Aspect Spotlight: The Hanged One

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 Hanged One is still undergoing some testing and will be available for download soon.

The Hanged One is one of my favorite tarot cards. I think all tarot people have cards they look for that will sell them on a deck if they’re good, and the Hanged One is one of mine.

A lot of artists draw an upside-down figure when they reinterpret the Hanged One. And upside-downness is important, but they’re so much more than that.

I think of Hanged Ones as yogis, bending themselves into shapes that offer them perspective and enlightenment, just as yoga does.

As a tarot card, the Hanged One is associated with abandonment, letting go, growth through a changed perspective. They’re all of that, plus the change of perspective itself. Every Hanged One is a zen state, a flow state, a state of mind that lets them be powerfully, blissfully present.

In that way, every athlete, musician, skilled technician, and competitor is a Hanged One. If you have to practice long hours to be good at it, you know them. They’re the funny internal loops you have to tie yourself in to become great at things.

They’re also everything you have to give up in order to grow in that way. You have to unburden yourself emotionally, physically, and temporally—even your time has to get sacrificed. You have to spend time upside-down if you want to see the world differently.

When you play the Hanged One, you’ll be the part of the Hero full of outsized focus, a figure focused on growing and letting go by placing themselves in a position to learn from difficulty.

In game terms, many of your Powers grant you Harm Effects—gameplay hindrances you’d ordinarily face as a result of pain or trauma—and give you benefits for having them. The complications of pain are feelings you can use, and feelings you can invite upon yourself and your fellow Aspects in order to grow.

The Disciplined One grants you a personal discipline—a divine passion that only you pursue and that none of the other Aspects benefit from.

By using The Complicated One, you may change the number on a just-revealed card, even more so if you’re carrying a Harm Effect.

You can wager your Psyche using The Patient One. Will you redraw a Test that was just read as a Failure for free, or will you have to pay? Becoming Depleted (completely out of Psyche) is a condition that you may thrive in.

Using The Balanced One, you can take on the burden of a Harm Effect currently carried by another Aspect, making your journey more complicated and theirs easier. You wouldn’t have it any other way.

You can teach all the Aspects to learn from limitations as you do using The Frustrating One, which will apply Harm Effects to them, but also restore their strengths.

When you play the Hanged One, you will benefit from states that often hamper the other Aspects (particularly the Depleted state), and from carrying Harm Effects. This allows you to play “expert” Divination if you want to, imposing penalties on your gameplay while earning lots of XP as a reward for doing so.

You’ll suffer sometimes, but that’s the way limitations work. They offer you enlightenment, but at a price. As the Hanged One, you’ll aspire to pay it elegantly, leading the Hero toward enlightenment, but walking a funny path to get there.

Read about the other Aspects here: