You can listen to this episode here.
This week I’ve got James D’Amato (Campaign: Skyjacks, the Ultimate RPG book line, and the upcoming Oh Captain, My Captain) here to talk about custom oracle decks. Yeah a Tarot deck is cool, and great for doing Tarot, but James makes the case that it’s the “custom” in “custom oracle deck” that will really bring the not-quite-but-feels-like magic of an oracle to your table. But before we get into that, we dig deep into a mysterious black cube to get to our specific custom oracle deck: the Sooth Deck of Invisible Sun.
Further Reading
Invisible Sun on the One Shot podcast
Spindlewheel by Sasha Reneau
Oh Captain, My Captain preorder link
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Transcript
Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and consult a mysterious black cue to divine its best intentions. My name is Sam Dunnewold and my co-host this week is James D'Amato.
First order of business. This is the last episode of this season of Dice Exploder. I know I'll miss you too, but I'll be back in December for another year end Bonanza, might have another treat or two for you between now and then, and then season five will come sometime in January.
Now today's episode. James D'Amato is one of the first RPG podcasters, going all the way back to 2013 when he co-created the podcast One Shot, the first or second actual play show I ever listened to, and that kept me feeling involved in the hobby while I really didn't have anyone else to play with in the early tens.
But James has gone on to do so many other things too: GMing on the Campaign: Skyjacks podcast, publishing the Ultimate RPG book series through Adams Media, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, and now publishing a game through that same line: a For The Queen hack called Oh Captain My Captain focused on a legendary captain and their crew. In pre-orders now! Go to bit.ly/ohcaptainrpg, or there's a link in the show notes.
But that's not what we're here to talk about. This is dice Exploder. What's our mechanic? Well, what James has brought in for us today is a doozy: the sooth deck from Invisible Sun.
Invisible Sun designed by Monte cook is... It's just so much, I'm not going to dwell on it here because we spent so much time explaining it during the episode, but suffice to say that it's a maximalist game that comes in a giant black cube that costs $250. And of the many, many things included in that cube is the sooth deck of versatile custom oracle deck to help guide your story and play.
A good chunk of this episode is time well spent marveling at the behemoth that is Invisible Sun, but that marveling is all there to set us up for talking about the many, many uses that an oracle deck might bring to your game and table through the use of apophenia, that beautiful human instinct to find a pattern in anything. And James makes a strong case that it's the custom in custom oracle deck that really brings that no-quite-but-feels-like magic of an Oracle deck to life. So let's get into it.
Here is James D'Amato with invisible sons sooth deck.
james D'Amato, welcome to Dice Exploder.
James: Thank you so much for having me. I am very, very excited to be on a program where I will not feel rude for talking as specifically about a game as I would like. So,
Sam: That's what I made the show for, without further ado, what are we talking about today?
James: We're talking about Invisible Sun, which is a strange and beautiful complex machine but we are talking about a specific part of that machine, and that is the Sooth Deck. And more generally, and broadly because we're talking about the Sooth Deck, we're talking about Oracle Decks.
Sam: Yes. And I don't want to spend too much time on Invisible Son because that's a whole season of this fucking show, so
James: There are definitely enough mechanics in that game to do that.
Sam: But I do think we should start with, like, What's Invisible Sun? This is the game that comes in a cube. It made $664, 000 on Kickstarter. It is by Monte Cook. I don't know much more about it than that. What's the cube? can you
explain?
James: the best way to understand Invisible Sun is to understand Monte Cook a publisher and Monte Cook as a designer. Monte Cook is a Game designer who's had a very long career has, you know, interacted with some very mainstream products , has fingerprints on Dungeons and Dragons in the 3.
5 era and whatnot, and generally of the designers of that era, Does a really good job. Definitely has a more crunchy sensibility to what he does and has kind of built a brand around that. But the thing that I love to say about Monte Cook is Monte Cook is a designer who makes heartbreakers that sell really well.
Sam: That's so perfect,
James: to, the audience who, might not be as, like, deep in the RPG industry paint as, us there used to be a concept that technically still exists within RPGs called the Fantasy Heartbreaker. And it was usually somebody who played D& D and was like, Ah, I can fix this by Designing the entirety of D& D and changing one thing to make it more annoying or more racist.
And back in the day, before we had digital only products, people would have to commission a garage full of thick books that they stored in there and hopefully try and recoup some of the losses of the 30, 000 or whatever that they spent on that initial print run. So, it's a heartbreaker, because somebody poured their heart and soul, and, you know, maybe they were a little misguided maybe their ideas weren't so good, or maybe it was just really hard to market that product, but like, somebody made a piece of art, and it ruined them financially and probably emotionally.
These days because of crowdfunding, because of digital products, people normally just get emotionally wrecked by heartbreakers, as they Pour work and effort into it but Monte Cook designs these weird games, and they have a very esoteric setting and a maximalist presentation, and that is obvious nowhere but Invisible Sun, like, more.
Numenera has a very strange setting and was, like, the first big hit that MCG put out and they do have maximalist presentation, like, In Invisible Sun, this is the product that Monte Cook, weird games guy, was like, I want to invent a weird system that is super robust and super, like, up its own butt.
