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.

Transcript

If you feel and also it’s a meditation practice like it is a very hard skill to be able to clear your mind like we’re clearing our goal is to make our mind empty so that the muse can give us thoughts and if you want to call it the muse if you want to call your subconscious if you want to call it God uh I guess you can call it Jesus whatever you want to do if you want to call it Carl Young himself speaking to you from the grave we could be necromancers. What’s up guys? I just finished the first video for the other channel. I’m amped up. I’m hyped.

I’m ready to go. Uh again, I’ll never mention it again after this. Uh that video is on how to like really take ebaying seriously. I’m going to start this miniature company off with eBay and talking about the tips of like I talked about a little bit before, but this one’s like really like what exactly to do to be successful on eBay. So, if you want to watch that, matt.

com. No, not mattelbert. com. Just go. I’ll put a link in the description.

I’m sorry. Only once. I’m not I’m not going to spam my other channel just once. I said I wasn’t going to do it, but for those of you who want to find it, there’s a video there. So, now you can find it.

It didn’t exist yesterday. But today, we’re making Dolmanwood characters, baby. It’s crazy how fast I messed this table up. Like, I just cleared this table off, but now we got to do it again. Today, we’re going to focus on our first Dolmanwood party, which is these guys.

Uh, I’m going to be introducing a little bit of the OSE races just because I love these figures. I I have their character stories planned out for so long and I’m finally going to get to use them. Um I’m also going to probably not today. I don’t think I’ll have time, but this will be the Dolmanwood proper party back here using some mossings. Uh a brele very excited and a frier.

Don’t worry about that. Men off back there. I was working on 50 point list, but they’re going back in the closet. But now I got to clean up real quick. and dwarves from advanced OSE and spineflamm from OSE.

I’m just using their races. I will only everything else will be Dolmanwood classes. Uh I just really like these guys and the whole point of this party is they’re going to be starting in my homebrew world in a forest and then uh they’re going to be going through the hole in the oak adventure and that’s what transports them in to Dolman Wood proper. So, uh, if you’re only interested in if you’re only interested in Dolmanwood, uh, hopefully that’s not too disappointing, but I’m doing this for me and hoping that you’ll like it after. So, after after like probably the first I’m going to make all the characters using Dolmanwood rules, get into the Dolmanwood lore a little bit.

The first episode will be playing through that adventure, laying the seeds of some things in amongst the party and then all Dolmanwood 100% all the time for the next foreseeable future. I’m very excited. I’ve been wanting to solo roleplay my own world, my my long-term view and I think also do the vlogs on top of those videos, I think. So, I don’t want to like spoil what’s going on in the campaign. So, I’m going to try to not spoil that kind of thing in the vlogs either.

But with I had this vision of where I’ll play through my solo campaign to establish the world and like learn Dolmanwood front to back and then my my parties will become NPCs for my real groups probably next year, right? Um I’m hoping to get a party going next year, the latter half of next year, whether in person, I prefer in person because it’s just it’s everything I love about the hobby. It’s terrain, it’s miniatures, it’s storytelling, it’s hanging out with the homies. But I might do uh like a Discord group or like whatever the kids use these days for virtual tabletops. Might do that, too.

So, I don’t know. I might be looking for a group here in a couple of months to start that, but right now I just don’t have the time. We’re going to run through character creation based on the methods in the book of antithesis, which is pretty cool. Going to show you a little bit of this, a little bit of my own razledazzle. Uh, we’re going to make the character role-wise according to Dolmanwood, but you’ll see what I’m talking about.

All right, we’re back downstairs. It is pretty late. Very cold. Very freezing down here. Okay, we’re back downstairs.

Very cold. Very freezing. We have two characters left to do our prep with. And then I think tomorrow is when I’ll actually like build out the Dolmanwood character sheets and finish character creation. So, that’ll be a separate video just purely focused on the Dolmanwood side.

And I think for now, uh, we’re going to keep it weird. So, let’s uh let’s get started, which is Garen and his trusty companion, Barrow. Uh, I don’t have any I have the backstory of what of how they’re like they meet up with a party. I don’t really have anything else about this guy. this will be a better judge of how this process works because like I said, the other ones I had uh had the backstory written and ready to go.

