Pathfinder Cards: Deluxe Harrow DeckDivine your destiny with the Deluxe Harrow Deck, the legendary fortune-telling deck of the Pathfinder RPG world! With this 54-card, full-color set of fortune-telling cards, you’ll learn how to include the Harrow in any Pathfinder RPG game, and enhance play with rule cards detailing spells, fortune-telling methods, and other insights. With vivid art, patterned backing, and a size common to many real-world tarot decks, the Deluxe Harrow Deck straddles the lines between game supplement and storytelling set piece.
Pathfinder Harrow Deck
The Harrowing – Paizo’s Surreal Trip Down the Rabbit HoleIn early 2008, Paizo released a card deck for use with their Golarion campaign setting. Intended to provide a method of fortune telling during play and to potentially serve as an alternative Deck of Many Things, the Harrow Deck was released with great fanfare at the time. With the word “harrow” operating as a play on the word “tarot,” the cards were a departurefrom Paizo’s card deck line, which had largely been used at that time as props and accessories for treasure and magic items in game. The Harrow Deck featured a unifying art style, drawn and colored by veteran comic artist, best known for his whimsical illustrations in both Dungeon and Dragon magazine during Paizo’s stewardship of those periodicals.
The deck contained 54 individual illustrated cards and came with a rulebook for using the cards for divination as well as for its card game “Towers”.Additionally, Paizo incorporated the deck as a game play option as part of the plotline of the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path.If the Harrow Deck has a real deficiency, it is the backs of the cards themselves, which feature an illustration from the box art instead of a simpler geometric pattern. I would have preferred a more traditional diamond checkered pattern than a reproduction of the box art logo on the back of each card, so that when the cards appear face down they look more like a traditional tarot deck – and less like a gimmick. The only other oft repeated complaint about the Harrow Deck is that the box is a little too large to tightly constrain all of the cards within it after the cellophane wrappers are removed from each of the 2 x 27+ card decks the product ships with. Admittedly, the cards can rattle around a little bit in the box after it is opened when you shake it. Overall, those are rather petty complaints about the Harrow Deck, a widely acclaimed original and unique RPG game accessory.The Harrow Deck was well received by fans, ultimately garnering the Gold ENnie at Gencon 2008 for “Best Accessory”. After its appearance in the Curse of the Crimson Throne, the Harrow Deck was absent from Paizo’s adventure products for about three years.
Finally, in February 2011, the Harrow Deck reappeared in another Adventure Path, the ENnie award winning Carrion Crown. The divination cards’ presence within Carrion Crown seemed especially appropriate, given that the Ustaslav region where the Adventure Path is set is the homeland of the Varisians, Golarion’s analog to the medieval gypsy culture.Around the same time as the Carrion Crown AP was being written and developed, Erik Mona, Publisher at Paizo Publishing LLC., decided he wanted to take the use of the Harrow Deck within a Paizo adventure a step further. Mona was determined to have the Harrow Deck become the central plot device of a stand-alone adventure.
Mona’s adventure premise would ultimately become The Harrowing.Mona explained how the idea for the adventure came about: “The artist who drew the Harrow Deck and came up with a lot of the conceptual work for them, Kyle Hunter, is one of my best friends, and I've always had a soft spot in my heart for them. I love the idea of phantasmagoric adventures that stand out from the norm, so I thought it would be a good idea to do just such an adventure in which the PCs get sucked into the world of the deck and have to deal with its unusual denizens.”“It’s a Trap!”The central premise of The Harrowing as initially conceived by Mona was to use a cursed harrow deck as a trap and portal to a small demiplane. When Crystal Frasier, Production Specialist at Paizo, pitched her version of The Harrowing to Mona, James Jacobs and Wes Schneider,she ultimately got the green light to go ahead.
Pathfinder Harrow Deck Pdf File
“Crystal's proposal was right on the money and exactly what I expected. Well, that's not true. It was actually better than I expected,” Mona clarified.“Erik wanted the story to just focus on the Harrow Deck and the story behind it,” adventure author Crystal Frasier explains. “The turnover was that they wanted an adventure that revolved around all of the cards in the Harrow Deck.” So Frasier set out to do exactly that.The Harrowing – BackstoryAs Frasier has designed the module, the pocket dimension in which the PCs find themselves is a demiplane created by the Varisian bard Sonnorae, who set out to create a microcosm in which the tales, myths and legends of her people would not be lost to the ages and forgotten. Ultimately, Sonnorae entered into the demiplane she had created from the Dimension of Dreams to permanently dwell there.
Like other demiplanes touching Golarion, time does not really pass within the Harrowed Realm and so Sonnorae lived on within it without aging, imbuing the Harrowed Realm with the characters, settings and myths of her people until they finally took physical form. These characters, quite literally come to life straight out of the myths and legends in which they were described over the ages took form as the demiplanes’ only denizens, the Storykin. Eventually, the entrance to the Harrowed Realm demiplane became fixed and tied to Sonnorae’s harrow deck upon Golarion, the Deck of Harrowed Tales.However charming it first appears, the Storykin are victims of the same tales that gave them life. Like the characters in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “ The Royale”, or the film Groundhog Day, the lives of the Storykin endlessly repeat without deviation, over and over without cessation. The Storykin yearn to escape this fate - and the Harrowed Realm - and to become wholly real.
A group of the Storykin, the Conspirators, resolves to kill their creator Sonnorae in order to escape the Harrowed Realm and their endlessly repeating lives.While the Conspirators are successful in killing their creator and gaining some measure of self-determination, they find they cannot leave the Harrowed Realm. The lesser Storykin around them continue with their ceaselessly repeating lives essentially as before.