Home Consultations

Home consultations are one of the signature gameplay loops in Witchbrook. A student of Witchbrook College visits a resident at home, sits down with them, and uses divination to answer a personal question. The scene is quiet and intimate: the client pours tea, the witch lays out cards or consults a star chart, and the two of them talk through whatever is on the client's mind. Chucklefish has confirmed that consultations are a specific expression of civic witchcraft, the practical vocation that turns classroom magic into community service across Mossport.

Overview

Consultations sit at the intersection of school life and town life. During the day a student takes Divination classes at the College Observatory, learning tarot card reading, and at night advancing to celestial work that involves communicating with the constellations. Back in town those same lessons become paid services: residents who cannot read cards for themselves book time with a trainee witch and ask for guidance on questions they care about. The developers have described this shape of civic witchcraft as a witch's vocation, the idea that magic is meaningful precisely because it helps ordinary people with ordinary problems.

The topics a home consultation can address have been publicly confirmed to include travel, finances, and love, with room for other personal subjects as the player's divination repertoire grows. A student with solid tarot technique can act as something like a trusted personal advisor for the citizens of Mossport, turning schoolwork into a social and economic activity.

How a Consultation Works

A consultation is a scripted, turn-by-turn scene rather than an open sandbox interaction. The general arc the developers have described runs through the same set of beats each time, with the details of each beat shaped by which client is present, what they want to ask, and which divination tools the witch has been studying.

• Receive the request. A resident asks a witch to come by the house, either through direct conversation in town or through the community's job board. The request names a broad topic (a trip, a money question, a matter of the heart) without locking the witch into a specific answer.

• Arrive at the home. The player travels to the client's address during a time window that works for both of them. Many consultations take place in the evening after the client finishes their own routine for the day.

• Set the table. The witch and client sit down together and the witch selects a divination method, typically tarot cards at the start of the school year and expanded celestial readings later on.

• Read the cards or stars. The witch draws cards or consults a chart and interprets what they show. This is the moment where classroom training actually pays off: a student who has been practising tarot will read the spread more confidently than one who has been cutting class.

• Give advice. The witch translates the reading into practical guidance the client can act on: whether to take the trip, how to handle a recurring expense, whether to confess a feeling.

• Close the visit. The client responds to the advice, pays the witch, and the two of them part, usually with an opening for future consultations if things go well.

Diagnosing Client Needs

Before the cards come out, the witch has to understand what the client is actually asking. Clients rarely state the problem with perfect clarity: a question that looks like a travel question may really be a love question in disguise, and a money worry may be rooted in a family relationship. Part of the consultation is listening carefully to the way the resident frames their concern, noticing the details of their home, and choosing the topic of the reading accordingly.

Because Mossport's citizens follow persistent daily routines, witches who pay attention to the town outside of consultation hours have a real advantage. Seeing who a client spends time with, where they shop, and what they worry about in casual conversation feeds directly into a more accurate reading once the cards are down on the table.

Crafting the Right Reading

Divination in Witchbrook is a discipline that rewards study. The daytime Divination classes at the College Observatory teach the basics of tarot: the meanings of individual cards, common spreads, how a reversed card changes an interpretation, and how to ask a question cleanly. Nighttime classes extend the practice into the sky itself, with students learning to communicate with the constellations and to fold celestial signs into their readings.

A home consultation does not demand ingredients or a potion the way an alchemy job would; instead it consumes the witch's preparation. Time spent practising at school, revising from textbooks, and learning new spreads is the raw material that makes a consultation go well.

Delivering and Following Up

Because the witch travels to the client rather than the other way around, consultations double as a tour of Mossport's neighborhoods. Clients live in houses that reflect their personality: a shopkeeper's flat above a storefront, a retiree's garden cottage, a College-adjacent dorm shared by classmates. Visiting these spaces builds familiarity with the town and frequently sets up follow-up interactions that are not strictly about the reading.

Follow-up matters. A good reading tends to produce a second visit, whether the client returns to ask another question, to report how the previous advice turned out, or to introduce the witch to a friend who needs help of their own. Poor readings, or advice that turned out badly, tend to dampen future demand and to shrink the witch's reputation across town.

Relationship and Reputation Rewards

Consultations pay the witch in three overlapping currencies: money, relationship, and standing. The coin earned from a reading is the most immediate reward, but the long-term payoff is usually social. A client who feels properly heard becomes a regular, and regulars tend to loop the witch into the wider community: dinners, seasonal festivals, introductions to romanceable townsfolk like Hana Sato at the Calico clothing shop. Over the course of the school year a consistent consultation practice quietly turns a new student into a trusted local figure.

Standing is earned through reliability as much as accuracy. Arriving when promised, listening before drawing, and giving advice that fits the client's life all feed into Mossport's shared sense of which students are taking the vocation seriously. This reputational layer ties consultations back into civic witchcraft as a whole: a witch who is known as a thoughtful reader will also get more of the other community jobs, from postal deliveries to festival work.

Variety of Consultations

Chucklefish has emphasised that no two readings are meant to feel identical. The pool of confirmed consultation topics is deliberately broad, and the same topic can surface in very different guises from one resident to another.

The breadth of possible questions means every client household becomes a small, self-contained story beat. A consultation with a nervous shopkeeper plays very differently from one with a College classmate or with an older resident who has been through the same question many times before.

Connection to Schools of Magic

Home consultations are the public face of divination, but they sit inside the wider system of magical disciplines taught at Witchbrook. Each school contributes something different to a witch's career, and consultations highlight how divination differs from its sister schools.

Because a consultation only exercises divination, students who want a steady consultation practice tend to prioritise their Observatory classes and put tarot revision ahead of other coursework when scheduling a visit with a client.

Consultations vs Other Civic Witchcraft

Civic witchcraft in Mossport is a broad umbrella, and home consultations are one option among many. The Oracle newsletter, authored by Eli Ivers, has framed civic witchcraft as taking all kinds: one student delivers letters for the Post Office, another sweeps up after weekend crowds, another fixes leaky water fountains before anyone notices, another runs a jam stall at the Sunday Market. Hana Sato's window displays at Calico are another example. Home consultations fit into this spectrum as the quietest, most personal option.

Because each student can pick which of these threads to pull on, two witches at the same school can graduate with very different reputations. A consultation-focused witch becomes the person residents think of when they have a personal question they cannot answer themselves, while a delivery-focused witch becomes the reliable face everyone sees dashing through the streets. Home consultations are simply the quietest, most inward form of the same underlying vocation: magic that exists to make ordinary lives in Mossport go a little bit better.