Divination Obsession
(severe)
This is really a sub-type of the Obsessive Compulsion derangement (see The World of Darkness Rulebook, p. 98). The character feels the urge at least once a night to perform some sort of divination. He could read tea leaves, or examine a newspaper horoscope page, or read the Tarot, or get a divination from a 70s mass-market paperback capitalizing on Mayan prophecies. He might perform the Sortes Virgilianae, which is where you take a significant book – a copy of Virgil, or the Bible, or Shakespeare, or Milton, or the Bhagavad Gita, or the Qu’ran, or anything else – and open it on a random page, point at a random sentence and take that as a divination. He could shave the head of his ghoul and perform a phrenological analysis of the imperfections in her scalp. He might even find a cat and disembowel it, reading his future from the spatters its guts make on the floor. Players are encouraged to find interesting ways to read the future.
Symptoms
In game terms, it might be helpful for the Storyteller to have some divinations prepared; perhaps having a collection of clipped newspaper horoscopes for this very purpose. Divination methods and sample divinations appear throughout this book. Essentially, if given the opportunity to act on the divination (to do what it says) in any way, the character will. For example, if the divination says that a fair-haired stranger will bring good luck, the character may put his total trust and confidence in the first blond he meets, even if she turns out to be working for the enemy, and refuse to believe that she is bad news. If the player considers following the divination to be stupid, or dangerous, the player must roll Resolve + Composure with a -2 penalty to avoid doing what the divination says. If the roll fails, the character has no choice but to act on the divination, and will follow the literal word of the divination as closely as possible.
Type
Mental