So, I had to buy a new set of Tarot cards for the Fortune’s Fool RPG, which uses pulls from a Tarot deck instead of dice rolls. I actually already own a couple of decks; they were given to me by friends, but most of them have nonstandard/ridiculous iconography. (I just can’t see using the Hello Kitty Color Me Tarot to decide the life or the death of someone’s PC.) After some waffling, I chose Lo Scarabo’s Pictorial Key Tarot.

Pros:

I chose this deck primarily because it includes traditional iconography and it’s easy to discern suit and number when you pull a card. Suit/number determine successes and fails in Fortune’s Fool (as well as spellcasting mana and degree of success,) so it’s imperative that players be able to identify both easily. I’m fairly happy with the deck overall. The cards have handsome backs, they come with a handy carrying pouch, and they’re not so thick and unwieldy that they’re impossible to shuffle. Buuuut…

Cons:

The computer generated images on these cards look like the Sims.

Consider the Temperance card:

Now consider it like this:

Yep. Somehow, the card makes more sense, doesn’t it?

Here’s Strength with Simlish bubbles that I assume approximate what’s happening:

Now let’s talk the card in this set that gets my vote for both favorite and least favorite, the Moon. The Moon card represents the life of the imagination and the subconscious, but not necessarily in a positive way; the person who gets this card use may fantasy to escape real life instead of releasing his imagination in artistic endeavors. The Pictorial Key cards has a nicely rendered domesticated dog/wild wolf image, which I think nicely suggests the divide between conscious (domesticated) and unconscious (wild) self. Here’s the part of the Moon card that I really like:

That’s a thoughtful, easily interpretable image, really. But then, the artist had to go and include this:

NO, U!

WTF?! Why the hell is Cthulhu in this picture?

Anyway, overall, I’m pretty happy with this deck for the purposes of playing FF, but I think that–what’s that? What, Mr. Cthulhu?

Oh.

Screw it. I’m going back to bed.