Divination by cards, laid out in a prescribed spread and read by their meanings and their positions relative to one another. Each card carries a settled significance; what the reading turns on is which cards fall where, and what they say about each other.
Cartomancy is the art of people and their entanglements — who is working against whom, where a loyalty actually lies, what a person is afraid of, what is already in motion around them. It answers in the shape of a story rather than a fact, and a cartomancer who is pressed for a plain yes will lay the cards a second time and give the same story again.
A reader works from their own deck, kept and handled by them alone; the cards are held to take an impression from their reader, and a borrowed or newly bought deck reads at a penalty until it has been carried and used for some while. A deck that has been shuffled by the subject of the reading, on the other hand, reads better — which is why a cartomancer always hands the cards over before laying them out.
- Medium — a deck of cards, laid in a spread
- Requires — the reader’s own deck; the subject present, or something of theirs to lay the cards on
- Time — a quarter of an hour
- Answers — the human situation around a person: motives, alliances, pressures, what is already under way
Resolution and the reading of the result are as described in Divination. Because a cartomantic answer arrives as narrative, a Critical Failure here is the most dangerous of any art’s: it is not a wrong fact but a wrong story, coherent, satisfying, and believed.