This guy is just uh a model that I have loved for many, many years. I’ve had them for so long. He’s starting to patina, which you can probably see, and I’ll show you better pictures of these guys uh probably when we’re doing the Dolmanwood when I’m actually filling out the character sheets. So, this guy, we don’t really know what we’re going to be in store for. We’ve cleared our mind.

We’ve meditated. We’re going to start and see. Uh, we’re pretty much uh, now that I’ve had some time to think about this, and I’m not going right off the cuff, I’ll probably put this one in the front to explain what exactly is going on. We’re going to use some esoteric concepts, some meditation, a little bit of astrology, some silliness, and we’re just going to make some really deep cool characters. I’m going to solo play these guys, but I’m pretty much going to treat them as very well fleshed out NPCs, and I just kind of see what happens to them.

So, we have tarot cards. I like the Wyatt Smith uh Smith deck for this for any for anything really. Um, I have my bag of bones. Uh, this is just a little sack of objects. Specifically, what I’m doing, I have seven coins that correspond to the seven ancient planets, the ones that they could see.

And we’re essentially going to give this guy a birth month. And uh, and we’re going to so we can treat it like a zodiac. And that’s going to allow us to kind of get a better idea about who he is as a person, has his personalities, his motivations, maybe the external forces influencing him. Here we go. I’ll put this video, this one at the front, even though I’m doing them towards the back.

So, we’re going to shake up our coins. And now, whichever ones are face up. See, this is very interesting. I haven’t had this happen before. Uh, every single coin here is face down.

Um, that’s intriguing. That’s We’re going to just have to sit and reflect on this for a moment. Uh, no, no influence. What is going on? Is he outside?

Is he ionic? Very interesting. Was was not expecting this. So, normally what I would do like say if this the silver coin, this is real silver was flipped up. Uh for me that corresponds to the moon.

So I would know that he his moon signed which is the earth element. Um some example influences are health, safe travel, friendliness, wealth, protection, uh things like that. So I can it it takes me it gives me a little bit of an inkling to do. I’ll use the corresponding color dice to roll his stats. But the fact that he has no influence on him, do you know what that means?

It means we’re going to use our clear clear dice on him. I only have one clear d6, so we’re going to have to roll it three times uh for each of his stats. But but this is a true uh true independent. Very interesting. I haven’t I I’ve made a lot of characters like this.

I’ve never had them never have a an influence pop up. But the whole point of this is just to embrace it. Get it get immersed and enjoy the process. So strength in uh intelligence, wisdom. What am I?

Dexterity. That’s what’s next. And then constitution and charisma. So we don’t really know. We’re going to have to roll this three times.

Uh the first is a two, a six, and final oo a five. So that puts us at 13 strength. That’s respectable for a grizzled vet. intelligence two uh one and a one. So he’s he’s not very smart apparently.

That’s crazy. Uh wisdom is one four and a one. Oo, this guy is not coming along. He’s not very wise. Dexterity is four.

This dice isn’t really rolling. Maybe that’s what our problem is. This dice uh is not bouncing. Let’s give this guy We’ll give this guy something to bounce to. All right, so six and four.

This is for dexterity one. That did not help him. [laughter] Uh dexterity is 11. Constitution five, three, and a one. Nine Charisma five three five.

There we go. Uh 13 charisma. Let’s reroll that in score cuz that one is that one’s pretty bad. He’s not even going to be able to communicate with the party. That one’s a little bit too low.

And I I think there’s a six seven eight. All right, that’s that’s more respectable. I don’t usually do that, but that four of intelligence is really bad. And we’re going to chalk that one up to not really rolling because these are very sharp edged. Uh, and I think that’s what was up with that one because otherwise this guy uh is not even going to be able to really work with the party.

So there’s there’s a stats rolled up. 13 strength, eight intelligence after we cheated a little bit. Six wisdom, 11 dexterity, nine constitution, and 13 charisma. So now we will turn to the tarot deck. We will do this is a quick three card read.

