination.
The divinatory arts differ in what they read, what they need, and how long they take; they do not differ in how they are resolved.
The arts
- Fate — reading, and tugging at, one’s own thread
- Astrology — the heavens, charted
- Augury — omens in the living world
- Cartomancy — cards laid out
- Haruspicy — the entrails of a sacrifice
- Rune Casting — inscribed lots, cast and read
- Scrying — a still dark surface, looked into
- Tasseomancy — the residue in a drained cup
How a divination is resolved
A divination is invoked as a Success Test, exactly as any other Mystical Ability is. What is unusual is what the success level buys: not an effect on the world, but the quality of the reading. Where an art gives no reading of its own, the standard interpretation applies:
| Success Level | The reading |
|---|---|
| CF (−1) | A false reading — and the diviner has no inkling that it is false. It is delivered with every confidence a true one would carry. |
| MF (0) | Nothing. The signs will not speak, or speak in a way the diviner cannot make out. |
| MS (1) | True, but partial — a single fact, an ambiguous image, or an answer that holds only as far as it goes. |
| CS (2) | True and clear — the answer the question deserved, and enough of its context to act on. |
The answer itself is always given by the gamemaster. A divination establishes that the character learned something and how well; what they learned is a matter of what is actually true in the world, and no roll can supply that.
What a divination cannot do
- It does not compel. A divination reads what is hidden or what is coming; it does not bind anyone to it, and a foretold future that the characters then act to prevent is a foretelling well used, not a rule broken.
- It reads circumstances, not choices. No art answers what a person will decide, only what presses on them.
- It confers no bonus. Foreknowledge is worth what the players make of it, and never a modifier on a later test.
- It answers through the aura. No divination may be performed while the diviner carries Aural Shock, and — like every Mystical Ability — a divination can never be fated.
Asking again
A question asked twice is answered once. Repeating the same question about the same subject by the same art returns the first answer again, however it turned out, until the circumstances the question bears on have materially changed. A false reading is therefore not corrected by asking harder; it is corrected by events.
Turning a different art on the same question is another matter, and is the ordinary recourse of a diviner who suspects they have been misled — the cards and the entrails do not agree by accident.