Thursday, March 31, 2011

Ethos ODS Tarot Deck !

It is very gratifying as a game designer to finally have a tangible and beautiful manifestation of their work. I am very grateful to my artist, Jason Moser, who took my written descriptions for each card and turned them into an exquisite deck of Elthosian Tarot Cards. It's fabulous. At the moment we have only printed the major arcana, which are 24 cards, and the only ones actually needed for the Elthos Cosmological system. Nevertheless the minor arcana are already finished, but no printed into cards at this point. This was a test batch to see how the Major Arcana cards look when printed. I just received 10 decks in the mail. I am absolutely delighted with the results!

Here is a sample of the six of the cards starting with the back face... 








I could not be happier!  Thank you so much Jason!   Two decks are heading your way pronto!

Sunday, March 06, 2011

Elthos ODS Tarot Deck

I'm very excited that we are moving ahead with our first physical print test of the Elthos ODS Tarot Deck.  This is one of the aspects of the system that I've most enjoyed working on.  It ties together a whole set of Elthosian World Weaving Development Tools into a relatively easy to use and coherent system.  I will certainly post more details about this later on, but for now suffice it to say that 10 Elthos Tarot Decks are soon to be printed, 2 for the artist and his lovely wife, and one for my dear mom, several for some friends of mine who have been very supportive of the game development, and of course one for me!  :)

It's an exciting development and I'm looking forward to seeing the results of the test print. Here you can see The Emperor Card.  You may notice the circle at the bottom, which demonstrates the card's astrological alignment, and key correspondences.  The images in the card reflect additional correspondences as well.  The entire deck was designed to give the Gamesmaster an easy visual reference to a correspondence system that can help to keep the back story of the game coherent over time.  It does a few other things to help with World Weaving aspects of the game as well, but more on that another time.

The Cards are designed by yours truly, and the artwork was done by Jason Moser of Ellium Fame at Asylum.Net.  Jason is a wonderful artist, and exceedingly professional in his dealings with me.  It was delightful to work with him on the Tarot Deck, and I look forward to working with him again on other aspects of the Elthos Project.