First card this is this is represents his past and what he has recently overcome to get us to this point. Knight of cups. Uh then this is going to be what crosses him, what his current challenge, what his current fate is bringing him. And then the third card is his future. What he has before him.

Oh, he is certainly a fool with that intelligence score. So, Knight of Cups. Let’s see what we’re in for. Arrival approach. Sometimes that of a messenger, a proposition, an invitation, an incitement.

Very cool. So, you see what happens when you do these kind of things is there synchronicities that form up. I’ve written his backstory that Tris, our elf here, has kind of enticed him and tricked him to go on an adventure, talked him into being hired for our mage here to escort him on a search for some kind of artifact in the forest that’s going to lead them through a portal into Dolmanwood. So, that’s very interesting. And again, there’s there’s a lot of interpretation.

That’s how I’m interpreting it. So, now we have the nine of swords. This is what his his current challenge is going to be, what he’s going to be working through. And also, if you’re doing this, when you do the the the middle card, the one that’s crossed, it’s never reversed. It’s always just upright cuz it’s sideways.

Um, death, failure, delay, deception, disappointment, despair. See, this is our first our first card that kind of maybe has a little bit of an effect on the narrative because now we know what’s before him, right? We know what maybe is going to be happening. It gives us something to go on as we’re kind of crafting the narrative and and DMing ourselves, you know. And then finally, it’s it’s the fool.

The subject of the reading faces a choice in life. A choice of vital importance to him. Therefore, he must be careful to use all his power to make the right choice. Uh the fool is about to enter the supreme adventure. Uh and that is the truth.

He is about to be on the adventure of his life. He is an old and grizzled vet. Um very I think looking at his stats, I think that actually probably really emphasizes where he’s at. Uh, we’re going to say there was a blip in the system for that in roll, but an eight intelligence perfectly spot on. Uh, so now we we have this rule.

I’m going to write this down. We kind of have an idea about what’s in store for him, what kind of challenges he’s going to be facing, which is this is very apt uh for what I I know is coming, what I know is happen to them. But it’s just very cool to see this the universe speak to us this way and have it come through to us. So, very cool. All right, we’re done with him.

Um, he’s got his little puppy boy. We’re not going to do a reading on him. Actually, we’ll do what’s we’ll do a quick one for the pup. What’s he coming from? Uh, five of wands.

Whoops. Five of wands. He’s got the two of pentacles and the 10 of cups. The five of wands. What did he What did that little boy just overcome?

He a strenuous competition and strife, struggling to trying to attain riches and success, the battle of life. So, now that he’s kind of in retirement with his with his homie, he’s made it through all the wars and the battles, and now he is just happy to be here hanging out with his owner. The two of pentacles, harmony in the midst of chains, agility, and handling situations. Hey, he’s he’s in a going to go on a new adventure, but he’s cool with it. He’s down.

Like I said, he’s just happy to be there. And then we’re back in at the 10 of cups, which it looks pretty positive. A happy family life with true friendship and happiness to come. He’s just a happy boy. He’s a happy little boy.

How could a dog be anything but a happy little guy? Happy to go on an adventure, meet new people, eat new food, uh poop in a new forest. It’s funny how how the cards [snorts] work out. Pen and paper. I’ll eventually put this on official Dolmanwood sheets, but I like just putting them out on notes first.

We’re going to do some exercises to like clear our mind and just help us determine more about these characters and how they’re going to play and who they’re going to be. Okay, so we’ll start. We’re going to start with Ro. Um, at sometimes at this point, you might not even know their names. Um, I’ve RL is actually just this miniature’s actual name and I love it so much that we’re keeping it.

Ro is from Monkstone Miniatures. He is going to be a Film and I don’t know how to spell that. Right. Pretty straightforward. We can see that he uh we can see what he looks like.

We can see he has a shorten sword and shield. We’re going to stick to what the the model has. And now we kind of want to get a little bit more information about him before we start uh before we start really getting into it. So that’s where um my pouch of of random objects comes into play. Each one of these objects corresponds to just things in in my mind.

