This is your past, the good and the ill of it, and that which is neither . . .

It seemed like a good idea at the time: since the fantasy series my co-writer Alyc Helms and I were writing (the Rook and Rose trilogy, under the name M.A. Carrick) is set in an invented world, we shouldn’t use the familiar tarot for the divinatory cards that appear in the story. No, this called for an original deck, one that would reflect the culture and history of the setting.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple.

Designing our own deck immediately opened up countless questions: how many suits should the deck have? Should it have suits? Numbered (like the pip cards of a normal playing deck or the Minor Arcana of the tarot), uniquely named (like the cards of the Faerie Oracle or Lenormand deck), or a mix of both kinds? How many cards should there be in total? What concepts would be represented, and what concepts left out? And how are the cards read -- what layouts do the people in this world use? Do the cards have reversed significance as well? What would we call the deck? Because both Alyc and I are anthropologists and folklorists by academic training, we even went beyond the deck itself to ask ourselves questions like what games people might play with the cards and what in-world folklore the various names and images might be referencing.

It was a ton of work. And worst of all, we had to know the answers to many of these questions before we started writing the series. Not all of them -- the cards languished under placeholder names for a good long while -- but the fundamental structure and significance of the deck, yes. Because our main protagonist, Ren, uses these cards . . . and what’s more, we didn’t want to go the route I’ve used in one of my own solo series, deciding what a given spread needs to say and reverse-engineering a selection of cards that will convey that message. Instead I took a blank deck, wrote the names on the cards in Sharpie, and any time we needed a layout in the story, I shuffled and dealt and we wrote what we got.

The results were eerily on point.

Sometimes too much so! There’s one scene in the first book, The Mask of Mirrors (whose title comes from the card of secrets and lies), where we had to lean on the existence of certain magical defenses to stop Ren from seeing a piece of information we really needed her not to gain until the second book (The Liar’s Knot, the card of trust and betrayal). But every time a card or a whole spread played perfectly into our plot, we gained more confidence that we’d designed the deck right. It fit with our characters, our world, and had just the right balance of specificity and flexibility, enabling a variety of interpretations. On occasion -- one chapter in The Mask of Mirrors, one in Labyrinth’s Heart (the third and final novel, the card of stillness), and the entire plot of the related novelette “Pearl’s Price” -- we even used the deck to structure the narrative, building our scenes around what the cards evoked.

This is your present, the good and the ill of it, and that which is neither . . .

So what does the deck look like?

The first decision was one of nomenclature: we named it the pattern deck. That word calls to mind the connection between textiles and fate, and point one seven seconds later, textile imagery had spread all across the culture of the Vraszenians, the people who created the pattern deck. Because of that, we also termed the suits “threads” -- and because Alyc and I are the aforementioned anthropologists, this wound up connecting to Vraszenian religion and beliefs about the multi-part nature of the soul. But the rest of our worldbuilding is another story . . .

We opted for three suits, initially for very pragmatic reasons. Four would call to mind the tarot and the regular playing cards of the West; five felt like too many. But three wound up being perfect, because the series has another magical tradition (developed by a different ethnic group) which is all about numerology and sacred geometry, and thanks to that corner of our worldbuilding, the number three wound up as a recurrent and significant motif in the story. We also decided to name every card individually, rather than numbering them -- partly because it just felt more flavorful for the narrative, but also because making the deck unnumbered would help distinguish it from that foreign, mathematical tradition. (A decision we regretted at times, as we struggled through the long process of naming every single card. Some were easy; some . . . weren’t. One, which fortunately hadn’t been mentioned during The Mask of Mirrors, didn’t get its final name until after we’d finished drafting The Liar’s Knot. Another, which is a special case, dragged out all the way to the revisions on Labyrinth’s Heart.)

