Setting

In the Chariot card I read willpower, ambition, and self-control in the face of power. In Temperance I see the changes one has to make in order to maintain balance.

Meditating on what kind of Road the Chariot might be like, and what kind of fun I wanted to have with the change- and balance-making features I was imagining for Temperance, I arrived on a version of “classic” wizardry—one informed by alchemy, a concept still in vogue in occult circles at the time the Pixie deck was published.  

Nyx here today!

This series on worldbuilding for Divination is mostly coming from Matthew, because the setting mostly comes from Matthew. But I wanted to break in and add a few thoughts about why I asked him to write these posts in the first place, and why I believe it’s not (totally) biased to say that this thing we’ve developed may be the single most genuine and complete fusing of tarot and tabletop roleplaying games that exists today.

The world of Divination is one wherein Pamela “Pixie” Colman Smith (a real life person who is lovingly fictionalized in our setting) depicted the Esoteric almost perfectly in her 1909 tarot deck. So perfectly, in fact, that the Art began to flow more freely into the Apparent, opening Third Eyes…

The truth is, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t making a tarot RPG. It seems like I always have, pretty much as long I’ve been GM’ing games and telling stories. When I found the tarot, I was an angsty teen in the 90s, looking for spooky things in spooky places. I was drawn to…