What Are the Odds?

It's hard to see the world through the eyes of somebody who doesn't know what you know, especially when it comes to really fundamental knowledge about the way the world works. I managed to make it 30-something years into life without taking a chemistry class. When I finally did, as part of a quixotic premedical postbaccalaureate zig on the long and winding road of my life, take a bunch of chemistry classes, the new knowledge irreversibly changed the world for me. I see the chemistry of things everywhere now, all the time: the reactions in soft drinks, the ideal gas law at work, the molecular structures of things like caffeine and perfluorooctanoic acid. Having gone decades without this understanding, though, I can sometimes, with a little effort, turn my knowledge off and get access to a mindset that sees more inscrutable mystery in the makeup of things.

I cannot do that with probability. Is it the fact that I took AP Statistics at the formative age of 16? Or just a lifetime of playing with dice?

* * *

Anybody who's spent 15 minutes talking history with me (or letting me talk history at them) has probably heard me gripe about what a hard time people have seeing the past as having been anything other than inevitable. Some people do believe this literally, of course—that everything was foreordained by God—but many others start with at least a fuzzy understanding of contingency. You look at the present moment, you see the possibilities arrayed before us, and you understand that people living in the past also faced uncertainty and choices that had to be made with incomplete information. Oddly, though, many people then begin constructing an edifice of historical argument that denies or downplays that quality of contingency. Whatever did happen, even if it wasn't preordained and literally inevitable, must have been likely to happen, right? Very likely, in fact, given that it happened and the alternatives didn't. People look for factors that explain why what did happen was likely; they do not look for factors that support a contrary argument—that something that didn't happen actually was likely, or that what did happen was, before its realization, improbable.

We get a lot of post facto justifications for things that were extremely improbable. Ask the average reasonably well educated person why the German invasions of Poland and France were so successful, and you'll probably get some species of Nazi mythmaking. It was the genius of the German Blitzkrieg strategy. It was their highly advanced weapons. (Or, in a specious latter-day variant, it was that they were all hopped up on meth.) It was their iron will to power, whereas the Poles and French were unmotivated and demoralized. 

These things aren't all false—German doctrine was better suited to modern combined-arms warfare than Franco-Polish doctrine was, and that made a big difference—but several of them aren't as true, or as significant, as people assume. German armor was inferior to the best French and Polish designs. Many of their aircraft were obsolete. They had few halftracks and trucks; the vast majority of the Wehrmacht infantry and artillery moved on foot or was dragged by pack animals (this remained the case throughout the war). They had neither a major technological advantage nor an overwhelming numerical advantage over Poland, to say nothing of France; the decisive factors in the invasion of Poland were the fact that the French did not attack the weakly defended German west and that the Soviet Union did, after some delay (waiting to see what France would do), invade Poland from the east. The decisive factor in the subsequent invasion of France was either German boldness or luck, depending on how you want to look at it—they gambled on a high-risk, high-reward strategy and happened to line it up very well with Allied weakness.

The German planners, in 1939, were pessimistic. (Consider the series of false-flag attacks that German agents and German soldiers in Polish uniform carried out in the run-up to the invasion of Poland. People today often sneer at these efforts—who in the international community was going to be convinced by these brazen fabrications? But the audience wasn't France or Britain or the Soviet Union. It was the German public, who were extremely unenthusiastic about the prospect of war.) The world, in 1940, was astounded that France fell so quickly. Today, everybody just assumes it was inevitable. Nazi super science and übermenschlich tenacity carried the day!

* * *

I've realized lately that this blindness to the possibility that low-probability events can (and, in the big scheme of things, often do) defy the odds runs forward as well as backward. People don't just look at the past and assume that whatever did happen must have been most likely; they look at the future and assume that whatever they're told is the most likely outcome will happen. Models that said that Hillary Clinton had a 90% chance to win the 2016 election must have been wrong, because if she had actually had a 90% chance, she would have won: 90% is a very large percentage.

And it doesn't just have to be that large; 70% seems to be enough now to make people think something is essentially inevitable in political polling. Watching people respond to shifting recession forecasts in recent months has been bewildering; people (media outlets, even) keep reading a move from “45% chance of recession” to “55% chance of recession” as “recession now likely," as though 50% is some magical threshold. It's like a weird mutation of the old joke that everything has 50/50 odds—either it happens or it doesn't. Now everything is either certain to happen or certain not to.

My girlfriend works in public health, and was involved not long ago in a conversation about risk that baffled her. The doctors and public health experts in the room were arguing that a 0.1% chance of infecting each patient with a potentially deadly disease was unacceptable. Given a few years, this team will see hundreds, maybe more than a thousand patients, and one or two of those people will probably contract this infection, something they can't have on their conscience. But to others in the room, this seemed absurdly overcautious. A 99.9% chance of being safe? That's basically a guarantee. And if each individual patient is perfectly safe, what could possibly go wrong even in a large population, across a long stretch of time?

* * *

All of which is to say…I don't know, that maybe people ought to play with dice more? There's something about the physicality of them (even digital simulacra of them) that breathes life and menace (or hope) into low-probability outcomes. When percentages show up in videogames, they always seem to lead to frustration. I had a 95% chance of making that shot in XCOM—how could my dude have missed? It was supposed to be a guaranteed hit! But nobody rolling an actual d20 is ever blindsided when a natural 1 turns up. You're always holding your breath, watching it skitter across the tabletop, bracing for the worst or hoping for the best. Nothing is inevitable.

Flyover Counter: Chapter 9

"Anthill Stories—Arcade" by Marat Zakirov

Continued from Chapter 8.

* * *

The two groups debrief and divvy up the loot, with the high-value stuff and the pieces Nobu Stephanidis wanted going in the secure crates Director Rao provided (alongside the sniper rifle, the rocket launcher, and the other weapons they're definitely not allowed to be carrying around down here). The three young survivors from the other group of looters will have to smuggle their share of the take into the city bit by bit and fence what they can locally.

These three are Kathy Chen, Oksana Yousef, and Patrick Muñoz. Patrick is the oldest and most experienced of the three, and he's barely 21—seems like the late Lorena was something of a Fagin figure in the lower depths of Sokhna, recruiting teenagers to a life of crime. Without her to lead them, these kids are at loose ends, and Sarai, being something of a Fagin herself, offers them a chance to sign on with the crew, get off Opis, and see the Sector.

After discussing matters among themselves, they agree. Kathy and Oksana will sign on immediately; Patrick is staying on Opis for now to manage the sale of their loot. The three accept a 60/40 split on their art from the heist. The share they're leaving for Patrick to deal with wouldn't all fit in the secure crates, even if the PCs were inclined to stiff the kids (and certain parties are so inclined, though thankfully not a majority), but it's worth a good chunk of change, maybe 100,000 credits altogether if Patrick can swing some good deals.

* * *

Safely back in Sokhna, with their loot loaded up, no APB out on them, and no pressing time crunch to worry about, the PCs split up to run errands, meet old friends, and close a major commodity transaction, with Sarai netting a 16,000-credit profit on the wine they shipped over from Rustam. Batias and BQ find their way, down in the lowest depths of the underground city, into an illegal casino, where Batias gambles away 13,184 of his own credits, then 13,000 borrowed from BQ. On their way back, jumped by would-be robbers, they explain that they're completely destitute. The robbers, impressed both by Batias's sangfroid in the face of deadly violence and how sanguine he is, having just lost a modest fortune, about his financial prospects, stay awhile to listen to him preach the prosperity gospel.

“Give me your credits,” he promises them, “and your wealth will be returned to you sevenfold.” They dig around in their pockets for the credsticks they've lifted off other victims and scrape together 118 credits. BQ promptly demands that Batias give him half.

Sarai has looked up the chef who was assigned to her parents during the family's glory days as high-flying diplomats. The woman, Laurence, is back on Opis, her homeworld, retired from the Ministry of External Relations and raising her two teenage kids, Timothee and Charlotte, in Anchorpoint, which is only five hours away or so from Sokhna by high-speed rail. They make plans for dinner; Laurence recommends several fine restaurants in Sokhna, and Sarai chooses a Franco-Egyptian place called Barbeau's.

Sarai wants to catch up—it was Laurence who started her on the path to being a gourmet and an amateur chef, and Laurence who, among the foreign-service staff who essentially raised her in the stead of her negligent parents, was always kindest to her. They swap stories and recipes; Sarai finally gets the list of secret ingredients to make the tiny samosas she most loved as a kid. But she has an ulterior motive, of course. She wants information. Who ratted her parents out? Laurence isn't 100% sure, but she points a tentative finger at a man named Yuriy de la Cruz, a senior secretary in the diplomatic corps who was assigned to the Commonwealth embassy on Alzuhr alongside Sarai's mother. Just as crooked as the Lentiers, if not more so, he might have betrayed them to save his own skin when his sloppy trail of graft caught up with him.

Mustang, meanwhile, gets in touch with old friends from the world of filmmaking. She meets Elsa Herrera, a documentarian, for a drink at a dive bar down in the lower city. Elsa promises put Mustang in touch with some folks she's been working with who might be interested in facilitating the Jaynewei Moon cinematic renaissance.

Back on the ship, Mustang finds a beautiful pair of shoes among the odds and ends she bagged at the estate—seems Elsa wears the same shoe size as Nana Malik, slightly too small for Mustang—and has Kathy wrap them up and run them over to Elsa as a gift. She gets Kathy cleaned up and dressed up first and gives her some “ice cream money.” Mustang then retires to her quarters to bask in the 126,000 comments and multitudinous DMs her TannTann videos have provoked.

* * *

Krissa wants to find a mentor to help her understand and manage her burgeoning telekinetic powers, but is, as always, leery of letting anybody know just how powerful she is, or that she's a psychic at all. Could she find a trustworthy teacher around here?

There must be literally thousands of telekinetics on Opis; even if a disproportionate number have been pressed into government service, and their mortality rate is high, and less than 10% of the planet's population is in and around Sokhna, there should be several hundred telekinetics in the region, which means several tens of skill-1 telekinetics, which means several skill-2 (but probably at most one skill-3). Even if there is anybody above skill-2, Mosylon has a near-monopoly on the highest-level psychics, and any skill-3 psychics who emerged in the Commonwealth were probably snatched up by the government and military. So there's likely no psychic around who's more powerful than Krissa, but there might be a handful who are as skilled at telekinesis as Krissa is at biopsionics and precognition, and perhaps one or two of them have private academies.

The dice say…yep, there's a fellow named Adamu Ibrahim in Sokhna, trained in metapsionics and telekinesis, who offers discreet training and mentorship, a sort of one-man private academy with a limited curriculum. There's no time for a proper course of story, but Krissa has a consultation, and the kindly Mr. Ibrahim teaches her some exercises to practice her telekinetic powers and settle her fears.

She and Sarai meet up when their engagements are done to restock the ship's liquor cabinet (five bottles of the good stuff, five of rotgut) and kitchen (all-purpose pan, stock pot, stand mixer, etc.).

* * *

Everybody spends the night on the ship and, after some cooking and other lollygagging, depart around midday. They drill out around the same time on the 20th, having tortured Kathy and Oksana (neither of whom has ever been off Opis before, no less out of the system) a bit with mild hazing and then terrifying horror stories about interstellar travel. They arrive in Marquez around midnight at the start of the 22nd, and land on Rustam early in the morning on the 23rd. The delivery of goods to Stephanidis goes off almost without a hitch, but Batias can't resist trying to shake the old man down for some extra money. Not only will he not budge—they get paid only what he had promised them—but they've now probably burned a valuable contact. Oh well; there are more fish in the sea. And more valuable contacts to burn!

They've got a couple other irons in the fire, after all. For one thing, there's the other stuff Leila asked them to look into. Having landed a sweetheart of a deal on Opis, they don't have much incentive to head to Marjan now, so investigating the pretech cultists is out. Leila had two tasks for them here on Rustam, though—looking into Enderlein & Sons and snooping around sketchy pharmaceutical company Foxglove. Their inquiries about Enderlein haven't turned anything up, and the local who probably has the best inside info on whatever pretech smuggling the company might be doing is now disinclined to help the PCs.

Foxglove, though? Turns out a couple university classmates of Roman's ended up working for them, and one, Aline Wang, is an associate director in the R&D department right here at the Porto Seguro research campus. She's willing to meet with them; guess Roman didn't make too negative of an impression on her.

Their conversation is cagey. Aline makes it clear that she has some knowledge of what Foxglove is doing on Lopez Ring—she travels to the station semi-regularly, and her position involves organizing research logistics—but of course she's not going to sell company secrets cheaply. The amount of cash the PCs have on hand clearly isn't enough to interest her. What else have they got? Roman explains that they're in the business of archaeological assessment and salvage, they've been identifying and recovering relics from Mandate-era sites all over the Sector (he begins to exaggerate a little), and surely something they've recovered would be of interest. Associate Director Wang asks, “For example?”

Roman's player turns to me. “Is there any kind of pretech super-science material she'd be desperate to get her hands on?” And hey, what do you know? At one point in my brainstorming, I actually did come up with just such a material: atrament. Of course, at this point, atrament exists only as a couple of scribbles in my notebook:

inky black mercury-like psychic smart matter?

And then, slightly more thought out:

Atrament, or atramentum, is an ink-black, psychically resonant liquid metal invaluable for repairing, producing, or modifying advanced pretech. It's the most important and most valuable of the strange synthetics identified thus far.

It's not nothing, but it's gonna need some fleshing out. Roman's player's first thought was, hey, Roman's a genius chemist, he'll just cook some of this stuff up. But I have to veto this: The thing about atrament, I decree, is that nobody knows how to make it. Limited quantities are left over from before the Scream, tightly controlled, hoarded by governments and other powerful factions. If Roman could figure out how to synthesize the stuff, he'd be the richest (and/or most wanted) man in the Sector.

Roman's player is unfazed. Can't make it? No problem. Roman can just fake it, probably.

“We pulled a couple liters of atrament out of a site not that long ago,” he lies. “We've stashed it in a secure location, of course.”

Wang is astounded, skeptical, and greedily curious. A couple liters, I explain, is far more than she's ever seen of the stuff, more than her employer possesses. Probably on the level of a sovereign planet's entire strategic reserve. A quantity that would be extremely significant even to the few entities in the Sector that do have considerably more than that already—the Commonwealth, the Directory, Seneschal Systems, maybe a handful of others.

She wants to see, if not atrament (she understands why they wouldn't be walking around with it), some kind of proof that they really have been rooting around in untouched pretech ruins. The PCs, who are still carrying a handful of the items they yanked out of the Freeport site (roachpoppers, holocodices, projector panels), oblige. She still doesn't entirely believe them about the atrament, but she can't miss even the chance of an opportunity like this; she asks them to bring her a milliliter of the stuff, gives them the next dates she'll be at the Foxglove offices on Lopez Ring, and encourages them to meet her there as soon as possible.

* * *

How are they going to get their hands on even a small supply of atrament? They contact Leila, who scoffs at the idea of supplying them any, but does transmit some useful information about the substance's chemical and electromagnetic signature, which might help Roman spoof some. Having run some experiments in his makeshift lab aboard the ship, he experiences a rare moment of humility; he doesn't think that any fake atrament he'll be able to produce will stand up to the kind of scrutiny it would be reasonable to expect from Wang. The crew decides to put this flimflam operation on the back burner. They'll be headed in the general direction of Magonia, Roman's home planet, where the Sector's greatest expert on atrament, a researcher named Nelson Martinez, lives. Maybe he can help? Maybe they can rob his lab.

