Divination In My Games: Part II - Recent Gaming

I posted Monday about Divination in the old days - especially my AD&D games.

What about more recently - specifically, my 10-year GURPS campaign and my more recent 7-year run of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy? And that two-session delve into White Plume Mountain?

Let's take a look.

What counts as Divination?

If you just mean spells that gain you knowledge, divination magic is completely routine now. It's routine to use Seek Earth to search for precious metals, Seeker to find lost objects, Seek spells of all sorts to locate almost anything, Summon Spirt to question the dead, and so on.

It's actually become fairly routine. It's so routine that we saw Augury used in WPM, and I didn't even really know how the spell worked since no one ever used it in my AD&D days. The people I play with now* use spells to detect things.

But how about a more narrow definition - spells which give extraordinary ranged senses or predictive answers about the future?

I cast "GM gives us a hint."

We get significantly less of that, but we still get it.

We've had a fair amount of Crystal Gazing in my current game. We've had direct prayers for hints to the Good God. We've had a little bit of History and Ancient History castings to determine what happened in the past.

While GURPS does provide some "ask the GM" style divination, we don't have that many of those spells ready for use. Prereqs and time pretty much limit that.

But my players are much more aggressive with using magic to determine the answer to puzzles, root out history and backstory, and otherwise find out the easy way what something does before they mess with it.

Because of this, I expect that if we played more AD&D (hey, it's possible), we'd see more use of Commune and Augury and Contact Other Plane.

Divination is a really interesting tool that we sadly underused in my earlier gaming. This group is much more willing to spend resources on "find out" and not husband them all for "do stuff" like we did in the "good" old days.



* which actually has one overlapping player, who played in my high school AD&D and Rolemaster days, played GURPS with me in college, and played in my previous GURPS campaign as well as the current one. It's worth keeping good players.