Aspect Spotlight: The Empress

This post is part of a series focusing on the eight Aspects—the “playbooks” of Divination if you will. Learn how each one represents its tarot card in the Hero’s psyche and how it plays, including a spotlight on a couple Powers for each one. The entire series is linked at the bottom of the page.

The Empress is the force of abundance—she’s everything you get to have when there’s more than enough resources to go around. That’s art, civilization, celebration, culture, pretty much everything we enjoy and call life. She’s the good stuff.

There was a time before her where we didn’t share and didn’t settle down, an animal way of living in our distant past but not erased from our genetic memories. That time was an era of her mystic (if not romantic) spouse, the Emperor. The kill-or-be-killed part came first, from nature; the blood-in-tooth-and-nail time before civilization, that was undeniably his domain.

That means this era of peace and prosperity and seemingly endless abundance might be mostly hers, or becoming hers slowly. She is younger than her bloody spouse, after all.

Hers isn’t a world of constant hunting, predation, disease, and death. Hers is a world of artwork, celebrations, family dinners, and found family. She’s why our lives aren’t horrible hellscapes of constant warfare. She is pure, delightful peace. The promise of future generations. The conditions required for happy children and happy societies.

When you play the Empress as an Aspect of the Hero, you play their connection to divine abundance—and all the great things that come as a consequence of that. Your Powers reflect that in the ways they create energy for you and your fellow Aspects, and in how they establish and enhance your connections with others.

You might use Inviting Presence to make yourself a social butterfly, more able to charm and see through the charms of the people you’re interacting with. Everyone loves the Empress.

You can call a relationship a Sacred Bond thereby immunizing an NPC to all the powers of the fellow Aspects, except the ones you allow. When you truly care, you’ll be the one to decide who the Hero is and isn’t connected to.

The Empress is a negotiator, but when pushed, she’s hard to knock down. With Enduring Force, you can offer the Hero rare benefits against Passive Tests—the unexpected and assailing forces of the world.

With Gaze of the Empress, you can shock people at any time, offering moments to drive the story in unexpected directions when interacting with the people of your world.

Players that get into the social dynamics of TTRPGs will enjoy the Empress for the ways she interacts with NPCs, and in the ways she interacts with her fellow Aspects. She manages resources for the other Aspects (like Psyche—the fuel of their Powers) while controlling the way the Hero maintains their relationships.

But even if you make an Empress with few connections, there are plenty of opportunities and ways to use her to make a community in the mind. You can keep yourself and your fellow Aspects going when all else fails.

Read about the other Aspects here: