A Tarot Reading for 2021 - Choosing A Deck

As part of our New Year's revelry, I asked my spouse to help me with a Tarot reading for 2021.  He obliged, and so I have my (pretty awesome) reading for 2021 to share over the next several posts.

Given that I'm a scientist, I'm sure it's no surprise that I do not view Tarot as supernatural.  Rather I view it as a engaging and creative means to uncover some of my own psychology.  Tarot works best for me when I look at a card and consider the implications that I easily accept, and then those I immediately resist.  Also during this time of pandemic, I find myself gravitating to tactile activities that are not computer based.  There's a sort of need for texture, color, and the sound of shuffling cards.  It's very grounding and comforting in a time when so much of the physical world, and the physicality of other people, has been out of reach.

For my 2021 reading I chose my Tarot Grand Luxe deck.  It's my go-to deck for when I want lots of detail, but don't want to work too hard to find the messages.  One of this deck's best aspects is that, unlike SO many other Tarot decks, it includes people with a wide range of skin tones and facial features.  It's a dynamic, vibrant deck that's full of life.  Now if I could only find a deck with a wide range of genders and body types, too, I'd be pretty darn happy ...

Tarot Grand Luxe.  Stunning art, detailed images, diversity,
high-quality card stock and labels that are easy for the eye.

This is a gorgeously illustrated Tarot with largely standard themes.  Because the themes and symbols are standard, it makes interpreting the messages more straightforward than some of my more unorthodox decks.  What do I mean by standard themes?  Let's take a look at a comparison of four of my favorite tarot decks.  I've taken the Six of Coins/Pentacles and the Hermit card from each deck.  Check out the image, with helpful arrows and labels!  :) 

The first deck is the Rider Waite Smith Tarot deck, a variant of the very first decks used for divination published in the early 1900s.  The second deck is the one I've chosen for 2021, Tarot Grande Lux.  As you can see, the first two decks have similar imagery and symbols for both cards.  The Hermit is an old dude with a long white beard, usually carrying a lantern or such and maybe a cane or staff.  The setting is a path or journey.  For the Six of Coins, there is a scale and someone weighing out gold.  It's easy to say, yep, that's a scale and it's being balanced, or that's a lantern and he's looking for something.  I.e. you can get a quick read on the general idea of what you are looking at in the card.

But decks can be a great deal more unorthodox, with imagery and symbols used in new ways, or that are not immediately recognizable.  The last two decks show a progression from weird to weirder.  Revelations Tarot is pretty cool because the cards can be read as they fall, either right-side up or upside down.  I don't usually bother with 'inverted' or 'reversed' readings - if I pull a card and it is upside down, I flip it.  Many people prefer to leave the card inverted, and then interpret the meaning in some way that is reversed to the original meaning of the card.  Revelations Tarot makes that super easy - it's almost like there are two whole decks here, since each card has a top and a bottom image.  However, these images are highly stylized, and combine symbols in unusual ways.  Deviant Moon Tarot is one of my more weird decks, and is perfect when I'm in that headspace.  The images here look nothing like the Rider Waite Smith Tarot, and the moon and tone of the art is vastly different.  So when I'm in a mood for the strange, I'll choose a deck more like this.

Nuff for now, more later.

Image Credits:  All pix are taken by me of my own Tarot decks, except I have cut in the pictures of the RWS Hermit and six of coins into my image from Wikimedia Commons.

Mixing Genres in Speculative Fiction: Another Look

Astronaut Wizard by Jordan Grimmer
jordangrimmer on Deviant Art. 

I am a huge fan of work that encompasses more than one genre.  Regardless of it is a game, a movie, a work of art, a novel, or whatever - I'm always pleased to find myself in a complex world, with many strange or scary or wonderful things afoot.  I've written before about crossing genres, first in an introductory post here, and then a follow up here.  Still, things have changed since that first post (back in 2010), and I felt it was time to once again sing the praises of mixed genre work.

The artwork at right "Astronaut Wizard" by Jordan Grimmer (jordangrimmer) is an evocative visual display of multiple genres.  The artwork does such a good job of focusing our attention on the juxtaposition - all the light is on the magic hand reflecting off of the helmet.  The rest of the suit and background are lost in shadow.  I enjoy how it jars the imagination - one does not expect magic from an astronaut.  Just the thought makes the mind race with possibilities and questions.  What would space exploration be like with magic at hand - in this case, literally?  What would our past have been like (historical fiction) or our future (science fiction)? 

As far as novels, I read Watership Down by Richard Adams when I was about nine years old and adored it.  On the surface it is a fantasy about rabbits seeking a new home, but it includes so much more - political maneuvering, adventure, mystery, and even a nod to the supernatural.  It's also a very literary book, as far as I see it.  Thinking of it as a fantasy seems limiting, even if basically correct.

Sometimes science fiction is even better with mystery, or romance, or a bit of something scary thrown into the mix.  Certainly the scariest movie I've ever seen was Alien and it was, again on the surface, straight up science fiction.  But wow.  Horror.  Really incredible suspenseful horror.  I'm getting creeped out just thinking about it.

And then how about video games … I'm thinking of the Steampunk groundbreaker "Arcanum" which included magic, robots, monsters and more.  It even felt a bit like a western in places.  My character was always suited to be an arbiter - someone who solved problems by negotiation, and tried to avoid conflict.  This led to navigating some interesting political situations.  There were mysteries to solve, as well as battles to be won.  A generally great, complex game. 

So back to writing.  Fortunately, the tide has turned as far as the acceptance of cross-genre work.  Although it might still be difficult to pitch and categorize such work (and therefore difficult to sell such work) readers seem to be quite keen to read it.  There are lots of posts and articles that will give you tips and hits on how to write and pitch something that includes multiple genres.  I've put a few here as examples you might want to peruse.

Alan Rinzler, Ask the Editor:  Is it OK to cross genres?
Penny Lockwood Ehrenkranz, Mixing It Up:  Writing Across Genres
Brian Klems, How to Write and Sell a Cross-Genre Novel

And there are a lot of commonalities between the articles. Here are a few take-aways for writers.

1. Read any genre you want to write in. Make sure you actually like what you are reading, and are motivated and enthusiastic about the genre. Be sure to understand the conventions, and what it is that gives a particular genre its appeal.

2. Focus on story. That means as you are writing, worry less about genre and more about creating a really compelling story that people will clamor to read. As usual, the reader has to care what happens to the characters. And something interesting does need to happen, somehow …

3. Stay consistent. No matter how complex the world, stay consistent within that world.

4. Eventually, you will need to know the primary genre of your piece. No matter what, there is a dominant genre in your work somewhere. It might not be by much, but it is in there. This is important information when trying to pitch or advertise your piece, or when trying to figure out how to tag or select keywords for searches. After all, readers have to start somewhere when they are looking for a new read.

5. Be confident. Don't listen to people who say you can't or shouldn't mix genres. If the story calls for it, then write the story.

Image Credit:  Astronaut Wizard by Jordan Grimmer, jordangrimmer on Deviant Art. 

Musing About The Talisman Universe

A recent round of the board game Talisman has me obsessing over the game ... again. This is one of those games that seems to polarize people - either you love it or hate it. I conducted a very small and quite unscientific survey to determine what it is about Talisman that is so very appealing, or for many, quite the opposite.

First of all, if you haven't played the game it is worth the time to check it out. No really. A geeky friend (like me) might be hiding a copy. Looking at the box top for the most recent (fourth) edition, you can tell you are going to be in for a good time. You can see a variety of characters attacking a dragon (or perhaps being attacked by a dragon) that is guarding a crown. Naturally, this is completely atypical of how the game play actually feels, and there is no dragon guarding the crown. Still, you can see the fighter being all fightery, the magic users casting spells, the thief ignoring all of this and trying to get the crown on the sly, and the assassin sneaking up to stab the thief in the back. And the sorceress, I think, is there with huge bubbling pot of some potion in one arm and her staff in the other. It can't be easy having to go into combat with a caldron as a a key part of one's melee strategy.

