Wandering Arcana

You are a fortune-teller who walks between towns. You arrive at the end of an afternoon, lay a cloth on a table in the square, and wait for somebody to sit down. Then somebody does, and they want to know whether their son is coming home. The cards fall. And you are the only person at that table who can read them. Most solo tarot games are about reading for yourself. This one is not. Wandering Arcana is about reading for other people — and about the two seconds after you have understood the card, while a stranger is still looking at you. Every reading, you pick one of three: - Speak It Plain. The truth, including the part they will not like. If the news is hard you lose the room, and you put down a point of Weight — a hard truth said out loud is the only thing in this game that ever takes anything off you. - Soften It. Every word accurate, the edge left off. Nobody is angry and nothing is resolved, which is the commonest outcome in this job. +1 Weight. - Turn It. You tell them something the cards did not say. +2 Regard, +2 Weight, and their name goes in the Ledger of Turns, because a lie is the one thing here that follows you out of town. Regard is what this town thinks of you and it resets at the boundary. Weight never resets. It crosses every town line with you, and the sixth point stops the session dead for the Reckoning, wherever you happen to be standing. After five towns the season ends and you read for yourself, once — and that is the one reading you are not allowed to soften. You don't need a tarot deck. The game runs on its own 22-card Wandering Arcana, printed on a page you cut out once: The Wayfarer, The Kept Fire, The Toll-Keeper, The Fallow Year, The Long View. Original archetypes with original meanings, nothing borrowed from any commercial deck. Prefer dice? One d6 and one d4 are the whole deck, on a table that includes two results reading *No Card Falls* — which is a real answer, with its own rule. In the eighteen pages: - The full rules for the draw, the reading and the choice - All 22 arcana, upright and reversed, with the image line that does the real work - Four suits — Road, Hearth, Coin, Knot — and their 24 Turns - Tables for the town, what is wrong with it, who sits down and what they ask - The Aftermath, the six Reckonings, and how a season ends on your final Weight - Journal prompts and a one-page quick reference - The cut-out card sheet, plus three printable sheets: the Reader's Sheet, the Day's Readings and the Road Ledger What you need: a pencil, scissors or two dice, and about forty minutes a sitting. One sitting is one town. You get the same book as two PDFs, one laid out for A4 and one for US Letter, so it prints correctly wherever you are — or reads comfortably on a tablet.