Postcard Games: Improvised Playing Cards

In order to give your tabletop setting a little flavour, you might want to create a set of images or icons necessary to fuel, for instance, the symbols of the suits of playing cards, or the tiles of Mahjong or the signs of the Zodiac - or even the Loteria (thanks, Tim Powers). These aren't as such arbitrary, having their own heritage and meaning - but I would argue the way they are used can be and that any wider context for these (for instance, why the constellation of Capricorn is named as it is) rarely plays a part in their use.

I possess a (larger than necessary) collection of postcards purchased from Museums and Galleries over the years. These images would form the basis for the symbols involved. I decided to pick only the portrait orientated pictures - just as a real playing card. I excluded any repetitions or near-repetitions (for instance, Edward IV and Richard III, or two scenes of the Annunciation). I also excluded anything too close to an existing symbol (no fools or magicians), anything too modern or anything with an obvious literary root (a scene of HG Wells's Tripods, for instance).

The biggest grouping of symbols for fortune-telling, card games, aesthetic schemes &c, I thought to be the Tarot.  So I drew three set of images:

4 Suits
3 Face cards
17 Major Picture cards (Major Arcana)

(This last figure was decided as being d12 + 10. That many unique images should serve most goals above. If putting a rule on this, I would say 1d6 suits, 1d4 face cards.)

So what did I get?

Well, we have our Suits:

Bears, Serpents, Rams and Owls. (I chose Serpent over Dragon to unify the suits as mundane beasts.)

Next, the face cards:

Huntsman, Syndic and Hierarch. Whoever these people may actually be, these are the names I am picking. Besides, 'The Hierarch of Rams' sounds rad.

And so, onto the picture cards:

The Flightless Bird, the Pyx and the Stylite.

The Charter, the Maiden of the Wilderness, the Battle

The Effigy, the Procession, the Mystic Rose [Cue TS Eliot]

The Companions, the Scholars, the Surgeon

The Glass, the Harper, the Hospitable Castellan

The Stairway, the Garden

[If you want to know where any of these come from, just ask and I'll post it in the comments.]

So, there it is. One pseudo-Tarot suitable for use in a constructed world at the tabletop, set aside from real iconography.

In-universe people might know and use the suits and face cards for games, but have no real knowledge of the picture cards. Your one fortune-teller or magician might know the meaning - and of course these meanings can be created in the course of play.

A method for creating sets of symbols - it could be used for artistic motifs or coats of arms or even street gangs (the South Side Mystic Roses?). Perhaps you don't even need postcards.....