In the meantime, they want to focus on ripping off Ashbrook, with Orlando as their double agent. Ashbrook doesn't know where Orlando has disappeared to—few people, if any outside of the crew and Elias, know that he's aboard the PCs' ship—so a little while back, they had him contact her, explaining in a carefully calibrated tone (half angry, half pleading) that he survived the fiasco in Freeport, still wants his fair share of the money, and has been independently tracking the PCs. He believes the looted cargo is still aboard their ship, he claims, and he has the opportunity to seize it if only Ashbrook will extend him some funds with which to hire mercenaries. She needs to act fast, though.

She does. The message, and the money, come through. She wants Orlando to hire mercs, seize the ship, and bring it back to Morrow. The rendezvous site is a desolate salt flat within easy flying distance of Freeport. He should communicate his ETA at his earliest (secure) convenience.

Batias takes the entire 8,000-credit payment Ashbrook has sent, claiming that he knows a guy who can hook the crew up with combat field uniforms—they want to be prepared for what might turn out to be a knock-down, drag-out firefight, right? He does, it turns out, know a guy, whom he manages to persuade to sell him four CFUs on credit. Batias pockets Ashbrook's credits. Now he just needs to find another gambling den.

The Tarot as Encounter Table

Selections from the Tarot de Carlotydes (my personal fave)

I own a bunch of tarot decks and have been meaning to learn to use them for ages now. And I've managed to pick up some of the basics, but it'd probably be easier for me if I could incorporate them into something that's already part of my daily (or at least weekly) routine. Why not games?

I do know some games that use tarot cards, but they often use them more as a flavorful random generator (His Majesty the Worm, for instance) than for their “real” divinatory content. Incidentally, I actually own a D&D-branded tarot deck that was intended to do this for 5E campaigns—offer up quirky random encounters and events that have next to nothing to do with traditional tarot readings—and, although the cards are beautiful, I find it useless both as a tarot deck and as an encounter table. The art, though attractive, doesn't communicate anything about the arcana or its associated random encounter; to glean anything from your draw, you have to look it up in a little booklet. To make matters worse, there are no design elements to distinguish the different suits, so you have to match each minor arcana card individually with the corresponding art in the booklet. What's the point? Just give me a d100 table.

I want my tarot encounter “table” to draw from the traditional interpretations of the cards to begin with, just for my own edification, but in contrast to that mess of a D&D deck, I think there's something to be gained from that in terms of ease of use, too. To be usable at the table without a lot of flipping through booklets and hemming and hawing, we'd want the cards to have easily legible systematic meanings, rather than having each one be a separate, disconnected entry in a table. Luckily, that's pretty how much the minor arcana, at least, already work!

* * *

Let's look at the suits:

Cups are associated with the element of water, and by extension with intuition, emotion, and interpersonal relationships. Traditionally, this suit was associated with the clergy, but we could extend that idea (a large organization at least ostensibly concerned with the common weal) to the magistrates or mandarins of a bureaucratic, rather than theocratic, state.

Swords are associated with the element of air, and by extension with the intellect and the world of ideas, but also with sorrow and violence. There are some obvious associations here—the nobility, mercenaries, and bandits all live by, and are symbolized by, the sword—but scholars, researchers, explorers, and mourners could serve too.

Pentacles are associated with the element of earth, and by extension with money (in other languages the suit is often “coins” or “rings”), natural resources, the home, and health. Again, many associations are obvious: merchants, traders, peddlers, miners, farmers.

Wands are associated with the element of fire, and by extension with willpower, creativity, labor, and ambition. The name of the suit, in a conventional TTRPG context, obviously suggests magic-users, but tradition associates the suit with what we might call the “creative classes,” like artists and artisans, and with the vitality and energy of the common people in general.

For simplicity's sake, we might, in our traditional quasi-medieval TTRPG setting, boil these associations down to the estates of the realm (we're going to divide the lower classes between merchants and workers/peasants, as in Sweden, Russia, Italy, etc. rather than using the Anglo-French rubric where all commoners get lumped together in the third estate and the fourth estate ends up being journalists somehow):

Cups are associated with the element of water and the first estate, the clergy.
Swords are associated with the element of air and the second estate, the nobility.
Pentacles are associated with the element of earth and the third estate, the burghers.
Wands are associated with the element of fire and the fourth estate, the peasantry.

In a different setting, these are easy enough to adapt. In a modern or futuristic game, for instance, the clergy become the civil bureaucracy, the nobility become the military and other security forces (and perhaps organized criminals too), the burghers become corporations (or oligarchs, or just the bourgeoisie), and the peasantry become the urban proletariat.

Encounters don't always have to be with the actual members of each estate, just their representatives or people associated with them. Back in our quasi-medieval setting, for instance, we could have four consecutive encounters with commoners on the road, but have each associated with a different suit: first a group of pilgrims on their way to a holy site, then a company of soldiers mustering for a deployment, then a group of carters carrying goods for their merchant boss, and finally some peasants taking goods to market on their own behalf.