So I like this isn’t something like you kind of just got to do this for yourself. It’s just a bunch of collected objects that are really good for one just role playing in general, even if you’re not solo role playing. But it can help you just randomize your game without the use of an oracle because each each one of these things might mean something to me. And I’m not going to like explain all the meanings out, but the important part here is these coins, which are grimkin coins from War Machine, all correspond to a different planet in my head. So, when I I’m going to start with these, then that’s going to tell us like what kind of planetary influence uh what kind of personality aspects this person has.

And you pro I probably totally lost most of my audience. You guys are probably already like, “What what the hell is going on?” And that’s okay. But to [laughter] to hopefully try to explain this a little bit more, uh, we’re following ancient Greek, the ancient Greek zodiac. And again, in the in the book of antithesis, it explains this much better and more succinctly than I could.

But you have each planet, each of the original, the ancient planets that they could see, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, the moon, Saturn, the sun, and Venus. Each one of these has a corresponding color and element and the influences. So, say um say we I’m gonna flip these coins out. And I think I’m missing what I got. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Whoops. Um missing one more. Where is it at? Okay. So, uh I’m going to throw these.

When something is face up, that’s going to tell me which one of these uh influences them. So, say and and you’ll be surprised. There’s seven items, right? Sometimes you’ll get just one face up. Uh sometimes you’ll get two.

Very rarely do you get like more than three. So say say we just get the one that corresponds to Jupiter. They are like wealth, favor, peace, disenchantment, fame. These are just influences upon him. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that these are character traits.

These could be like like if you’re like deities or factions or nations that are influencing this character as maybe they’re part of their backstory or it can absolutely be personality traits. So, we’re going to start here. So, I just shake them up. And usually I have a little mat here, which I realized I actually forgotten. All right, so this one jumped out of my hand, right?

And you might think that’s ridiculous, but this was meant to jump out. It is the wanderer coin, which I don’t even need to throw these because I now know that the wanderer has a very strong influence over this character. And actually, in my homebrew world, the wanderer I use the War Machine figure. He is a deity in my homebrew world. Uh but I the wanderer coin responds to Mercury which uh is gray, purple and yellow, water, luck, gratitude, memory, divination, poverty and memory loss.

Interesting. So now we know um now I can just put that his planetary influence is Mercury and his element is water. Right? So think of this where it’s a astrology for our characters, right? And it just helps us like I’m already immersed like we’re in this um everybody watching this and it’s this is a very this is a very personal and I don’t know esoteric hidden aspect of myself.

I haven’t really shared this with anyone before. So it’s actually I wasn’t sure if I was going to do all this but I think it’s pretty cool to share the process and show you how powerful it is at making characters. Right. So, we know um his element is now Mercury. And you’ll you’re about to see why we do that first for me.

That is that now means that we go to my yellow dice. Yellow is Mercury’s color. Uh I keep all of my I have a color for every every planetary influence. Uh now I have his 3d6. We’re going to go 3d6 down the line to get his stats.

Right. So, strength first. Whoa. [snorts] I don’t know if you can see this. His strength is 666.

He’s a little guy with 18 strength. This boy is ready to smash. That’s insane. And see, like, [snorts] so now we know they’re I don’t know. It’s crazy.

He these dice uh these dice are ready to go. That’s all I got to say. What’s next? Intelligence. Uh intelligence.

He’s an 11. He’s not bad. Not bad. Um okay. I can’t believe we just ripped the 666 on camera.

First roll. That’s how that’s what happens when you start messing with this kind of thing, baby. They’re here. Uh it’s it’s here. It’s ready.

All right. [snorts] Uh, next I believe is wisdom. All right. Oh, that’s wisdom. Let’s see where this guy’s at wisdom wise.

Oh, he is not very wise, which makes sense because uh I’ve already kind of I’ve done this exercise a little bit just to think of what his backstory is going to be. and he is a forphilin that spent his whole life underground but was called to come to the surface to be a valiant warrior of the sun. So he’s he’s not going to be wise. He’s he’s uh he’s spending his whole life underground. Very cool.

