Weekend Sketchbook

viii. Justice 

A short break from the In Search of the Miraculous series (more of that on Monday). Here, six more pieces of line art from the Chariot Tarot, straight from the sketchbook. 

Illustrating Tarot Cards

 Tarot update: 39 cards finished out of 78, although I may add a couple of cheeky extra cards. I'm varying in how close I get to Rider Waite, and the symbolism in some places, which is personal to me, may in some places seem off or even broken to a more adept reader (images after the cut, one of which is NSFW).

Knight of Cups, Queen of Swords

All of the courts are done now (although there are three nude ones, so you'll have to  wait to see those). 

Two of Swords, Ace of Cups

The Lovers

Aside from a few cards which I've done with digital media, most of my mooted deck have been drawn by hand. Then the process is that they're cleaned up a bit digitally, printed out on art paper, coloured and then scanned in again. Which is a pretty roundabout system, but it works. I find that colouring digitally doesn't actually create the effect I want, and it isn't any less work. I'm enjoying the cards so far... But then I've only done a dozen and I'm sure that come card 78 I'll be sick of them.

Relationships

Rhadamanthes, a Muvian.

No one exists in a vacuum, fictional or not; even the most convinced loner has people he or she communes with in some way (consider the hermit in Maine, who, although he lived utterly alone for 27 years, still depended on locals whom he could burgle to survive).

Chariot is a game themed on the lives of others. Player characters in Chariot have in common the revelation that the catastrophe is coming, and that they're going to die in it, and not before. If you know that whatever the consequences of your actions, you will live to see the final end, wouldn't that change the way you faced the world?

But whatever you do, it can't happen outside of the context of people. Who will escape? Who will you save? Who will you drag screaming into the ocean depths with you?

Tarot as an esoteric artefact, Tarot as a game mechanic

When you've spent maybe 25 years (and holy crap it really has been that long) mucking about with dice, dice become familiar to you, you start to understand their little quirks and things. You expect things of them.

And here is a thing: using an alternative means of generating numbers can be an unknown quantity. Which is by way of saying, Tarot cards, eh?

Conflict resolution (in a slightly roundabout way)

Makarakan.

[Edit, December 1st 2015: some of the mechanics here have changed in the writing of the game.]

So aged twelve, I painted illustrations for my game, like actual illustrations drawn only as a twelve year old with some talent and no technical skill whatsoever could, mainly using the idiom of 1980s Marvel comics, and came the with all these ideas, and none of them survive. They were all destroyed in my teens out of acute embarrassment, which is sad, because I would have loved to show them to you.

Chariot character metrics

(My thoughts about my game are, I confess, a bit scattershot, but gradually a picture should emerge. Go with me here.)

In a tabletop rpg, character attributes are how your character interacts with the game world, so they need to reflect the sort of story you want to tell. I mean, this you know. So. Stats.

Four pools of points

This is actually the framework that underscores the basic game mechanic.

I'll write a bit about how it works next time.