* * *

That's suits sorted. Next, numbers. These have one obvious use—they can just be numbers. Ace of Swords? That's a lone knight riding off on a quest. Six of Pentacles? A traveling merchant and her five guards, or a traders' caravan of six wagons. Four of Cups? A prioress and three novices returning to their monastery. But they also each have associations of their own:

Ace: New beginnings, potential, opportunities. This could represent a proposition or quest.
Two: Partnerships, relationships, balance, choices, duality. This could be a literal or metaphorical fork in the road for the PCs.
Three: Creation, groups, growth, collaboration. This might be an offer of company or a recruitment pitch.
Four: Stability, foundations. This could be a physically sheltered place or otherwise just a good opportunity to rest and recuperate.
Five: Conflict, change. This might be a scene of violence or disaster, or just a place or person experiencing some kind of transition.
Six: Harmony, growth, cooperation. This could be an offer of, or request for, cooperation or aid.
Seven: Achievement, understanding, reflection. This might be some general knowledge gained, or a clue toward some task the PCs are pursuing.
Eight: Action, accomplishment. This might be an obstacle or adversity to overcome.
Nine: Fulfillment, fruition, completion. This could be an encounter with someone or something the PCs have been looking for.
Ten: The ending of a cycle, renewal, wholeness. This might be a reunion, a restoration, or even the opportunity to complete a major quest.

These can be used with or without their suit. Maybe our Ace of Swords has a quest for us. Maybe our Six of Pentacles has a valuable object she's willing to trade to us for something we recently acquired. Or maybe our Four of Cups is just a pleasant grove of trees around a spring by the roadside.

The minor arcana also include “face cards.” These are associated with different stages in an individual's life or career, but also have broader associations. They can represent ranks in the hierarchies associated with the suits, individuals of different ages, or abstract ideas:

Page: A teenager. A seeker or student. News. An apprentice.
Knight: A young adult. An explorer or traveler. Movement. A journeyman.
Queen: A mature adult. A teacher or mentor. Power. An expert.
King: An elder. An authority or virtuoso. Wisdom. A master.

The Page of Cups might be a messenger with word of the new bishop's appointment. The Queen of Swords might be an armsmaster willing to teach one of the PCs a few of her tricks. The Knight of Wands could be a young wizard off to make their mark on the world or just a young farmworker traveling to find work in a foreign land. Alternatively, the Knight of Swords could be a whole army on the march, or the Queen of Cups might be that new bishop and his vast entourage making a procession of great pomp and circumstance.

So we've got a nice, reasonably tidy system for the minor arcana. But what about the major arcana, which make up more than a quarter of the deck?

* * *

When you're reading tarot, the major arcana are usually considered to be more consequential than the minor arcana: major life events, turning points, important lessons. We could take that approach here, but do we want 28% of our random encounter “table” to be serious drama? Probably not. On the other hand, some of them have names that fit perfectly into a traditional TTRPG setting, so why not think about class archetypes, and perhaps a few classic not-necessarily-hostile monsters? (The cards have loads of other associations and interpretations baked in, which we can use when the adventurer/monster doesn't fit.)

The Fool (0): Potential, beginnings, opportunity. A bard, or perhaps a clown or jester, or just an impetuous youth.
The Magician (I): Mastery, skill, artistry, intention, manifestation. A magic-user, of course. More sorcerer than wizard.
The High Priestess (II): Spirituality, intuition, guidance. A cleric—maybe an adventurer, maybe a literal high priestess.
The Empress (III): Decadence, nurturing, beauty. A druid, or simply a noblewoman.
The Emperor (IV): Leadership, authority. A fighter, or a nobleman.
The Hierophant (V): Tradition, conformity, knowledge. A paladin, or an actual hierophant.
The Lovers (VI): Partnership, balance, emotion, bonds. A ranger and their animal companion, or simply a pair of lovers.
The Chariot (VII): Prowess, momentum, determination, free will. A rogue or thief, or an actual chariot, coach, or carriage.
Strength (VIII): Control, fortitude, rigor, dependency. A warrior monk, or just a really burly person. Or a really burly warrior monk!
The Hermit (IX): Solitude, wisdom, guidance, self-reflection. A classic wizard, with a pointy hat and everything, or just a mundane hermit.
The Wheel of Fortune (X): Luck, change, fate. A barbarian, or some playful (or malicious) agent of chaos.
Justice (XI): Fairness, truth, resilience. A lamassu, or a crew of bandits scheming to rob a holy place.
The Hanged Man (XII): Release, acceptance, perspective. A ghost or some other restless undead, or the site of an execution. Maybe both.
Death (XIII): Metamorphosis, release, transition. A vampire or lycanthrope, or a party of hunters in pursuit of one.
Temperance (XIV): Balance, combining, introspection, purity. An elemental, lost or let loose by a sorcerous mishap, or a solitary pilgrim.
The Devil (XV): Excess, attachment, temptation, desire. A dragon in human guise, or an adventuring band of would-be dragonslayers.
The Tower (XVI): Upheaval, chaos, dread. A dybbuk looking for a new body, or a glamoured hag or rakshasa posing as a traveler.
The Star (XVII): Hope, faith. An angel or other agent of divinity, come to deliver tidings to the PCs or compel them to some task.
The Moon (XVIII): Mystery, darkness, duality, regret. An invisible fairy, playing pranks on travelers, or a “naturalist” trying to catch one.
The Sun (XIX): Joy, clarity, happiness, peace of mind. A jinni, meddling in the affairs of passersby, or a charlatan pretending to be one.
Judgement (XX): Decision, reflection. A devil, come to make the PCs an offer they can't refuse, or to collect a debt from an NPC.
The World (XXI): Fulfillment, integration, conclusion, completion. A visionary or prophet, with a portentous message for the PCs.

(Shout-out to Skerples and the ever-fabulous Monster Overhaul for providing good creature inspo.)