With how complex the setting is and the design is and just push that as far to the limit as possible. And I want to take the most complicated thing about traditional roleplaying games, which is magic systems, and just make the whole game magical. Magic systems. So Invisible Sun is something that was controversial at the time that it came out because it is a RPG luxury product.
It had a very, very expensive asking price to start playing this game. You need something to play. called the Black Cube, and the Black Cube is a box that is full of game books and a bunch of greebles and accessories including a fiberglass hand.
Sam: You're showing it to me on camera.
James: yeah,
Sam: I didn't, I'd heard about the hand
James: I do, I do have the cube over there,
Sam: Oh, yeah, there it
James: we could do a tour of it later
Sam: yeah, we'll do an unboxing of the cube as bonus
content.
James: We're not engaging with the bizarre system and bizarre setting that is Invisible Sun, which, I frankly think, The luxury product angle is the least interesting part of this. Everything else is in the design of this game.
It's so strange. It has a deeply passionate fan base today. I don't know that Monte Cook as a publisher has as ravenous a crowd as it used to, but that just might be social media dying away and it's truly difficult to gauge because I see fewer communities that I am not directly involved with.
But they did recently have a revival for for printings of black cubes for Invisible Sun, so I think you can still get your hands on it today you can definitely get your hands on it as a digital product I think as a digital product the PDFs alone cost a hundred dollars or something like that Like it's still quite an expensive product but I can assure you that is because it is using every part of the beast
Sam: wild. It's the Monte Cookiest of games. It is There just has never been anything like it as far as I'm aware, unless you want to compare it to like, I don't know, the like weekend long LARP retreats feel kind of similarly maximalist, but like completely different in what they're
doing.
Like, it's so
James: I will compare it to two games the two things that I will compare this to is, first of all, Fall of Magic By Ross Kalman, out of Heart of the Deer nicorn maximalist presentation, minimalist in design, but that is a hundred and fifty dollars.
It is a hundred dollars shy of Invisible Sun as a product so , I feel like they are selling the same thing. It is part of the ritual of this game, part of the appeal of this game, is the physical object we have made for you to engage with. And I think there is merit to that design sensibility.
The other thing that I will compare it to, and favorably, is Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine. In that Chuubo's is a game that has fairly simple story focused mechanics, but the rulebook is 500 pages. So, it gets really, really specific about the game. Those very thin mechanics and all of the things that you can do with them.
I think that Monte Cook is just the traditional angle, like weird love child of those two products. It is taking a D& D 3. 5 designer's sensibilities and applying it to story games and games that are, Like, really swinging for the fences in terms of being unique and offering strange experiences. Which, think, through his entire career, Monte cook has been really, really good at crafting that together.
Again, this unexplainable product. We've barely started the podcast, and we're just trying to express to you, How weird this is. So, like, that's the general idea. mentioned that it's all about magic systems, everybody in this is some kind of wizard. All of them have their own unique, essentially, role playing system for the type of magic.
There are four classes in the game. And they each have wildly, wildly different systems that they engage with magic through. I think actually it might be five classes because there's the apostate as well. So they all have really robust systems. There is a robust generalized system that it sits on top of it.
But it's also playing in this story space, right? This, like less tied down to mechanics or less built. binary style of role playing that we are more used to in indie spaces and a part of that is the sooth deck.
Sam: so yes, let's move beyond the theatrical experience, the 5 designer doing theater at the table background here, and get to the sooth deck. So the sooth deck is an oracle deck. What, separate from Invisible Sun, is an oracle deck in your
James: The perfect example of an oracle deck and one that people would be most familiar with would be tarot cards. It is a fortune telling tool. The way Oracle decks generally work is there are cards in the deck, and each of those cards is attached to some kind of theme or meaning.
And when a fortune teller is telling your fortune, they will draw cards, and either allow you to or ask you questions so that you can make connections between things that you might be curious about or struggling with to the themes on the cards. This guides you through a process where It feels like the oracle is saying something about your life because you are entering conversation with those cards.
There are a lot of people who will walk away from a fortune telling table going, how did the cards know? Or how does this work? It is all playing with this beautiful thing that human beings do, which is search for meaning in things, try to understand things.
And of course we are all fascinated by ourselves and trying to understand ourselves at the same time. oracle cards are one way that. We can have a conversation with ourselves, think about our lives, our wants things that we hope for, things that we fear, and place them in front of us and allow us to have a conversation with a fortune teller who either responsibly or irresponsibly helps us think about ourselves.
They are even more powerful when applied to a fictional space. , role playing games are built on collaboration, and collaboration is a conversation between people, where somebody brings up an idea and you build on top of that idea. The Oracle cards are Unlike binary pass fail mechanic systems they are carrying more than just yes or no and because you're good at making connections, when an oracle card comes up, it is really, really common for the oracle card to feel uncanny to the situation.
