I have a couple of packs of dry-erase blank playing cards, but this idea works just as well with a few cut-up index cards, or you can just take a regular old deck of cards and a glue stick and paste blank paper over them. Whatever way you do it, you can make a custom deck of cards.
Take half the cards and put a plus (+) on the back of them. The other half put a minus (–) on the back of the others. Now turn them over.
Roll on your Muse of choice for a pair of words, once for every card. Write these words on the blank side of the card.
Now shuffle the cards and put them in a pile with the ± face up. When you want to ask the Muse, you turn over the top card. You will now see the two Muse words and the back of the next card. What you do is interpret the Muse words as one would normally, but with a slight difference. If the next card is a positive (+) card, then you interpret the words in such a way that they are positive or good for the character. If the next card is negative (–), then interpret it in a way that is bad or negative for the character. As long as you shuffle the deck every time you run out of cards, each word pair will give very different results depending on the context of the question and whether you are putting a positive or negative spin on the interpretation.
For bonus kudos, you can also put oracle rolls and yes/no/and/but/ complication etc. rolls and results for each level of likelihood that your chosen Oracle uses.
What you end up with is a custom Oracle and Muse deck that is unique to you. You can ask the Oracle, decide how likely the outcome is, and then turn a card to find the answer.
If you build your deck using a pencil, when you feel a certain result has come up too often, or the combination is not easy to interpret, you can refresh your deck. Each Muse table has 40 possible words, which gives 40 x 40 or 1600 possible combinations, and the positive/negative spin doubles that. You cannot possibly make all 1600 cards, so there is plenty of scope for refreshing your deck.
Anything that helps you play, you can put on these cards as long as you have space.
There are plenty of oracle decks available, take a look at some of them and decide how much you can get on each card face to make a custom tool that works for you.
Subscribe to our newsletter!