So that's that! A rubric for turning the minor arcana into encounters, some sparks for major arcana encounters, and maybe a slightly better sense of what the tarot is about. And hey, if you don't like the result prescribed or suggested by these tables, you can always just look to the art and ad lib something based on vibes. That's half the fun of the tarot in the first place, and what gives different decks their character and makes them fun to collect.

Ancestral Knowledge

So, like I said in the last post, I've been reading, and loving, Outcast Silver Raiders. One of the choices it makes that I'm enjoying is presenting the players with no racial (ancestry, species) options up front—everybody's a human by default. The game gives the GM a bunch of the trad demihuman options in the back of the book…but then actively discourages them from actually using those options. An all-human party makes a lot of sense for the Mythic North setting in particular (weird, grimdark 13th-century Scotland, more or less), but it also helps punch up any fantasy setting by making whatever non-humans the players encounter truly unusual and strange.

Besides, the menagerie of D&D demihumans, those intended for players and those intended as NPC foes alike, just isn’t very interesting. I'm not going to belabor this point too much (other and wiser folks have written at great length about it before), but they’re almost all just crude racialized exaggerations of real groups of people.

Most “monstrous” demihumans represent the Western archetype of the “savage.” They're primitive people hanging around on marginal land (swamps, jungles, mountains, caves, deserts) basically just waiting to be colonized or slaughtered. They might do a little raiding, a human sacrifice or two, or some quasi-cannibalism to remind us that they're evil (in case we don't have an alignment system to assure us that they're Evil), but mostly they're passive objects of imperial violence. They've often been given recognizable trappings of indigenous American cultures, or at least stereotypes thereof—feathers, tomahawks, blow guns, spear throwers, and so forth. Goblins, kobolds, and lizardmen fit into this category, among others. It's super racist!

Other monstrous demihumans, rather than being uncivilized savages, represent the anti-civilization of The Horde, threatening to turn the world upside-down and displace the point-of-view culture from its “rightful” place on top. Orcs, hogoblins, and their ilk get a bunch of cultural markers that suggest nomadic steppe people, particularly the Mongols (the centaurs of the Warcraft franchise are an especially ugly, heavy-handed example of this).

Several categories of “civilized” humanoids are just real human beings dressed up in fantasy trappings. Halflings and gnomes are basically “what if little people were magic?” with an extra coat of racist paint on the halflings in WoTC's “they're also Romani” characterization). Dwarves are a bit of the same, although at least they have solid roots in folklore…although of course in contemporary fantasy fiction, their culture tends go heavy on a lazy mashup of Scottish and Jewish stereotypes.

In all these cases, one of the major problems is that there's little or no attempt to imagine demihumans as anything other than simplistic analogues for real groups of people. There tend to be few, if any, internal distinctions within the racial categories. Each group gets one pantheon, one language, maybe two cultures if they're lucky. (Sometimes, what should be a distinct culture gets spun off as an entirely different species.) Maybe a few different tribes, all of which behave more or less identically to each other. Some of the latter-day D&D ancestries have had sense enough to step away from “These guys are Mongols” or “These guys are Aztecs” analogies, but they still paint with a too-broad brush. Dragonborn? They're just some dudes, but with scales. Tabaxi? Well, they're naturally curious, of course. Meow.

* * *

Okay, but what about the two most popular non-human 5E species? Elves and tieflings have been conspicuously absent from my diatribe. And why? Because they're actually pretty interesting, they're probably popular in part because they're interesting, and they show two good ways forward for character ancestry.

Elves have the important distinction of being older, wiser, haughtier, and generally better than humans. At least elves think so, and that makes them novel. Most D&D demihumans exist, both in the game and outside of it, for humans to dump on (and by extension for people in dominant real-world groups to dump on minorities). They're barbarians, savages, animals, misshapen creatures. Elves, on the other hand, look down on humans. Elves are smarter, more beautiful, better at magic. More cultured. More civilized. You can kind of map an envious awe of an older “race” by some young upstarts only recently emerged from barbarism onto, say, the 19th-/20th-century German (and Western European, more broadly) obsession with Greece and Rome, but it just doesn't work that neatly. Elves aren't Greeks or Romans. They're more complicated.

Much more complicated, in fact! They get real internal cultural differences. They get multiple languages. They get varied religious practices. It tends to be a bit thin, still, and it's mostly derived from Tolkien (so no need to give TSR or WotC any credit), but a few different elven nations and some kind of conflict among them is a lot better than halflings or orcs get. Elves are also distinct, surprisingly, for having real physiological differences from humans that actually matter in the game, like resting via trance rather than sleeping. They could certainly be weirder—if we stuck closer to their folkloric roots, they'd be stealing babies and drinking blood—but they're at least a little bit alien.

Tieflings represent the opposite end of the spectrum: not alien and strange like the elves of folklore, not merely foreign like the myriad demihumans who ought to just be replaced by distinct human cultures, but uncanny. Almost normal, almost like “us,” but off somehow. Tainted. Marked. Problematically literal infernal ancestry aside, tieflings are a richer and truer analogy for being a despised minority than the essentially antisemitic dwarven trope of “They’re hardworking and smart and by golly, they just love gold” or anything like it could ever be. To their neighbors, they almost seem like normal people, but something in their deep ancestry is different, wrong, corrupt. They can't be trusted. They're probably up to no good. And there are signs. Blood will out. (Aasimar, on the other hand, aren’t the least bit interesting, because they don't represent anything authentic or recognizable; nobody in real life ever believed that some particular racial other in their society was actually inherently better than them, and descended from angels no less.)

