Lords of Olympus Q&A: Where The Pundit Admits a Glaring Omission

This is a continuation of the Q&A thread on Lords of Olympus, which can be found on theRPGsite; at the Official Amber DRPG, Erick Wujcik, and Lords of Olympus Forum.  If YOU have a question for me about Lords of Olympus, please feel free to post it there and I will try my utmost to respond to it within a week's time, both on the forum and here on my blog.

So, on to the current update:

Evermasterx asked:
Q: Dear RPGPundit,
in the description of Scrying you wrote:
"This power allows a character to see glimpses of unknown, distant places or the hidden fabric of the universe that reveals secrets about the present, past, or future."
It's seems from what follows in the book that one can only scry the present and the future (divination). Can you say more about scrying the past?
Or do you mean that you can discover something about the past only through what remains of it in the present?

A: Wow, thank you for pointing this out! I think maybe its one of the most glaring problems someone has detected yet.
The fact is, somehow this escaped me. It had been my intention, originally, to include details on how scrying could express details about the past. Obviously, somewhere in between the planning stages and the execution, I plumb forgot. That's all on me.

So let's look at how, within the context of the system as it is, someone with Scrying to could use it to get glimpses of the past.

Scrying Places, people, and things: Scrying can be used to observe the Present moment in distant places. I think it would also make a lot of sense that Scrying could be used to obtain glimpses of the past of places, people, and things. However, the big limitation I would put on this is that unlike scrying the present, in order to make enough of a psychic link to be able to observe the past, the Scryer must actually be physically present at the place in question, or have the person or thing in physical contact with them. So you can get a vision of a subject's past through that connection at the same level (based on Ego Class) as you would scrying the future.
So again, someone with Olympian Class or higher Ego will be able to get a clear and detailed vision; though of course it is entirely possible that the particular context of the vision may not be immediately clear.

I would suggest as a guideline to GMs that they should try to consider whatever is the most significant event, which left the most intense impact, on the past of the person, place or thing in question. Thus, this may or may not be useful; it may not be directly relevant to what the PC wishes to know about; on the other hand, it may provide the PC with some kind of important information that they hadn't expected, perhaps on a subject that might be of some use in any case, or in the future.

RPGPundit

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