Tarot Wizardry

Character Creation

To generate a character, draw six tarot cards and lay them out as follows.

Place the first card in the middle of the spread. This card represents your character’s personality, attitude towards the world, and present state of mind.

Place the second card horizontally across the first card, and interpret it upright. This card represents an obstacle in their life that is so great they believe only magic can address it.

Place the third card to the west of the first card. This card represents why and how your character became a wizard. Write down a skill associated with this part of your character’s life.

Place the fourth card to the east of the first card. This card represents your character’s near future if they do not act to prevent it.

Place the fifth card to the north of the first card. This card represents what your character uses magic to achieve, or how they channel their occult prowess. Write down a skill associated with this part of your character’s life.

Place the sixth card to the south of the first card. This card represents their equipment, trappings, and resources. Write down a skill associated with this part of your character’s life.

Once you have established your character, build your character’s magical Practice. For each suit of the tarot, choose an aspect or element of the world associated with that suit. When your character casts a spell with a card of that suit, their spell manifests as an effect in that chosen medium. For example, a character with the Swords aspect of Perception could use Swords cards to obscure themselves from others, create illusions, scry over great distances, or identify the nature of magical effects.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: See Aspects & Practices below to get ideas. There is no comprehensive list.

Finally, designate one of your character’s Aspects as their Prime Aspect (also called their Home Demesne, Favoured Sphere, Chosen School, etc.). Your character has a special affinity for this aspect of reality, which empowers their spells in that suit.

Play

At the start of each session, each player draws 5 cards from the shared tarot deck. The cards in each player’s hand represent the spells that they can cast this session. The GM draws 7 cards, which represent the challenges they can bring to bear against the player characters.  Whenever the GM runs out of cards in their hand, they draw back up to 7.

To cast a spell, play a tarot card from your hand and interpret its meaning in the context of your character’s magic abilities. After determining the outcome of your spell, put it in the communal discard pile. Magic always affects the world unless explicitly counterspelled, so use magic wisely (or at least prepare yourself for the consequences of failure).

AUTHOR’S NOTE: If you can't narratively apply a card's meaning to a challenge, you can't use it to overcome that challenge. Don’t let this discourage you: twist meanings and wield wordplay to make your will manifest.

When you cast a spell, if the difficulty of the challenge has not already been set, the GM plays a card from their hand or reveals the top card of the deck to determine the task’s challenge rating. If you play a card in the Minor Arcana, you succeed if your spell’s value meets or beats the challenge’s rating (Court cards are 11s, Aces are 12). If you play a card in the Major Arcana, it always succeeds unless opposed by another Major Arcanum, but you suffer a Wound for channeling such a powerful magical effect.

Challenges have a visible rating between 0 (utterly inconsequential) and 15 (impossible without the strongest magic). If you have a relevant skill, whether chosen at character creation or acquired during play, reduce the CR by 2. To achieve a difficult task with mundane efforts, roll 1d10. You succeed if you meet or beat the challenge’s rating. If you fail, the GM narrates the consequences of your actions. You may attempt to save yourself from mundane failure by taking a Wound to cast a spell before the consequences take full effect.

When a player runs out of cards in their hand, their magic is temporarily exhausted until the next session. During the session, if they rest for at least an in-game day and have cleared all of their Wounds, they draw a new hand of 5 cards.

If the deck runs out of cards, you have strained magic itself to a breaking point. Call the session, even if you’re in the middle of something important.

Wounds and Scars

A player character can suffer 3 Wounds before becoming Incapacitated. Any Wound past the third also immediately incapacitates the character. An Incapacitated character cannot make rolls or cast spells until the end of the scene.

If you have 1 Wound, you need a day of rest to clear your wounds. If you have 2 Wounds, you need a week of rest instead. If you have 3 or more Wounds, you need a month of rest to clear your wounds, and one Wound is converted into a permanent Scar. Scars cannot be healed and count towards your total Wounds for the purpose of Incapacitation (but not rest durations). When you take your third Scar, you die.

Removing a wound without resting is a rating 9 challenge. If you fail to remove a Wound, it immediately becomes a Scar.

Wounds and Scars can be physical, mental, occult, spiritual, or even reputational. With cosmic power comes cosmic vulnerability — hexes, curses, and geases all function within the Wound and Scar system.

