Images: Codega’s favorite deck for Stardrawn, Arthur Wang’s TrueBlack deck; below, Content Pixie (Unsplash)
When Death Is Not an Ending
Telling Survivors' Stories with Stardrawn
by Linda H. Codega, designer of Tarot TTRPG Stardrawn
Place the Sun card in the center. The Moon to the left. The Stars to the right.
This is your ending. You deserve this. It’s the last move of the game, after all. The tarot cards have guided you through space and time, each spread giving you different ways to change the course of the game. You and your friends, your comrades-in-arms, have found meaning in the symbols, laid out each turn as you recall scenes from the intergalactic war you fought against the Empyre.
You lay these last moments out with reverence; the kind of pause you take just before you blow out a candle. This is the collective final spread. The only one that everyone at the table gets to interpret for themselves.
Your sun shines on the Eight of Wands. The moon casts Strength. The stars are the Seven of Coins.
You have fought long, survivor. With swift cards dealt out by an unforgiving deck, you have watched many things fall. Governments, planets, ships, friends. Memories haunt you, spread out along the table in front of you, each tarot an attachment, a choice, a spark, a division. The cards have given you stories and you interpret them, reword them, reverse, and straighten them. You smoothed out each scene, turning your oculus onto the questions asked during your turn, expanding the mythos of your table into universes of stories.
Each interpretation is yours. There are no masters, no dice, nobody keeping tally of death dealt cross-wise. You made your character out of a spread of three cards: a past, a change, a desire (Knight of Coins, Four of Wands, Queen of Swords). You found freedom in war, a place where your preparation, tenacity, and learning could be put to good use. You strive to serve the Queen of Swords, who is the minor arcana of justice, and ultimately you try to right the scales, balance the world, and give each part its merit.
Every turn, you, Knight of Coins, have fought across the galaxy and the tarot spreads to measure up to your goals. As the cards direct you to explore your past, you see your calculations on the field of battle, and each loss wounds you. You were supposed to help create tithes of wartime. You were supposed to prevent this.
You remember when hope was lost (a draw that consisted of the Five of Coins; The Fool; Destiny) as you looked back to the past. Reading through the symbols there, you announced to the table that a great hunger had beggared your worlds, destroyed your infrastructure, and brought your soldiers to knee. It had been your fault, you admitted. Numbers were absolute, and data had made one choice much clearer than the other, but your pride had brought you low. You thought you could save them all, and all suffered.
These moments never end. They occur over and over. The weight of your decisions stacking up slowly, measure by measure. As you move back and forth in time, reliving your past, you resurrect death. You are a survivor, but that means that people were lost.
Yet you have so much to live for. Each spread you’ve been asked to put on the table gives you hope. Gives you a chance to cling to that first tendency toward justice. Fate echoes through arcana as you play the game and draw threads through the galaxy, tracing stories through time, seeing your decisions reflecting through battles, decisions, adherents, and space. Every card is another story, a new interpretation.
So you come, Knight, to the end of ends. The last time you look at the cards for answers, and here they are. Your guiding constellation. Here is the culmination of existence, of the remainder.
The Card of Stars is the rising, the righteous, the revival—the Eight of Wands. You were driven by the message of alacrity, the desire to make change now, immediate, extant, to serve others. Remember when you drew the Four of Wands and it became a part of you? That first spread, that first turn, it haunts your stars now, an echo of freedom in immediacy. Is it real or manufactured? Did your advantage justify your indulgence, your decisions?
The Moon (and your ideal, born of the justice of the Queen of Swords) is Strength, the ability to speak and be heard. And you...your decisions were given consideration. Was it worth it? Was Strength the same as seeking a queen’s minor justice? Did you find strength, or did war allow death to give your actions meaning? If another person died, did that make your life more important?
Last, Knight of Coins, is your Sun-kissed memory. The rays reflect on the Seven of Coins, and you feel it calling to you, despite everything you want to be. Maybe you wanted to be strong, but you will be remembered for your rest. What you didn’t do. What you left off your scales. What burden did you ignore? What allotment buried? What rest comes from reward ill-reaped? That final coin, left at the altar, a passing rest. Did you ever truly embody justice during your time at the table? Did you finally go from Knight of Coins to Queen of Swords?
Now is your choice, Knight-to-Queen. As you look at the final spread of Sun, Moon, and Stars, you have to look back on the game itself, on the epoch of war you shaped, and ask yourself; What end is yours? What did you earn, with all your sums and ballast held in your past? What is your final tally? When you look back on your life, on the cards dealt, you see no dice were cast. Your gravity came in slow exploration, in quick decisions made firm over time. What end do you truly deserve? What do you survive?
It is apparent, Knight-to-Queen, you are fated to an uneasy rest. After the game you played, the scenes you laid out, the decisions you made, discussing lives and weights across the table with your fellow warmongers, you are owed no comfortable end.
You take your Knight of Coins and place it under the Seven of Coins, and you give yourself the ending you deserve. You tell the table your ending. A fitful retirement, haunted by old wounds, unable to break free. Strength is beyond you, swiftness too, and you remain lost in the count of a hundred thousand small decisions, and their ripples across the deck of stars.
Linda H. Codega (they/them) is a nonbinary writer living by a mountain in the Hudson Valley. By moonlight, they are a speculative fiction author and narrative game designer. Their work has appeared in various anthologies, magazines, and blogs, and you can find a selection of their games at lhcodega.itch.io, and find more of their work on their website.