More historical documents
Hello Mythicists :)
A few weeks ago I posted about the earliest print draft of Mythic in my possession, complete with scans showing marked up pages with editing notes. A Mythicist suggested I scan and digitize the entire book, to record for all time. That was a great idea, so I did it today :)
While going through the book page by page, I realized I failed to mention in my previous post an interesting table that's seen much evolution over the years.
At this point, I was calling it the Event Meaning Table: Divination. Although, you can see from the scratch marks that I was moving away from the "Divination" label.
Before Mythic, I played solo using Tarot cards. I would perform card readings for friends in college so I was familiar with their use. I figured, if the cards can give a narrative about the future, then why not have them tell a fictional present?
In theory that sounded great, in practice it was too slow for roleplaying. I dropped the idea and eventually developed the Fate Chart. However, I still liked the concept of divining meaning from a Tarot-like source. I came up with the Meaning table with results drawn directly from standard Tarot card definitions. You can tell when reading the entries above that they sound very divinationy with results like, "Loss, delay, disorder in one's material affairs".
While I thought this worked better than drawing and interpreting Tarot cards, it still wasn't satisfying. It needed more simplifcation. You can see my note on the side, saying, "Go through & clean. Just 1 meaning, short & direct."
While going through the editing process of cleaning the list, it finally dawned on me that the ultimate simplification would be to reduce each entry to one word only. This solved two big problems for me: 1) Even with the declarative statements simplified, they were still too specific to be applied to any situation, & 2) I no longer had to worry about cramming every possible meaning into the table since single words can be interpreted into any situation with almost limitless results.
I also broke the table into two d100 tables, which made more sense to roll on than one d200 table.
So there you go, the earliest ancestor of the modern Mythic Meaning table :)
Comments (10)
I love being able to see historical stuff and how it evolved into what we have today. This is so awesome to see!
Thanks Kevin, I'm glad you like it :) It transports me back in time, putting me in the headspace I was in when most of this stuff were still half-baked ideas that were growing. Feels like home :)
In years to come this will become known as 'The History of Middle Earth' for solo RPGs... ;-)
lol I like that :)
The meaning tables are by far my favorite part of Mythic, it's what made the most difference in my solo play before and after discovering Mythic (the oracle is great, but you can get away without it by using skill checks or making your own random tables on the fly). Thanks for explaining their genesis. And thank you Tarot reading for inspiring them, I guess. 🙃
Love the evolution! Oddly enough, I found Mythic because I was wanting something faster than use tarot cards for solo play. I have several plastic sets that have the meaning and a slew of other interpretations on the cards, which soed things up. But using Mythic cards and the whole Mythic system(s) really sped things up for me.
very interesting. as a life-long tarot enthusiast i never connected the dots between your Mythic system and the tarot. but now that you mention it..
Right? If you really read closely to the words in the first published Meaning tables, even many of those single word entries have a sort of Taroty ring to them.
Loving these Mythic flashbacks keep them coming!
Thanks Roosevelt :)