I purchased these cards because I wanted to learn tarot. The Portal Tarot makes learning how to read the cards easy. This was a great first deck for me. The production and quality of this product is wonderful. I also ordered The Master Deck because I love the art and design. The Portal Tarot along with the Gamemaster's Apprentice deck makes a fantastic oracle for solo roleplaying.

I was surprised at how well the Portal Deck works together with the GMA deck!

The other day a friend of mine who DMs a homebrew campaign was trying to think of ideas for small arc intrigue plots centered around a prince the PCs were going to encounter and attempt to win the confidence of. I mentioned to them that I had the GMA cards and Portal Tarot and they asked if I could draw some cards to help inspire ideas.

They had to make dinner, so I spent a while coming up with scenario possibilities: for each scenario, I drew 3 GMA cards and 3 Portal Tarot cards with no particular role envisioned for any of the cards except maybe "adjective / verb / noun". I started from picking three words and then looking at the GMA cards to figure out situational aspects and the tarot cards to figure out the people involved.

Very quickly I came up with several scenarios that were extremely intriguing and unusual. At least one will be used nearly as-is---all will be modified, of course, because as a DM myself I'm only able to run the equivalent of Golden Sky Stories. I'm too cinnamon...

Amusing quick summaries for some of them:

1. Helping a local temple deal with harassment centered around cultural prejudice. The three tarot cards became three NPCs associated with the temple with very different temperaments and ages.

2. Investigating the claims of a scholar/architect who wants to improve the water safety around canals but who has been held back by some third party and a really bad grudge has developed between the two. The scholar has been bugging the prince every week so dealing with this matter would be Good.

3. Investigating a potential contributor to a project to help war veterans find therapeutic help, whose altruistic demeanor is weirdly suspicious for some reason.

4. Fighting the forces of gentrification where a bunch of rich folks are trying to tear down tenements that are housing poor folks. But in Ancient Rome.

5. A letter to the prince from a previous war companion that basically reads "halp I did a dumb thing and now there are lawyers, I am sorry and ashamed but at least it was for Justice?"

This is the kind of idea generation I've never been able to do in my life before.

Thank you so much for these decks! I'm looking into maybe using them for art inspiration as well, and not just writing/rpgs.