You've learned and taught and practiced the Way, and suddenly there are people around you who seem to listen. You've spent time in the hallowed learning halls of one branch of our Order or another, and your High Priest or Conclave or Presbytery has sent you to a distant township with an ancient and decrepit sanctuary, or to a distant land to teach and work among the elves.
This is when you're going to need Divination. Oh, sure, it's handy for finding your way out of the mountain lair of kobolds on occasion, but mostly, you'll need it for more prosaic stuff. I don't think I've done that more than once or twice in my ten years as a cleric.
That does not mean, though, that it is useless, one of those spells that end up gathering dust in your spell-attic. Because once you're a cleric and you've got responsibility for those who walk the path with you, you have to know where the heck you're going.
Divination does that. It gives you the lay of the land. It gives you the feel for your community. It gives you the sense of the warp and woof of where you're going to be trying to express the Deep Real into this plane.
If you cast it, and cast it well, your community will have a solid sense of itself, it's place, and the best way to to proceed.
How to cast this critter? There are two approaches. There's the classic and traditional casting, which requires more time, a high wisdom score, and a significant sacrifice. Then there's a newer form of casting, one that requires the assistance of other clerics and a couple of magic users.
The classic and traditional casting is the one we'll talk about first. Two sacrifices must be made as part of it: a sacrifice of your time and a sacrifice of calories. This is a walking-cast, an observational meditation. When you're finally ensconced in that new community, you cast the spell over a series of days by walking in an intentionally random pattern around your church.
You look around. You observe. You talk to people you meet. If you so choose, you can stop by individual cottages and huts and engage the villagers in conversation. In the casting, your job is to listen to what you hear, and actually see what's in front of you.
Here's where the high wisdom score comes in. What do the homes and storefronts you encounter tell you about the character of the community? What do your conversations tell you? If you rolled a pair of threes and a four on your wisdom scores, this might not come easy.
Low rollers...and you'll know if you're one...have this unfortunate tendency to talk when they should be listening. They show up at a door, and the conversation is all about them and what they want to say. They come with an assumption about what it is they're going to see, and with an assumption about how they're going to respond.
You learn nothing that way. The Creator of the Universe could be trying to whup you over the head with precisely the knowledge you need to further the goal of our Order, spoken through the mouth of that half-orc mother. But if you're sticking to your scripted pitch or rote casts of Chant, you won't hear it.
You can also fail to see what's around you. If you try to cast this spell trotting along on horseback or comfortably ensconced in a carriage, you're going to blunder right on by what the Real has to tell you. An undercooked Divination spell is like half-cooked chicken. You don't want to bother with it. If it ain't slow, the spell won't go, as the cheesy old mnemonic went.
So take your time. Move slowly. Absorb and perceive. You'll learn and encounter things that others will have missed, even those who've lived in the very same village for years. Funny thing about humanoids: we so often end up living like giant ants, just bumbling along a scent trail for years, utterly oblivious to the reality on the other side of that field.
That's the old school cast, but there's a new option now, one that involves casting your consciousness into the virtual plane. This cast is increasingly the approach of choice among younger clerics. Sure, it's scroll-driven, which can feel a bit like a quick and dirty way to approach it. But what matters is the awareness, and this will get you there.
The MissionInsite Fellowship scrolls and the Elven Percept scrolls are two that are particularly good at quickly and easily casting this one out there. The clerics who've worked hard to create them know their business, and while they tend to be multi-classed cleric/magic user half-elves, they're particularly good at crafting these very practical tools.
They'll tell you everything you need to know, or rather, they'll give you all of the stats and roll counts. What you need to know still rests in your ability to actually take in what you're encountering.
Which comes back again to wisdom, which if you ain't got it, well, what can I tell you? Even the most perfectly crafted scroll won't convince some clerics that maybe they shouldn't try to build a gathering in bugbear country.
Ultimately, I'm of the school that favors using both the older cast and the newer one. The two are deeply complementary, and give you a layered Divination that will prove profoundly helpful as you negotiate the challenges of the material plane.
Divination. Because it helps to have a clue what you're doing.