One of the things about the Invisible Sun Kickstarter and my first experience playing Invisible Sun, I, played Invisible Sun because after, like, it started to come out I was like, one shot should do an actual play of this, cause nobody can afford this goddamn game, so, how else are people gonna, like, know if they want to spend that money on it, so we were the first Actual play that engaged with it and we were going through all of like the materials and because we were working with Darcy Ross Who worked with MCG at the time there were all of these things Within the promotional materials like they really wanted to emphasize the game is not done Magic.
Because MCG comes from an earlier era where the genetic memory of the Satanic Panic is very close at hand. And there's a lot of weird stuff. There's this six fingered hand in the game. There's all this occult symbolism and whatnot because they are trying to evoke feelings of magic and mystery and whatnot.
Monte Cook, who remembers, How troublesome that was during the 80s is like, hey, this is all pretend. It's not magic. And we thought it was very funny that somebody would take the time to point that out in their materials. And our first game of Invisible Sun, where we used the sooth deck we kept getting draws that felt, like, uncannily relevant to what we were doing.
And it was amazing. It led to this meme on our show where we would just be like, Monte Cook is a liar! The game is magic! It's a magic game, and it's cursed in this haunted deck, and kind of every game that I've played with Oracle cards since has had moments where, like, oh, this feels almost creepy, how relevant this is, like the same cards keep coming up, or this is exactly the perfect situation to slam dunk these themes.
So that is Oracle Cards. as a mechanic. They're, really exploiting something that fortune tellers have exploited for a long time to make people believe in magic except they apply it to role playing games so you see the magic in your own ideas.
Sam: What a lovely way to put it. They also feel, like, my experience with Oracle Dex is they also feel even more powerful in the fiction because they can start affecting the entire foundation of the world, not just your reflection on yourself, right?
James: exactly. Like, it really, It brings something to the table in a way that binary pass fail mechanics do not. I'd compare it to, you know, the, or Star Wars Edge of Empire, where there are non binary results in that. there's success failure, and then there's threat and advantage.
And that non binary, like, levels something on that think really adds to the storytelling thing, but when you start bringing up specific themes an oracle deck can throw a weird hook that nobody is expecting at you, and your mind really races to figure out how do these things work together. And when you find the right path, it's like, Oh my god, how did it know?
That's so perfect, it's brought everything to the next level, when really it's just like layering on top of ideas that you already have and dressing them up in like spooky skeleton clothing so that it feels a little bit magical.
Sam: alright, let's talk about a specific card from the Soothe deck. Like what does one card look like? What are the components of it? Because Like, a tarot deck, you've got a suit, and maybe a name of the card, and maybe some artwork, and it's fairly simple. But my understanding is there's a lot more components on an Invisible Sun sooth deck card.
What are they,
James: gosh, so the Oracle Deck within Invisible Sun is doing a lot of work. It is engaging with every part of the system. There are the standard Oracle Deck things that you would see which is a piece of artwork and suits associated with it so like it was tarot, you know, there's suit of swords Invisible Sun has suits that are mysteries, notions, secrets, and visions.
Each card also has some kind of a value the values run between zero and nine like a ten sided die and also face cards that have various, oh, and I forgot all of the stupid names for these face cards. There are Sovereigns, Defenders, Apprentices, Nemeses which technically interact with value a little bit.
And they also have sun signs.. Each of those suns has some kind of thematic connection, but it is its own dimension. For instance, there is the green sun, which is connected to this dimension that is like a very bestial and verdant expression of life and raw energy. And there's the red sun, which is about violence and you know, visceral action and whatnot.
There's the gray sun, which is just our boring world. So like there, there are these, the, the cards. Or some of them, are associated with suns. And what that means is, when it comes up, there is like a tarot spread style thing called the Path of Suns that you lay out sooth cards as you are playing the game.
And the most recent sooth card that has been pulled has a collection of general mechanical effects. If it is a face card they'll be giving either bonuses or impediments to players. If it is associated with color, it will enhance spells connected to a color of a particular sun, or diminish spells that are connected to a different sun.
So even if you are not engaging with the Oracle mechanic of the Sooth deck. The Sooth deck is still providing a layer of complexity that rests atop the normal mechanical function of Invisible Sun. There's almost no such thing as a neutral role in Invisible Sun. It's as if every situation that you could possibly be in is specific in some way.
then we get to the themes collection of words that each card represents for example, let's find my first card
favorite card here. The Golden Ship. Yes, here we are. The Golden Ship has themes of wealth earned, honor, Prestige and Respect. So that is just a collection of themes that the card represents that outside of its divination text or game text you can just draw that and go well based on these themes I think this card is saying this thing about this particular moment.
Then each card associated in its book has a meaning. Oracle text has a divination, which is, if you were to use this as a tarot card, you would use that divination to kind of explain it thematically in the way you would when you're analyzing a tarot card. People, like, know about the death card in tarot, how, like, oh, it doesn't really represent misfortune, it represents change which can mean literal death, but doesn't need to.
