Bunbury's Mu Tarot
philebus
Posts: 242
I was about to post this to the NPR thread but thought, as I’m going to work through at least 90 of these, I should create my own thread, rather than swamp that one.
This is part of a project that I’ve returned to after a number of years break now, this time under the monika of The Earnest Bunbury. The core of it is the effort to present the family of card games for the tarot pack in a maner accessible to most English speakers. For those who may not know it, tarot cards were created about 600 years ago for card games – games that are still played in around a dozen countries in Europe. Indeed, the occult associations weren’t dreamed up until the end of the 18th century and then for another hundred years, were limited only to France.
I’m close to what I hope will be the penultimate round of corrections to the rules before I start typesetting them into a new book. However, it tickled my fancy to create a new pattern of tarot pack that could lend itself to a broad range of the games, as well as be customised and appended to allow for new ones. In particular, I would like to build a Minchiate pack as these are seldom available and it is such a very good game.
So, I have the oddly named Mu tarot. Mu, simply being an acronym of Modular Universal. I will be building a basic 78 card pack that will allow for alternative arrangements of trumps, as well as the insertion of additional sequences. By using a print on demand service and making the boarder and backing designs available to download, I can eventually open it up for others to take part – should there be any interest. My own pack will be made available at a not-for-profit price (ie, anyone purchasing will only be paying the service provider and not myself), as will be the book (the text of which will be posted on a website and also be available as a free download).
I would like to complete the book of rules and the basic pack of cards before I open it up to others and I also have to iron out the rules of design for cards to qualify for being Mu. This is what the rules look like at the moment...
- The first rule is that any Mu design must avoid occult or overly religious images – they are intended to promote games only.
- They must be set within the standard Mu frames and employ the standard Mu backing design as made available by myself.
- The core trump sequence must follow the themes and names I have set out, though how they are interpreted is open.
- The first five and the last five core trumps must not be numbered. All other trumps should be numbered using Roman numerals.
- The first four trumps are also called The Birds and is assigned a bird that must appear on its design. The I of trumps is The Sparrow, the II of trumps is The Owl, the III of trumps is The Cockatoo, and the IV of trumps is The Vulture.
- The basic back must have four nation suits (so named as they each have their own court and subjects), each with its own suit sign which can be grouped into two pairs (such as the long and round suits of the Italian packs, or the red and the black suits of the French packs). Each nation will consist of four court cards and ten pip cards. The Court cards will be a Regent, a Consort, a Soldier, and a Page. The 1 of each pips will be called the Ace, and the 2 will be the Deuce, with cards 2 to 10 numbered in Arabic numerals. Each pip will show as many instances of its sign as its number. In two of the nations, the Regent will be a male, the Consort a female, the Soldier a male, and the Page a female. The genders in the other two nations will be vice versa.
- The Fool is usually a wild card but in many modern games, it has become the highest trump and in those instances, I refer to it as Tomfool and so the indices should show a symbol rather than its name. However, other approaches are available. A second card could be created named Tomfool – this would give game designers something else to work with. Or, it could be a double ended card with each indices name one of its roles.
- In a basic pack, two of the Deuces should include some sort of banner, so that on one can be shown the pack’s name and designer, while the other can give the publisher.
The Core Trumps from low to high are...
- The Juggler (also The Sparrow)
- Wisdom (also The Owl)
- Wealth (also The Cockatoo)
- Force (also The Vulture)
- Authority
- VI Love
- VII The Chariot
- VIII Justice
- IX Chronos
- X Tych
- XI Strength
- XII The Traitor
- XIII Death
- XIV Temperance
- XV The Satyr
- XVI The Windmill
- The Star
- The Moon
- The Sun
- The World
- Nemesis (Italian ranking)
I’ve yet to finalise what I want for the additional Minchiate trumps – it will require two groups of four and one groups of twelve. Traditionally, the twelve shows the zodiac but I can’t say that I like that, so I’ll be going for the labours of Heracles instead.
I've also not quite decided on the suit signs but one of them will be frogs - just because I like them and a new frog model has just been released.
Anywho, here are the designs as I do them...
I have made Trump IV but it has a decapitation, so I wasn't sure if it would be allowed.
This is tonight's addition...
I'm a long was from starting the nation suits but I had to do a quick test of the new frog.
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Comments
These all look great. I love your style. Have you thought about what the back of the card will look like yet? Just curious.
The back of the cards? My guess would be.... the frog.
I'm probably going to go for a simple 'tarot tartan' - most tarot game packs use one and it is a very practical design for absorbing little marks and scratches that come from use.
It IS good to have more card-games props for Daz Studio and Poser. I came across two different card decks on shareCG that were the traditional spades-and-diamonds kind that you see people playing all the time, i.e. for poker (in fact, one of those came with all the poker related stuff, too), but I was wanting something.... different. I'm actually probably going to make my own card-game props for DS, but in my case I'm looking for kids games, e.g. Old Maid and Go Fish, which while those CAN be played with the traditional deck of cards, a lot of companies are making dedicated Old Maid and Go Fish card decks, with their own custom images. I did come across someone else's kids card game prop set, on another Daz Studio and Poser content site, which was done in homage to some tradable-card-game thing from the 70s I'd never heard of before... then I saw why I'd never heard of it before: It was only in Europe, and I'm in the United States! LOL!
But yeah, good to see someone else here working on making card decks (will this also be a Daz Studio / Poser prop?) that is NOT the traditional aces and diamonds and stuff. With luck and inspiration, maybe more people will make a larger variety of card games props.
I'll probably create props from them for illustrative purposes. I've also dug out my old copy of Anime Studio Pro 8. I had never really used it and so didn't upgrade past that but I'm now thinkning that I could create card props for it to make tutorial videos.
Thinking of childrens' games though, I used to love packs of Happy Families. My favourite was one of animals and I can still remembrer one with Mr Robin standing on a hot water bottle.
Oddly enough, I only found out about the existence of Happy Families a couple days ago, from poking around on Wikipedia after I went there to refresh my memory on some aspect of Old Maid or something... Anyway, I fairly recently bought several different editions of Old Maid and Go Fish and other kids card games from different places, largely because I wanted to see what different makes of those games looked like. Part of this is because it sorta appeals to the same Inner Kid in me who likes playing the Old Maid cardgame app on my tablets, but also part of this is because I want to write fiction involving kids, so it pays to be familiar with the card games they play.
It's funny the different games we learn as children and from whom. With my mother, we played things like Happy Families and Old Maid, later learning Rummy. But from my nan, we learned to play whist, dummy whist, and solo whist from the age of five and these are the games that I really loved. That's probably why the tarot games really appealed to me so much.
Very interesting topic and love the cards you've created! I grew up playing "Trump" (Hi-Low) and many others. I still love card games.
I felt that the usual portrail of strength to have become to heavily associated with occult interpretations now. To avoid her being too similar to Wisdom, I put a product of violence in there.
Very cool, I really like the design and style of these
The Devil is a fun card but again, it has become weighed down with occult interpretation and religious unease. A satyr or Pan should make a nice classical alternative.
I want to avoid religious images and Nemesis is an obvious choice to replace The Judgement. I've made her a disinterested Nemesis though, as in real life, she surely must be.
I've been short on time for a while now but am finding just enough to keep up with these but. I've been a little out of touch with other threads of late though, so I'll try and get back to them next week. For now, here's another two...
loving these, great poses, and the characters and props are perfectly chosen.
plus you have some good compositional diagonals in most - give that nice dynamic feel
congrats !