These haven't been stupid questions. AW is built on impressions, like the number: 3-harm is a thereabout measure of a mostly arbitrary cinematic event ex: enough to blow that random guy no questions, really hurt and probably kill that specific tough guy, and one more of those will be the end of you unless you're kitted for big-ass cinematic warfare. Because AW is about impressions, its important that people ask these questions. It's how we start to wrap our heads around the why, something we got to do if we're going to run these games.
On Augury
This has manifested in my games on five different occasions. Each one was so completely unlike the others that really, nothing we tell you here will be a good indication of it potential. Augury is defined by the maelstrom, something that is completely and utterly unique to each gaming group and probably each game of AW too. The maelstrom is the flavor that helps make the games feel to radically different, and because of that, this move tends to define itself when someone picks it up and does it.
Some examples:
CYBERPUNK -- I was running an AW game that replaced everything wasteland with glitz glam sleek tech, corporate gods and filth that crawls the streets beneath the high rise cities. The game took place in the filthy degenerate outdated undercurrent, which involved all the PCs having criminal rap sheets, tussling over turf, and forcing anti-terrorist over-reactions from the elite. Essentially it was a man-against-god humanity-against-technology, where the maelstrom was the parts of the technology that just seemed to get out of man’s reach. It was the noise echoing from the internet of things, the security cams with their millions of recorded unwatched minutes, the life inside the robotics.
Our Hacker was a Hocus. He was always speaking Technobabble and marshaling a hacker-group made up of his followers. When he used his followers to go go augury, he was calling them to their computers, pushing virus' and code and fishing into the maelstrom for whatever he wanted. He used his augury for a number of things throughout the game:
• Hacking into a government computer and altering files (inserting information)
• Hacking security cameras and other sensory objects (opening a window)
• Cracking a Gun-Tooting automated Robot and taking it over (contain a fragment of the maelstrom)
• Programming and essentially giving birth to his own AI (contain a fragment of the maelstrom
• Running counter-hacking to prevent a Big Corp from finding a Friend (isolate and protect someone from)
The options many different things, but one by one they sort of (sometimes) became:
• Persistent = It let him have more time, do more simultaneously, or have extended cover / awareness that always tipped him off "announce badness" to something before it hit him.
• Reaches Deep = He could get into the most secure files, the stuff normally just too deep to protected too
• Reaches Broadly = He got more information about tertiary things that were related to his attempt, all useful, sometimes even completely unexpected. It was during one of these that the spark of the AI maelstrom was revealed to have an agenda all its own.
• Its stable and contained, no bleeding = you didn't set off alarms getting whatever you were after, you've got time before they release what happened, or your hack didn't hit more (leak into infrastructure, start fucking with shit you use, etc) then was intended, etc.
Miss: your followers / antennae takes the brunt of it. His little hacker group got to grow to be something huge and effective on the world scale–at least, for a while before its members started getting caught, squealing, getting killed, jailed, etc. Made life complicated.
FALLOUT - I have examples from Fallout styled games where the maelstrom was a dying earth and the slowly decaying memory of the world that was before. I'm not going to detail it out right now, but essentially they used augury to expose pats of the world that had been nearly "lost to time". The decay of the world and the forgotten time-bombs related to that were a big influence on the maelstrom.
THE DEAD - I have examples from a Post-Magical-Apocalypse game we dubbed the Magikataculmus. Essentially magic got out of hand and became a wild storm that reshaped the world, killing just about everything in the process. FF6 world of Ruin style for those familiar. The maelstrom was both harnessed magic and the memories of the dead. Really it was the ghosts of the dead wandering in the thin veil between this world and the next, held there because there was still at least one person infected with the weird that remembered them. It was a creepy dark game where even the dead killed people, or people killed themselves because they were hallucinating dead people, that never did become clear (as intended). Anyway the maelstrom in that game reached back into the dead, but only as the living knew it. So you could try to see where a dead person is wandering (where he died, etc) but only if someone alive could place him there, and he could only tell you what someone alive knew, and he might be haunting you now that you remember him. Anchors of the dead mattered, so sometimes augury was used to erase something or someone forever, change how everyone remembered an event, move a ghost or capture one, creating haunting storms to harry opponents, to free themselves from a curse, to bring back the half-dead from the mitts of the maelstrom. Crazy.
ANTI PHYSICS - I have examples from a game where the maelstrom was landscape of physics as it broke down and fucked up space/time/physics. Augury got used to teleport there, to stop the spatial degradation of an area, and caused a rift in the world that tore an entire landscape threat/treasure into... somewhere/somewhen? big ass hole where water rolled down into a bottomless vortex. It was coming out somewhere else and pouring into the same ocean so its not like it was gonna run out of water and dry up... but still. Huge damn portions of the map were drawn and redrawn with augury. That game was a three-shot one so we never did see how far it could go.
NEW WORLD - And I had been attempting recently to run another game, it never got off the ground but the brainstorming launched the group into a massive space-station as it crashed into an earth-like planet. With the environment and chemical make up of the place doing /weird/ things to the survivors. We did play a session, and during that session augury was used to directly communicate with the essence of the maelstrom. Something much biggest then could be comprehended at the time. It was an open your mind and then ask GOD some questions, only the god has an agenda and you, you're just human, not some type of prophet. That could have gone in so many cool ways. Alas. I'm done writing this for now, I could probably keep going and going.
Edit: excuse the little typos. I corrected the worst ones.