Oracular Randomness in Live Text RP

Back at the end of May, I decided to once again join the blogwagon hosted by Mr. Prismatic Wasteland. I followed the procedure described, and ended up with a goal of publishing a post on June 10th, as short or long as I desire, referencing a post by Last Grasp Grimoire. What I had not anticipated when I signed up for this, was the extent to which Baseline Drift would consume my productive time in the two and a bit weeks it lasted, so having failed to write the post I was asked to, here’s a post that mixes the randomness with Baseline Drift. For those not in the know, Baseline Drift was a live text RP/wargame hybrid in the vein of Over/Under, run by Kaylee of deer.stream and Yakamo, both veterans of Over/Under. For a more detailed write-up on what that means, there’s a great explainer by Valeria, and a nice succinct description from Juniper over at The Garden Below.o

Unlike Over/Under, I went into this game with a plan. I had an idea for a character making their living by doing tarot readings, and I thought it would be fun to do that by using an actual tarot deck and do actual readings. A nice little random oracular procedure. However, in the interest of having a steady income, I joined the media faction with the plan of doing some “televised” tarot readings to essentially advertise my business, and guaranteeing my paycheck (shout out to the original faction leader trio, Amber, Vox Valentine, and edmo).

What happened next was, I began doing reading for the ship (the game was set on a spaceship), and they seemed remarkably accurate. I did a reading of another player character, also very accurate to their idea of the character. Wild, huh?

I am not a great believer in supernatural forces, or predictive powers of tarot. What I do believe in, however, is the human capacity for pattern recognition, connecting dots, and reading meaning into what they see. My “predictions” continued to be accurate (I never fudged my draws!), randomly drawn from a tarot deck or on a few occasion an online tarot drawer when I didn’t have access to my cards. One particular instance even had some of my fellow players double-check that no info had been leaked to me, as they found it too fitting for their plans that day.

All this rambling to say, I thought it was a really cool and fun character gimmick, and with a bit of effort, it’s not that hard to do a tarot reading. I basically looked up the meanings of the cards on Labyrinthos and drew what parallels I could to the game state as I saw it. It worked wonderfully.

I don’t have a big final point to make, other than because this was really cool. I can really recommend using the oracular interpretation of tarot cards (or other oracular decks) in your games. The Hidden Isle gestures at this (you can read my review here), and loads of solo games use Tarot cards, but I think diegetic use of tarot cards while relying on a real world deck is a fun vein that remains untapped at many tables. Buy yourself a deck with cool art! Bring it to game night! Do some predictions! I’m sure it will be great.