[Koji Arala]

Heyo chummers, haven't been able to track down the answer to this one so figured I'd ask the masses: What does a nature spirit know about its domain?

It's always been my understanding that the spirit(s) you conjure from a location is the spirit(s) "of" that location. The spirit of the stuffer shack, the spirit of 54th street, the spirit of Lake Superior, ect. I recall some discussion in one or several of the books that a nature spirit's awareness of topics (such as what a gun is or how one works) is tied to the domain that it's conjured from and that their physical appearance tends to reflect the emotional, historical and practical purpose of the area. What I'm curious about is if this extends to straight up knowledge of the things that happen in their domain that their summoning shaman can then question them about.

For some context, I'm currently running a game that leans a bit more toward investigation and espionage than gun play. The group's shaman, in service of this group dynamic, has been leaning pretty heavily on his conjuring abilities when it comes to crime scene analysis. For example, the group comes upon a contact murdered in his apartment, the shaman will whip up the building's hearth spirit and ask it if it saw what happened. Is this a thing that is generally understood to be possible?

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Possible, just not admissible.  I'd let the spirit make a Memory test against anything that's occurred - though depending on the general nature of the spirit, I would give it a penalty or bonus due to the nature of the event(s) you're talking about.  (It's a spirit, after all, not a god.) Murders, beatings, and other violence would incur a penalty with a spirit that's mostly used to nice stuff, or who has a shaman in the area that's basically been good to it, except if the violence happened to their 'pet people'.  A darker, more nasty spirit - one that, if it became a Free Spirit, might turn into a shadow type - would tend to pay more attention to that sort of thing.  On the flip side there, though, is the risk of summoning that sort of lingering malevolence ... because in all cases, you're going to be using services to gain the information ...