> I would expect people who believe in Tarot to be unwilling to > accept a > completely alien mythos. I think a Dragaeran Tarot would mostly be limited to Brust fans as the audience. Still, if you wander into your local new age store, you'll find a fairly wide selection of Tarot variants, many of which are barely recognizable as Tarot cards. I think that most of the people who produced things like Native American Tarot a couple of decades ago have gone on to just create their own new kinds of divination/meditation decks these days instead. The trick with marketing a Tarot deck is not so much that it have a clearly understood background (mystery is desirable in these things) but that it have images that resonate with recognizable emotional states and that it have an instruction booklet that pulls the reader into the milieu used by the deck so that she become receptive to its symbology and feels some sort of intuitive boost from "interpreting" it. > > There's really no reason that Dragaeran Tarot has major and minor > arcana, Fools, hanged men or any of the things that have evolved into > current Tarot. (How long have our current Tarot been stable > anyway - > if nothing else, time will change things). But those might > be selling points for people who collect such. > > Still, it might be more interesting to come up with a completely new > deck with new rules that matched Dragaeran reality. I'd agree with this. I'd find a "real" Dragaeran Tarot that "feels" like it came from the Empire more interesting than a re-formatted earthly Tarot. The one justification for going with the earthly Tarot (marketing considerations aside) is that Tarot may, in fact, be imported from the East. The real Tarot has been rather surprisingly resilient in the face of hundreds of years of use. There are individual variants by noted paranormalists (The Crowley Deck being one of the more famous ones) but by and large the cards and the cocepts behind them are pretty well-grounded in tradition. The artwork is primarily what changes, with the symbols on the cards changing to fit the beliefs of whoever has published the deck. There are exceptions like the Morgan Tarot (The Magician is represented by the phrase "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards. They are subtle and quick to anger." You can get a computerized "reading" at http://www.sleepbot.com/morgan/request.html) and the "special interest" variants but the core of Tarot today is mostly just what it was four hundred years ago. Rather like I-Ching, the evolution has mainly come from the hundreds of years of commentaries rather than from any major change in the mechanics of it. Dragaerans have been shown to have no compunction about borrowing features from other cultures. I'd have no problem believing that the original Hungarian colonists brought Tarot with them and that it survived reasonably intact into the "present day", though with changes to the art that reflect the culture of the Empire rather than the East.