Selecting Your Death Arcana:
Stack up the cards, shuffle, and deal three to the players. They can select one of the dealt card as their Death Arcana .
Death Arcana has a face value, suit, and death story.
The player's character and background should be tied to the Death Arcana, though it does not need to be exact.
Example: "You finally achieved your goal as prom queen, but during your big dance, the vampires attacked."
Clearly, you always strived for excellence, and had terrible luck with that- but you finally claimed your position as top of sales in your corporation before finding out that your upper management are *literal* vampires who fed on your soul.
The Big List:
King of Coins: A computer technician in a world where everything is being added to the Matrix. And in an ever-increasing need to make more and more real world, you finally get digitized.
Queen of Coins: The world has fallen into nothing but a smog-filled jungle of concrete and twisted steel. You descended into the network, and lived in the network, and finally it swallowed you, never to awaken again, dying while still plugged in.
Knight of Coins: This new online RPG is absolutely amazing. It draws on VR technology, and your guild planned a giant raid for this newly released expansion. You've forced your way into the deepest depths of the dungeons, and you've played until you blacked out.
Page of Coins: You were a regular person, who always strove to distinguish yourself. Then you saw a young student shoved out in front of a automated truck, and you rushed out to save him.
King of Swords: The most popular student in school. On top of the world. Then that creepy, creepy stalker came after you. With a knife. They wanted to take your face and become you.
Queen of Swords: The medication helped at first, but it has slowly begun to fail. Strange things out of the corners of your eye, color mismatches between blinks, and the words being in the wrong language. When you stopped taking the medication, everything went crazy.
Knight of Swords: After you got the sickness, you spent energy, money, and favors travelling from hospital to hospital, doctor to doctor, researcher to researcher. Nothing helped.
Page of Swords: You have worked forever and ever on your work, for your business. You burned yourself out, and then your boss took all the credit. Suicide was all you had left.
King of Staves: Seven years ago, you made a deal with a man claiming to be a devil, and everything was perfect. Seven years later, you can feel your heart beating slower, and slower... and slower... and slower.
Queen of Staves: You've been odd your whole life, remembering things wrong. Recently, everything has felt like deja vu. The last five days you replayed the exact same day. Today you woke up somewhere completely different.
Knight of Staves: You were always someone who was seeking the truth; Weird cults, alien sightings, cryptids. You know that vampires and witches were not real, but WHY DO THEY HAVE SO MANY TEETH?
Page of Staves: They told you that the rumors of the house being haunted were obviously false. You knew they were false. Then you found that weird door. Then you opened the door. And it...came out.
King of Cups: The strange plague ravages the people of your country after the meteor crashed. The doctors struggle for an answer, a cure, even dying themselves to find the right medicine. The final fruits of their(your?) labor comes as you are laying on a cot, barely able to breathe.
Queen of Cups: The comet was coming, an omen of doom. The dark-eyed man who smelled of smoke and spices offered you a way out of the coming threat. You accepted, and then he stabbed you.
Knight of Cups: You've always been sick, wasting away. You escaped into books at first, and later into immersive games, and you created your own worlds when you were supposed to be focusing on school and work. You were deep in these 'escapes' when the gunshots started.
Page of Cups: For the longest time nothing happened in your life to distinguish you. Today, you were the center of the impact.
Players may get pulled from four worlds:
"Snow Crash" - A near-future, pre-cyberpunk metaverse realm. The color of your soul is yellow/gold. Your suit is Coins.
"Modern" - An early 21st-century world that has government and corporate dominance. The color of your soul is green. Your suit is Swords.
"Occult" - An early 21st-century world that has hidden secrets leaking from other realms. The color of your soul is blue/silver. Your suit is Staves.
"Nostalgia" - A late 20th-century world that was forgotten and wonderful, til the meteor hit. The color of your soul is purple. Your suit is Cups.