So, yeah. It's that sort of thing. Most of the divinations are neutral, I would say. And I've done a specific mechanical breakdown, and this is based on my opinion, so this is not set in stone, there are 20 neutral divination cards out of a 60 card deck, so 20 of those cards could go either way, for or against players, or they're adding some themes to a moment that don't necessarily denote success or failure.
They're doing something else. There are 16 cards that are positive. And I broke this down into mostly positive cards and hard positive cards. Hard positive cards are 10 times, this is a good card for you, as a player. And mostly positive cards are like 3 out of 5 times.
There are going to be certain edge cases where it doesn't work out in your favor. Similarly, there are 24 negative divination cards. Which are There are 9 mostly negative and 15 hard negative cards and a lot of that can be up for debate, I sorted things that way because I was trying to approach this game thinking about the sort of things that players would be doing within the game, so yeah.
Usually, you're trying to find out information. There are a couple cards that are like, well, this favors people who are very careful and intelligent or studious and driven. And it's like, buddy, every character in the game is supposed to be that. Even with personality fluctuation, they're all goddamn wizards.
Who are trying to exist in this wizard world, so like, most characters are gonna be that. It's really not gonna go either way, most of the time, unless you are playing intentionally counter to the game itself. So, you got those divinations. Then, you've got the game meaning. What is the game meaning? It addresses, in a more metafictional sense, what this card could mean.
And it does this Essentially giving you improv prompts for, like, an NPC needs something. A person has betrayed someone. So some of this could be applied to your characters and what's happening to your characters, but some of it could also be played in a space where we're only seeing NPCs. We're just looking at another part of the setting.
So it gives you a little bit of that. Also has joys and despairs which is connected to the experience system within Invisible Sun but on the cards themselves, it's like, well, this is a potentially positive interpretation of this card for a player, and this is a potentially negative interpretation of this card for a player, but To, you know, be fully transparent, in order to level up part of your character, because there are multiple leveling up systems within this game one of the ways that you do that is your character needs to have experienced a moment of joy, And a moment of despair.
You decide that at the end of the session, like, did you experience a joy? Did you experience a despair? Yes. Then you get a little token and you can cash those tokens in for level up points. There's also flavor text because of course there's flavor text,
but that's the anatomy.
That's the anatomy of these fucking things.
Sam: Ten fucking minutes of anatomy on one of these cards. Wait, okay, so you're running invisible sun, when are you flipping one of these things?
James: So the suggestions in the book, because like, they're working on multiple levels, there are three modes of play in Invisible Sun everybody who's played a traditional roleplaying game will be familiar with the first two which are action mode and roleplaying mode D& D, you know, would call these Combat, roleplay, and technically D& D has discovery, but discovery is like kind of folded into roleplay.
It's like this weird half baby between the two. Like those are the modes that everybody's familiar with. Then there is development mode. What is development mode? It is a weird tool that Monte Cook really wanted to experiment with in this game in doing two things. Part of it is allowing people to play with parts of the world that their characters aren't necessarily in.
So you could have scenes that are entirely surrounding the world. NPCs, and whatnot. But development mode was also really intended to be a tool for doing away from the table roleplay. They really wanted to bring personal play angle into the way the game works, so you draw from the sooth deck, because it gives you a complex answer to a simple question.
So, if you're like, yeah, between sessions, I want to make this thing. And I need to get like, newt eyes for this. Am I going to be able to get enough newt eyes? The GM will draw a sooth card and go like, yeah, but it takes you a while. So, you know, when you make the roll to create this magical object, like get a minus one or whatever.
It was a way for there to be Play by post style mechanics that were supported by an app that MCG put out Into the game itself. And so that's development mode. It's this weird beast where players are kind of invited into GM space more or less and Also GMs have tools to play on Part of the game without the full burdensome complexity of the cube.
So, development mode is where Soothedeck is really running the show. Then there's the Path of Suns. And the Path of Suns is, again, it's like a tarot spread. So, there is this banner that comes with the game or handkerchief, you lay it out, there is this path full of occult symbols, and as you play the game, When different significant things happen, usually it's like, if you change scenes, if you change location, or if you break down a game think of it in terms of scene, every time there is a new scene, Technically, you are flipping over a new Sooth deck.
So, like, we are entering an old house. We'll flip over a Sooth card for that. We encounter some ghosts and a combat starts. We'll flip over a Sooth card for that. We exit the combat into an unfamiliar basement area. We'll flip over a Sooth card for that. It can also be when, you know, significant characters show up or there's a big twist in the plot.
There are also I don't think they're called GM intrusions in this game, but if you're familiar with Numenera it is a classic MCG thing of the GM will offer you an opportunity to accept a complex narrative Thing happening to your character, usually playing upon a weakness that your character has or introducing new difficulty to the story.
But you get something as like compensation for that. Technically you flip sooth cards around that. So it is kind of the, the way the path of Suns work is really. I would say almost a rhythm tool for the game. It is really helping you compartmentalize the fluid play of an RPG into little segments that feel distinct from one another.
And it does this with the wild mechanical influences that sooth cards can have on the game separate from their, Like thematic ties, but also the thematic ties can get in there if you want.
