A Neo-Orientalist Good-Luck Ritual

Cost: 1 minor charge.

This marginally useful ritual ensures that your fortune cookie fortune will come true. Some dukes compare this to buying a pack of trading cards: you rarely get what you want, but you always get something.

The best way to simulate this ritual out-of-game is to have some actual fortune cookies on hand (available at your local supermarket). Failing that, this site is useful. How the fortunes manifest is up to the GM, but they should be noticeable and directly related to their fortunes, if not particularly potent, and somewhat erratic in significance. One could provide either a Hunch, a more subtle turn of luck played out in the story, a bonus to a roll, or even a new skill. A few examples:

“Someone is speaking well of you.”

Make a Hunch roll for Charm, Lie, or a similar skill, for use in impressing someone or concealing a transgression.

“It’s time for you to explore all those new interests.”

The next time you make a roll that would be unskilled, gain an appropriate skill for it at 5% beforehand.

“Someone will invite you to a karaoke party.”

Well, someone does.

And so on.

Ritual Action: Go to an east-Asian restaurant. An east-Asian restaurant is defined as any restaurant that serves fortune cookies and gives its customers chopsticks by default. You must wear cat girl ears (either on a headband or a hoodie) and a Domoku shirt the entire time you are in the restaurant. Listening to j-pop on headphones helps, too, especially if you keep them on while talking to the waiter.

Order a meal. The meal must include (at least) a bowl of soup, a cup of tea, a main course, a full serving of white rice or noodles, and a piece of fruit. Impress your friends by eating every bite of it with chopsticks. You must completely clean your your plate. You must also mutter something in an east-Asian language after every bite. For these purposes, an “east-Asian” language is any language that a majority of the players who aren’t knowledgeable of geography or far-eastern culture of any kind agree is an east-Asian language. It doesn’t matter whether your oriental word of power has any significance. You don’t even have to know what it means, or pronounce it correctly. It’s debatable whether it even has to actually be a word from east of India as long as you think it is. However, if anyone successfully calls bullshit on whatever your explanation of the word is during the ritual, the ritual fails.

Finally, when your plate is completely clean, eat the fortune cookie. Eat only one; try to double-dip in one casting, and you fail. Say the word, break the cookie open, say the word again, eat one side, say it again, eat the other side, say it again, and read the fortune aloud for all to hear. Then say in “in the bedroom!” whether or not it makes sense, laugh, and say your word one last time. Pay, leave, and keep the fortune on your person until it comes true (usually within a week).