Reinventing the Magical Polyhedral Wheel

"Cosmic Tree (Pochote)" by Jesús Lozano Paredes

The image is basically unrelated to the post; I just saw it at LACMA this weekend and thought it (and everything else there by Jesús Lozano Paredes, and in fact the whole exhibition We Live in Painting) was awesome. Seeing a bunch of cool art while traveling the past two weekends has been one of several factors that's got me thinking about fantasy instead of my usual dogged focus on science fiction (poring over my new copy of Outcast Silver Raiders has been another; more on that below and in posts to come).

* * *

Spring, as I believe Tennyson said, is when a youngish man's fancy turns to magic systems. They're never quite right! And as life returns to the world and hope returns to our hearts etc. etc. we think: I can reinvent this wheel. I can imagine something greater. Unpredictable and dangerous yet elegant and simple, and also redolent of mystery and darkness. Easy.

I've been reading Outcast Silver Raiders, which is dope, and I'm really, really enjoying the game's whole approach to magic. It accomplishes a couple of things that most iterations of D&D have completely whiffed on and even other OSR/NSR games tend to struggle with, which are making magic feel dangerous and forbidden (but still powerful and seductive) and simultaneously making the game world feel hostile to magic-users without turning them into an albatross around the necks of the rest of the party. Rituals are awesome, and worth the trouble because they're so much more powerful than what anything else can do. And yet the sorcerer's basic spells, though much weaker, are still gnarly, flavorful, and quite potent in a setting that has very little magic but does have lots of nasty problems that are hard to solve without magic. Great take on magical healing, especially.

But it's actually none of that that got me thinking about tinkering with a magic system. The way magic works in Raiders strikes me as being really well suited to the game, the setting, and the tone, and I don't see any need to hack it. But Raiders also uses usage dice for a bunch of stuff, and that got me thinking about how different dice could be used to represent a magic-user's powers in a game with a more conventional spell list. I've seen usage dice proposed for spellcasting before, and of course we've all seen a zillion different takes on dice pools, but I don't recall ever seeing this exact concept. Behold!

* * *

The basic procedure: Pick a die and try to roll over the level of the spell you're casting. If you fail, the die is exhausted and can't be used again for some time. You can't cast a spell unless you have a die larger than the spell level; you can use a d8 to roll a 6th-level spell (with a 1/4 chance of keeping the die), but you cannot use a d6 to do the same.

My first thought was that you'd start with a d4, each level would give you a new d4, and you could combine two like dice to get one of a higher level (i.e., 2d4 = 1d6). There are some obvious problems with starting at d4 (brand-new characters can cast 3rd-level spells, for instance), but d2s and d3s are fussy, and the problems aren't insoluble. This gives us the following progression:

Level 1: d4
Level 2: 2d4 / 1d6
Level 3: 3d4 / 1d6 + 1d4
Level 4: 4d4 / 2d6 / 1d8 / 1d6 + 2d4
Level 5: 5d4 / 2d6 + 1d4 / 1d8 + 1d4 / 1d6 + 3d4
Level 6: 6d4 / 3d6 / 1d8 + 1d6 / etc.
Level 7: 7d4 / 1d6 + 1d4 / etc.
Level 8: 8d4 / 4d6 / 2d8 / 1d10 / etc.
Level 9: 9d4 / 4d6 + 1d4 / 2d8 + 1d4 / 1d10 + 1d4 / etc.
Level 10: 10d4 / 5d6 / 2d8 + 1d6 / 1d10 + 1d6 / etc.

There are some nice dynamics here! Even at fairly low levels, casters can specialize into very different styles. You'll get about five 1st-level spells out of a single d8 on average, about nine out of 2d6, and about 14 out of 4d4, or roughly half that many 2nd-level spells out of each, respectively, so there's a distinct advantage to keeping your small dice and not just going straight for the heavy artillery (also, you stand a decent chance of losing your die on the very first cast if you only have one).

But there are more and bigger problems here. It works pretty neatly with a system where spells go from 1st to 9th level (5E, for instance), except that in such systems 7th-level spells, which a level 4 character can use in this system, are extremely powerful. We can make a custom spell list, of course, and save the really crazy stuff for 8th and 9th level, but that's a lot of fussy spell-list granularity for what's supposed to be a simple, elegant system, and lack of easy compatibility with other systems is a bummer. Also, a level 4 caster being about to semi-reliably shoot off 14+ Magic Missiles (or equivalent) is pretty nutty too! Any way you slice it, this is just too much power even for a high-fantasy setting.

Happily, it's easy to slow the spell-dice progression. Let's give our caster one new d4 at each odd-numbered level only:

Level 1: d4
Level 3: 2d4 / 1d6
Level 5: 3d4 / 1d6 + 1d4
Level 7: 4d4 / 2d6 / 1d8 / 1d6 + 2d4
Level 9: 5d4 / 2d6 + 1d4 / 1d8 + 1d4 / 1d6 + 3d4

This both makes a much more reasonable power progression and gives the player more interesting choices. In the middle levels, you really have to specialize in favor of quantity or quality, and even at the highest levels (assuming level 10 max), you have very limited access to really powerful spells and have to sacrifice a lot of lower-level power to get there.

