Saturday, March 2, 2019

Dice Delve: Tarot Dice As Big As the Ritz

One of my table top RPG peculiarities is my separation between creation and play. To wit, I have a very different set of dice at my desk for when I'm thinking up cool things to foist on my unsuspecting players. This differs sharply from the dice I use when I am running games at the table, which tend to be more thematic or associative.

When I create, I use various special dice as inspirational items/desk toys/impartial arbiters of chaos and doom. Dice like my various skull dice. My arrows of chaos dice. My favorite d20 dice in the whole world. Things like that. I even have some Rory's Story Cubes in case I want to just wing it, usually as a thought experiment.

This is from the picture on Amazon that shows off the dice.
Missing from the photo is a sense of scale.
Of course, that's not all in my Thinking Kit. I have coins, tokens, cards, and other objects to fiddle around with. It's not a set thing; I trade bits and bobs out often. But I almost always have a tarot deck in the box, if not nearby, because I love the symbolism that's front-loaded on the cards. I've even got a deck that is reminiscent of stylized fourteenth century pamphlet art, which is perfect for D&D.

I don't use the tarot in games; only when I'm creating something. Well, that's not quite true; I wrote a set of rules using the major arcana that I turned into a fortune-telling system (really, an adventure generator). It's very robust, but it's also very specific, as I have only used it in my Introductory Campaign. But I love me some tarot symbols.

So, when I stumbled, quite by accident, across Tarot Dice, from the now-defunct company, Tarotocy, Inc, I nearly broke my arm reaching for my wallet. And for only twelve bucks, too! Here are thirteen 13 d6 dice, each with symbols representing random major and minor arcana. You also get rules and a play mat for doing actual tarot readings, but let's be real, people: I'm just here for the dice. I had to have these.

So, what did I get?

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