On Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:07:06 -0400, Jeffrey Schwartz wrote:

>I'd be in favor of a complete break and start from scratch
>
>I mean... thousands of years? How many additional civilizations contributed
>in the thousand years since the Long Night?
>We don't even really use what Rome used for divination any more, and that's
>less than 2k years ago.

Yes, but...

Even though Traveller is set 2500 years in our future, it's still not
really "the future" - because the people who create it and play it are in
the present. I recall a line from _The Making of Star Trek_ that really
sums it up well - _Star Trek_ wasn't about 2300s man in the 2300s, it was
about 1960s man in what we imagined the 2300s might be like. Same with
Traveller; it's not about man-of-the-4500s in the 4500s; it's about
1980s-2020s man in what we imagine the 4500s might be like. Yeah, cards as
divination might (or might not) still happen, and might (or might not) be
different, but there's going to be a need to "relate" to some extent to
what the _players_ are going to recognize, rather than the _characters_.
That's more-or-less how I approached the Droyne Coyns in
https://www.freelancetraveller.com/features/culture/reference/coyns.html -
remember that the Droyne aren't human, and might not see the same symbolism
in the Coyns that I did. But even if we might play Droyne characters, we're
still not Droyne, and aren't going to think like Droyne.

If you want to break away from the meanings of the de facto standard of
Rider-Waite, or of the older tradition of which Nicole has spoken, you're
going to have to not only design the cards "from the ground up", you're
going to have to write the book on the meanings and symbolism involved.
That's _not_ going to be a small project. Traveller-adjacent imagery for a
Rider-Waite deck (or "Nicole Susans" deck) will probably be more
manageable, simply because you'll already have an idea of the imagery and
symbolism, and all you'll really be doing is different "paintings" for
them.

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