Minor concerns

Did a bit of event generation for my upcoming horror game. Like the NPCs I explained before I've been using tarot cards for these. A much simpler design as this is just littering the sandbox with shiny things for my players to look at so today I think I'll talk a bit about tarot cards.

Tarot decks have 2 sets of card "types" that don't even seem related. Arcane major which goes from zero to 21 where people are more familiar with including the infamous Death card. The Arcane Major is major happenings in ones life, when one shows up it should be payed attention too, though seemingly all tarot readings in movies has Major Arcane after Major arcane which is sometimes appropriate but is silly with how often it happens.

The other type is the Minor Arcane. This is the daily life events which are probably better for cold reading and normal things if not as interesting as the major arcane. There are 4 suits of 14 cards numbered from ace to king. If this sounds like a regular playing card deck it's because the modern ones were based on tarot cards without the major arcane and combining the knight and page into the jack while changing the suits. The four suits follow a general theme and I'll go over them. Pentacles or more likely known a coins is largely based around money issues and goods. Swords is the second suit, it commonly has cards easily interpreted as reasons for things, easily negative reasons. Cups the third suit is commonly based on emotions. The last of the Minor Arcane is Wands, it is typically people and their status or actions. While this is the general theme each card is different and some change meanings based on other minor arcane in the reading.

Another theme in Tarot is the reversed card which strengthens,minimizes, inverts the meaning of the card on hand. It's generally easier for the Major Arcane than the Minor with how they go. For instance Eight of Cups has a meaning of "The card speaks for itself on the surface, but other readings are entirely antihetical - giving joy, mildness, timidity, honor, and modesty" from the Radint Rider-waite booklet I have. A booklet that I have caused to be very worn out due to how much I look through it even though I've only had these things for a few months now and looks like I won't be working on only memory any time soon.

It's been fun playing with them especially after playing with some of the persona series. For my games it has taken a lot of sitting around doing nothing but worry if an idea I have is good for the game. For better or worse using them as seeds gets me to work faster and pump out ideas for this game. Currently have a list of 40 events to scatter throughout the game generated by this, and a cast of roughly 30 NPCs to play multiple personality disorder with. I am actually aiming to increase these numbers a bit more too.

Random NPC tarot creation

Well I talked about it yesterday so I might as well do it today. Also a confirmation about Shaw's inklings about this being similar to Shin megami Tensei ideas. While not completely taken from there it's where I got a lot of learning about the cards. Basing a character completely off an arcane major is a little too cheap for me, too little surprise. So without further delay my Random NPC generation method.

First:  The Fate Card. Out of only the Major Arcanes is the fate card. It's a binding force for all the following cards be it primary going with or against such a fate.

Second: The Mask card. This is obvious a persona refrence but it works, it's what the person appears like to the world be it how they project themselves or just how they end up being percieved.

Third: The Impression card. This is important for me for NPCs. It could be just how I have all other NPCs who don't know that particular NPC reference them as that's their only exposure or how the party gets to first meet them. Typically it's first impressions, just some things that are easily remebered about the character regardless of their mask.

Fourth: The Action card. How the NPC goes about things, or things they have done in the past and are remembered for. It's self explanitory to a degree though can get tricky.

Fifth: The Reason card. This can help lend a lot of help to the Impression, the Mask, and The action card. It's an event or a thought process that makes the character what it is today.

Sixth: The Hope card. This is what the character wants (or fears) to happen. Like the Reason card it retroactivly helps with all the cards before it and can tie them together.

So with that out of the way I'll go about generating an NPC with my Rider-Waite deck.

The Fate: Strength. The Strength card is a card about power, though it can represent the struggle with ones self. We'll see which works better after the others.

The Mask: Knight of Cups. The Knight of cups has a list of things involving messages, arriving, advancements and other such things. For a mask this easily can be used as a charming person. One who goes about doing things involving other people. A life of the party person.

The Impression: The world. A major arcane card, while I don't make a big deal about them in these readings they help a lot more than the minor arcane due to their nature. The world Is the journey card, going about places but also arrival at the end in some instances. It does fit the charming persona that has been somewhat established, always doing things with other people. Disapearing on trips or other assorted adventures.