Enemies

Mundane enemies are represented with static challenge ratings and are handled through narrative play.

Supernatural enemies are represented by a pile of up to 3 face-down cards. When a supernatural enemy threatens a character or a character attempts to overcome the enemy, if that enemy has no face-up cards, the GM reveals the top card of the pile. That card sets the rating for a challenge associated with that enemy. Once all of the enemy’s cards have been overcome, the enemy is defeated.

An enemy wizard has their own hand of 5 cards, their own practice and aspects, and can suffer up to 3 Wounds just like a player character.

Spells

When you play a tarot card to solve a problem, describe how you work magic to address the situation. This description must take two things into consideration: the meaning of the card itself, and your character’s Aspects.

Your character associates an aspect of reality with each suit. When you play a card of a suit, your magic expresses itself through that aspect. Minor Works in your Prime Aspect are called Prime Works, and count their value at +2.

Minor Works

When you play a card in the Minor Arcana, perform a Minor Work. Describe the spell that you cast by interpreting the meaning of the card you played through the lens of your aspect for its suit. For example, if your aspect for Swords is Fire, when you play the Two of Swords, interpret its meanings (such as Avoidance) through that lens. Perhaps you erect a barrier of flame between yourself and an enemy, or you temporarily quell a raging inferno.

Minor Works cannot last longer than the scene, though their effects on the mundane world may linger.

Court cards (traditionally the Page, Knight, Queen, and King of each suit) are part of the Minor Arcana, but share a value of 11 and have an additional suit based on their seat at Court. The Page is associated with Earth, and therefore with Pentacles. The same is true for Knights with Fire and Wands, Queens with Water and Cups, and Kings with Air and Swords. Spells cast with Court cards are Prime Works if either their printed or associated suit match your Prime Aspect.

Furthermore, as Court cards are often used to represent people, they are an effective tool to influence, target, or even summon beings represented by the card in question.

When two Minor Works oppose each other, the spell with the higher value wins out and its caster narrates the ultimate result. Resolve ties between Minor Workings of equivalent value by referencing the suits’ respective elemental dignities.

Support (Wands vs. Swords, or Cups vs. Pentacles): Combine. The spells synthesize into a greater whole. If only one of the constituent spells is a Prime Work, that caster gains control of the gestalt spell; if neither or both of the spells are Prime, the spell becomes uncontrolled.

Weaken (Wands vs. Cups, or Swords vs. Pentacles): Counterspell. Both spells fizzle in their casters’ hands, and inflict damage

Neutral (Wands vs. Pentacles, or Swords vs. Cups): Ships passing. If only one of the spells is a Prime Work, its caster wins. Otherwise, both spells take effect but cannot affect each other.

Strengthen (A suit vs. itself): The Price of Hubris. The spells combine into a Major Work with value equal to their sum and run Rampant. Roll on the Magnum Opus table. This is only possible if a card is played against itself, which shouldn’t happen if you’re only playing with a single deck, but magic oft refuses such mundane strictures.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: These only happen on ties. Don’t worry about the mechanical effects of elemental dignities in other circumstances.

Major Works

When you play a card in the Major Arcana, perform a Major Work. Major Works obviate any mundane challenge and surmount any Minor Work. Furthermore, Major Arcana do not have suits — their effects are so powerful that they can only be channeled through your Prime Aspect. They are not, however, Prime Works — they are something greater.

Major works cannot last longer than the session, and their effects on the mundane world will reverberate.

    A Major Work is also taxing on its caster. To cast a Major Work, you must suffer a Wound. The nature and narrative impact of the Wound are dictated by the card’s meaning and your ultimate intentions for the spell.

When two Major Works clash, roll 2d6 on the Magnum Opus table. An even result means that the Major work with the higher value wins; an odd result means that the Major work with the lower value wins. Before the work resolves, the Magnum Opus result takes effect.

