Using Tarot Cards & Casting Bones to Create Deeper Roleplaying Characters

The Philosophy

This is a meditation practice. It’s a very hard skill to be able to clear your mind. Our goal is to make our mind empty so that the muse can give us thoughts. If you want to call it the muse, your subconscious, God, Carl Jung himself speaking from the grave—we could be necromancers.

Today we’re making Dolmenwood characters using the methods in the Book of Antithesis. I’m going to show you a little bit of this, a little bit of my own razzle-dazzle.

The Party Setup

I’m introducing some OSE races because I love these figures. I’ve had their character stories planned for so long. The whole point is they’re starting in my homebrew world and going through the Hole in the Oak adventure—that’s what transports them into Dolmenwood proper.

My long-term view: I’ll play through my solo campaign to establish the world and learn Dolmenwood front to back. Then my parties will become NPCs for my real groups, probably next year.

The Bone Casting Method

My bag of bones is a collection of objects. Each corresponds to things in my mind—this is something you have to develop for yourself. The important part here is the coins, which correspond to the seven ancient planets: Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, the Moon, Saturn, the Sun, and Venus.

Each planet has corresponding colors, elements, and influences. When I flip the coins, whichever ones land face up tell me which planetary influence affects the character.

Rolling Rorl’s Stats

For Rorl, the wanderer coin jumped out of my hand—and that was meant to happen. The Wanderer corresponds to Mercury: gray, purple, and yellow, water element. Influences include luck, gratitude, memory, divination, poverty, and memory loss.

Now I use my yellow Mercury dice to roll 3d6 down the line.

His first roll for Strength? 6-6-6. This little guy has 18 Strength! That’s insane. These dice are ready to go—that’s what happens when you start messing with this kind of thing.

Final stats: 18 Strength, 11 Intelligence, 9 Wisdom (makes sense—he’s spent his whole life underground), 9 Dexterity, 8 Constitution, 16 Charisma. A little cutie with a heart of gold.

The Tarot Reading

I use the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. For Rorl, his significator is the Knight of Swords—rushing headlong into his destiny.

• Past (Seven of Cups reversed): Good use of determination and will, a project about to be realized. In our story, he just came to the surface!
• Present (Six of Swords): Passage away from difficulty, a journey by water, success after anxiety
• Future (Two of Swords reversed): Caution against dealing with rogues. Maybe there’s somebody in his party he needs to keep an eye on…

The synchronicities are crazy when you do things like this.

Multiple Planetary Influences

For Thoric, our dwarf, five coins came up face up—then when I recast, exactly three. The Moon, Mars, and Venus as major influences; Mercury and Saturn as minor.

For our mage Ellerin, everyone wanted a piece of him. All five coins refused to give up their stake. So we roll 5d6 and keep the best three. He’s got 14 Strength, 14 Intelligence, 11 Wisdom, 14 Dexterity, 15 Constitution, 17 Charisma—a monster.

His tarot reading: The Hermit (silent counsel, wisdom from above), Six of Pentacles (philanthropy, charity), Queen of Cups reversed (maybe dishonesty). That dishonesty part is what I had in mind for this character.

Why This Works

We’re not building characters—we’re tapping into another dimension and bringing them into our world. We’re channeling this information onto their character sheets.

These tools help me add depths to characters for myself to play and for NPCs in campaigns. The bag of bones will definitely come back in solo play as an oracle. The cards are always with me.

The Party Assembled

Our mage has hired an escort through the woods to recover an artifact. Trist, our elf, talked her longtime companion into signing up for the mercenary job. As these three come through the forest, they find our dwarf cleric who has recently healed our Zenephilim knight—found badly wounded on the forest floor.

The party is together. The adventure begins soon.

This is probably my weirdest video, but also one of the most valuable exercises in my hobby. It resets me, fills my bucket back up. When I do stuff like this, I’m bringing something into me.

Day 91. Thanks for letting me share my inner sanctum. See you tomorrow.