#digital tarot

[anonbeadraws]

two of my favourite Light cards got uploaded so I can share them with you!! ✨✨✨

 Carmilla (which i got to gay up to my hearts content and have some historical fashion fun) and The Odyssey (yes i got to give him top scars,,,,what a dream)

 Check out the other amazing cards on the kickstarter!

[crazyskirtlady]

nothing is gonna b alright

Cybersigil chips say:

$10,000 are headed your way

[savsiee]

XII - The Hanged Man

A piece for my friend’s birthday of her half drow warlock pc, still getting used to using clip studio but its not going horribly as of yet.

[shawnieracetarot]

[tarot-on-a-technicality]

*Victory screech* Pardon the lack of complex descriptions for most of the cards. I’m writing them in in batches. Mostly just excited that I have it doing more than one card spread.

[astralcraftreadings]

History of Astrologian Card Readings (OOC)

I have a lot of love for Final Fantasy XIV and I spend a lot of time in-game these days. So when my Free Company was talking about making an RP bar, I wanted some way to contribute that would be unique. One thing led to another, and I got it into my head to create a full Astrologian themed fortune telling deck from scratch.

Ok it wasn't entirely from scratch. Massive thanks to Yourou for doing a lot of the ground work on this. They posited making a minor arcana of six suits, one for each element. I loved the idea and decided to use their card suggestions as the starting point for my deck. With that post in mind, I came up with a few goals for my version of the minor arcana.

Artwork descriptions - I wanted the person getting a reading to have some idea what the card looked like. Ideally, I wanted to tie every card to some in-game job class, as that makes the cards more relatable.

Changing numbers of cards per suit - Yourou proposed seven cards per suit. I, however, wanted to double down on the pattern of sixes. Not on that, but if I was going to have one job per card, I already was looking at more cards than jobs. To even it out, I reorganized some of Yourou’s suggestions and meanings to make the cards ‘fit’ better.

Lord and Lady of Crowns - The one thing Yourou didn’t touch on that I wanted to was the Lord and Lady of Crowns, the only two “minor arcana” cards FFXIV gives us off the bat. Still, Crowns doesn’t feel equal to other suits like “Hammers” or “Cups” so I took it a slightly different direction and made them the two “wild cards” or “jokers” of the deck. Generally, they just mean significant change, with some nuance of where from depending on the positioning and such. 

To make all of this work, I loaded all the cards and a bunch of pre-formatted card spreads into a Discord bot I made to do randomized card pulls. All card descriptions are easily sized to copy and paste into in-game chat and interpret for guests from there. 

I’ll go into more detail on how the card deck works in another post but I needed to give credit where credit is due to start with. Thanks again, Yourou, for your hard work on the original idea! 

[fleurdefoudre]

Digital Tarot (and why it’s not a bad thing)

So as I mentioned in another post, I use tarot apps.  I am absolutely sure that there are people to whom this is outright blasphemy and others who just think that there’s something missing from the experience that way: there’s no cards in their hands, nothing that they feel they can ‘connect’ with.  But here’s my take on the really lovely parts about digital tarot apps and where I think they fit in at least my practice as a reader.

They’re cheap.

I’m not going to even play games here: digital tarot apps go the range from free to roughly 3.99 on the App store (at least for iPhone) and even at almost four bucks, that’s about five times more affordable than a physical deck.  Now, there’s some people who’d say ‘you get what you pay for’ but considering that most folks only get to see maybe four or five cards from a deck on advertising or packaging of a deck, it’s a really cheap way to get in to see the cards even if you ARE planning on buying the physical copy.  And for those who are on a shoestring budget, it puts the oracle at their fingertips without making them have to cut corners for a 45-50 dollar deck.  Because (as of my visit today to a new age shop), even the most basic Rider-Waite was at least 20 bucks.  

They’re accessible.

As my 20 minute drive today showed, getting somewhere that sells tarot decks isn’t necessarily the easiest thing.  While I lived up in NYC and even on Long Island, finding a new age shop was pretty easy and most of the book stores have a decent selection of decks to choose from.  But since I’ve moved down to Virginia, the pickings became much much slimmer.  My visit to the local B&N recently was legitimately disappointing; I was there to look for a Thoth deck, one of the most basic, and they didn’t have it.  Their section was, maybe, one shelf and most of that was angel oracle decks.  And that’s me, someone with a decent amount of time and a car.  For folks who are younger or without transportation or without any kind of shop like that anywhere around (or who could face trouble for going to such a place), an app store is just a click away.  

They Don’t Take Up Space

As I’m packing up right now, I’m getting a full on lesson on just how much space a tarot collection can take up.  And the thing is, I’m lucky enough to have space and all this junk, etc.  But I’ve been in places where I haven’t.  And that’s just storage.  It also takes space to lay them out, and if you’re in a situation where that’s just not possible, it can feel like more of a chore than a ritual to get your reading done.  And yes, one box of tarot cards isn’t going to take up much space, no.  But how many of us are satisfied by ONE set of cards?  Why make folks living in a studio apartment with three roommates or a person living in a college dorm have to give up variety?

They’re Mobile

It sounds stupid to say it out loud, but if your cards are in your phone, then you always have your cards.  And you’ll never need a table or a cloth to use it.  As much as the ritual is a great part of reading, there are times when you need some guidance and you just don’t have the resources you need.  Sometimes, the only space you can find to yourself is in the bathroom for a few moments or in a small guest bedroom or even the back seat of a car.  

You Can Connect Just As Well To Them As To a Deck Of Cards

Here’s the one where I figure I’m going to get a few looks but hear me out: we’re told that the way we leave our energy with a deck is handling it, using it, keeping it close to us.  I’ve seen books mention sleeping with a deck under your pillow, shuffling continuously, and all manner of other tricks.  

And how many of us do that kind of thing with our phones Every Single Day?

For most of us these days, our phones are our lifeline, they’re our source of information, our connection to the people we love and the greater universe around us.  I spend more time with my phone than with my own husband.  You want to tell me that my energy isn’t a part of that device?  

And no, there’s no physical cards to hold, but those cards exist as data, as energy, literally manipulated by the bioelectricity of our fingers, energy to energy, our energy connecting to show us the cards.  It’s so common place, an idea so boiled into our lives that we don’t even think of it as extraordinary but think of it like that, consider this device that we hold in our hands as a connection to the world around us, and the idea of using a phone as part of your divining practice becomes positively logical.

Of course you still need to learn the cards, and the more effort you put in the more you’ll get out of it: simply using a basic spread and going by the pre-written answers isn’t going to give you the best results.  But using them like any other deck can be great, especially since a lot of apps include journaling and ‘save’ features to let you track your progress and save your interpretations of the cards for each reading.

So if you don’t have the cash today, or you don’t have the space, or you need something for an on-the-go reading or two, I urge you to give a couple of tarot apps a try.  Like I’d mentioned re: the Urban Tarot, the LWB on the app has everything from the paper copy at a fraction of the cost, but most of the apps from The Fool’s Dog are a good value and there’s a huge variety of decks at your fingertips.

[shawnieracetarot]

"The Hermit "