Magnum Opus

12. Projection (As Above). All of your Minor Works for the rest of the session are Prime Works, regardless of their suit or aspect.
11. Exaltation. An angel of your Prime Aspect arrives to deliver your spell in person. It will hang around until the end of the scene.
10. Congelation. Choose one of your non-Prime Aspects. Until the end of the session, that Aspect becomes your Prime Aspect.
9. Multiplication. Until the end of the scene, Minor Arcana may be played as previous Minor Arcana that have been played (and resolved) this scene.
8. Conjunction. Reveal the top card of the deck.
7. Cibation. Draw a card.
6. Dissolution. Discard your hand, then draw 3 cards.
5. Calcination. The spell sets everything it touches on fire, even and especially things that are impervious to mundane flames.
4. Separation. Your skin splits with uncontainable magic power. Take a Wound, and your spell runs Rampant.
3. Putrefaction. Everything nearby begins to wilt, wither, and rot. Everyone in the scene suffers a Wound.
2. Sublimation (So Below). For the rest of the session, all cards are played reversed.

Rampant spells become NPCs under the GM’s control. They may take the form of elementals, spirits, demons, daemons, daimons, or other supernatural beings with inscrutable and orthogonal goals. While they dissipate at the end of the scene or session in accordance with their power, they may return of their own volition or be summoned by an enterprising practitioner.

Aspects & Practices

A practice is a set of correspondences between tarot suits and aspects of reality. These are not mandatory (you can always modify, mix-and-match, or wholly ignore them), but cultural contexts and established occult orders make it easier to find people who use these combinations of aspects.

A Practitioner may select any Aspect of their Practice as their Prime Aspect. A Daemonic practitioner focused on Commanding will behave very differently from one whose Prime is Contracts, Communing, or Calling; while their Minor workings are similar, their Major workings are entirely different.

Practice: Technomancy
Swords — Machines
Wands — Creation
Cups — Data
Pentacles — Money

Practice: Daemonic
Swords — Calling
Wands — Commanding
Cups — Communing
Pentacles — Contracts

Practice: Elementalism
Swords — Air
Wands — Fire
Cups — Water
Pentacles — Earth

Practice: Psychic
Swords — Perception
Wands — Instinct
Cups — Emotion
Pentacles — Memory

Practice: Traveling
Swords — Motion
Wands — Impulse
Cups — Time
Pentacles — Resistance

Practice: Witchcraft
Swords — Hexes
Wands — Animation
Cups — Divination
Pentacles — Healing

Practice: The World
Swords — Weather
Wands — Growth
Cups — Dreams
Pentacles — Flora & Fauna

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I referenced the Rider-Waite-Smith deck when writing this system due to its ubiquity, but these rules should work for even nonstandard decks — homebrew as necessary.

Advanced Workings

With an hour of proper preparations and focus, you may discard a card to perform Divination and look at the top card of the deck.

You may use an evening without distractions or discomfort to Meditate. At the end of your Meditation, discard a card of your choice and draw a replacement. You cannot Meditate in this way more than once a day.

With a night of hard work, concentration, and precise preparations, you may perform Ritual Magic. Describe the spell you are preparing to cast, then draw a card, then play a card from your hand. If the card you play does not have an appropriate meaning for the spell, the spell will act unpredictably even on a success.

When several wizards work together, they may create a spread of multiple cards that imparts greater meaning, versatility, and/or specificity to the resulting spell. Each wizard may only contribute a single card to a spread, and the spread’s value is the highest value of a minor arcana within it. Spreads cannot be Prime Works, but spreads comprised of exclusively Major Arcana are some of the most powerful and dangerous Workings a wizard can wield.

Six Flames

Ghastflame

Burn corpse wax to create the sickly green ghastflame. Its wisps map out faces of the dead and damned, which it invites to the flame like moths. Light from a ghastflame torch reflects off past deaths and reveals the fates of those who met untimely ends, like bloodstains in Dark Souls.

A ghastflame bonfire will become haunted by unquiet spirits, take a horrid amalgamated form, and attempt to fulfill their many conflicting desires. This ghast sets fires to all it touches, though these new fires are not ghastflame unless they burn more corpses. After a ghast’s fuel runs down, it becomes a will-o-wisp and seeks out new victims or corpses to burn.

This is why you don’t set bonfires at old battlefields.

Ghastflame Lantern: The glass in this lantern is silvered to prevent the lantern from becoming haunted, and has shutters to conceal the flame when the sights of shades of the dead would be inconvenient. If the glass breaks, it’s just large enough to become a will-o-wisp, so be careful!

