Divination by the residue left in a drained cup — tea leaves, grounds, wine lees, the dregs of a broth. The reader takes the cup from the drinker’s own hand, turns it, and reads the shapes the residue has settled into.
Tasseomancy is the most domestic of the divinatory arts and the most narrowly aimed: it reads the drinker, and no one else. Their near future, the state of their health, what they are carrying that they have not mentioned, whether they mean what they have just said. It has nothing to say about armies, places, or absent people, and a reader asked about them will turn the cup over and say so.
Its requirement is simple and absolute: the subject must have drunk from the cup, in the reader’s presence, and the cup must come to the reader undisturbed. A cup carried across a room by a third party is no good; a cup the subject drained yesterday is no good. This is why tasseomancy happens at tables, in kitchens and inns, between people who are already talking — and why it is the divination most often practised on a guest who did not ask for it.
- Medium — the residue in a cup the subject has drained
- Requires — the subject present, drinking, and the cup handed straight over
- Time — minutes
- Answers — the drinker’s own near future, health, and undeclared concerns
Resolution and the reading of the result are as described in Divination. The art’s short reach is its safeguard: a Critical Failure misleads one person about their own affairs, which is a small disaster next to a false scrying — though a reader who tells a healthy man he is poisoned has still done real harm.