Why Every Dungeon Master should try Tarot

Kieran Sheldon, 7/10/24

When I prepare to run a game of Dungeons & Dragons, I gather dice, pencils, rulebooks, a dry-erase mat, and miniatures. I also bring a less-conventional item: my deck of Tarot cards. In my fifteen-plus years as a Dungeon Master, I've found this tool to be nearly as indispensable as my Dungeon Master's Guide. The Tarot and D&D overlap in unexpected ways, building off of each other into a storytelling experience that's more than the sum of its parts.

Allow me to explain.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS & YOU

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is the original tabletop roleplaying game. It invites several players to assume the roles of adventurers in a medieval fantasy setting. One additional person, the Dungeon Master (DM), narrates the story and controls the adventurers’ monstrous foes. Players roll dice to determine whether their adventurers succeed or fail at their endeavors, and their DM referees the outcome based on the rules detailed in several thick tomes.

I began playing D&D at a very young age. Even as a mere ten-year-old, I accepted the responsibility of becoming my family's Dungeon Master. I've worn the DM's mantle for more than fifteen years now, running games for friends and family. I've also been a professional children's DM with summer camps and after-school programs.

In my long tenure behind the DM's screen, I've found that there are many ways to play D&D (as tactical wargame, as simulation, as improvisational comedy, etc.). I prefer to play it as a cooperative storytelling game. My players and I work together to tell a fantastical story, with each player controlling one of the story's protagonists. In this framework, the game's rules and dice exist primarily to stimulate creativity. The rules create problems that require inventive solutions, and the dice introduce a random element to build tension and twist the story in unexpected directions.

YOUR FUTURE, IN THE CARDS

I came to the Tarot by chance and curiosity. I first told fortunes as a high-school freshman with a hideous deck of steampunk-themed cards. In the decade since, I've kept my divination skills in my back pocket as a fun trick at parties, and I've even earned money telling fortunes in public parks. Years ago, I told a fortune that convinced two of my friends to start dating. They're getting married soon, so I guess I'm halfway decent at this whole "telling the future" thing.

As a note to the uninitiated, the Tarot is a deck of seventy-eight illustrated cards, originally used for card games in medieval Europe. Around the 1800s, occultist clubs with fancy wizard names like "The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn" decided it'd be more fun to use the Tarot for cartomancy: telling fortunes with cards.

A disclaimer: I do not personally believe in the supernatural side of the Tarot (though it's fine if you do). To me, Tarot cards are ink on paper, nothing more. The cards' meanings are so universal and flexible that a skilled fortune-teller can craft a compelling fortune no matter what cards happen to be drawn. It's a magic trick that relies not on slight of hand, but rather on slight of story.

However, this doesn't mean that Tarot cartomancy has no value. On the contrary, I believe that a person can gain significant insight by exploring how the universal motifs depicted on the Tarot apply to their life. It's an effective way to promote creative thinking and pick one's own brain, even if there are no occult forces involved.

My analysis of the Tarot will be based primarily on the symbology of the traditional Rider-Waite deck, created by occultist Arthur Edward Waite and illustrator Pamela Colman Smith in 1909. This is the most popular interpretation of the cartomancy deck, and its imagery and symbolism inform most modern decks. This deck is divided into the four fourteen-card suites of the Minor Arcana plus twenty-two uniquely-named Major Arcana such as the Fool, the Sun, and Death.

Tarot cartomancy typically involves a subject, who seeks information or advice from the cards, and a reader, who interprets the cards to answer the subject's questions. Sometimes, a reader performs a Tarot reading for themself, in which case they are their own subject.

During a reading, the subject randomly draws cards from a Tarot deck, which the reader lays out in a specific pattern, called a "spread." The position of each card in a spread adds context to the cards' inherent meanings. For instance, the Ten of Swords card, representing defeat and despair, has a very different meaning when placed in a position indicating the future then a position indicating an anxiety or fear. Cards can also shift in meaning based on whether they are randomly placed upright or upside-down (inverted).

FANTASIES COLLIDE

Right away, we can point out similarities between a D&D game and a Tarot reading. The reader in a Tarot session plays much the same role as D&D's Dungeon Master: narrating a story in which another person controls the leading character. Both roles require talent at improvisation, attentive listening, and audience engagement. It's just that the protagonist in a Tarot reading is its real-life person, not, like, Grognak the Barbarian.

Additionally, both D&D and Tarot reading incorporate an element of randomization to stimulate creative thinking. D&D's dice force players to adapt to improbable successes and dramatic failure. In a similar sense, drawing random cards from a Tarot deck invites a reading's subject to consider their current situation from new perspectives.

When I first started using the Tarot, spreading cards on the grungy carpet of my high school, I found that I had a knack for fortune-telling. I think a major reason for my early success at cartomancy was my history as a Dungeon Master. I quickly found that my experience narrating cooperative, improvisational stories transferred easily from one fantastical realm to another.

