The great empire is a prognosticracy

i want to fuck anise

...

Exactly the same way it is in Tales of the Abyss, the source of this thread. Pretty shitty.

What happened there?

In a medieval society it would be common for the nobility and clergy to occupy 10% to 20% of the population. So if only .1% has it to a useful degree then they would be occupying the highest levels of society.

>In a medieval society it would be common for the nobility and clergy to occupy 10% to 20% of the population
Horse cock.

Well, this is interesting.

The most important factor in all of this is the question of whether the future is fixed. If it is, then divination per se is useless: it can only tell you about events that are guaranteed to happen, so there's no point in acting on anything a diviner says. So let's take the less boring route and assume that the future is at least somewhat malleable. However, even a malleable future has the important property of being the same for everyone; two diviners of the same ability scrying the same thing should reach the same conclusions. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure how general relativity interacts with clairvoyance, but it's not relevant in this context.)

The next topic is that of what sorts of forecasts can be made. The utility of divination depends on its scale, accuracy, resolution, and reach: the nature of the governing body depends on the area or number of people which can be simultaneously scryed, the reliability of the resulting forecasts, the degree of detail with which forecasts can be made, and the temporal limit on a diviner's ability to see into the future. A highly accurate forecast about one person has a different kind of utility from a vague prophecy about the far future of a kingdom. In this case, it's plausible to assume that the nobility wishes to keep itself in power, so their primary concern is looking into the future for signs of civil unrest, invasion, natural disasters, or other adverse events which could lead to their deposition. Individual royals or nobles are probably concerned with their own futures as well, so they probably use divination to see who they're going to marry, whether they'll be subject to assassination attempts, etc.

Scrying for the good of the realm probably happens at regular, frequent intervals, to see the effects of present-day actions. Personal scrying is likely more idiosyncratic, but still frequent; if you stick to a schedule, then it's possible that someone might manage to kill you if you ever develop a blind spot about the future. (For similar reasons, diviners may also take care not to reveal exactly how far into the future they're capable of seeing.) On the whole, though, courtly intrigue probably ranges from boring to nonexistent, because nobody has all that much to gain from it— the nobility collectively protects itself— and those with the most power, the royalty, are also the best-equipped to defend themselves.

Scrying the past and present is probably rarely done except as an adjunct to scrying the future; it may aid in the interpretation of a prophecy, but knowing past or current events just isn't as useful as knowing future ones.

Marrying into the nobility is the main means of improving ones' station in life, but it's insanely difficult. Nobles want to protect their bloodlines from dilution, and in any case diviners can see how a possible relationship will pan out before it happens, so they're excellent at finding their soulmates, and possibility somewhat resistant to making bad decisions based on, say, sex appeal. This could lead to a situation where inbreeding among the nobility balances out their capacity for divination— they can see the future, but they're too stupid to do anything with the knowledge— but that setting would be dumb, so let's not do that. (Now that I think about it, though, there is something to the idea that intelligence and self-control would help a diviner choose between possible futures and realize them, respectively.)

Nobles would be good at business ventures, avoiding lousy financial decisions and investing in profitable ventures.

This is good and helpful. Thank you.

The kingdom would be difficult to attack, because the people with the most to lose, the royalty, are also the best seers, and the rest of the nobility has a vested interest in backing them up. This advantage might very well extend to foreign policy in general, but I somehow doubt that it would apply to conquest. It's just my intuition, but I suspect that predicting the actions of the enemy would be highly useful in a defensive engagement, but logistical concerns would dominate in an attempted invasion. (Although I guess the divinocracy could slowly work out what resources were needed to conquer some area.)

Ordinary non-clairvoyant folks would be at the mercy of weird, arcane commands from on high. They'd be accustomed to obeying dictates that made no apparent sense, issued to secure the best possible future. However, the majority of dictates would probably be fairly ordinary. The future is unpredictable, but generally not wildly so.

My empire's administration employs 30.000 seers and treats them as a strategic resource, but bloodlines don't affect one's potential to have prophecies. The sucess rate is about 65% up to a year or a hundred kilometers away. They are treated and paid very well, but also have many restrictions imposed by the empire. Seers cancel each other out. No use trying to find out what the other found out.

Besides, make a good ritual with many sacrifices to the gods and you may get a prophecy yourself. This isn't the actual future, but a god or goddess informing you based on things he/she knows, sees etc. Not unlike using the internet to find out things.

