goblin.zone

Reading Tarot for GMs

There's a lot of guides online for how to read tarot. Seemingly, however, everybody has something to sell. I often find these guides circular, vague, self-contradicting and unhelpful.

Which is a shame, because tarot reading is a lot of fun. While I don't believe in the mysticism, I do think that it can help you structure a conversation with yourself - bringing in questions and getting you making links you might not have thought of otherwise.

For GMs this is massively helpful. Any question you or your players have can be answered by a quick reading. The power of tarot at the table is its flexibility. The same tools can generate anything, and you can make the reading as simple or complex as necessary. That same potential to introduce links or questions you hadn't thought of is a potent one.

Where to Start

Joe Sparrow Joe Tarot Get a tarot deck! I love this one by Joe Sparrow. Which deck you get doesn't really matter, but I'd recommend one with unique (non-mirrored) art on each card. It can help a lot with readings (especially if you might struggle to remember the 'standard' reading for a card).

The Structure of the Deck

The tarot deck consists of four minor arcana (Cups, Wands, Swords and Staves) and the Major Arcana.

The minor arcana of the tarot deck were what eventually evolved into the standard 52 card deck, and just like in your standard deck you have numbered cards (1-10) and a court of face cards (Knave, Knight, Queen and King).

The major arcana consist of 22 numbered cards, each with a unique name.

Tarot cards have fallen out of fashion, overtaken by the simplified 52 card deck - but tarot cards were the progenitor. Originally designed for trick taking games in the 15th century, the major arcana were the trump suit. Cartomancy (using cards to predict the future) came later in the 18th century, but was just the latest in a long history of people using games of chance for prophecy.

A lot of tarot readings just make use of the major arcana, but every card in the deck has a unique meaning.

The Structure of a Reading

When you read tarot cards, you arrange them into a configuration known as a spread.

The spread assigns a unique significance to each card in it.

For example, the standard three card spread assigns one for each of the past, present and future.

There are a lot of spreads out there. I'll go through four below (one card, three card, Celtic Cross and the Romany Spread) but you'll note that they're quite wishy washy. Feel free to hack, chop and change the spreads as you see fit.

This has me thinking that I might want to put together a collection of tarot spreads specifically for GMs, so stay tuned!

Reading a Card

When you draw a card, you can consider a few things:

It's very likely that these factors won't line up. Where I find tarot works well is that in lining up and reasoning through how they could work you end up with something interesting and appropriate.

The Minor Arcana

The four suits represent, respectively:

And each value puts a twist on that:

The Major Arcana

Each major arcana card has a unique meaning:

Useful Spreads

One Card

Quick and simple, have a question in mind (e.g. What's this guy really after? What's this Inn like on a weekday evening?) and draw for an answer.

Three Cards

Often used for Past, Present and Future or three approaches to a problem.

The beginning, middle, end structure makes it useful for generating stories (myths, rumours, backstories, quest outlines)

Other standard spreads (e.g. Celtic Cross or Romany Spread) tend to be too slow to be any use in play, but might make sense during prep.