Carrying another setting

→ Off the path: an invitation, not an obligatory step

This book sets down a system; above all it opens a grammar. The system is the handful of gestures you have just read, written once. The grammar is everything those gestures make possible, and that a world-book, or you, will decline without end. The rulebook supplies the alphabet and the syntax; a world-book writes its sentences. This page addresses whoever is writing a world, not whoever is discovering the game.

You have almost nothing to invent, because the matter is in the tarot. A card already offers four dimensions (four ways of making it mean), and it is enough to seize one of them to build a rule.

Dimension	What it says
Suit / element	Fire, Water, Air, Earth — a domain, a temper
Number / intensity	from Ace to Ten — a force, a stage, a charge
Court card / presence	Page, Knight, Queen, King — someone, a degree of mastery
MajorMajor Arcanumone of the twenty-two named cards, from The Fool to The World. It does not answer: it names, and it weighs.parts 2, 4, 6 / fateFatewhat comes in when you keep a major at the opening, and by no other door: the moment stops being ordinary. What it closes, only it can open.part 6	the everydayEveryday (the)what plays out when you have kept a minor at the opening: fate has not come in, nothing is put at stake.part 4 (minorsMinor Arcanumone of the fifty-six cards of the four suits, from Ace to King: the matter of the everyday.parts 2, 4) or what weighs (majors)

◆ The gestures

You already know these gestures: the body of the game uses them. Naming them is giving you what it takes to forge others.

◆ The passage — an action you do not go around

An action can become a passage: a place in the world you do not cross without drawing, even when the character knows how.

Taking off in a skyglider, for instance. A good pilot lifts off without being made to prove it. That is the rule of part 5. But if your world decides that the sky must be asked, every takeoff is played, and the scale does not change: two cards, the stronger wins. What you choose is what failure costs, rarely the flight itself: rather the wing that whistles, the hour lost, the cargo that had to be lightened. A passage does not forbid passing; it sets the price.

◆ The ritual — a rule of posture

A ritual settles nothing: it installs. It is a way of doing that your world imposes, so that a moment stops being ordinary: two or three questions always put in the same order, a gesture repeated every time.

Once in flight, for instance: what is the weather? what can be seen from up here? who saw us leave? The same three questions at every takeoff, to the coinCointhe oracle of closed questions: heads the first pole, tails the second. It never resolves an action.part 1 or to the tarot, and the flight takes on a thickness that a sentence would not have given it. The ritual works with the draws: it does not say what happens, it says what is asked.

◆ A world’s stakes

You can decide that certain situations bring a stakeStakean open question on which somebody else is making progress: it does not forget itself, and it does not ripen on its own.parts 8, 10 to life (part 10), not by chance but because your world works that way.

Handing in your report to a superior, for instance: the matter is closed for the character, it is not closed for the hierarchy. The stake is born there, and it will come back, with questions of its own to settle. This is not a way of loading up the standing pageStanding pagethe page that keeps what is pending: living actors, waits, stakes, desires under way, doors closed by fate. There is only one, and it replaces the previous one.part 8: it is what makes the world move against the character without your having to invent it each time.

A world also gains by offering its stirringsStirringthe gesture that brings a stake to life: drawing through to a major, then playing a raising.part 10: a few typical stakes, ready to be raised, so that the player finds an objective within reach on the evenings when he does not know what to play.

Three gestures, three dimensions: enough to build dozens of rules of your own world without ever leaving the tarot. The language is there — the sentences are yours.

◆ What is advised against

One temptation weighs the game down, and it consists in adding.

Creating new draws. A novel gesture — four cards laid out differently, a reading of its own — builds an engine on top of the engine. The player already has a handful to hold from memory; the extra gesture he will forget, or he will reopen the book, and either way the sceneScenethe unit of play: you open it, you play it, you close it.part 3 stops. Use the gestures that exist, and change what they ask.

◆ Embodying or reassigning — a world’s suits

A world-book can give the suitsSuits (the four)Wands/Fire, what cannot wait · Cups/Water, what comes back · Swords/Air, the line that separates · Pentacles/Earth, what remains. They say a card’s matter, and how you acted.part 4 meanings of its own. Two very different gestures hide there. Embodying — the element keeps its nature, the world gives it a local face. Reassigning — you trade its nature for another; and there, the engine breaks: the suit does three jobs (part 4), and it can no longer say how one acts if its gesture has been taken away.

The verb test. Write your local meaning, then say the verb of the action aloud. Does “I cut” still hold for your Sword? “I charged” for your Wand? If so, you are embodying — keep it. If not, you are breaking the engine — back away.

An example, a science-fiction world:

Local meaning	It looks like…	It is actually…
Wand → the revolt of the AIs	embodying	embodying — pure Fire
Pentacle → the human outside the machine	embodying	embodying — Earth: the flesh, what remains
Sword → spirituality	reassigning	embodying — Air is the non-material; and illumination cuts, it separates who has seen from who has not
Cup → fine technology	reassigning	embodying — the interface, what links, what flows between beings

The lesson: the best liveries look like reassignments and are secretly embodiments. The deep structure survives, the surface becomes unrecognizable: that is what allows a world to be radically other without breaking the game. It is “the flavor, not the engine” (below), applied to the elements.

◆ A setting that already exists — the flavor, not the engine

One day you will want to play a world that already exists: a well-known fantasy, a space opera, a novel you love. The temptation will be to replicate its game: its classes, its life points, its action economy, its grid. That is the surest way to lose yourself. One never carries a game into Ask the Sky — one carries an imagination, and plays it in this body. The fiction of a setting transplants effortlessly: its archetypes become Ways, its creatures majors, its magic suits, its factions actorsActora presence that wants: someone who will come back and weigh, where the Backdrop is forgotten. You anchor him on the standing page in one line.part 7 on the standing page. Its engine, though (the grid, the gauges, the numbered levels), leave that to its own book: it already has a heart, and you cannot graft a second one onto it without the two fighting each other.