KP Horary, or Prashna, answers a single pressing question without a birth chart. You concentrate on your question, pick a number from 1 to 249, and choose the category it belongs to - marriage, career, finance and so on. That number fixes the Prashna Lagna (the horary ascendant) and its sub-lord, and a Krishnamurti Paddhati chart is cast for the exact moment you ask. The tool then reads the relevant houses and gives a clear Yes, No or Uncertain verdict with the reasoning behind it.
Krishnamurti Paddhati divides the zodiac into 249 unequal parts. Each of the 27 nakshatras is cut into nine sub-lord spans in the proportion of the Vimshottari dasha years, which gives 243 spans; six of those spans straddle a sign boundary and are entered once in each sign, which is why the table has 249 rows and not 243. The number you pick selects one row and fixes the Prashna Lagna - the ascendant of the question - along with its all-important sub-lord. This is why no birth details are required: the number itself supplies the starting point.
The ascendant is taken at the starting degree of that sub-division rather than its middle or its end. That is an arbitrated default and not an inherited habit: of the three candidate conventions, only the starting degree reproduces the anchor printed for number 145 (Libra 29 degrees 26 minutes 40 seconds, star Vishakha), and the sub's ending degree is ruled out because the 249 intervals are half-open. The planets are then placed for the moment your question is taken up, and the twelve houses are anchored to that Prashna Lagna.
Each life matter is read through specific houses, and the verdict turns on one object: the cuspal sub-lord of that matter's primary house. The tool takes the houses that sub-lord signifies and sets them against the category's own favourable and negating groups. The answer is Yes when there is at least one favourable hit and the favourable hits are not outnumbered; No when the negating hits outnumber them; and Uncertain when neither group is signified at all. The Ruling Planets of the moment - seven of them, the sign, star and sub lords of the ascendant and of the Moon plus the day lord - are computed and printed beside the chart as a separate check you can make yourself, and do not enter this verdict.
Eleven categories are offered, and each one names its own favourable and negating house groups, so the same chart can promise one matter and deny another. The verdict prints the significator houses it found on both sides rather than only the conclusion:
KP is defined on Placidus cusps, not on whole signs: the KP volumes instruct that the chart be prepared by the Western semi-arc (Placidus) system, and five independent KP-school sources attest it. That matters here because in KP the sub-lord of a house cusp, and not the sign sitting on it, decides the matter for that house - and Placidus houses are unequal. Measured on a Delhi chart they run from about 22.75 to 34.75 degrees rather than a flat 30, so an equal-house ring would place every cusp except the first wrongly, by as much as 4.7 degrees.
A horary ascendant, though, is not read off the clock: the number fixes it. The remaining eleven cusps are therefore recovered by inversion. The tool searches the day the question is taken up, at the place it is taken up, for the instant at which the sidereal ascendant equals the Prashna Lagna, and reads the Placidus cusps there. The search window is exactly one sidereal day centred on the moment of asking, which is the length that contains exactly one such crossing. Above roughly 66.5 degrees of latitude the solver reports a failure instead of an answer, which is the same boundary at which Placidus houses cease to exist at all, and every result carries the residual it actually achieved so the ring can be checked rather than trusted.
No. The number you pick from 1 to 249 supplies the ascendant and its sub-lord, and the chart is cast for the moment you ask. Your date and place of birth are not used at all.
Sit quietly, focus fully on your one question, and let a number from 1 to 249 come to you. In KP the number is treated as a meaningful signal of the moment, so pick it intuitively rather than by calculation.
Uncertain means the significators and cuspal sub-lords are giving mixed signals, so the chart does not clearly promise or deny the matter. You can wait and ask again later with a fresh number when the situation feels clearer.
Each of the 27 nakshatras is divided into nine sub-lord spans in the proportion of the Vimshottari dasha years, which gives 27 times 9, or 243 spans. Six of those spans cross a sign boundary, and a span lying in two signs is entered twice, once per sign. 243 plus those 6 split rows is the 249 numbers a querent chooses from.
For educational purposes. Astrological interpretations are traditional and not a substitute for professional advice.