The first version was printed oh, so very long ago, and ended up having a plethora of add on modules, cards, characters, and more.  The setting for the game is a sort of high fantasy realm where encounters on the board can increase or decrease your statistics, such as strength, craft, and number of lives.  Needless to say, when you are out of lives, well, you are out.  (Unless you go ahead and start a new character and jump back in.)  The art from the original game was quirky, whimsical, occasionally silly, and the source of about a million inside jokes in my family.  Of particular note was the art for the "toad" card.  Much more ignominious than getting killed to death in this game is being turned into a toad ("toaded" as we say) by a witch.  The toad card had a rather outraged and startled expression that was certainly apt.

The thief is in for a serious surprise, here.

It became hard to have all the expansion modules open at once without say, three tables and a sizable part of the floor available.  It was so big that you might spend an entire game poking through the Talisman universe and never encounter another player.  The expansions included a tower to the ultimate dragon battle, a catacombs, a full blow up of the one City tile into a new whole board, and a sort of outland futuristic board with strange worlds, aliens, radiation, and bizarre new artifacts.  I'm sure I am forgetting something, because there was so very much.
 
In more recent times, the game was rebooted without all the expansions (as I said, it is now up to a fourth edition) and this one seems to have the charm of the original without quite so much of the crazy.  Although I really liked the crazy.  It is hard to explain how crazy the game could get, actually.  Each of those old expansions added an entire new piece of board space.  Little words to wander around in.  I'd forget there was an objective to the game and get lost in exploring and seeing what cool stuff I could find.  Getting distracted was a good way to lose, but I always had fun. It was a wonderful romp through all kinds of speculative goodness - fantasy, horror, and even a bit of sci-fi thrown in for the canonical good measure.

This new version is more palatable to those of my friends and family who do not have an affinity for the game, in general.  But by more palatable I mean they will play under extreme duress, instead of not at all.  Alright, I can see that any game that regularly goes over two hours can be a drain.  When you have more than three people playing Talisman, you can probably guarantee a three hour play time or longer, unless someone has a whip and a timer.  But there are many involved strategy games that have long play times that are not as divisive as Talisman.  So I'm tabling the play time as "problematic, but not a show stopper."

So what is?  My survey suggests that the unguided nature of the game - without specific benchmarks on the way to the final objective - is the real issue.  The game moves forward in a very free form fashion.  You can move in either direction on the board, wandering wherever you want, encountering the spaces of the board themselves or drawing cards.  Over and over and over.  The point is to get yourself tough enough with increased stats and/or great stuff and/or followers and definitely a mule early on or you can't carry all that stuff so you can fight your way to the center, grab the Crown of Command, and basically command all the other players to die off.

The sorceress is about to splash
some stew or something on
this dragon.  Note toad.

In addition, there is a random element to the game that means you might lose your nice high stats, or some of your followers, or - flying spaghetti monster forbid - you could lose your mule which is carrying all your stuff.  This means you can spend the entire game getting nice and buff, only to have it all taken away at the last, most heartbreaking moment.  I sort of like this aspect, since I like the fact that anyone can win the game.  You don't know however many turns in advance that you have no chance at all.  There is always a chance.

The final aspect of the game that seems to rankle the unbelievers is the rules.  There are not actually too many rules, but the complexity of the game means that they are always being checked and rechecked.  Then when you realize there is no official ruling for the situation you are in, you either have to make up a new house rule, or take a break from the game to go surf the intarwebs for possible solutions, or at least other people's house rules.  Yes, you guessed it, I kind of like this.  I enjoy when strange situations come up and we have to deal by a sort of community vote on what "makes sense" or what goes with the spirit of the rules, or what seems fair, or whatever will keep the game going.

