Fortunetelling | Haruspex

[Gauteamus]

: The ability to divine the future from the intestines of sacrificed livestock or poultry.

Process (with few changes to current mechanics):
Slaughter an animal.
Put intestines (or bones, maybe make chickens should yield one intestine) on altar.
Get more or less useful information.

Possible results (with few changes to current mechanics, a host of other results can be imagined):
You get a pop up box with some variation on the following information:

Time of day: 2 o'clock
Moonphase: Waning Crescent
"Fishing with <lure_type> on a <hook_type> in <location_type> may yield <fish_species>"

The amount of information may be dependent on e.g intestine quality, Charisma and Tradition setting.

[Pansy]

The Romans and others did this to get an idea of whether an area was a good place to settle or not. And as it turned out places where the local wildlife were riddled with liver flukes were not great places to start pasturing sheep, so there was some genuine value to this process.

It could also give information like, "somewhere within 10,000 tiles is a q27 clay node"

Obviously wandering around and digging and experimenting would be the simple way to get this kind of information but this way would be extremely cool and might give data that digging would not. For example, if the clay beds have seen a lot of activity the clay you find might go up to q15 but the Haruspex come up with the info that at its best that clay node is actually way better.

[Shoop]

It could also give information like, "somewhere within 10,000 tiles is a q27 clay node"

I sure hope you mean a 100 by 100 area.

[Chakravanti]

This is a good idea.

[Grog]

nice one

[theTrav]

sounds pretty cool

[Gulluoglu]

I like it; another cool divination method of yore is scapulimancy. Basically heating a scapula or turtle shell over a fire until it cracked, then reading and interpreting the resulting cracks and fractures. Maybe these divination things should be worked into wyrd rituals, however that is all supposed to work. Either way, sounds good to me to add more spiritual type things.

[ThirdEmperor]

In olden days people thought the stars decided just about everything from your lucky lotto numbers to your favorite color.

So:
New Skill: Astrology

With this skill you can craft a telescope out one iron bar and one chunk of raw glass. Using a telescope you can "read the stars" by clicking on a player and selecting it from the menu. Doing this gives the player a small bonus to a random skill for the rest of the day. However, you can only have someone Read the Stars for you once a day, so you can't keep using it till you get the buff you want.

Ideally the buff would be big enough to matter but not so big that you only did things improved by the buff. +5 plus a extra +1 per 20 QL points of the telescope sounds about right.

[Jestrb]

Seeing that we don't want magic, atleast give us some mumbojumbo spirit stuff to play with..
Love the idea, as said, would go good with wyrd to have rituals and stuff

[Grog]

that idea is pretty similar to the one of gaut, reading future from intensines
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=8379

merge?