Sam: I can imagine like you know, Freddy comes into the bar, , interrupts the scene, and we flip over a soothe card to like, establish what his mood is, and that is like, marker for everyone that this is a big deal of what's happening, and we also, you know, use the Oracle then influence and incorporate whatever is going on with his entrance and his plotline.
James: yeah, it is a really versatile tool it is a really interesting tool and it's so maximalist, it is like so excessive because like, there's an entire, very traditional, extremely mechanically robust, spread across four different books roleplaying game in that black cube, but the sooth deck itself could sustain its own roleplaying session without any of the other stuff.
Sam: Okay. So. I need, I need a couple seconds to reorient myself. I had like several questions come up.
James: I'm going to get some of these cards out, too.
Sam: Yeah, do it.
James: Yeah, right. All right. Just an odd note, the one area of restraint that was shown in the design for the Sooth deck is it does not have inverted readings the way some tarot cards do. All the card backs have, like, an orientation, like, where there is a definitive up and down, so you wouldn't be able to, you know, Have an accidental inversion.
I think that's good because they're already carrying so much. There's so much on these weird little guys.
Sam: Okay, on that note Okay, on that note Too much on these weird little guys? Like, I would say, yes. I would say that, like, like, I'm a minimalist, I like simplicity in my games. Like, I respect the hell out of Invisible Sun. I respect the hell out of, like, people who love a really, really crunchy game.
But also, you know, I played a little campaign of Tension, which is a nice little Adira Slattery game, that's based on Killing Eve, where you're just using a tarot deck, and that's the entire game. And that's my preference. you think are the pros and cons of like a very simple Oracle kind of system versus the super elaborate thing that's going on with Invisible Sun?
Like what are the strengths and weaknesses?
James: the thing. I. I am not going to say, like, I think there is a lot happening in these cards. There's a lot happening in this game. I don't think it is inappropriate for the game that it is in. The enjoyment that I get out of a much more pared down Oracle RPG experience versus what I get from Invisible Sun, like, they're just different things.
A complex robust dice mechanic isn't inherently wrong, it's how are you using it, how is it driving your enjoyment of the game, and I am somebody who, you know, there's a lot of documented evidence about how much I love RPGs. Elegance in designs. Alex Roberts is my favorite game designer of all time, because I think among the many things she is good at, she has a eloquent game design voice.
Everything that is there needs to be there and it is doing what it is doing to serve the overall experience. There is beauty in that and wonder in that, but I also like big, weird. Mechanically complex things. I grew up playing D& D 3. 5. The first time I played Shadowrun 4th edition, it felt like a revelation to me.
And that is a game that is, like, very kitchen sink. We have crammed as much into this as we possibly can, and Invisible Sun is an exercise in Making everything feel special by giving it specific mechanical support. Everything in this game has a component to it.
Every component has some level of mechanical effect. The narrative is tied to these mechanics and these components. It is a game that is extremely aware that the ritual of a role playing game, what you do physically, tactilely around it, informs your experience of the game. So making it so that the soothe cards are Each mean, like, five different crazy things all at the same time.
Is it a lot to remember? Yeah, but it also means that every part of that card matters. Every part of that card is weighing down on that particular moment. And the, you know, rule of cool, and like, certainly if you go back and look at the episodes that we put up for A Woman with Hollow Eyes, which was our Invisible Son game that we did on OneShot, we, I feel like, only ever played a third of the game at a given time, like, it must have been so rare that we were using every single mechanic that was on the table, because, you know, Only so much could fit in our goddamn heads.
But Invisible Sun is a game that wants to take up a lot of space, that wants to have that versmilitude, that specificity. And it does that. So, you could definitely look at this and go, It's doing too much, and If it were in any other game, I think that point is better, and it is easier to feel that way when you haven't played this game, or it, you know, the overall super mechanically robust system is not your cup of tea.
If you haven't played it, it's hard to see how it could possibly work, because, you know, gosh, I, what do I compare it, like Ulysses. A wildly complex novel that sucks to read in a lot of ways. But it's also, like, kind of a brilliant piece of art, too, and it is very easy to dismiss it as valueless because it's so hard to fucking engage with.
There is value in that it doesn't have to be for you. Because, you know, for a lot of us out there, it's not meant to be.
Sam: Gosh yeah, I, feel like the amount of information I'm getting off of one of the soothe cards is like, looking at an all you can eat buffet.
And I don't have to take everything from the buffet, but also there's sort of like part of me just habitually as a game player who wants to understand and be able to , wrap my head around any game that I'm playing, is really opposed to letting bits and pieces like fall off. I don't have to take everything from
the buffet, who cares, right?
But it's, it is. it's an effect and a feeling that, like I'm sure no two tables play Invisible Sun the same way, but they're eating from the same buffet, right? Like they have that same feeling of like looking at this big thing and engaging in all the little filigrees of it.
