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Directors Notes: 219 - The Traveling Tarot Reader
🕑 Added 2022-12-02 15:34:24 +0000 UTCAnything is a tarot card if you're willing to spend time diving meaning from it. We've squeezed meaning out of countless things in the timeline of human civilization: stars, tea leaves, palms, groundhog shadows, 8-balls, and even that they-love-me-they-love-me-not game that involves the brutal murder of a daisy.
But it's hard to know what to focus on. We see SO MANY THINGS throughout each day, how would we begin to choose what to divine meaning from? The direction the squirrel runs out of the trash bin when we startle it in the morning? The length of a crack on the pavement on our way to the train?
Honestly, as I write this, I figure why not just bring your RPG dice with you. And right before a big presentation at the office, you can just roll for charisma. You roll a 1, you know to take your time, be very cautious. You roll a 20, you can loosen your inhibitions and just let fly as you press NEXT SLIDE.
Anyway, thinking about tarot and divination led me to making up a new tarot deck. I don't know much at all about the tarot symbology other than via osmosis, so I figured while my tarot brain is still smooth, why not make up a new set of suits, arcana, and images? Instead of drawing them (I'm not good at visual art at all), I'd just describe them.
[It's a fun little writing exercise. And because most of what I wrote was in sketch-form, it's not very well polished, which is why I'm not sharing it with you. But idk, maybe some day. Oracle decks are a thing, right? That's basically what I invented completely on my own, and has never existed until now.]
And of course, it fit well in Night Vale to have someone who roams the streets selling tarot readings from an unrecognizable deck, so I yanked a few things from my notes that seemed to work here, and then divined new meaning from images I just made up.
What I'm saying is I have a fun job.
Comments
Caedeus Desdemonia
I love the idea of an ad-libbed Night Vale "Oracle Deck". - That's what us diviners associate with a deck that doesn't have the 2 Arcana (Major Arcana and Minor Arcana) or the suits (Cups - Water for emotions, intuition and dreams, Wands - Fire for creativity and energy, Pentacles - for earthly needs and the home and bank account, and Swords - Air, for stabbing things usually yourself because your communication sucks and you need to be better at communicating or recognising communication.) It's of course a lot more detailed than that. But oracle decks are exciting and I think that something more... intuitive for Night Vale is something more fundamentally "realistic" to its place in the cosmos. Without patterns typically discernable or understood. Without mathematics that follow a particular story of events... open. Broad. Up to the diviner's intuition.
Adam Eaton
There is an RPG by Monte Cook games called Invisible Sun that uses a "soothe deck" as a mechanic. Monte has stated that several people have asked him what magick tradition he got the cards from, because they always seem to reveal a card that perfectly applies to the situation in their games. He insists that he just made up the cards himself from scratch and doesn't believe in tarot, but people refuse to believe him.π
