Bob's Tarot-based game for storytelling / role-playing

[Bob McNamee]

Hi everyone,

I've been thinking that using a tarot-based card system to power role-playing would be a good way to tell stories that lend themselves to symbolism and archetypes.

My thought was to use it in telling GM-less Charles de Lint style urban fantasy genre stories, or perhaps King's Dark Tower style.  The New Age-type mechanism just fits for me.

Anyway, my wife and I had a Tarot deck that we never liked using (back when we were doing that stuff), it just had too many disjointed photo symbols to "read" at a glance.  I looked it over again thinking it would be a possibility for making a game around, since it had no baggage from prior use.  Not only was it a good one, it had a one word interpretation printed on each card... just great for what I had in mind.

The game I put to together with it is at, http://www.geocities.com/bob_mcnamee/index.html.

It seems to have mutated from my concept of a role-playing game into more of a structured interactive storytelling game, but its an interesting narrative romp.  As a RPG it doesn't have much currency, or at least competition for it, except for imaginative card narration and the icons, perhaps. I haven't decided if thats a problem, or not

Let me know what you think... I need to put up an example of Play at some point.

Bob McNamee

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Bob,

Uh-oh, got a broken link on that try. (You're probably correcting it even as I type ...)

But even so, I recommend checking out the short-lived game called Psychosis: Ship of Fools, from the early 90s, I think. It was more of a by-the-numbers go-to-page book than what we tend to think of as an RPG, but its Tarot resolution system was actually quite strong.

I'll run some specifics and comparison by ya when I can check out your stuff.

Best,
Ron

[Bob McNamee]

A period got incorpoarted into the URL
here's a working URL for the Tarot Game

http://www.geocities.com/bob_mcnamee/index.html