Sects Tarot
Been working on some tarot cards for Sects. Here are the first two.
I’m really pleased with these, especially this second one, but I realize they’re… a lot. The way I convey myself online is becoming more accurate to who I actually am, which is good, but also may be challenging for folks - I’m a peculiar creature and it doesn’t matter how tolerant a person is, eventually they will run into something I’ve done or something I believe that they find completely intolerable. I’m just like that. I am, at best, only intermittently suited to human contact.
So, the cards. The first is Johnny as The Fool, an archetype I’ve been clinging to personally since I was about twelve. For that reason, there’s some nostalgic imagery in there. The corgi is there because Johnny has a corgi, and that’s because my grandma has had corgis my whole life, and I find them charming and distinctive to draw. The landscape below the cliff is modeled on the End of the World from the fantasy game in “Ender’s Game” - see the dead Giant’s legs? That book substantially shaped my own internal creative landscape, so this is a kind of homage.
The second one is Quo, the major eldritch god of Sects. There’s a ton of story expressed here, but most of it is spoilery, since at this point I haven’t progressed the actual plot of Sects very far. We can see that he’s chosen to incarnate as Jesus, or at least what an eldritch being might interpret Jesus to be. The stigmata are operating in pretty unusual ways, just for starters. We can also see that he’s swept the altar clean of our usual tarot accoutrements - the pentacle, the wand, the sword, and the chalice all lay discarded on the ground. Quo uses only a hammer, and your world is a nail.
