December 6, 2022: Parting The Mists Of The Future

To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to predict the future in what we think of as the Real World. Game worlds are not so limited. In some of them, you absolutely can predict the future. In others, everyone believes in divination – including the PCs! That fortune-teller in the marketplace might be a scam, but might just as well be a respectable professional offering valuable personal and business advice. You pay your gold piece and you take your chance. This means that in-game methods of divination can be very useful to the GM. And it just happens that we've got several . . .

• The Silicon Valley Tarot is fortune-telling for today, or perhaps, as Max Headroom would have it, 20 minutes into the future. The deck of 70 cards speaks to modern tropes, but can be used just like a classic Tarot.

• The Zodiac Die is a 12-sider with the signs of the zodiac and a booklet discussing how it can be used for divination, character creation, or quick bits of NPC background.

• The brand-new Elder Futhark Die is a 24-sider (Yes, really! Its 24 sides make an elegant die!) with the symbols of an important Norse-style runic system. Its booklet tells you how to "cast the runes" in a Viking-inspired game, and right now it's on pre-order!

• Also new and on pre-order is the Bad Luck Die. It is a 26-sider (13 twice) with 13 different traditional and modern symbols for bad luck, starting with the black cat and the number 13. If you cast fortunes with this, all those fortunes will be bad . . . but maybe that's what you want. Total Party Kill, or at least Total Party Doom and Despair!

• Turning things around, the Question Die is a d6 that asks "who? what? when? why? where? how?" Use it along with one of the other tools to decide just what kind of question is being answered!

• And to make more mundane predictions, the Phases of the Moon Die and the Weather Die both do exactly what their names suggest.

-- Steve Jackson