BETTER DUNGEON MASTERY THROUGH TAROT

So, now that we've explored how a DM's skills can apply to fortune-telling, how can familiarity with the Tarot improve our D&D games?

Most simply, I believe that learning to tell fortunes hones the empathetic storytelling skills that define a good DM. Tarot reading teaches a storyteller to look beyond a person's surface-level actions and explore the deeper motivations of their behavior. A reading is often a weighty emotional affair: my subjects have opened up to me about grief, divorce, mental illness, romance, and other topics that would rarely surface in casual conversation. Navigating such a reading demands that a storyteller approach their subject with non-judgmental compassion and empathy, gently guiding them towards a better understanding of themself.

These skills are directly transferable to storytelling in D&D. After all, one of a Dungeon Master's core responsibilities is helping players achieve a better understanding of their characters and the world they inhabit. A DM who approaches their fictional protagonists with practiced empathy and gentle curiosity will excel at this duty. Even more critically, Tarot reading teaches a DM to build a space where friends and strangers feel safe exploring intense emotions and expressing vulnerable truths, which is essential to cooperative storytelling.

Those are all soft squishy skills, though. Let's discuss some of the more concrete ways that a clever DM can incorporate the Tarot's lessons into D&D.

The power of random

Firstly, the Tarot itself can function as a randomization mechanic that encourages creative storytelling. When the game's unfolding story calls for improvisation, a Dungeon Master can draw from a Tarot deck for a quick burst of inspiration. Because of the deck's nature, this works best in relation to characters' personalities and motivations. I particularly love drawing a card or two when introducing new non-player characters into my D&D games to quickly establish the character's personality quirks and goals.

In fact, this sort of Tarot-inspired randomization is not foreign to D&D. The game's fantastical world already incorporates direct references to the Tarot! Each card in the Deck of Many Things, a fictional item that adventurers might acquire, unleashes a different world-altering effect when it's drawn. These twenty-two cards clearly mirror the Tarot's twenty-two Major Arcana, right down to shared names including "Fool" and "Sun." Separately, when playing through the classic D&D adventure module "Ravenloft," adventurers will experience a randomized fortune-telling with playing cards, called “Tarokka cards” in later editions. This reading determines key elements of the story to come.

Wizards of the Coast, D&D's publisher, has recently sold both of these fictional decks as physical products, complete with guides on incorporating random card interpretation into a D&D game.

Fortune telling for fictional characters

On a different note, I often use the Tarot to deepen my understanding of the fictional characters in the stories I tell. A DM can take advantage of the universal themes of the Tarot deck by performing readings for the characters in their D&D game and interpreting cards from the perspectives of those characters. This exercise delves into characters' inner worlds and prompts unexpected insights about the external and internal factors that guide their choices. I believe that the inhabitants of my fictional worlds lead richer lives thanks to the Tarot. Sometimes, I even perform in-fiction readings as part of a game’s canonical story, inviting my players to explore their characters’ futures with me.

The players in my primary D&D game are also fluent in the Tarot, and we frequently discuss how the cards might reflect on our campaign and vice versa. What cards best represent the players’ characters? Which character in the story would best embody the Star card? These debates aren't just fun; they also grant us a better grasp on the story we're telling together.

My players also use the Tarot in the same ways that I do, performing cartomancy readings for the protagonists they control. By doing so, they approach their characters from new perspectives and enhance their ability to roleplay on D&D night.

How to see the future

This brings us to the final, essential similarity between D&D and the Tarot. When executed well, with care and heart, they both can feel like pure magic. Fortune-telling is clearly intended to feel magical, and it often succeeds at summoning insights that linger long after the cards are shuffled and tucked away. A good session of D&D can work a similar sort of sorcery, conjuring real emotion out of fiction and plastic cubes. Why not mix both schools of spellcraft together and see what emerges from that bubbling cauldron?

So, how does a person start reading Tarot cards? It's simple: look at some tarot decks, buy one with art you like, and jump in. I recommend exploring Etsy and Kickstarter to find decks illustrated by incredible independent artists. Recent years have also seen the publication of several explicitly D&D-themed decks of Tarot cards, including the clever Ultimate RPG Tarot Deck and a gorgeous officially-licensed deck . Clearly these two magical realms have a lot in common.

Most decks will include a little booklet detailing the meaning of each card and some spreads to try for your readings. A quick Google search will also reveal copious online resources for understanding the symbolism of the cards. Here's the secret, though: just as with running D&D, there's no right or wrong way to read Tarot. The meanings of the cards vary by reader and by deck. Just look at the pretty art on the cards, listen to your subject, and improvise. If you're a Dungeon Master, you're already good at this. I promise.