The rules of prophecy are somewhat enigmatic, so there is an imperial institution dedicated to understand cryptic sayings, improve the sucess rate, find new seers and work out each one's best way to divine.

Prophecies have a momentum and cheating ability directly proportional to the amount of people believing in them. "Ancient Evils" are villains which figured out this and implanted beliefs that allow them to return is slain.

If you can't marry into wealth, you might want to become a seer by training. That's not as good as being nobility, but it's pretty damn good: you get paid well, you get a major boost to your social status, you have amazingly good job security, and, lest we forget, you can see into the future! In addition to dominating the general run of white-collar jobs, well-trained seers would probably have a strong presence in academia, though not an exclusive one, as the training needed to become a seer takes time away from studying insects or rocks or mathematics or other specialties. (Maybe seers frequently call on other kinds of expertise when they receive visions that are hard for them to interpret.) People who are good at training others in divination magic probably get a lot of respect, even from the nobility.

There's practically no point in trying to create a fake prophecy, because everyone can see the same future; if something looks suspicious, it's easy enough for another diviner to check. This may not strictly apply to cases involving huge rituals, but you really want to have some kind of checks on those anyway. Perhaps you'd do them in pairs, with two unrelated seers, or groups of seers?

A Parliament of Seers might be more interesting, because it allows for some argumentation between diviners. A monarch or emperor, on the other hand, is an absolute authority, and the scope for argumentation there rests primarily on the question of whose advice he or she decides to take. (And, of course, the monarch/emperor could always look into the future to see the possible futures that advice might bring about...)

I can easily imagine a bored and silly young noble forgoing divination as a stifling and dull way of life, deciding instead to make decisions on the basis of coin flips or dice rolls or such.

Oh, I'm sorry, I hadn't seen that. What do you mean by "cheating ability"?

I suppose I'd have to think about this some more. 65% isn't all that hot; for a binary question, it's better than a coin flip, but not by much.

When you add the belief part in, something about this scenario starts to remind me of a Keynesian beauty contest (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest ), but I'm not sure what it is.

The clergy and nobility were the ones in charge of any place that wasn't some merchant town back then and for nobility it's not just the guy holding the title but their family is counted as well

>Oh, I'm sorry, I hadn't seen that. What do you mean by "cheating ability"?
>Prana is the primordial element from which all others are made. It is also know as life-force or soulstuff, because souls are self-contained and organized acumulations of prana. Any and all sentient beings have souls*, while animals have proto-souls. Having a soul in the first place demands that something has its own name, making it distinct enough that it may acquire spiritual links with other soul-possessing beings. Such links are called "ley lines", happening whenever one develops feelings of any kind upon something**. Prana flows through ley lines***.
A prophecy becomes a focus for ley lines and develops a reservoir of prana coded into its details. If you fit in enough, you get the benefits of this. Know when the chosen one suddenly acquires a power he never knew he had, ignores his own wounds etc? That was him being benefited by the prana reservoir.

> 65% isn't all that hot; for a binary question, it's better than a coin flip, but not by much.
Yes, but situations such as floods as taxes to be paid rarely are that simple. Plus, there is some value in knowing things that aren't likely to happen because the 5% hit seer said it.

>When you add the belief part in, something about this scenario starts to remind me of a Keynesian beauty contest (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest ), but I'm not sure what it is.
Not sure what to make of this, I'll have to digest on it a bit.

So i, too have some questions regarding the setting.

One, elaborate on the political camps. Is there one for extremist defiers who try to break prophecies on principle,
or maybe some who have the ability but never really use it for anything?
And two, is there anyone in the setting who has no destiny to tie to any prophecy?
And if there is, how would the empire react?
Even the top brass getting extremely cryptic wishy-washy results,
or maybe the seances just fizzle out if someone tries to read his future?

I really want to understand if this is a genuine interest in running a setting like this in a ttrpg or if this is just a thought experiment, because I can't see this setup leading to an interesting plot without conflicting prophecies or the power to overturn divinations.

In fact, the whole idea of infinitely recursing divinations, where people who see the future are seeing the future where people who haven't looked at it yet have already done so and made decisions based on what they have seen just seems like a massive headache to prep with.

Please make this setting into something worth discussing, OP.

Now, if you're actually going by Tales of the Abyss, you're leaving out a whole cadre of ambiguity the game uses to convey its twists.

I think it would be interesting to pair it with the city covered by a massive Zone of Truth. Thematically speaking.