I do love me some sweet, sweet looking Tarot Cards. Are there any cool RPG's that use either the cards themselves as a mechanic, or have Tarot Cards as part of the setting or something like them. I know Amber has the trump cards, and someone made an Imperial Tarot thing for 40k

Mage: The Ascension

The German game Engel had a Tarot-based mechanic, although it was the d20 conversion that was translated to English.

  Ravenloft has had its own "Tarokka" deck for fortunetelling. You can find versions in Forbidden Lore or the red-boxed Campaign Setting. (WW did an update for 3rd Edition, but it's pricey as all heck nowadays.) Find the old Dragonlance: Fifth Age game and a copy of DRAGON #240 (and 264 for some improved variants) and you can run the whole game using it as a resolution mechanism.

Crimson Cutlass...a truly awesome small press pirate RPG from the late 80s/90s. You used D8s (pieces of and a tarot deck. Sweet memories of great campaigns.

Here's my review
http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_5225.phtml

Here's an old forum post on RPG.net about CC
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?184209-necro-Crimson-Cutlass-rpg

Fortune's fool by Pantheon Press use tarots to resolve actions and power up characters.

It seems a nice fantasy game, though personally I haven't tried it yet (just read the rulebook)

Cadwallon's setting has a deck of Tarot cards that hold mystic power and Tarot Mages who make use of them. IIRC the cards have been scattered and are now in the possession of various powerful NPCs. Given the nature of the game I'm not sure if the details of all the cards has been spelled out... they're powerful artifacts so I'd think they'd see most use as McGuffins to send the PCs after or give them one and see how long they can hold on to it amidst all the power-brokers of the city trying to get it from them.

I use a Tarot-based sanity system for my Mythos investigation games, in lieu of COC's SAN point system. The occult magic system also utilizes the Tarot, although this is still in a state of constant revision.

pathfinder uses a tarrot deck called a harrow deck check the inner sea world guide

Used them from time to time to generate NPC behavior by drawing two random cards from a deck.

The underrated and very short-lived Pre-D&D3 WotC oddity Everway used it's own pseudo-tarot for action resolution. You could easily use a "Real" tarot deck with it instead if you desired.

I dimly remembar that the old RM/MERP module The Court of Ardor had a Tarot-like card game (not the physical thing, just description and card illustrations sprinkled over the whole book).
I don't remember how they were used or integrated in the setting or plot, but they inspired me to "invent" my own set of cards for my second campaign.

The engine of vs. Monsters runs on a regular poker deck, but for more gothic-ness it could switch to Tarot.
(Characters have numbered stats, a check is the draw of [stat] cards, look for the highest card to beat a difficulty - so it's basically a d13 pool system.)

Castle Falkenstein could also be used with a Tarot.
(Characters have stat/skill values, players have a hand of cards and can play one or more cards to add their values to the skill, again trying to beat a difficulty. The system has more bells and whistles, like the card suit has to match the nature of the action, or else the card adds only 1 measly point.)

In both cases you'd have to invent meanings for the High Arcana.

Engel didn't use a proper Tarot but custom cards featuring images and names from the Engel mythos. Also, the game ran only on what would be the High Arcana of a Tarot.
(Cards didn't have numbers. Every action was decided by the draw of a single card which was "read" (= interpreted) in a fortune telling method. This led to results that were hardly ever a simple pass/fail. I honestly don't know why White Wolf chose to ignore the original rules and only translated the d20 part. Maybe they feared that US gamers would find the Engel rules to be more suited for storytelling than the Storyteller system...?)

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;823637The underrated and very short-lived Pre-D&D3 WotC oddity Everway used it's own pseudo-tarot for action resolution. You could easily use a "Real" tarot deck with it instead if you desired.

I was trying to remember the name of that one. I always thought it looked interesting... if not as a game then as a way to generate ideas (which I've also used a Tarot deck for). For whatever reason I've never seen it in the flesh... so it remains a bit mysterious to me.

Quote from: Simlasa;823695I was trying to remember the name of that one. I always thought it looked interesting... if not as a game then as a way to generate ideas (which I've also used a Tarot deck for). For whatever reason I've never seen it in the flesh... so it remains a bit mysterious to me.

Everway went to the discount bin faster than you could say "Tweet".

WotC killed that game before its release by tying it to the then-recent MtG release: game stores were required to order a copy of Everway for x Magic display boxes.
So there were shops eager for MtG and they ordered accordingly, but they didn't want that weird RPG. They got rid of it as soon as they received it.

But even proper RPG stores hated the game because it came in a ridiculously oversized box that didn't fit their fixtures.

Add the esoteric design, artwork, and non-traditional mechanics, and you have a game that was bound to fail.

It also didnt help that the box art made it look like a sequel to Myst

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;823697Everway went to the discount bin faster than you could say "Tweet".

Add the esoteric design, artwork, and non-traditional mechanics, and you have a game that was bound to fail.

Even worse, it had it's own tie-in set of fantasy art cards to use as visual prompts (In play you could ignore them or use any old fantasy art trading cards that you had laying around). This led many role-players to think it was a collectible card game.

Too bad, it was an interesting game, kinda an art student's variant of Amber Diceless.