James: Yeah, I know when I played it was when a sooth card flipped, whatever the most interesting part of it, Like that leapt out to us is kind of what we would latch on to
About it and like we would remember certain things sometimes like if it was in a combat Was when we were the best at remembering like oh this card gives us some kind of advantage or disadvantage on our rolls or whatnot
You know usually it was like the theme is really interesting let's figure that out I have not had the good fortune to play with like to Monty or Shana or, any of the other designers who were involved in the project and like really know the system I think it would be very interesting to play the game like that t I, I'll bet I could still enjoy playing it one of the fun things about Invisible Sun is like I had been playing, you know, minimalist story games for years at the point where I first played it, and Playing the A Woman with Hollow Eyes campaign is one of the first times in a very long time I had felt the feeling of power fantasy that I got from, like, role playing games in college where I'm like, I wanna min max this character and have them be really, like, powerful and untouchable and capable of, like, stuff and it is partially driven by the fact that, like, the mechanics really let you do that cause there are so goddamn many of them.
Sam: This episode is sponsored by Characters Without Stories. a TT RPG interview podcast, where host Star talks to creators about the characters. They haven't had a chance to play yet. I myself was on an episode of characters without stories. Maybe that's fun place to start. If you want to hear about fascinating characters and the fascinating people who made them listen to characters without stories, wherever you find your podcasts.
This episode is sponsored by indie press revolution, bringing you the best in small press role playing and storytelling games for 20 years. Check out www.indiepressrevolution.com for more than 600 games from 240 publishers. This isn't an ad any more, this is just me talking: indie press revolution is the absolute best and a gift to our hobby.
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Sam: okay, I want to pull back a little bit to sort of Oracle decks in general. There's this idea, you kind of touched on this a little bit very early on when introducing Tarot and the Sooth deck to begin with, but if you have a game where the Oracle deck is very important to play, then. The contents of that deck are really gonna influence what kind of story or world or other thing
is going on at the table and in the story. You have also, like, my understanding is you've played a bunch of games that use Oracle Decks and also have made one of your own.
Like, how do you think about how the contents of the deck are influencing what you're getting out of play?
James: This is a lovely question because it gives me an opportunity to talk about a lot of the Oracle games out there use tarot as the base.
And I don't love this as a design choice. the reason I don't love it as a design choice is Tarot is something that is more or less not intentionally designed, or not intentionally designed with the same goals that a game designer might have.
Tarot is , is an object that tries to cold read you, and also it arrived at its design through folk practices. It is just like, well, some people liked this and Alistair Crowley got really into this. And this is kind of the version that we have of it. So when you use tarot as your oracle deck you are Filling up your space, your setting, with just very general themes and you aren't really thinking about how does introducing these themes as something that is active within the game, that gets to have a say at the table about the results of different player actions is this contributing?
It is just taking something that is a popular format and using that format as a tool. There are plenty of Oracle games that use tarot cards that are great, and I don't want to say it is a bad practice, it is just, I'm least inspired by that because it is not, Using every part of what an Oracle deck can offer because, in your outline here, you definitely hit on what is Oracle good for?
Injecting direction and surprise when you're feeling stuck, like, yes, that is what dice do when something is uncertain, you roll. are letting something else decide how that uncertainty plays out. That's fine, but when you make an Oracle deck and tie it to the world of the game that you are working with, you essentially create a catalog of themes that shape your world.
Every time you reference it, you are going to those themes and allowing them to exert themselves upon the world again, reinforcing what your game is about. It creates this mechanical narrative harmony that Feels like magic
is amazing how little it takes for the Oracle uses to feel uncanny , we reference the designs that I've done with, Oracle cards for Campaign Skyjacks, which is an Actual play based on the music of the Decemberists.
We built a like piracy kind of adventure folk magic themed world based on the entire Decemberist discography and the card game that they co created with Keith Baker, Illimat.
Illimat has these tarot sized cards in it called the Luminaries, and the Luminaries at least the first two batches of Luminaries
were Symbols, characters, and figures from two Decembrist albums The Crane Wife and The Hazards of Love.
So, in looking at those and making them into Oracle cards and making those Oracle cards kind of the foundation of the setting that I was playing with it means that I sat down intentionally and thought about what is this setting about if these stories are the most important stories of the folktale of the crane wife and the changeling's tale from the hazards of love.
If those are stories that exist at the core of the world what do their various characters say? And laying that out, looking at those different things, like, those are Important forces within the world, and every time they get pulled and I look at those themes, those themes are once again tying themselves directly to the action of our storytelling.
We draw these cards, make our connections for what we're doing in our story to the themes at the core of the world, and we go, Oh my god, we're so brilliant, we're so smart, everything we're doing says this beautiful, coherent thing it all. All works together.
So like, that is the deepest strength, I think, of Oracle cards is if you make your own, you can allow your world to Stay relevant at the table and have a say in the individual actions which are going on and collaborate with you in a way that it can't really as a static object.
my second Oracle thing for Starwall, which was, it's using the role playing system that we're using on Skyjax now so for that, We made a smaller oracle set just so that we could continue playtesting that mechanic and we just did a thing where every player sat down and got to make two oracle cards.
