Tarot Crawling

I've uploaded a new set of rules to itch.io that use Tarot cards to prep and then run a wilderness area for exploration. The reason I'm linking it here is that the last page of the zine describes the primary function of bells within Gelgelim.

I've written about bells before. As a quick recap, bells ward off bad things (thieves, storms, spirits, witches, bad luck, demons, etc.), but it is difficult to model that at the table unless these warded-against forces actually plague the characters. And I'm not interested in making my players' lives more stressful in their urban interactions. However, by assigning 'bad luck' types of events to Tarot cards, which I present in the zine as an alternative to random(ish) encounters, I find a use for bells.

Bells make traveling more safe by reducing the chances of bad things happening. Different modalities and melodies ward off different things, and better bellringers can choose to weave together these modalities and melodies to abjure against more things at once. At the table, the player chooses some number of cards to avoid from a pre-selected list (boginky, spirits, delaying circumstances, catastrophe, traveling accident, and a few others). If I would reveal that card while the characters travel, I instead shuffle it back into the deck. If I draw that card again, the bells have no effect.

Silver bells repel boginky, both the card that invokes them and, if encountered anyways, will keep them at bay as long as the bells sound.

A New Beginning

About two weeks ago, I shuttered development on the Sea of Shadows. Questions of cultural appropriation had hounded me from the beginning, but seeing JB's new project, I realized that 1) the Sea of Shadows was, no matter my care and attention to detail, an appropriative project and 2) there are some phenomenal designers already working on places and spaces like what I wanted the Sea of Shadows to be (Zedeck Siew's and Munkao's http://athousandthousandislands.com/ is an excellent example). I felt an ethical need to refocus my (colonizing) attention away from the Sea of Shadows. I'd love to return there with other, better qualified designers, but that is a dream for another time.

Instead, I have started work on a new region within the same world: Gelgelim, from the Hebrew word for wheels. As a Jew and a Pole, there is a vast treasury of Slavic, Ashkenazi, and Polish folklore that is weird and interesting and worth exploring. My players agreed to take the plunge with me and we created new characters and begun a new game within Gelgelim a couple of weeks ago.

The following is the description of the setting as it appears in the Core Book. I'll have posts on bears, birds, boginky, bells, and kabbala coming out in the next week or so (I'm on a half-vacation with WiFi, so I've the time to bang all of this out).

“Gelgelim channels Polish, Slavic, and Ashkenazi lifeways with a dollop of Irish and Welsh folklore into an area some 360,000 square miles large (about the size of Germany or Japan). To the north lie the toxic ruins of the Azintheen Empire, filled with bronze monstrosities and powerful magics. The rugged lands to the west resist exploration. And Chornilis, the black woods, blocks southward and eastward travel.

“The time is a century after the Scorching, a man-made cataclysm that destroyed the Azintheen Empire, boiling the land and souring the sea. In Gelgelim, the forest responded to the Scorching by expanding hundreds of hectares in a single day, consuming towns and cities and blocking passage east. The remaining towns and villages of Gelgelim have yet to fully recover. Toxic ashfalls and contaminated water have claimed many a would-be explorer, and the bears roaming wild have claimed many more.

“For money, fame, power, or the good of your village, you have decided to brave these dangers and explore the wilds. Good luck.”

Pamphlet Up and Other News

I've been spending a lot of time browsing the ttrpg materials on itch.io, and I'm somewhat impressed. Itch.io is a game distribution platform primarily for software, but there's a fairly robust ttrpg community doing good work there, mostly micro-RPGs, ttrpgs for groups of 1 or more people to be played in a single session. These games often focus on exploring interpersonal relationships and collaborative storytelling rather than the tension-release cycle of adventure games like Alexis' or mine.
Itch.io's most significant feature, however, is the game jam. Anyone with an account can host a jam, which is an open submission forum for games dealing with some topic decided by the jam's creator. Some of these topics are thematic, some are structural. The game jam allows you to find and follow other creators who do similar work and to give your submitted work some publicity. Itch.io handles payment if you want to charge for your material. My account page has my first 'published' product, a free-to-download pamphlet describing a sequence of 7 nights by a crossroad. I'd love feedback, if you wanted to give it a read. Itch.io gives me a place to publish material that won't see the light of day in my regular game for a while (we had a TPK last session and are starting a new game in a different region, so much of my private brainstorming on the Stone Cult won't be immediately useful). I can build a body of work outside these blog posts with the Stone Cult and practice some skills that need honing (like dungeon design).

In other news, I've changed the name of my game from Prodigy to Saharjin. Ultimately, this is because there is another roleplaying game called Prodigy on the market, and although our games are completely different, I took this as an opportunity to find a name that speaks more to what my game is about: Saharjin is the name of the magical rainforest that dominates much of my setting.

