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.
Rune casting 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 rune caster who starts elaborating is a rune caster who has stopped reading the lots.
It is also the most portable of the arts. It needs 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, which is a great deal more than can be said for astrology. 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 it must be one the runes can answer. A caster who throws for “what should we do?” gets nothing; one who throws for “is the ford watched?” gets an answer.
- Medium — inscribed lots, cast and read where they fall
- Requires — the caster’s own set; one question, framed in advance
- Time — minutes
- Answers — a single narrow question, tersely
Resolution and the reading of the result are as described in Divination. Because the answers are so short, a Critical Failure is correspondingly stark: a flat, confident wrong answer, with nothing in the reading to hint that it should be doubted.