The suits -- or rather, the threads -- aren’t arbitrary divisions. Like the suits of the tarot, each one has a theme. The spinning thread, represented by a spindle, is focused on the “inner self,” which is to say matters of the mind and the spirit. The woven thread, represented by a shuttle, addresses the “outer self,” concepts that have to do with relationships and social institutions. And the cut thread, represented by shears, deals with the “physical self,” the body and the material world. In addition to these, there’s a much smaller set of cards (seven instead of twenty) for the Vraszenian clans, though for in-story reasons those have largely fallen out of use by the time of the trilogy.

Although the cards are named instead of numbered, we do have something reminiscent of the court cards: the Faces and the Masks. These again link to the Vraszenian religion, wherein all deities are believed to have two aspects, one benevolent, the other wrathful. Each thread has four pairs of Faces and Masks, and the theme of duality they bring in extends to the interpretation of all the cards in the deck. Placement within a layout, not orientation, determines whether a card should be read as positive or negative . . . and everything, no matter how seemingly good or bad, contains its opposing aspect. Drowning Breath may be the card of fear, but doesn’t fear exist to warn us of danger? The Face of Song may be the card of peace, but isn’t peace sometimes a facade achieved at the cost of ignoring problems?

Layouts are one aspect that evolved quite a bit as we wrote the series. At the outset, our only plan was for a nine-card spread, three rows of three -- a grid whose rows are introduced with the phrases I’ve been using in this post, This is your past/present/future, the good and the ill of it, and that which is neither. But, well, it takes a lot of words to write through the interpretation of that many cards; we weren’t sure our readers would sit still for it over and over again, and besides, sometimes that felt like overkill. So we introduced both a single-card draw for immediate inspiration and a three-card line for guidance on a problem, with the first card representing your current situation, the second the path you should follow, and the third where you may wind up.

That was all in place early in drafting the first book. But seven is another number of significance in the series, for example with the seven Vraszenian clans, and it felt to us like there would be a layout built on that framework. Thus, while working on The Liar’s Knot, we invented the seven-card wheel: one position for each of the clans, offering more in-depth insight on subjects like allies and obstacles, the question you must ask and the wisdom you should remember. And with that in place, well, the number five was sitting right there, conspicuously empty among the one, three, seven, and nine-card options. In Labyrinth’s Heart we reveal that this is used, very rarely, for cursing other people -- not a step to be taken lightly!

This is your future, the good and the ill of it, and that which is neither . . .

Even before we started writing the series, Alyc and I dreamt of making the pattern deck for real. Not my blank cards scribbled on with Sharpie -- precious though they are to me, given the role they played in shaping the series -- but a proper deck, illustrated and printed in a form we could share with the world. We’re delighted beyond words to say that dream recently became reality: thanks to the support of over four hundred backers on Kickstarter, we now have the money to pay three amazing artists, A.C. Esguerra, Avery Liell-Kok, and H. Emiko Ogasawara, to bring our vision to life.

We made the pattern deck for the world of our story, but we hope its particular structure and set of concepts can be of use to other people, whether for divination, personal reflection, card games, or storytelling. On our website there is a simplified widget -- which will have the card art once that’s completed! -- where you can lay a three-card line or a nine-card spread, and if you want to explore the full list of cards with their significances, we’ve made those available as well. And if all of this sounds like something you’d enjoy exploring, you can pre-order the pattern deck on BackerKit right now, along with several add-ons like the full-size guidebook, a cloth bag for the deck, or dice for playing a pattern-related game.

May you see the Face and not the Mask!

Guest Contributor Bio

Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly leans on her academic fields for inspiration. She recently misapplied her professors’ hard work to The Game of 100 Candles and the short novel Driftwood. She is the author of the Hugo Award-nominated Victorian adventure series The Memoirs of Lady Trent along with several other series, over eighty short stories, several poems, and the New Worlds series of worldbuilding guides; as half of M.A. Carrick, she has written the epic Rook and Rose trilogy, beginning with The Mask of Mirrors. For more information and social media, visit linktr.ee/swan_tower.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

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