Thanks for sticking with me. Now that I've my ADHD medication and it's turning into summer, I'm looking forward to being more active and posting more content.

Cultural Capitals

[This is an excerpt from the Prodigy Book]

Prodigy takes place in and around the Sea of Shadows, a mystical place south of the equator, where myths and legends lurk just beyond city gates. This world is diverse in peoples, places, creatures, and beliefs. Consequently, there are many ways to wealth and secrets to uncover for the bold and clever.

         For ease of use, the Sea of Shadows divides into several cultural capitals, urban locations that represent the confluences and conflicts present within the game’s setting. Chapter 14 discusses each in more detail. Games should start in or near one of these cities, moving elsewhere as the players desire.

Blyth is a hotbed of anti-Tarluskani activity. Rebels flock to the city, whose Tarluskani overlords grow increasingly draconian in response.

The Catacombs are the underground holt of the Archivist people and home to the best libraries and research apparatus imaginable. The Catacombs sponsors teams of scholar-explorers to acquire new knowledge and bring it home.

Glenden Wood is the home of vice and free enterprise. Almost anything imaginable can be found there, for a price.

Hackerith Hill straddles the two territories of the Tarluskani Empire: the Khanite cities and Deliverance. Yet its proximity to the jungle and Nithya have weakened the Tarluskani Empire’s hold over the city.

Jask is home to a deeply divided Tarluskani population. Many have grown comfortable in their role as people of property and bureaucratic power, but nostalgia for a nomadic past is rapidly rising. The enslaved Khanites sit precariously between these two factions.

Korg hosts the dreaded Pirate Sovereigns of Korg, with their gem-hued magics, who protect the islands from the Tarluskani’s advances yet also terrorize the indigenous peoples who were there first.

Ophir is the largest city on the Wildlands, the capital of the Yanera tribes, and one of the few places in the savannah welcoming of foreigners.

Reyjadin, once named Avondon, is the heart of the Tarluskani Empire’s expansionary efforts. The Tarluskani reforms have brought new wealth and prosperity to the city, some of which have trickled down to its inhabitants.

Sha’aryam is both a ruined Azintheen city and the nearby encampment. Glory seekers brave the city’s metal defenders for untold wealth and long-lost technologies.

Tarlusya, capital of the Tarluskani Empire, is a decadent place, having grown fat from the sweat and blood of the enslaved Khanites.

Yrsh sits on Saharjin’s edge and is just as mercurial as the magical rainforest. The jungle’s ever-present threat has forced an uneasy alliance between the Tarluskani authorities, Nithya forest-worshippers, and Azintheen explorers.

Prodigy Character Creation Rules

I've been reworking the Prodigy book, making a clean .word document and copying over content in its near-final form. For those who are curious, I'm attaching my character creation chapters. They contain all of the information necessary to create a character for Prodigy.

An Addendum for Character Creation

When I was first looking at the wealth of material on Alexis’ blog, I was struck by the detail in the character background generator, which compares a d20 roll to a character’s attributes, filling in part of the character’s history (with accompanying mechanical impacts). I loved the concept, but implementing it in my own game was rather difficult, as I have 5 ability scores, ranging from 1 to 6. When I started using cards for hirelings, I also removed dice rolling, instead placing cards in a 5x3 grid, summing the rows to generate a number between 3 and 30 that I converted to 1-6 in a bell curve.

It struck me recently that I could use tarot cards to accomplish a similar result, with some added interpretive benefits. I present the following set of rules as an add-on to the character creation process. They flesh out a character’s personal relationships and history with enough vagueness for the Facilitator and players to come to a mutual understanding about the impacts of this history on the game. The cards identify 5-6 individuals important to the character. For games that avoid inter-player conflicts like Prodigy and most D&D-adjacent games, I recommend allowing different characters to have NPCs in common but have another person’s character as one of these 5-6 individuals. For more storytelling-focused games, do what you will.

The mechanical implications of this are simple. Each character has a heart card that typifies them. Whenever that heart card appears in a card mechanic later in the game, it means that the character has a personal stake in the events transpiring. If the heart card appears in the player’s hand, this personal connection works in their favor and grants a benefit. If it is played against them, the character immediately loses or takes some penalty.

The Deck: one tarot deck (78 cards)

Shuffle the deck and have the player draw 1 card at a time. One character can be generated at a time from one deck (shuffle between readings).

The first card is the Heart card. This determines how others perceive your character at first glance. It also determines the character’s birth month. I use 13 lunar cycles in my world and have assigned them accordingly. Each lunar cycle shares the first letter with the solar month it resembles, with Equivocation as the 13th month (the change between wet and dry seasons happens halfway through Equivocation).

