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I have a section of the current game I'm working on, where the protagonists can get their fortunes read by an old Gypsy woman (love that trope).

Obviously, it is meant to offer the player some cryptic/nigh-useless hints about what is to come - which will only make sense after the fact (another good trope).

So, while I could go with ye old crystal ball, I thought having the fortune tell flip over some Tarot cards might be a little more interesting. The problem is I got no experience with Tarot, other what I have seen in this video.

Anyone here got enough Tarot knowledge to offer a few card combinations that could mean stuff like:

"DOOM"

"Turn back now, before it's too late!"

"You'll bring death to us all!"

"Better to take that other path..."

etc?

@simplesabley

The main issue you're going to run into is that the trope of the "doom upon you" tarot reading is mired in misunderstanding of how tarot works in the first place.

Even the card titled Death doesn't necesarily mean death, it represents rebirth 99.9% of the time. Because death is part of the cycle of rebirth. So it just means that something is coming to an end and making way for something new. In some decks the Devil card seems ominous, but it typically represents the material world and how one can become trapped by their attachments to materialistic pleasures (a rich social lite being depressed due to a lack of spiritual fullfillment would be a prime example).

My advise would be to take full advantage of people's general lack of understanding and superstition about Tarot and just go with the trope no matter how unlikely it is to get those kinds of combos. To get that specific you would either need to do extremely intricate card spread like a modified celtic cross or hope and pray that simple doesn't backfire and do a 3 card past, present, future spread.

At it's core Tarot is more about introspection than actual foretune telling. It's a great tool for personal meditation. When used in a fortune teller gypsy trope setting it only works well if the person on the other side of things has little to no understanding of how tarot really works.

Oh, so that's what the three card draw typically represents (past present future)? I can probably work with something like that.

The idea of using cards as a fortune-telling device that foretells DOOM is less of a gypsy/tarot thing and more of a French tradition that was then appropriated into Voodoo Mysticism. In that tradition, the deck of 52 cards that we're familiar with is used, and the Ace of Spades usually meant bad luck. This was later exagerrated to mean CERTAIN DEATH in popular culture after the vietnam war when the Americans invading the former French colony assumed that the Vietnamese would be superstitious and started leaving aces of spades everywhere. You'll have to look up some voodoo witchcraft stuff or look into the bicycle deck style of fortune telling to figure this one out.

For literature, I think having just the face cards would be easier than trying to incorporate the whole deck.

Please kind sir, let the gypsy tell your fortune with Loteria cards instead.



Your future awaits:



But what can it mean....

La Sandia O-o

Wow, I didn't realize Pepe was that old!

WTF with these cards though haha!

There is luckily a short, handy guide I found on how this sort of thing works. There are apparently some more intricacies in this, but the Spades suit is the only one that always promises trouble outright.


I'm sure the ace of spades has enough prevalence of its own in literature, however. I remember in elementary school reading a pretty old book during the designated Slavery Unit where a kid and an old man were running away from a plantation, had their fortune told by a voodiferous woman who refused to tell their fortunes until they insisted, and then when they got the ace of spades card, the older guy straight up died in the next chapter.

Pretty interesting.

Pretty sure you could just show this one card and people will get the idea...



Realizing, of course, that no matter what you do, the professional tarot card readers will have something to say...

Lay waste to all those who oppose you...

Same with the other one I wrote, if its confusing, just ignore me :P

And you could use this one for, well, pretty much any other meaning at all that you want it to have:

 May you see what life has to offer...

 I'm sorry, had to just say that. If you get it, you get it. If you don't, just ignore me.