We started out with a collection of, like, eight, and, like, that's all you need. And it's like, oh, what is, what an amazing coincidence. This card has come up again. It's like, well, we only have eight of them, so it's not that amazing a coincidence, but it's still, like, people listen to this listen to that and go, wow, the the, the theme cards in Starwall are just as haunted as the luminaries in Illimat, or, or the sooth deck in Invisible Sun.
And it's like, yeah, they're all using the same thing, and it's making all the sense. us look really good because it's supporting what we're doing in a really, like, intuitive way.
Sam: Yeah, actually, there's, there's almost a benefit to the deck being smaller so that
James: Yes. I, I think the 60 card deck that MCG put together is really interesting. It is kind of a sprawling thing but, you know, when we played, we, Darcy Ross, kind of like on the fly, invented a mechanic that became a real cornerstone of the game. She had us just look through the sooth deck and pull out our favorite card, pull out one that we liked the look of.
And that kind of became our mascot card, or spirit card for the campaign. Every time that card came up, it felt like a coincidence because it was just, this is the card that I'm bound to this character. And every time it comes up, if something cool and special feeling happens that adds to the ritual, the mystique of the card.
So, yeah. Like, there are all these things where, like, if it's smaller, if it's coming up more, the, the, obviously the more you reference a certain set of themes, the more important they're going to feel in the story. And certainly there are things, like, on Skyjax, there are listeners who have broken down, like, every luminary pull up through the first hundred episodes, or something like that.
And. You know, it feels like certain ones get pulled more often than others, and to a certain extent, that's true, but also, like, it is just because the moments where some of those have come up have always been, like, big moments, that every time it appears, it goes, Oh, this must be a big moment. We lean into it,
Sam: they develop like a history
James: Yes, they do! You develop relationships with these cards. I remember in A Woman with Hollow Eyes, there is a card called The Revolutionary. Which, gosh, I love this card. It's themes are, ba ba. are, Lust, sexuality, change, and destruction. And the art for this card has this, like, really, really buff dude surrounded in flames, and, like, it does kind of look like one of the flames that is jutting out is his penis.
And we called him the Fire Penis Man and I think he like, he showed up maybe like two or three times in our game, but like, it was a card that like, so evocative, so out of left field almost that it like, made us stop and pay attention every time it showed up. We're like, it's the Fire Penis Man again!
Like, and we wanted to uplift the importance of it because of the relationship that we had with the card. So, it really, really became something that built up on its own, just again, taking advantage of, like, the mechanics that already exist within Oracle spaces but doing that through folk practice at the table.
Sam: Yeah. , do you have other, like, specific advice for people about writing their own oracles?
James: I do, and I'm going to give the caveat that I just published a book called the Ultimate RPG Game Master's Guide. And one of the exercises in this book is I straight up broke down how I approach creating Oracle decks. And part of it is because. I think if you walk away with one thing from this episode, you should understand how powerful a supplementary tool Oracle cards can be to your game.
They can drive their own system, you can incorporate them into an existing system,
and especially if you customize them and make your own It will collaborate with you in ways that, like, you never imagined possible if you've only played with binary pass fail mechanics before. So, I really went into detail there.
It's not too much detail. I think the exercise is only, like, a couple pages. I give you some examples of, like, things that I came up with using the system. My advice is, have simple, grounding themes, and for collections of themes, you really want to have three to maybe five at most themes attached to an individual card.
That way, like, the first two themes should be very broad and very grounded. and you can get into more specific and edge case space with your remaining themes. That allows it to do the cold reading thing that all Oracle decks do. Even if it doesn't feel like it's the card necessarily that's matched to the specific situation that you're talking about, if you go three themes deep, or four themes deep, all of a sudden you're like, Oh, this!
I can make a connection to this. So you need to, you need to be shooting with a wide enough space. You gotta use a shotgun. It's not, it's not a bullet. You gotta, you gotta take a wide enough shot that you're gonna hit pretty much whatever target you're pointing it at. The next thing is, it is the time to give yourself permission not to be silly. but To get high on your own supply, because the other thing that oracle cards are doing, they are tying symbols and ritual to your world. You need to respect, when you fashion the cards, you need to respect your world. in the way that you respect the most sacred fictional texts in your life. and if you've ever talked to somebody who really loves Lord of the Rings and knows a lot about Lord of the Rings and they, like, devoted an entire scholarly part of their brain to
retaining this knowledge and having thoughts about it, that kind of reverence Is what you're going to take an iota of that and apply it to your own work because you are trying to create symbols and titles and associated material that feels powerful.
One of the easiest piece of advice I give people is just keep it like two to three words at most and have one of those be the. Like in,
Ilumat, we have the forest queen or the union. Like, it has a title even if it's like an abstract concept, like, the forest queen is a character, but the union is a concept and making it the, just gives it this personality and presence and if you respect your world in that way, the symbols that you're going to create for your oracle deck, which is going to reinforce the world, are going to assert their own magic.
They are going to proclaim their own magic. that they have spooky powers if you create them by giving them the allowance to have that. So just like, take it more seriously than you would take other parts, even if it feels a little embarrassing, because if you give them that power, they will take it.