And and you’ll see how these like synchronicities and these things just kind of start to happen. Like this guy has he has his own life. Like we’re again I I’m just going to go all out. We’re not building a character. We’re tapping into another dimension and we’re bringing him into our dimension and we’re channeling this information in onto his character sheet.

Okay, dexterity. Nine dexterity. That probably makes sense cuz he’s got to carry this big heavy shield and his armor and his sword. He’s not going to be he’s not going to be dextrous because he’s got all these muscles. He he can’t really be dextrous.

Uh next we’ll see constitution. Is he going to be a tank? No, he’s [laughter] not gonna be a tank. He’s a little guy with a dream, which again makes sense. And finally, Charisma.

Is he gonna be a charismatic little hugger? Of course he is, cuz he’s a little cutie with a heart of gold. So, 16 Charisma. Okay, there we go. And obviously, um, I’ll take this information and I’ll actually truly build out his Dolmanwood character sheet, but I’m gonna while I’m locked in and I’m in the zone, uh, I’m going to just keep going.

I’ll do all this exercise for all the characters. And, uh, I also I almost forgot. So, next up, we’re going to we’re going to give him a tarot reading. And just a quick just a little three card spread probably. Um, let’s see.

We will use what do we want to use for him? He’s the knight of swords. He’s he’s rushing headlong into his destiny, right? So that is the signifier or significator that represents him. And I’ll I’ll probably do multiple videos where one video will just be the Dolmanwood side and this vlog today’s vlog will be me being a little weirdo down here in the dungeon doing tarot card readings for little miniatures.

[laughter] But all right, here we go. This is our guy. This is what he has recently overcome in the past. The seven of cups. This is what uh crosses him.

This is his current challenge. The six of swords. And then this is what the future holds. The two of swords reversed. Okay.

So, uh usually I’ll at this point I’ll probably snap a picture uh cuz uh I’m still also I’m still like learning the tarot. That’s It’s like, are you ever not learning the tarot? I’m a couple years into it, but I I do not have everything memorized yet. Okay, I’m still I’m still doing this reading, but it’s really you do this and you can It’s really amazing at what happens. So, I’ I’ve written this guy’s backstory.

Um it’s kind of it came to me. I’ve had the idea. I’ve had this miniature for years. I’ve had the idea of what I wanted to do with him for years. I wrote it out.

I posted to the website yesterday. Uh if anybody went and looked, it was there. It was posted yesterday for sure. Um his backstory is that uh there was this event called the fracturing and it exposed the Sepilum stronghold to the surface world. He saw the rays of sun and he was determined to get up into the surface world.

What this is the the tarot revealed and I also have the pictorial key. But what is the reverse? The reverse seven cups good use of determination and will a project about to be realized. So in our story he has just come to the surface that card uh and again like there’s always it’s always up to interpretation but just very cool synchronicities like this will start to happen and you’ll see and if I didn’t already have that story like that’s a pretty good prompt to write your story, right? Very cool.

Uh, six of swords [snorts] is uh, passage away from difficulty, a journey by water or success after anxiety, sending someone to represent you in an undertaking. Very interesting. So, we know that this is what’s before him and what he’s facing. So, that can kind of help us as our own DM maybe style the adventure for him. And then the last one, the two of swords reversed.

Release a moment of affairs sometimes in the wrong direction. con caution against dealing with rogues. Oh, he better he better look out for rogues. Maybe maybe there’s somebody in his party that he needs to keep an eye on. Very crazy when you do things like this, the synchronicity that comes up.

And Carl Young, I’m sure, has a lot to say about that. But there’s our first character. We have his reading. I’m going to run through these. Um I don’t know, but I’m going to keep the camera on.

I’m going to keep it real. This will be a long form video. Uh I’m sharing you guys my inner sanctum, my occult practices, uh very specifically what Alistister Crowley said and friends say not to do. But here we are. We’re just playing games.

We’re not actually talking to the devil. So here we go. Next character. So um from here we got we got R. And eventually I’ll actually like I’ll work on a sigil for him too as time goes on and we get we get going.

Um so we we’ve done that. We’re going to move on to the next character. All right. Next we’re going to do our dwarf. He’s our last.

