Game: Tarot Magic
Publisher: Mystic Eye Games
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 29th, May 2003
Reviewer’s Rating: 7/10 [ Good ]
Total Score: 7
Average Score: 7.00
Take your copy of Tarot Magic and being careful not to bend the front cover, use your thumb to quickly flick-book the top right hand corner. You’ll see that the cup sidebar graphic jumps up and down and left to right.
That’s about the only distraction in the book. Aside from the dancing cup, Tarot Magic concentrates on giving GMs what they need to use tarot magic in their game and that’s what I like to see from a d20 supplement.
Tarot Magic begins with very large tables designed to emulate tarot card draws and readings by using dice. You don’t need to know anything about tarot to use the book; you certainly don’t need to know the meaning of individual cards. It is a simple matter then to bounce a few dice, consult the table, discover which cards have been drawn in game and what they could mean. The catch, of course, is that the GM doesn’t actually know the future any more than the players do and so needs to make “most-likely” guesses from her notes and couch any predictions in suitably vague terms. If there’s one on-topic area that Tarot Magic is light on then it’s this lack of help for GMs trying to sound oracle-like without actually giving too much away, or sounding oracle-like when they’re as uncertain as what might happen next as the players. There is a knack to it, GMs and professionally fake fortune-tellers all have their own tricks and I would have been over the moon to find even a small sampling in this supplement. There’s none. There is, however, an example reading where a GM elaborates suitable material from game notes for a player visiting a tarot mage.
There are a lot of dice involved. There are more tarot cards than sides on a d20, the interpretation of a tarot card changes depending on which way round its drawn too and so there can be as many as three dice rolled per card. Complex readings can use over fifty different cards (the Tree of Life uses 70 or more) and so a gaming session might see over 150d20s bouncing for one non-combat scene. Thankfully there are attempts to streamline this procedure and provide an alternative but less “accurate” table, but even the culling of one-third of the d20s still could leave a gaming group buried under a pile of plastic polyhedral.
Tarot Mages are more than just fortune-tellers. The Tarot Mage is presented as both a core class and a prestige class and this is a good move by Mystic Eye, it’s the sort of GM empowering option that makes books like this worthwhile. The Tarot Mage uses tarot cards to cast magic. Pretty simple, huh? Wizards use spell books. Tarot Mages use tarot cards. In effect, Tarot Mages are somewhere in between sorcerers and wizards in terms of magical style. I was pleased to see the core class/prestige class option so imagine how chuffed I was to have the choice of two completely different spell systems for the mage. They don’t need to prepare in advance but they do need the right set of cards.
There are 88 pages in Tarot Magic and 50 of them are devoted to the two possible magic systems. The first system suits gaming groups who are willing and able to step away from D&D spell lists. The second magic system, predictably, is a closer match to standard magic rules.
The second system simply requires the Tarot Mage to have the right combination of cards in order to cast standard spells. If the Tarot Mage wants to cast Acid Fog then he’ll need to be Level 6 and have the Seven of Pentacles and the Knight of Pentacles. He needs to be Level 6 in order to have a magical version of the Seven of Pentacles in his deck of cards. A Level 1 Tarot Mage would only be able to have the Two of Pentacles, a Level 4 Tarot Mage would have up to the Five of Pentacles and a Level 9 Tarot Mage could have up to the Ten of Pentacles in his deck. The face cards (Kings, Queen, Knight and Page) in combination with their suit determine the school of magic being used. The Knight of Pentacles equates to the Conjuration school.
The first system of magic doesn’t use standard spells. In many ways the first system is simpler and cleaner, each minor arcana maps directly onto a set of new spells and each major arcana temporarily pumps an attribute. These new spells are slightly subtler and slightly less comic book than typical D&D spells. Low level Tarot Mages can only use the low level spells in each card set and high level Tarot Mages can use all of them. For example, the Three of Cups can access Comfort, Healing Magic and Shared Love. Comfort is a 1st level spell, Healing Magic is a 3rd level spell and so is Shared Love. In order to cast Healing Magic then the Tarot Mage will need to be able to cast 3rd level spells and have the Three of Cups. The Three of Cups isn’t a very “high” tarot card. The Ten of Wands can access Spirit Mastery (9th Level), Spiritual Growth (6th Level) and Test by Fire (6th).
The catch with both systems is that there’s such a thing as “magic” tarot cards and “mundane” tarot cards. There are feats that govern the creation of the magic tarots but if I was a tarot mage I’d have to wonder why some cards could read the future but weren’t magical enough to even cast a weak level one spell.
There is room in the few pages at the end of the book for a section on Tarot Magic items and a Foul Locale encounter.
I liked Tarot Magic. I don’t have too much of a problem with a game where one of the PCs is concerned with collecting magic cards – even if it does sound rather like a cross between Magic: the Gathering and a Saturday morning anime TV show. In fact, collecting magic cards should put the game under no more stress and strain than a wizard trying to maintain a supply of materials for his spells would. I don’t think I could ever face a large tarot reading using the d20 rules but I could certainly see an atmospheric scene where a character turns over three cards in a simple reading and the dice are rolled for all to see. Whereas I’ll not describe the book as %100 killer; I’ll certainly agree that there’s no filler between the covers, it’s all on-topic and valuable content. I like the options Tarot Magic is able to offer; tarot readers may all be charlatans, some might have real skill, tarot magic can be similar to normal spells, entirely different, tarot mages may be a core class in a campaign or a rare prestige class. It’s rather ironic that a book on tarot cards and destiny (albeit in a roleplaying supplement) is so laden with choice – but it’s a good sort of irony.
