Assumption

The idea of Assumption is drawn directly from Tim Powers’s novel Last Call, and if you have any interest in this rules-set, you’d better go read the book right away. Don’t worry, though—it won the World Fantasy Award, which is not small potatoes, and it’s a terrific book.

Concept

In an Assumption campaign, the Tarot cards have a real existence in the game-universe. Not only do the cards exist, as of course they did historically, but they have a deeper meaning and reality. There are twenty-two Roles, special powers or forces, that guide and undergird reality itself, and each Role links to a Trump. When you manipulate cards as a player, then, your character touches upon the power and force of the relevant Role. If the character continues to draw on a single Role, and furthermore aligns his or her life with the concept underlying that Role, then he or she can be described as trying to Assume the Role. When a person fully Assumes a Role, the power in question is entirely controlled by and enacted through that one person.

For example, let’s suppose someone wanted to Assume the High Priestess. In your campaign world, that Role has a set of initial characteristics, parallel but not identical to those described in Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot. So in order for this person to Assume the High Priestess, she’s (it’s almost certainly a woman) going to need to discover what the Role is really all about, align her life with that Role, and utilize the card and its magic as often as possible. The more she does so, the more powerful she will become when she does High Priestess activities, and the more she will be driven to be like the High Priestess. Eventually, if she is successful, she will be the High Priestess, and every time someone else somewhere tries to draw on that Role, that someone will actually draw upon the power of this one person.

In an early run of Shadows in the Fog, there was a special deck of cards, supposedly constructed by the artist William Blake. These were the real cards; all others were only imitations. The Roles were a bit different from the usual ones (see chart). Now in this campaign, Jack the Ripper was actually the Beast (XV). Originally, he was a person, but through one means or another he came to Assume the Beast. When the Black King decided to make a move for great power, bidding on the City against another would-be power, he tried to manipulate the Beast as a strike against his opponent. He failed, producing only a series of pointless crimes against prostitutes, and furthermore a series of clues to follow. But he also distracted attention, since all the other Players of the Game could detect that the Beast was on the move, and they started wondering why and how.

The William Blake Tarot

Incidentally, for some reason a lot of people seem to think that this deck is either actually Blake's work or that it's the cheesy Blake "tarot" invented a few years back and published by U.S.Games Systems. It's not, and Blake certainly never designed any Tarot cards.

Mechanics

The mechanics of Assumption are pretty simple. Whenever you want to make a move for Assumption, you simply state that you’re doing so and lay down the appropriate card (yes, you have to have the card in your hand). You indicate that you are Marking your current running plot with this card, and you put the card somewhere obvious. At the end of the session, put the card in your envelope as usual, but put a paper-clip or something on it so everyone will remember what it’s doing there.

From now until the end of the plot in question, that card will act as a harmonic on every magical effect in your plot, and on every magical action the character takes in any plot. You may try to be “in accord with” the card, or not, as you like; the other players and the Host will indicate when there is a difficulty to overcome.

At the end of the plot, you gain points as usual, and funnel them into an Assumption pool. For every ten points in the Assumption pool, you gain an extra card. At the same time, any cards used by the character in a manner not consistent with the Role may cause you to lose points of the pool. As a rule, the higher the pool, the more precise you need to be.

As you go along with play, the other players will tell you when you act inconsistently, i.e. in a manner not consistent with the Role you have chosen to Assume. If you disagree, you must explain your interpretation; if they still don’t agree, you must “burn” one Trump for every twenty points in the pool (rounding down), i.e. turn over that many Trumps on the table and state that you’re right and they’re wrong. Otherwise you must abide by the ruling. So if you have 50 points in the Assumption pool and you have a flat disagreement with the other players in the group, you may burn two Trumps and win your case; if you had 60 points, you’d have to burn three Trumps.

Once you have 90 points in the Assumption pool, you may make a choice. Either you can Assume the Role permanently, or you can fail horribly, knocking your pool down to 50. If you Assume, you become the Role—which is to say, you become a NPC, and must design a new character. You have now become a force of nature, and are no longer a person. If you fail, you remain a character—perhaps a wiser one—and may choose to move away from the tempting and dangerous goal of Assumption.

Complete success at Assumption makes your character inhuman, an occult force and not a person. It also makes your character very, very powerful.

Effects

The big point about Assumption is that it’s addictive. It’s a very fast way to get more cards, which translates directly into power. And powerful actions tend to be approved by the group, because they’re cool and mystical. So there’s a big temptation to go for Assumption.

As a Host, permit this and actively encourage it. The thing is, it’s addiction in a really ugly, heroin-like way. The more the character gets, the less human he is, and the less under control. And it’s pretty much permanent. He will start overruling his fellows, burning Trumps to do so. He will get increasingly arrogant and self-absorbed. And in the end, he will stop being a person at all.

This is all good stuff, and should be encouraged as much as possible.

In a game where Assumption is a big issue, the question is how to get people on the path as quickly as possible. Who tells them about the cards? How do they know what they are? You now have what’s sometimes called a Premise: how much will you give up for power, and what kind of power will you pay the most for?

Assumption is self-destructive and nasty. If you want a really clever take on something like this, read Ron Edwards’s game Sorcerer, in which the whole thing is driven by a trade-off between Humanity and Sorcery, where the one undermines the other. Make Assumption really, really attractive, and make those extra cards very, very powerful. Believe me, somebody will be fool enough to start aiming at a Role, and then nobody will want to be left behind as the wimpy loser of the group.

You now have a rather dark, ugly game. If that’s your cup of tea, go for it.

Incidentally, Assumption works pretty well as a one-player thing. It’s available to everyone, of course, but you just make sure that only one character actually knows the secret, whatever it is (some special ritual, actually having a copy of the Real Tarot Deck, or whatever). That way, if somebody else wants to jump in later, that’s possible, but will need extensive in-game explanation.

Down-Sides

The down-side of Assumption is twofold. On a simple level, it’s self-destructive, and will destroy characters. If you don’t care how long your campaign runs, that’s not a big concern, but if it’s clear that the campaign is short-term, people will tend to go for short-term gains rather than worry about long-term destruction. Just be aware of this. So long as you make the slide into power (i.e. Assumption and destruction) agonizing and exciting, it hardly matters how long the campaign is.

The other down-side, however, is more subtle. We’ve talked about the player-character analogy in the context of magic and ordinary Tarot card use. Well, with Assumption, this analogy starts to get ugly. The characters start to get like players, you see, rather than the other way around. They stop thinking like people in a world, with friends and neighbors and enemies and whatnot, and more like Players at a big Game. And in doing so, they become inhuman. So what happens is that the game starts telling the players that they themselves are inhuman, because they are already like their relatively human characters will become.

If this seems so abstract it’s silly, then don’t worry about it. Just be aware of it: if it comes up, it’s time to shift the game or play something else for a bit. But for a lot of people, the line between player and character is something not to be blurred or messed about with. Some of us are very aware of the fear that playing violent characters makes players violent, and things like that; while we ourselves don’t think this is a necessary connection, the focus on Assumption does increase the contact, because of the deliberate analogy. Just be very careful. If things get ugly, be prepared to drop it like a hot potato, okay?

A nod’s as good as a wink, right?

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 24 Dec 2004

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