We next lay out a 5x3 grid:

We sum each row to get our attributes. Most Tarot cards have a number (aces are 1). Court cards are assigned a value based upon their station: Page is 1, Knight is 2, Queen is 4, and King is 8. We convert these sums to attributes as following:

From this point forward, we interpret the cards to infer a character’s personal background. This reading is performed as the character reaches adulthood, before they choose a trade. It does not force a character down a certain path, but players should feel free to let the cards suggest a profession.

Cards 3, 8, 13 represent the character’s past, present, and goals, respectively.

Cards 1, 6, and 11 reflect the character’s social circle, their kin (chosen family or biological relationships). The first card describes this network overall. The second corresponds to the character’s connection with the social circle. Card 11 indicates the person in this social circle with which the character is closest.

Cards 2, 7, and 12 further explore the social circle. Card 2 personifies the leader of the group. Card 7 reflects the group’s emotional core, and card 12 typifies a member of the group lurking on the group’s fringes.

The social circle has at least 3 members (as card 11 might correspond to cards 2, 7, or 12). Its full size is equal to the number of adjacent pairs of cards in the spread of the same suit (major arcana acts as its own suit). Adjacency works along a grid axis, so no diagonals.


Cards 4, 9, and 14 correspond to a mentor or guiding figure, someone who has had a large impact on the character but remains distant. Card 4 describes this person as they relate to the character, while card 9 indicates their occupation. Card 14 details this figure’s current status – their goals and life circumstances.


Cards 5, 10, and 15 encompass a long-standing and significant relationship. Card 5 describes a formative shared experience that bonded the character to this person. Card 10 explicates the current relationship between the character and this person, while card 15 indicates this person’s current goals.

Chases and Pursuits

We had a chase in my game last Monday and I realized that what rules I had for pursuits were not sufficient. I've hopefully now rectified the problem.

In a pursuit there are two major events that must occur for the escapee to successfully elude their pursuers: they must break line of sight and then avoid the ensuing search. In order to break line of sight, the leads (those fleeing) must gain enough distance from their follows (those chasing) in order to break line of sight and then maintain it. If one ducks behind a corner and, mere milliseconds later, the follow ducks behind that same corner, it is unlikely the maneuver gained the lead anything. Given several seconds, however, the leads' chances increase dramatically.

As I usually do before making new rules, I scoured the internet to see what other folks had suggested. Unfortunately, almost every set of chase or pursuit rules I found were modelled after action cinema chases, which are less a pursuit and more a fight sequence that takes place while traversing difficult terrain, and I consequently needed to reframe much of what I found. The following rule still requires a fair amount of complication (having rules for multiple groups herding or hounding a lead, longer-duration chases, etc.) but should cover my bases for now.

There are 6 positions in a chase. Rather than tracking exact yards covered, I care about approximate ranges, using the number 6 for convenience.

1: Follows catch up to leads
2: Hot on Their Heels
3: In Pursuit
4: In Pursuit
5: In Pursuit
6: Follows have lost the leads

We determine the initial distance between leads and follows via card draw. A diamond is position 2, heart is position 3, club is position 4, and spade is position 5.

We track the chase on a minute-by-minute basis, which incorporates my rules on how long characters may sprint: their Strength modifier minus 3 equals the number of minutes they may run. Every minute spent running thereafter requires a Constitution test of increasing difficulty starting at Apprentice. Unusually for a pursuit, characters who fail this test may take damage equal to the difference between their result and the difficulty to continue running.

At the beginning of each minute, we determine how the characters are grouped. Characters of equal AP in the same position form a single cluster. Each cluster draws 1 card per AP and may draw more if all cluster members take 1 damage per additional card.

Follow clusters compare their cards to the nearest lead cluster. If they are able to cancel out the lead cluster's cards, they advance by 1 position. If not, the follow falls behind by 1 position. To make this somewhat easier, we allow clusters to manipulate their cards.

Diamonds are a trump suit, meaning that a diamond beats any other non-diamond, regardless of numerical card value, and that only a higher diamond beats a diamond card. The Ace of Diamonds cannot be bested.

Clubs can become diamonds via a successful Constitution test.
Spades can become diamonds via a successful Gymnast test.
Hearts can become diamonds via a successful Understanding test.
The difficulty for these tests depends upon the numerical value of the card. 2-6 is Apprentice, 7-10 and J are Professional, Q and K are Expert, and Aces require a Master-difficulty test.

However, follow clusters who are 'Hot on Their Heels' may not adjust their cards - they must be lucky to finally overtake the leads.