Corpsewax Torch: A single corpse provides just enough fat to render into a single torch of corpsewax. While any spirit will take the chance to haunt a lick of ghastflame, the spirit of the person whose corpse was used takes precedence. Spirits prefer corpsewax of a similar age to them when they died, and some palaeoalchemists have claimed to have created ghastflame from burning fossils.

Deeplight

Torchmoss secretes an oily coating that both burns well and protects the moss from its own dim green flame, called deeplight by dwarves and goblins. As the moss matures, it turns from a deep green to a rust red, at which point it has been saturated with its characteristic oils. Mature torchmoss will hold a flame for as long as it remains fed with mineral-rich water.

Many dungeon environments are ideal for the cultivation of torchmoss, as condensation drips from the ceiling to feed torchmoss colonies on the walls. This provides the dim ambient light so prevalent throughout cave systems, ancient ruins, and city sewers.

Torchmoss oil is currently in high demand as a skincare product, which makes fashionable nobles surprisingly flammable. 

Terrarium Lantern: This terrarium holds a small colony of happy and well-fed burning torchmoss. So long as the moss is fed with mineral-rich water, the terrarium will give off dim light indefinitely.

Balefire

Burn your own living flesh to create the balefire, a black and smokeless flame of sacrifice. It casts shadows rather than light, and holds a rough shape when cast off. You cannot burn another’s flesh to create balefire, only your own — it gains its power from sacrifice.

Balefire inflicts an additional 1d6 damage to those it burns for each point of damage it inflicts to you, and can be thrown like a projectile. A chunk of living flesh cut from the body will still burn with balefire until the blood dries. Burning silk also gives off balefire, mystifying philosophers, alchemists, and theologians alike.

The esoteric martial school of the prophet Abnegatus teaches the use of balefire as a method of simultaneously casting off the trappings of the flesh and destroying their enemies, creating sacred balefire that mortifies the flesh rather than cauterizing it.

Thief’s Caul: A long silk veil that burns with balefire. While it burns, it casts shadows that obscure the wearer while permitting them to see in the dark as if they had a lantern. It lasts for 10 minutes or one exploration turn, at which point it must be discarded lest its flames consume the wearer’s face.

Frostflame

Frozen vegetation burns ice-cold with frostflame, a milky-white fire that cannot be extinguished with water. When lightning strikes a frozen forest during a blizzard, the resulting frostfire burns the entire forest to an icy crisp. The ash left behind is fine and slippery, creating shallow seas of fine crystalline particulates in the tundra.

Once started, frostfire still burns traditionally flammable fuel sources and scars flesh with glassy frost-burns.

Frigid Lantern: Frostflame lanterns throw an unnatural chill across all that their light touches, making them ideal for refrigeration on long caravans or protection from dangerously hot environments. They consume more fuel than mundane lanterns, and if a frostflame goes out it’s very difficult to restart without environmentally-frozen kindling.

Bladefire

When you burn magic items, they give off a colorful flame that mimics the color of the item's magical effect. This is how you make flaming swords, which has led to the effect’s common  name of bladefire (much to the chagrin of wizards everywhere). Setting bladefire is also a popular way to identify the properties of magical items, as it burns slowly enough to prevent serious damage to the item during the identification process.

Items wholly burnt away with bladefire leave behind a sparkling magically-charged ash called residuum, which can be snorted as a magical accelerant much like ground wizard teeth (+1 temporary magic die or spell slot, 2-in-6 chance of addiction, horrific long-term health effects). Enchanters love residuum for more practical reasons, as it’s easily worked into new magic items during the forging process and can even transfer the previous item’s properties into the new one.

Wizard corpses burn with the silent, violet Killing Flame.

Flaming Sword: +1 to hit. Ignites with red-orange bladefire once you’ve dealt damage with it, and inflicts an additional d6 fire damage while ignited. The fire burns out at the end of a round in which you haven’t dealt damage with the sword.

A flaming sword's ignition condition determines the color of its bladefire. Knights, lords, and even entire armies take great pride in signaling their value systems through their flaming weapons' hues.