Everybody else will be a official Dolmanwood race. Um this is Thoric. Thoric has a very detailed backstory that I wrote. I actually have played Thoric before. Um, I did not do this kind of exercise with him though.

So, I’m pretty curious about uh what we’re gonna get because like I said, his story is a lot more fleshed out than everybody else’s just cuz he played in a campaign. The campaign fell apart obviously as the D and D campaigns do and I did not feel very satisfied that I got to live out for Destiny. So, first we’ll start here. We’ll see what happens. And again, I always I cut my hands like this and I try to shake them.

Keep them pretty close though. It’s not good to have things fall out. I mean, actually, that’s not true. It’s It’s not charged. It’s not good or bad.

It just is, right? So, hopefully you’ll see a real casting of the bones this time. You shake them. You get them properly mixed. And then you sprawl your hands out.

And so, let’s see. This one’s face down. This one’s face down. We have the child, the dreamer, the wanderer. Uh, I got to remember what these two are.

It’s been a while. We have five planetary influences on this poor guy. But wait, there’s only three dice to roll, right? So, if you uh I I do 3d6 down the line cuz I just want to accept what fate gives me. If you wanted to roll five and drop the lowest two, but we’re going to just cast these again.

And uh I would almost guarantee we’ll get three or less face up on this one. Uh, and if we don’t, everything I’m talking about is [ __ ] We’ll see. Face down. Face down. One, two, three.

Isn’t it funny how that works? So, we have the dreamer, the child, and the tile. Okay, we’re back. I had to I had my files mixed up. Uh, the moon should have been in.

So, the moon is the silver coin, not that tile. That’s what was throwing me off. Not sure what I was thinking there. So, his major influences are the moon, Mars, and Venus. That’s what these three are.

And then he has Mercury and Saturn as minor influences. Okay. Actually, uh I’m not going to roll his stats because we’re for his stats, we’re going to use those stats that we first rolled in our Dolman Wood video. Uh I just remembered like those stats were just so perfect for him that uh he was forcing his way into this Dolman Wood campaign. I was going to use the Dolmanwood characters only.

So, we’re not actually not going to roll these, but those are the dice that that uh would have corresponded here. We’re going to represent him with a hierofant. And if you if you know his story, that hopefully makes sense. Um, and when it comes to like picking the significator, uh, you just kind of go vibes. And again, I’ve already written this guy’s backstory, so it’s kind of cheating, but we’re just going to see like what else we can can ascertain for him.

And I just shuffled the deck and this card just popped out. So this is what we’ll start there. That uh that was the past. This is what he’s facing now. And this is his future.

Seven swords reversed. Wheel of Fortune and the 10 of Wands reversed. Wow, I just realized the camera turned off, but uh her stats were a nine strength, seven intellect, nine wisdom, six dexterity, six constitution, and four charisma. So uh yikes. Oh no.

She’s uh she’s she’s a young elf. So maybe that’s what that corresponds to. We we will see. I don’t know what her significator is going to be. So we’re just going to leave it.

She herself will be. This is her past. This is what she is crossing or what she’s facing right now. And then this is her future. So we have very interesting that she has royalty so much.

So king of wands, the five of cups and then reversed queen of wands. Interesting that they’re she has both reversed uh royalty of of that. All right, we’re going to come back. We’re gonna come back to that. We got to keep keep this moving.

I might need to stop for now. Wow. I just realized the camera turned off, but uh her stats were a nine strength, seven intellect, nine wisdom, six dexterity, six constitution, and four charisma. So uh yikes. Oh no.

She’s uh she’s she’s a young elf. So maybe that’s what that corresponds to. We we will see. I don’t know what her significant civic uh significator is going to be. So, we’re just going to leave it that she herself will be.

This is her past. This is what she is what’s crossing her, what she’s facing right now. And then this is her future. So, we have very interesting that she has royalty so much. So, King of Wands, the Five of Cups, and then reversed Queen of Wands.

It’s interesting that they’re she has both reversed uh royalty of of uh of that. All right, we’re going to come back. We’re going to come back to that. We got to keep keep this moving. I might need to stop for now.