We can slow the progression down a little bit more, too, by separating "get a new d4" from "combine two like dice." You get the former at odd-numbered levels; you do the latter at even-numbered levels. This pushes the big jumps in potential power level back from level 3 and level 7 to level 4 and level 8. It also spreads out the player's choices a bit, giving them something to think about every time they level up:

Level 1: d4
Level 2: d4
Level 3: 2d4
Level 4: 2d4 / 1d6
Level 5: 3d4 / 1d6 + 1d4
Level 6: 3d4 / 1d6 + 1d4
Level 7: 4d4 / 1d6 + 2d4
Level 8: 4d4 / 1d6 + 2d4 / 2d6 / 1d8
Level 9: 5d4 / 1d6 + 3d4 / 2d6 + 1d4 / 1d8 + 1d4
Level 10: 5d4 / 1d6 + 3d4 / 2d6 + 1d4 / 1d8 + 1d4

You can combine any number of like dice you want at any even level (otherwise, you wouldn't be able to get a d8 until max level, which is boring). Can you separate them later? Probably not. At the GM's discretion, maybe.

* * *

Either way, we're getting somewhere. I see two major problems remaining (although there are probably others I'm not seeing). The first is the spell list; maxing out at 7th level is an improvement over 9th, but it's still a lot of different tiers to sort spells into, it doesn't line up very well with other systems (6th being the max level in older editions of D&D, and 5th being common in newer games), and it still lets brand-new characters chuck 2nd- and 3rd-level spells around.

There are a bunch of potential solutions here. One is to step down from a d4/d6/d8 progression to d2/d4/d6. This works very neatly with systems that have five tiers of spells, making the system easy to use with Shadowdark or WWN or whatever. On the other hand, flipping coins (or using custom dice, or using larger dice as ersatz d2s) feels clunky, and this would really limit the number of spells a character could cast without resting or otherwise refreshing their dice. More on that below, but I don't love the d2s no matter how you slice it.

Another solution, of course, is a custom spell list. Could be a great choice if we were building a system for some specific setting—you can squeeze a lot of lore and flavor into a spell list!—but as a module to try jamming into other games, or as part of a bare-bones generic system that we can plug other games' spells into? Not so great.

The best option might be the laziest one (other than adding cantrips): Just let caster power levels be a little wonky. No magic-user knows how to cast Fireball or Fly right from the jump, but if they loot an evil wizard's tower during their very first adventure and find a tome with those spells in it, why shouldn't they be able to try them out? This requires a paradigm in which casters only learn new spells diegetically (through study, from mentors, by looting scrolls and spellbooks, etc.), but that's my preference anyway. As for 7th-level spells, the system doesn't even need them. Getting one d8 in your pool lets you cast a 6th-level spell or two, something that's already very potent at level 8. For a bespoke setting, we could still cook up a partial or complete list of original spells, including 7th-level ones, while maintaining easy compatibility with other systems.

* * *

So that just leaves one other (obvious-to-me) problem: It's really easy to burn through your spells in this system. A max-level magic-user can pop off one 6th-level spell and one 3rd-level spell and be totally spent—in fact, it's more likely than not. We need some way to mitigate this. We also need a process for refreshing exhausted dice; maybe they can go together?

That was my first thought, anyway. There are a lot of knobs and levers here; refreshing bigger dice could require longer rests, dice could be refreshed sequentially (biggest first, or smallest first, or at random), we could roll to refresh dice, etc. That last option could be available even on a very short timescale. A magic-user could take an action, even during combat, to "focus" or "concentrate" or something like that, getting an opportunity to refresh one die—like a monster rolling each turn to see if it refreshes an exhausted power. Could be a good approach for a system that's very granular with skills (Arcana, Concentration, etc.), especially in a high-fantasy setting.

I like simplicity more than granularity for something like this, though, and I like magic being rare, costly, and unpredictable more than I like it being something a highly trained expert can master. A better solution, for me, brings this whole post full circle by actually drawing inspiration from Outcast Silver Raiders (rather than flying off on a free-associative tangent that barely ends up having anything to do with usage dice at all).

If you ever roll a 1 while casting, the die is automatically exhausted. If you roll above a 1 but below your target, however, you can pay in blood for better odds. Need a 7 but rolled a 3? Roll again and add the second die to the first. The total counts toward your target, but is also deducted from your HP. Better hope it's a 4 this time and not another 3! (I think you just roll again if you still aren't at the threshold, and risk going way over; forcing the player to take damage but still automatically lose the die seems harsh without being much fun. They should have the choice to back out with partial damage, though, because that creates interesting situations. If you went into the above scenario with 12 HP, for instance, even an 8 on your first blood-magic roll couldn't kill you outright…but if you rolled that second 3, it might be better to stop at 6 HP than to take a third roll, where a 6, 7, or 8 would drop you.)

This has to be tuned according to how many HP casters get, how much magical healing (if any) is available, the tone we want for the system/setting/campaign, and so forth. Maybe you only take damage from the extra die (or dice), not the original roll; maybe your attribute bonus or an appropriate skill bonus can partially mitigate the damage. Maybe you can get advantage on the initial roll sometimes. But I like the core idea a lot. Adds some danger, and a push-your-luck element, to casting.

Randomness is great, but it's best when it presents players with difficult choices rather than just imposing outcomes on them. We still have automatic successes and failures at the top and bottom of the range; letting players hedge against bad luck by taking on a different kind of risk is more interesting than taking spell dice away fully at random and then restoring them equally randomly with the focus/concentration action described above.