Seers of the Bright Eye

The making of the Made Gods required a more than mortal awareness of the flow of arcane energies and divine numina. While the rarefied excellencies of awareness that went into creating these artificial gods is long since lost, the Seers of the Bright Eye have managed to retain the more prosaic arts of foretelling and far-seeing that win them their current coin and influence. Lesser Seers are little more than street-corner fortune-tellers, using a few small arts to puzzle out what a petitioner wants to be told of the future. In cities were several dwell, they usually form together into formal guilds of oracles, the better to avoid treading on each others’ prophecies and to train apprentices in the art. These novices are often recruited from likely urchins, and are little more than slave labor. Many of them have no actual magical talent whatsoever, and make their fortune with a glib tongue and a skill at cold reading. Some Seers with actual talent or determination refine their abilities to truly behold the future and cast their senses beyond their imme- diate surroundings. While the future is always mutable, they can gain hints of what is to come and visions of likely future events. This gifted elite finds service in the courts of nobles and princes, though most are regularly forced to prove the strength of their gifts by their suspicious patrons. This gift is hindered by the relatively simple warding practices that can serve to blind a Seer’s vision. Any location wrought with these wards becomes impenetrable to a Seer’s magic or future sight. Any competent occult adept knows how to lay these wards, but they also require regular tending to maintain their power. Exceptionally pow- erful and costly wards can last indefinitely, however, so long as they remain physically intact.

Structure

Apprentice The apprentice can determine likely immediate good or bad outcomes from a choice, detect curses or magic, pinpoint the time and location of the caster, and identify a person’s predominant character traits if they have been seen or their birth date is known. Adept The adept can gain brief visions of familiar people and their surround- ings, identify magic items and standing spells, get visions of important events likely to happen to them in the next week, overhear the sounds of a remote place they’ve visited before, and locate lost objects familiar to them. Such scrying never lasts more than a half-hour per spell cast. Master The master can locate people they’ve seen or had carefully described to them, ask questions about probable futures and receive yes or no answers, gain visions of where to go to find something, and scry distant locations known to them. Repeated queries about a single future topic tend to distort the readings, however. Archmage Archmages can penetrate weak wards against divination, such as those laid down by occultists of less than master expertise in their low magic tradition. They can also locate people or objects on a casual descrip- tion, provide a detailed oracular description of a likely near-future event, or create a movable scrying point in a distant location. Their scrying spells last for an hour each at most.

Type

Social, Brotherhood