All right, we have our last member of our party. Little ominous. His name is Ellerin Vale. He puts on an appearance of being a dooodter. But is he?

We don’t know. We don’t know anything about him. The cards have been Let me give the cards one more shuffle for this fine boy and start here. We’ll see. The only thing we know about him is he’s on a quest for an artifact in the middle of this forest.

We’ll see what kind of influences he has upon him. Okay. So, face down. Face down. And this is kind of an introductory class on reading the bones.

Uh these five, we kind of ran into this with the other character. So, because these are face down, we know they don’t apply. Um he has five minor influences uh which these themselves correspond to Jupiter. uh Mercury, the sun, the dreamer or I use I’m using uh accordance the dreamer is Venus and uh Saturn. All right, so we know those are the five which ones are really very interested in him.

Of course, he’s got everybody everybody’s watching him as the as the mages usually do attract attention. So, now we’re looking for three face up. We’ll see. Talked about this earlier. Let’s see if we can go two for two.

Wow, they’re all face down. So, they all really want to influence this guy. That’s what I’m taking. Nobody wants to give up their stake. So, let’s see.

Everybody wants Everybody wants a piece of him. That’s how that’s going to go. That’s how we will play it. So, we have we’ll roll 5d6 and we’ll just keep the the best three. This guy’s going to be a monster.

If that’s how they want to play it, that’s how we’ll play it. So the heretic or the sun mercury, Jupiter, Venus, And last is Saturn. All right. So, five dice that didn’t No one wanted to relinquish their hold on them. Uh we’ll see.

All right. 56. We’ll keep the top three and we’ll let the let the planets fight them out. See who’s who. All right.

Five is a Venus. Four uh is Jupiter. Mercury is out. Wanderer is out. And the sun.

So his strength. He’s going to be a strong mage. All right. Intellect. This one should be astronomical since everybody wants to be in here.

6 53 2 1’s may see in my mind like these these two have both been consistently low which it these two are like trying to hold they’re doing their best to like hold him back. They’re trying to stop him from really becoming powerful is how we play that. So that’s that’s how you kind of take the randomness of the die rolls and the and the silliness of the influences. So now like we know that Mercury uh and Saturn am I no Mercury and Jupiter are opposed. They’re consistently low numbers.

Uh whereas uh the sun is consistently high, Venus is consistently high. Saturn’s Saturn’s kind of hanging in there. Um all right, let’s see where we’re at. Now, this is wisdom again. Mercury low.

Mercury gets in there. So again, this the sun is is three in a row. Good. Venus is three in a row. Good.

Oh, no. Venus is Venus is kind of backed off actually, but uh that’s an 11 wisdom of virtue, dexterity. Five, five, four. The usual suspects uh puts us at 14. Dexterity.

He’s a dextrous dextrous mage. All right. Constitution. They wanted to make sure he lives. Interesting here, right?

If you’re following along, but he is uh he is the tankiest character we have rolled constitutionwise, which makes sense cuz we are rolling five dice. Now, Charisma is he he’s a very charismatic. That’s it’s crazy, but which also again makes sense for someone uh of his style. So he has 17 in charisma. So charismatic.

He presents very peaceful, very dog goody, but he has some ulterior motives, I might suspect. I might suspect. So I’m just putting all my dice back where they go. I’ve got them into sorted colors and bins. And so now that we have our characters made, I I I’ll probably play like most of Dolman Wood.

I’ll use my the actual dolman wood dice. But if I if there’s something maybe if it’s a big roll and he’s a good example and it’s like Jupiter and Mercury are trying to step in to stop him from doing what he’s doing, I might roll those dice in the roll and and that’s how it’s going to be, you know, or like since the sun was very involved in in a bonus, maybe he’ll roll that one. And it’s just a cool way to keep uh to keep your deities in the game, stay immersed, do cool things. It’s always good to to touch your cards. It’s always good to roll them bones to just get your subconscious working.

Tap into the universe. Tap into something you don’t understand. Something that makes the back of your neck tickle that little kiss of the muse on the back of your head. It’s always a good thing. So, here we go.

What’s behind him? The hermit. Obviously, we we had to. Of course, it’s the hermit that’s behind him. Next, what’s crossing him?