Sacred Flame

Burn holy items to create an entrancing and golden sacred flame with light soft enough to look upon directly. This fire burns until it exhausts all atmospheric divinity in its surroundings, then burn the divinity within their own fuel. Sacred torches last longer when held by a believer, and prayers feed it like oxygen feeds mundane fire.

A believer’s flesh may produce sacred balefire, while their corpse burns with holy ghastflame. I leave the effects of these flame as an exercise for both the reader and my future self.

Altar Candles: Bees fed on syrup made with holy water produce the sacred beeswax necessary to produce Church-standard altar candles. These candles burn indefinitely in a sufficiently holy site.

Reliquary Lantern: This lantern is made of stained glass and contains a relic, creating a microchurch with an internally sustainable sanctified environment. The relic produces divinity at a sufficient rate to fuel a small sacred flame, preventing the flame from burning the relic itself so long as the lantern remains intact. If containment is breached, the divinity will dissipate into the surrounding environment and the flame will consume the relic if not immediately fed with prayer.

Magic Hexcrawls

Magic: the Gathering is fertile ground for hexcrawl generation.

Grab a Commander deck. If you know what MtG is, you either have one or you have strong opinions on why you don’t. The 100-card deck should have approximately 35-40 land cards, with the rest as various types of spell. Shuffle the deck, including the commander card.

Reveal cards from the top of the deck until you reveal a land card. Stack all those cards underneath the land.

Then, repeat this process to create another pile beneath that land card. Continue until you’ve completed a column of several piles, then start another column staggered half a card-length lower.

Make the next column start at the height of the first column, and continue making columns in this way until you’ve run out of cards in the deck.

In front of you there should now be nearly 40 land cards, each covering between zero and many spell cards. Each land card is a hex, and each other card beneath it represents a feature of the area — perhaps a roving creature, a band of NPCs, a strange weather effect, a structure, or a piece of loot.

Take the pile of Plumb the Forbidden, Fiend Hunter, and Sun Titan beneath the land card Command Tower -- a daemon-hunter seeks the forbidden secrets of a tower from which a giant rules the surrounding hexes with an iron fist. The Access Tunnel hex to its northeast has, among other things, a secret entrance to the lowest levels of the tower, while the Battlefield Forge to the north is a titan-scale armory where the Sun Titan smiths its great weapons. Local soldiers make pilgrimages to worship its martial prowess at the Temple of Triumph (though as no other cards were revealed beneath the Temple, it's the off-season and no one's yet in town), while the Bloodstained Mire to the south lies unquiet as a memorial to those who once attempted to resist. The two mountain hexes to the southeast make up part of a long mountain range, and the Caves of Koilos to their north/northeast delve deep within their hearts.

Legendary cards like your commander are fertile ground for quests, faction leaders, rivals, or villains. Instant and sorcery spells are well-represented as events — a Murder is a recent murder, a Lightning Bolt a recurring storm, a Wrath of God an ongoing inquisition.

If there’s a pile of 4 or more cards in the land, put a settlement there. Lands with names that mention settlements aren’t necessarily populated; a Nomad Outpost with no other spells might be abandoned.

Land art can also inform the contents of a hex. If it’s one of the Ravnican lands that depicts a swathe of the plane’s ecumenopolis (such as the Boros Garrison or Rakdos Carnarium in the sample map above), perhaps place it within the ruins of an ancient city. The Clifftop Retreat has a massive statue, so it's the petrified body of another titan that the Sun Titan knew, loved, and lost to powerful magics.

Think about the material relationships between the places that have developed this way. Where do the numerous denizens go for their needs? Most commander decks play at most three of the five colors in Magic, so what’s missing from this landscape? What’s scarce, and therefore valuable?

Use creature cards in the deck (and any tokens they may make) to inform random encounter tables. You could even shuffle them up and draw from an impromptu deck in lieu of a conventional table.

Most commander decks play the card Sol Ring. That means it’ll show up in a disproportionate number of these hexcrawls. Here’s some GLOG rules for it.

Sol Ring
Ancient starlight woven into a silver torus too large for any mortal’s hand. It hums with the music of the hemispheres.
This ring provides +1 Magic Die. It emits starlight that glows through any layers of clothing or magical concealment, as well as an unmistakable static hum that cannot be silenced.