The Action: Reversed The moon. I use reversed tarot cards, what a reversed card generally means is an inverse of the meaing, or in some cases a strengthening or deluding of some aspects. The moon is a somewhat dark card. Talking about hidden enemies and deception. The little booklet I have likes to reduce the aspect of the moon and for this it fits. The character is known for streching the truth on more than one ocasion or outright fabricating lies to carry a conversation.

The Reason: Reversed Two Swords. Swords is rarely a happy bunch of cards, this sword however has a meaning in Conformity, courage, friendship and a few other nice things. Normaly reversed it means imposter, falsehood, and disloyalty among a few other things. As a reason this really works for this charcter, could make a very dark reason but today I shall make it silly. They were mistaken for another person at a party and shown the town under a lie. Now the lie continues in some fashion. Simple enough.

The Hope: Seven of Pentacles. Every once in a while you run into means that are conflicted with another. Seven of pentacles has quite a few readings, the one you settle on is going to based on other cards. For this character with all the fun loving roguery I'll settle on business. With all his trips and other actions they could be making up some form of clientele or business partners. Always charming everyone in hopes of further gaining their business or suport in the future he keeps on rolling like a ball of energy.

So with these taken as a whole we get this.

A person of considerable power of personality. Always in a state of motion he travels about entertaining others at events even if qutite a few stories are far fetched. Actions stem from an incident in the past where he found out that some lies and fun can help quite a bit especially with meeting new people. With this there is hopes of the busniess partnerss of the now and future look favorably upon the person.

And that's what we have. Hopefully this has been somewhat of a fun read.

Progress day

And for once I use an image  that is not scribbles.

I'm taking the rest of the day to spruce up some projects I have been lacking on, and I have quite a few so this will be a short post. I have the Combat Test project that I'm going to work on later, some planing for a possible instance in a game tomorrow, and a stack of homebrew that could use my cold hearted and fun destroying eyes look over. Since those would take too long I'll go on about what I was doing when I realized it was about time for me to start this up, and it relates to the picture even.

For a while I have been designing a sandboxish horror investigation game for my group. Using basic d20 resolution and systems via Mutants & Masterminds I'm not giving my players much to work with, the system chosen is basically for me to have a good hold on running the game and making monsters with it. Since it was a sandbox game I decided I need a huge cast of non playing characters to mess with. Not being one to actually have off the cuff creative ideas had some inspiration and the entire concept of how I'm making this game came from it. I generated all my NPCs from tarot cards. An Arcane Major for their 'fate' and a variation on the 5 card spread for who they are and went from there. I didn't even own tarot cards so I made a virtual deck in python that allowed me to test this out in rapid progression. The result, some unexpected and wonderful created poor souls for my Players to befriend before the problems start to sprout up.

Tarot cards are some old things that were primarily for card games. In fact dropping the Arcane Major and the knight will give you a standard playing card deck of sorts. More commonly we know it for fortune telling purposes. Mostly it's cold reading. The majority of the cards are based around mundane everyday things that can easily be cold read into being important. Major Arcane like The Tower pictured are generally more important, more focused, while somehow being more ambiguous than the minor arcane. Taking The Tower for example means generally bad things, it's one of the bad cards to draw. It's things not working out, being beyond your control, and just bad things happening. It was originally the fire at some point as the picture suggests, as in the old days if you were in a tower or castle and the bottom floors caught on fire you were generally unable to do anything beyond jump out. While it is a grim card it can be applied mildly to situations, you pull up the tower card and ask if anything out of the persons control has been making you feel down or causing unneeded worry and you'll get something. In whatever spread you just make attention to it and move on.

I don't believe in the divination properties of such cards. I do however believe using their piece-mailed ideas to create characters or events is quite interesting and rewarding. It has been saving me a lot of time when coming up with a 25+ list of npcs the players will regularly have a chance to interact with. It has also given me quite a few good starting points for event ideas. I'm not the most creative but somehow I can take things and wrap them into something applicable to an idea so it's been a good discovery for me. Maybe I could even start up some tarot posts on this blog later but for now I'm going to focus on making at least a dozen more events for my players.