Divination by gazing — into still water, a bowl of ink, polished stone or glass, a flame, a mirror kept dark. The scryer does not interpret signs; they see. What appears in the surface is a place, a person, or a thing, shown as it is (or as it was, or as it will be) rather than described.
This makes scrying the most specific of the divinatory arts and the most useful when a plain fact is wanted: how many are camped at the ford, whether the gate is barred, whether she is still alive. It also makes it the most easily misunderstood, because a vision arrives unlabelled. The scryer sees what is there; they are not told where it is, when it is, or what it means, and a scryer who reports “a burning hall” has reported everything they actually know.
Scrying is demanding in a way the quick arts are not. It needs darkness and quiet, an unbroken surface, and above all a link to the subject. A name is not a link. Having met the person, holding something of theirs, standing where the place can be pointed to — these are links; hearsay is not. The stronger the link, the more readily the surface answers.
It is also the one divination that can be noticed. A subject with a strong aura may feel the attention as a prickling or a sense of being overlooked, and a place that has been warded against watching simply shows nothing at all — which is itself a useful thing to learn.
- Medium — a still, dark surface: water, ink, stone, glass, flame
- Requires — darkness and quiet; a genuine link to the subject
- Time — an hour, undisturbed
- Answers — what a distant place, person, or thing is actually like
Resolution and the reading of the result are as described in Divination. A weak link is a penalty the gamemaster sets. A Critical Failure shows a true-seeming vision of something that is not so — the hall that is not burning, the man who is not dead — and the scryer will swear to it, because they did see it.