140. Augury

By default, nobody has access to augury, but a hocus’ followers, a savvyhead’s workspace, or other circumstances might give it.

When you are able to use something for augury, roll+weird. On a hit, you can choose 1:
• Reach through the world’s psychic maelstrom to something or someone connected to it.
• Isolate and protect a person or thing from the world’s psychic maelstrom.
• Isolate and contain a fragment of the world’s psychic maelstrom itself.
• Insert information into the world’s psychic maelstrom.
• Open a window into the world’s psychic maelstrom.

By default, the effect will last only as long as you maintain it, will reach only shallowly into the world’s psychic maelstrom as it is local to you, and will bleed instability. On a 10+, choose 2; on a 7–9, choose 1:
• It’ll persist (for a while) without your actively maintaining it.
• It reaches deep into the world’s psychic maelstrom.
• It reaches broadly throughout the world’s psychic maelstrom.
• It’s stable and contained, no bleeding.

On a miss, whatever bad happens, your antenna takes the brunt of it.

You know what’s strange about this move? Its name.

In ancient Rome, augurs were the dudes who interpreted the flight patterns of birds to divine the will of the gods. We commonly use the word augury to mean the act of reading physical signs and omens to predict what will happen.

Now look at that list of things you can choose from on a hit. None of them have anything to do with reading signs or omens, and they certainly don’t have any predictive powers. The choice that most closely resembles this traditional meaning is to “open a window into the world’s psychic maelstrom.” Presumably you then would get to see the omens and signs within the world’s psychic maelstrom to then interpret. But the other four options are ways to interact with or control the world’s psychic maelstrom in some way--to pull something out of it, to put something into it, to protect something from it, or to reach something through it.

So why use the word augury for this move? It’s a really interesting choice, and for some reason it feels like an important choice to me, even a revealing one. The Bakers are smart folks with impressive vocabularies and a poetic command of the language, so I have no doubt they could have found another word or phrase if they wanted. But no, they chose the word augury.

The latinate root of augur is the verb augere, which means “to increase.” Nothing in the move seems to suggest that “increasing” is an important aspect of it, so the root is probably not what they were after.

What I do think is important is that augury was performed solely by priests, people who bridged the gap between the desires of the gods and the actions of mortals. Similarly, all the acts of augury in this move bridge the space between the howling maelstrom and the mortal world. By using the word augury, the game signals that the augurs of Apocalypse World are priests and the world’s psychic maelstrom is something extra-human, perhaps a kind of primordial and spiritual paste made from the crushed and ground together parts of a pantheon of gods. There’s a whiff of the religious about the world’s psychic maelstrom, but not some Judeo-Christian religion. Augury points to Roman mythology, and what were the Roman gods but extensions of humanity, powerful beings with all the emotional turmoil and social drama that mortals possess? They are the most human-like of gods. The religious overtones of augury are nothing like those of Dogs in the Vineyard or Poison’d, but it’s there nonetheless. It’s a humanitarian and rather secular religion, but all the same it smells of souls and morality and life beyond this mortal coil.

So if that’s the case, who are the priests of Apocalypse World? The hocuses, certainly, with their followers and their ability to perform augury if they have the right kinds of followers. Brainers are gifted with a high weird, but they don’t really act as any kind of go-between, do they? They use the world’s psychic maelstrom for their own ends. An angel with the touched by death move can use the body of a dead or unconscious character to perform augury. And then there are the savvyheads of Apocalypse World. Other than brainers and hocuses, savvyhead is the only basic playbook that insists that each character has weird+2. What the hocus can do with her followers, and the Angel can do with an unconscious body, the savvyhead can do with machinery. I like the idea of the savvyhead being a kind of priest without a flock communing with people through the things they create rather than with them directly. Following this line of thought there’s an interesting analysis to be made about the relationship between humans and machinery in Apocalypse World.

As a side note, the only other basic playbook that even has the option to start with a weird+2 is the gunlugger. Why the gunlugger? What does that say about Apocalypse World? And is it significant that to gain a high weird the gunlugger must give up their cool?