So there is my Talisman game breakdown.  It's a game I love and long to play, while others whom I know want to play pretty much anything else.  At all.  Please.

What's your take?  Have a talisman experience to share?

Image Credit:  Me and my Talisman game.

On Failing in Games and Going Back for More

I read a provocative gaming article over at The New Inquiry called Born to Lose by author Christian Brown.  It is about the inherent ability of gaming to give the player the true experience of failure in a very lifelike fashion. (Actually, it's about a lot more than that, go give a read, I'll wait here.)  Brown notes that this feature of games is distinct from movies or books - "We can let the protagonist lose and force them to try again. The cycle of dying and starting the level over forces players to empathize with the character who toils in spite of certain failure."  Brown goes on to say that in some games "... the difference between “winning” and “losing” is obliterated ... we are forced to confront the personal experiences of the characters involved." 

As an avid gamer, I found this article to be really interesting.  This is unquestionably a feature that draws me to this kind of gaming - it requires determination and resiliency to continue when you've already died a million times, and when you are not even sure you are doing the right thing.  No matter how hard you try, there is no guarantee things will turn out well. 

For example (Spoiler Alert - Dragon Age II) there is a scene late in Dragon Age II where one of your party members (Anders) appears from nowhere, rants a bit about his personal crusade, and then blows up a very important building with a lot of people in it.  That action forces you to choose between two sides, instead of finding a way to forge a peace.  The first time I played the game I actually screamed in pain and outrage.  Both because the guy blew up a church, and because the character had taken my options from me.  Feeling indignant and betrayed, I played the game several times trying to get the "good" ending where I was able to make peace between the sides.

If you know the game you know that ending does not exist.  Anders always appears and always blows up the Chantry.  I was stunned when I realized this really was the conclusion - that the game was written so that so many of your choices become moot.  In spite of this, I kept on playing the game.  I played it even knowing the ending, just for the experience of really exploring all the moral ground and ideas the game offered.  Had the ending been more black and white, I doubt I would have spent the time.

I feel similarly, although less strongly about Mass Effect (Spoiler Alert - Mass Effect 3).  This is a game in which you become quite invested.  First of all, as the author of the above mentioned article notes, you can become quite empathetic to a character that has died and come back a million times, through three entire games.  Some battles take a dozen tries, especially when the game is on harder difficulty settings.  Then there is the ambiguous ending to the whole series.  Three choices are offered - none of them good.  The canonical "best" choice is one where you force a change on every person in the entire galaxy without their consent.  Yet, I was not as impacted as I was by Dragon Age II.  I simply didn't feel the characters had enough life of their own, and the final choice was too divorced from every other choice made in the game.

Other games I've played have toyed with this concept.  Say like the Fable Series (Spoiler Alert - Fable 2 and 3.)  Fable 2 has three endings, one patently evil, but two that are good and bad in different ways.  The first has you saving everyone, but losing your family and truly beloved dog that has been with you the whole game.  The second has you saving the family and dog, but losing everyone else.  Fable 3 puts you in a position where - unless you play very well - your nicey-nice decisions can leave you without the resources to defeat the final onslaught of bad guys.

These were nice twists, and I enjoyed the tension.  But to really get it "right" - like how I feel about Dragon Age II - a game has to have a suite of characters with deep motivations and personalities, it needs to be very internally consistent, and it needs to make you feel as though you just might be able to win.  You have to have this sense that if only you'd made that one certain choice, it all would have come out differently.  This hearkens back to the article that got me thinking about all this, where the author says, " ... let us experience trying to unravel the betrayals and corruption ourselves and letting us fail and fail again. Letting loss and failure sluice over the viewer until they know there is nothing else that could be done."

For some reason, this works at creating a truly compelling gaming experience.  Well, at least it does for me.  Gives me a hankering to play Dragon Age II again.  Surely I can save the world this time, right?

J.A. Grier

Image Credit - photoxpress.com