Sam: It also feels like it's just prep in a certain sense, but it's also like prep that allows you to skip doing prep later. Like, you prep all your fun ideas, like the things that you really care about appearing in this campaign, you put them into your oracle, and then every time it comes up, you're guaranteeing that one of those things is going to get incorporated into the story.
James: Yeah, I people have strange notions sometimes about game mechanics and what they do and what they are meant to do. And part of it is because they do. a lot of things. There are a lot of people that go, well, game mechanics will incentivize you to make certain decisions, and certain mechanics do.
I mean, if we look at the Sooth deck in Invisible Sun some of these cards favor certain suns. So if I draw the Empty Gallows, which favours the pale sun. If I have a spell that is associated with the pale sun, I might want to bring it out because it will be cheaper or more effective than it normally would be.
And that rules. there are also people who say, well, game mechanics help you abstract complex things. And certainly if you are going to, there's no editorial reel. in role playing games, right? It's this wild, free, living, improvisational thing. So, it is easy to meander in directions that maybe don't feel fully connected to the work or what you're doing, and one of the things that Oracle cards can do is Always pull your thinking back towards that center, tying you back to those core foundational themes, making it so that you think within the confines of a space that feels cohesive, even if it was never cohesive, it just happened organically and accidentally.
There are people who say that, like, game mechanics are just there because the raw mechanical joy that you get by moving numbers around adds something to the game. All of these things are true at the same time and true in different ways. And so a mechanic can be something that makes something difficult, easy.
It can also be something that makes something fun It can be something that is not a crutch to use when you are having difficulty, but like a shoe to use when you are trotting upon a treacherous path. you only have an experience of games of like the mechanics feel like they're always getting in the way, I definitely would call to you to broaden your mechanical experience because well created, intentionally crafted mechanics that Support the overall experience of the game will actually, like, you will want to engage with them.
You will seek them out where possible. And Invisible Sun certainly kinda does this, but obviously the best role playing game of all time, Starcrossed, really fuckin does this. So Look to those experiences as you broaden your sense of, like, what a mechanic could or should be, like, cause, yeah, in a certain sense, I'm not a prep guy, I don't like to build a world by deciding what to do.
each individual hex has in it, and laying out what each item could be within a tavern or whatnot. There are some people who worldbuild that way, where that is the joy they get from the game, is they've got volumes and volumes of notes, hundreds of pages that they've written over decades dedicated to making a world, brick by brick, to feel as real as possible.
I. Do. Want. my worlds to feel reactive and real and like there is richness to explore when people, you know, make decisions within them. But I prefer, rather than having definitive answers, I prefer to have mechanical supports that make it so that the answers we create in the moment feel especially relevant, feel thematically powerful.
And that's, that's why I love mechanics like this because they just, they work and it's fascinating when something like this works.
Sam: I would say that sounds like great place to end, but is there anything else that you want to make sure you get to say about oracles?
James: Try a game that has its own original Oracle deck. Maybe even, if you're game designers and you want to play around with stuff, maybe decide, what happens when I only take some of the cards from this deck into a game? Like, play within those spaces. Then, yes, please, goodness, please. Look at other divination tools, look at other oracle tools from different practices and see what you can do with that.
Also, folks when you create these things, making them into diegetic objects within the world of your fiction, the fact that the luminaries in Campaign Skyjacks are really important. Symbols within that world, that people walk around with luminary decks, and when we want to know something about the world of Sphere, we draw one of the luminaries, we're holding the same kind of card that the character is holding. There is power in that, even if it is silly. Even if it is imaginary, there is real power in that.
So just, just have fun with it. Go absolutely hog wild nuts with these ideas because every time somebody has invested something in this, I feel like we have come away with something almost breathtaking.
Sam: James, thanks so much for being on Dice Exploder.
James: Oh my god, thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for having me! What a delightful conversation! Sam, we, we scratched the surface today, and that feels good. There are a thousand other mechanics in that goddamn cube that are all, I would say, equally as fascinating, but for different reasons.
Sam: Thanks again to James for being here you can. Pre-order his upcoming for the queen hack, oh, Captain My Captain, now at bit dot Lee slash oh, captain RPG. And here in the credits, I just want to really underline my plug for this game, because I think James is doing something really cool here to try to leverage his relationship with a real ass book publisher, to take a chance on a role-playing game.
And I know he has done a ton of work trying to get this thing made and he's done it in large part because he hopes it will mean they take a chance on other indie games in the future. I think this game genuinely looks really great. Like a good for the queen hack, and I hope it succeeds on those merits alone, but I also hope it sees success just to get more publishers into the world of role-playing games. God, that would be cool.
Anyway, you can find the rest of James's Ultimate RPG book line at your local at your local bookstore. And you can find the one-shot podcast network, including Campaign: Skyjacks at oneshotpodcast.com.
As always, you can find me on socials at S Dunnewold or on the dice Exploder discord. Our logo is designed by sporgory. Our theme song is sunset bridge by purely gray and our ad music is Lily pads by my boy, Travis Tesmer.
This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar. And thanks to you for listening. See you in December.