Jeff makes an excellent point.  This is a game tool.  A nifty idea a few
TML nerds came up with over 20 years ago, and that I, digital pack rat
that I am, collected the details on a web page.

I have a few RPG/SF/Fantasy decks of varying value as actual Tarot decks.

I have the French Zelazny's Amber Tarot, the Mage Tarot, the recent D&D
Tarot, and the Steve Jackson Games Silicon Valley Tarot.  Those are the
kind of thing I was looking for when I started on this project back on 2003.

The URL for that collection of ramblings is buried down in this thread,
so here it is again. https://www.urbin.net/EWW/RPG/TRAV/TAROT/

I'm only a bit of Tarot nerd, Nicole is clearly much more knowledgeable
on the subject than I am.

Personally, I would like to keep the Rider-Waite meanings as a
framework, since I'm more familiar with that model.  However, I'm
willing to deviate a bit if a concept is cool enough.  Like the Chariot
being drawn by two warrior class K'kree and driven by a Penguin in
battledress.  I want to keep the Penguin in tribute to an old TMLer who
wrote the GURPS:Traveller Ground Forces book. The late Doug "Penguin
Boy" Berry.

Currently I have no grand ideas of actually producing a Deck that I
would have to ask Marc Miller permission to go forward with. This was
just a "wouldn't it be cool" concept that came to me back in the early
21st Century.

Mark

On 6/15/26 19:19, Jeff Zeitlin - editor at freelancetraveller.com (via
tml list) wrote:
> 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.
>
> ®Traveller is a registered trademark of
> Mongoose Publishing, 1977-2026. Use of
> the trademark in this notice and in the
> referenced materials is not intended to
> infringe or devalue the trademark.
>