Augury: How does it work in YOUR game?

We had the first use of Augury in last night's game.  It was cool.

Sorrow the Hocus is head of a crazy, mixed up cult who worship a complete mashup of pre-apocalypse religions and pop-culture stuff.  The Touched Madonna, Ares and Saint Brangelina all feature heavily, but it's a mash-up with a heavy pop-culture Voodoo theme.

So Sorrow hands out peyote, snake venom and all kinds of nasty psychotropic crap to his congregation at their nomadic camp and they all dance around the camp fire like something out of a bad movie, chanting and yelling and beating drums.

Once he tunes himself in to the heightened minds of his congregation Sorrow is granted visions of things.  We've established that the psychic maelstrom in our game is like a sponge which absorbs echoes of whatever is going on around it.  So Sorrow can see what's going on elsewhere (as least, a dreamlike, caricatured, hallucinated approximation of it) through his augury.

Sorrow's not exactly a shyster, he believes in what he's doing, but he's also a hell of a showman.  Dipping into the visions of what'd abound in the world takes him about 10-15 seconds, but he's charging people for this stuff, so he makes sure it looks the part.

How does Augury work in your game?

Spector the Savvyhead hears voices.  See, he's a guy who you go to if you want to make a radio work - if you've got a gang of thugs and maniacs you need to keep in touch with over a long distance or if you've got to keep your loved ones back home aware that you're still alive out there in the blasted suburbs.  He's the guy who runs the rusted tower you can see on the horizon no matter where you are.

When he's not working on gear or fixing up some piece of rotted-out equipment, he's listening.  He's tuned in to the patterns that float amidst the static that makes up the world's psychic maelstrom.  He drinks, he stays up all night, he burns out his eardrums on five, six, ten different frequencies at once.

They say he's making a machine that'll let him record it all, too.  Let him clamp those weird headphones over YOUR head and make you hear the shit he hears. 

I'm not entirely sure yet, but I've got an online game going involving a Hocus with psychic-antennae followers AND a Savvyhead with Reality's Fraying Edge workspace, so... yeah, I'll let you know. Especially once the Brainer gets his violation-gloved hands on one of those isolated fragments or opened windows. (It's a very weird-themed group.)

I suspect there's a link between the world's psychic maelstrom and the maelstrom of tornadoes that's swept the earth for the last 50 years, but I'm not entirely sure yet. I do know that the Savvyhead's going to have an interesting time trying to build that weather control device.

Reality's Fraying Edge is Augury, right? In that case, I used it to extract someone's nightmares from the Maelstrom and store them in a jar.

Which he later weaponized into a makeshift grenade, if I recall correctly.

In our world, Gitch the Savvyhead (who will be portrayed by Peter Dinklage in the TV adaptation) has a place in his workspace where he uses a giant hookah machine to smoke special stuff from his controlled growing environment. He trapped Doghead's overwhelming lust for H in the hookah with this Augury; it looked like purple swirling smoke.

Later, our driver and perennial fuckup Phoenix decided it was a great idea to smoke that hookah with a woman from the local chopper gang...

Spector the Savvyhead hears voices.  See, he's a guy who you go to if you want to make a radio work - if you've got a gang of thugs and maniacs you need to keep in touch with over a long distance or if you've got to keep your loved ones back home aware that you're still alive out there in the blasted suburbs.  He's the guy who runs the rusted tower you can see on the horizon no matter where you are.

When he's not working on gear or fixing up some piece of rotted-out equipment, he's listening.  He's tuned in to the patterns that float amidst the static that makes up the world's psychic maelstrom.  He drinks, he stays up all night, he burns out his eardrums on five, six, ten different frequencies at once.

They say he's making a machine that'll let him record it all, too.  Let him clamp those weird headphones over YOUR head and make you hear the shit he hears. 

That's so good.

Thanks, Joe! 

I was going to make a slightly less weird character for this run through AW but I just couldn't do it. 

<3 the Maelstrom

Oh, my favourite part was that it was an entirely non-weird character. It's a dude who builds radios in a radio tower, and is trying to build a tape recorder. But spun with some grimdark tech-priest-ness.

I'm trying to take a very secular approach to the Maelstrom.