The Game

There is a law that goes above the laws of man. It’s a law of nature—the law of nature—and a concept we make the subject of constant discussion. 

In its simplest, most base form, that law is: there is no law.

One of the first things everyone learns about the Death card is that it doesn’t mean death, it means transformation. That doesn’t stop it from coming up in every movie about witchcraft. 

While a lot of the Road of Death—The Shivering Road—is still being written, some of its elements are among the oldest of my creations in Divination.

So—this game isn’t quite a horror game, and it isn’t quite an adventure game, but I haven’t played a game of it yet that hasn’t included both horror and adventure.

I think most games I’ve played rely on an antagonist to bring the horror. I get that. If I encounter a monster in the real world somewhere, I’m going to scream and run and die, and I’d be genuinely horrified as I went. That’s a true source of horror: facing the unfaceable as it advances on you, intent on murder.

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…