Weekend before last my buddy and I were playing around with a supplemental tarot-based mechanic for our game. We're still hammering out some details for how the major arcana work; the suit cards work great (we use them to establish facts and/or rack up dice). Since I'm a great believer in not re-inventing the wheel, and I noticed a thread in indie game design and a mention in another thread of tarot-based game mechanics, I thought I'd ask as a general question what mechanics had already been designed and where I could find out about them. Thanks in advance for any help, and apologies if there is already a thread on this; maybe someone could point it out to me if so.

Everway has a pseudo-tarot card system you may want to look at if you haven't already.

"Psychosis" is an out-of-print game from 1996 by Chameleon Eclectic. I have a short players guide available online at http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/archive/freerpgs/psychosis/psychosis_rules.txt

"Shadows in the Fog" is an indie game currently in development by Chris Lehrich. You can download the rules at http://auroragames.com/pdf/Rules120.pdf

There is also "Dragonlance: The Fifth Age" and "Marvel Superheroes Adventure Game" from TSR, which used the SAGA system that had a special 96-card deck. I don't have a good link for this one, but I heard it was available for download at some point.

Thanks, gentlemen! I'd love to see what Psychosis did with the major arcana - I suspect that's going to be a hard game to find, but I'll start looking.

Keep 'em coming...

Hi Sean,

I'd love to see what Psychosis did with the major arcana - I suspect that's going to be a hard game to find, but I'll start looking.

There's an official PDF scenario for the game floating around on the web as well. It's called The Gordian Knot. It's available here on Erskine L. Meldrew's Psychosis site.

Paul