Valiant Persona, Part 2

February 4, 2024

So we started poking at turning Valiant Horizon into Persona in Part 1 by establishing initial premises of what even this kind of game is like. It's got a lot of the DNA of urban fantasy/masquerade style games (WoD, Unknown Armies, etc) but with a very different emphasis, and especially the fact that there's a harder divide between the two "halves". Now we start digging in to what we want to do with that.

Arcana vs Classes, Persona vs Heroes

To reiterate, the big goal here is not to like reinvent the game from scratch so much as add context, mechanical or otherwise, that recontextualizes it. One major avenue of context in any given Persona game is the use of the Tarot Major Arcana as a symbol that has meaning in-game. And we have a very similar hook in Valiant Horizon: Classes.

In Persona, any given character who has significance will be associated with one of the 22 Major Arcana. In tarot readings they've got a pretty fixed set of meanings, which the games kind of follow (though they've developed their own sub-language with them): a character associated with a given Arcana will usually relate to it in some way. (It also clusters kinds of demons/powers them up as you grow closer to that person but we're not doing that with relationships.)

This is useful as shit for scaffolding. In the core rules I've got 12 classes: after the season pass (coming soon!) is done, I'll have 24 classes. (To say nothing of the 6 backer classes!) That (almost, put a pin in that) matches up numerically with those 22 major arcana! And each Class has a very similar naming convention (could easily be rephrased as The ____).

Now...the easy move would be to try to line each class up with one of those arcana from the out and just write the association into the book. But that's fairly prescriptive and means that two of those classes are going to necessarily be left out (we're still putting a pin in those, mind you). I do want to use those tarot cards though...so here's an idea.

• Sift the minor arcana out of a tarot deck.
• Each player draws from the top of the deck of majors. The typical meaning behind the card should tie into their false self: how they're perceived, how they like to comport themselves, their reputation, etc. (These can be represented by a chart of leading questions to help people draw something related out. We might pick out a skillset based on this if we're going with normal VH asset-mechanics for non-Shadow-Realm stuff, I haven't quite decided yet.)
• Each player picks their class: that's the arcana of their character's true self. Maybe each of them is pre-associated with some kind of weapon (this is something I initially considered but rejected for VH, but it might make more sense here though!) For the rest of the campaign, these two arcana, a real-life one and the class, are entwined, as both are associated with that characters. Keep track of which is associated with which! You'll end up with a table (and save this table, I'm secretly setting us up for Part 3) like:

• You can take that pin out now. The table comes up with a Tarot Arcana to represent the broad strokes, on-its-face nature of your bond based on the premise of your game: what is the general concept, what common goal brings you together? (Don't be too bashful about this, Persona makes up new major Arcana all the time or finds obscure ones when they need one.) Tie this to a class as well: what is the closest manifestation of your common cause?
  • The goal is to have most of the "normal" tarot arcana assigned to a class be someone you can have a Relationship with, as per standard Valiant Horizon (sometimes in different ways than others, but that's a later problem). This one's special: it's a relationship every PC has with each other as a team, which automatically goes up as they level or as they grow stronger or something. Every time it goes up, reflect on how the mission has changed.
• The Narrator makes up another Tarot Arcana, this time representing the appearance of the threat. Tie this to a class as well: if you're not sure, pick one at random and make it make sense later as the campaign progresses.
  • This one is similar: it goes up over time as they level or as the threat manifests a new angle or something. Every time it goes up, reflect on how your characters' understanding of the situation has changed.
• Finish out the rest of that chart, drawing the rest of the cards and assigning them the [22 - party size - 2] remaining Classes. (I'm assuming we just loop in the 24 core+season pass classes here, but pulling in a backer or third party class shouldn't be too hard: either sub out an existing class or come up with a similarly auto-leveling force like those two we reserved, things like the student body or the city or reputation or something.)

And now we've got ourselves something that ties strongly into that Tarot theme and helps everyone get set up. In part 3 I'll get into some ideas I have for how that manifests in play (and we'll come back to that player:tarot:class table).

(Read the original on cohost here!)