Probably some money problems. Uh, and what is before him? Uhoh. All right. The hermit.

The hermit. Actually, it doesn’t mean he’s is a solo guy. It means he’s kind of I’ll just I’ll get to the book so that way I don’t butcher it. But hermit, silent counsel, wisdom from above and prudence, a meeting with one who will guide the seeker on the path to material or spiritual goals, attainment, possibly a journey. That is certainly what’s in store for our mage here.

Uh the six of pentacles. philanthropy, charity, and gifts. Alms dispense with justice. Present poster present prosperity shared with others. So he’s he’s very interesting.

Um in my mind, I kind of had the story for him and that’s not quite what I was thinking. So maybe I need to rethink that. But this is very cool. Let me write the write the reading down. Hermit.

Six of Pentacles. Queen of Cups reversed. Okay. Queen of Cups reversed. What are we looking at?

What are we looking at? Okay. Queen of Cups reversed. Maybe a good woman in some ways, but it’s sometimes perverse. may indicate dishonesty or immorality.

Uh that dishonesty part is what I’ve had in mind for this character. So, it does make sense. And it’s funny how it works out. Uh, of course, it works out how I was thinking because I’m interpreting the cards. But it’s helping me pull out the story that I was already thinking of.

That’s what we’re doing there. Okay. Uh, there we go. Oh, there was one that we didn’t um I didn’t do on camera. We’ll go ahead and do her.

She had it was our our elf character. She had the king of wands, the five of cups, and the queen of wands. So, the king of wands is where she’s coming from. Uh, honest and conscientious and impassionate and noble. uh be token unexpected heritage or a good marriage.

So maybe that’s just her her life of of leisure as an elf and and wealth and riches that she’s kind of left left behind to go out and explore and experience the human world. Then the five of cups. Let’s bookmark where we are to get back to the queen. What she’s dealing with now. vain regret, loss, uh, inheritance, not up to one’s expectations could mean marriage, but carry with it the bitterness and frustration, the rejection of pleasure.

That’s very interesting what’s in store for her right now. And then reversed queen, uh, strict opposition, jealousy, deceit, or infidelity. So, uh, we have all five, six, if you count the puffers. Um, our mage, I’m going to burn them all down. Our mage has hired.

Uh, our mage was looking for an escort through the woods to kind of go try to recover some sort of artifact he’s heard about there to further his studies. Um, Trist, our our elf, has talked her longtime companion into signing up for the mercenary job. He’s been kind of aimless and and wandering through now in his late 30s trying to figure things out. And now that he’s kind of out of the army and no longer in service, he doesn’t really know what to do with himself. And as these three are coming through the forest, they come upon our dwarf cleric who has recently healed our our spriaking knight trying to or not sprien who has recently healed our Zenephilim [snorts] uh knight and who he just kind of found very badly wounded on the forest floor.

He got probably tore up by a wild animal that he just wasn’t prepared to face and now the party is together and their adventure will begin soon. Uh, tomorrow I’ll roll up their actual Domenwood characters. Thanks for watching. This has been a really fun one. Probably going to end up being a really long one.

So, if you made it this far, uh, thanks for sticking with me. This is probably the weirdest one I’ve done, but this is also this one of the most valuable exercises uh, in my hobby. It’s what really kind of resets me, fills my bucket back up. It’s uh it’s not like painting where like painting is awesome and it makes me feel good. But that’s certainly like something is coming out of me to do that.

And when I do stuff like this, I’m still creating like I just created five people. I I’ve brought them into existence. But this method kind of fills me back up and it’s bringing something into me. So, I just wanted to share how I can how I add these depths to my characters that I make for myself to play as well as for like NPCs in my campaign. And these tools, uh, the the bag of bones will be definitely coming back in the solo play.

And you’ll kind of see how I I read those through as an oracle. And the [snorts] cards are always going to be here with me. So, that’ll give you a taste of how the solo play is going to go. Thank you for watching. Again, I really appreciate all of you.

This was day 91, man. 91 days. I’m so excited for the next 91. Thanks again. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.