Darling Divination

So one of the Important Aspects of my Winterhaven story is that the Pfeni rely upon runes for divination- but since I'm setting this in a fantasy world (with magic!) I didn't want to just fall back on the stereo-typical Germanic runes.  So I pulled a(n off-brand) Tolkien and made up my own.  And, of course, I decided to make up an entire divination system to go with them because hell, why not?

In the end I settled on twenty-five runes, with meanings so complex and incestuous (and still in development) that it would take several lifetimes to master them- which, fortunately, the Pfeni have had.  You can cast them like the runes we're familiar with, but more often they get laid out in patterns/spreads, like tarot cards.

(The runes aren't actually carved on squares- I was just working on graph paper at the time.  Don't ask.)

It's a serious rabbit-hole of World Builder's Disease, and has already sucked up more hours of my life than I should really admit- and I can't help but find myself thinking, "You know, if you didn't want to draw this story, you wouldn't have to spend so much time developing a bunch of symbols..." and then I'm all, "Pish tosh, this is superawesomefunplus!"

Part of why it's so superawesomefunplus is because for once I don't have to do any friggin' research- I've spent my entire (reading) life  educating myself on various forms of divination, so now I can just run around crazy as a kid in a water feature.  It's fun.

(Actually it's also been fun to do research on the flora and fauna of the Arctic and Antarctic- a subject which I also have a bit of grounding in- it's like this is the story I was always meant to tell...)

Speaking of drawing (remember that, two paragraphs ago?) here is a reindeer, along with a list of some of the patterns the runes can be cast in:

DEH

In her antlers you can see where I was working out the rune Deh, aka "The Deer".  Can you guess what some of the others are?  Don't be fooled by the fact that Deh and deer happen to align on the first letter (although Byr does that, too)- it was completely unintentional.