When I was in college, I had such a thing for tarot cards. I had an Alice in Wonderland deck, a good old Rider-Waite, and several others. The symbology always fascinated me, independent of the fortune-telling aspect. It's excellent for storytelling, and just a few weeks ago some homebrew-flavored tarot popped up in a Blades in the Dark game.

So I was eager to have a look at The Ultimate RPG Tarot Deck, even if I wasn't fully sure what I was getting. An RPG-themed deck is just a fun idea in general, and throwing some actual fortune cards into your weekly game adds another level of immersiveness. What I wasn't expecting, though, was a multipurpose deck that can do everything from quickly generate an NPC to randomize encounters. Oh, and tell fortunes, of course.

While the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana are traditional and inspired by familiar card compositions, they're also tied directly to fantasy RPG concepts and designs. On the surface, this is just fun. It's a cool theme, and it shows that the deck's creators put a lot of thought into every single card.

There's a bonus when using these as regular tarot cards, though. If you're not versed in tarot but you are versed in Dungeons & Dragons, these cards become much easier to parse. There's a well-written guidebook to help you understand each card's meaning (and more, but more on that later). But just knowing which familiar characters, spells, and story beats align with each of the cards helps you understand the nuance that much better. It's done a better job explaining tarot to me quickly than any book I've ever read.

In addition to including a variety of traditional spreads and analyses of every card, the booklet also includes multiple ways to use the cards. There's a guide to quickly generating NPCs on the fly, using the Minor Arcana suits as personality traits. You can also pull cards to make choices or generate random encounters—kind of like that one session of Oxventure, but with tarot cards instead of Magic cards. The RPG keywords at the bottom of every description in the booklet help with this, too.

We actually gave the deck a test run at my Thursday night table—I'm not the DM, but Phoenix was nice enough to integrate the cards into my fey wanderer ranger's attempt at praying to the local deity of knowledge. This was the part that interested me most: the idea of using them for augury and other messages in-game. DMs are naturally encouraged to interpret any draws in a way that actually aligns with the campaign and characters. Of course, this would be doubly good with a character who happens to be a fortune teller.

I was expecting The Ultimate RPG Tarot Deck to be a novelty—when it's actually a highly versatile toolkit. Players and DMs alike should absolutely have a copy to hand, whether it's to spice up a campaign or to add some intrigue to a storyline. Best of all, the booklet betrays the creators' deep love and understanding of gaming: the storytelling, the culture, and the camaraderie. It belongs right next to your binder and your dice bag.

The Ultimate RPG Tarot Deck goes on sale June 6.