Wheel of Fortune
Fate, Luck, Randomness, Coloring With Your Cool Animal Friends, Showing Off Your New Sword, Being Able To Support An Entire Cylinder With Only Your Incredibly Tight Buttcheeks, Pat Sajak
The Wheel of Fortune means “random bullshit” and boy is this card ever covered in some random bullshit.
I’ve been mostly leaving out mention of the esoteric occult mythology while I talk about these cards, because if you read too much about Kabbalah your brain starts to pour out of your ears: it’s sort of a syncretic mishmash of “judaism but with the rails taken off after taking a bunch of hallucinogens”, astrology, alchemy, and Aleister Crowley’s sleep paralysis demons. The idea is, I think, if you pile enough bad ideas together they start to look like a coherent worldview1.
Anyways, that’s how this incredibly simple card ended up loaded down with a pile of symbols from astrology, hebrew characters, alchemical symbols, and a surprisingly thick-bootied Anubis.
Trying to read any concrete meaning into that is a fool’s game. This card is about one thing and one thing only:
Wheel! Of! Fortune!
The idea of the Wheel of Fortune2 goes back thousands of years, to the point where it was already a time-worn cliché by Ancient Roman standards. King or peasant, whoever you are, you spend your life bound to the Wheel of Fortune: sometimes you’re up while other people are down. Sometimes you’re down while other people are up, and the turns happen entirely unpredictably.
Friends & Foes
The Gambler is almost pathologically willing to put everything on the line, often without much of a justification.
For everything that could go wrong for the Sad Sack, it has gone wrong. They’re profoundly unlucky. It’s fun to play it for humor, but they are also very likely to be incredibly resilient.
The Fortunate Son is the opposite of the Sad Sack - born into wealth, never suffered a day in their life, won the lottery, got in to the best school by accident.
The Dunce Confederate is enormously pompous, whiny, lazy, badly dressed, pseudo-intellectual, demanding, slow, and convinced that everyone is out to get them. They will, once encountered, follow your players almost as if their life depended on it.
The Cursed has invited some kind of extra juicy supernatural torment into their life.
The Captain Danger is, honestly, not someone who should be in charge of other people’s safety and well-being, considering how little regard they seem to have for it. Their risk-taking usually pays off – for them – although a lot of their underlings haven’t been so lucky.
Lady Luck doesn’t believe in fortune. Either through magic or far more likely through sleight of hand, she manipulates her fortune so that she always comes out ahead.
Hooks
Your players owe a significant debt to a terrifying entity. Payments are coming up soon and the consequences for lateness are dire.
In a chance event, it turns out that one of your players, despite their mundane upbringing, is actually nobility. There’s a vast fortune and many jealous, angry new family members.
High risk, high reward: it’s time to pull a heist.
Locations
The Casino is a classic location, flashy, dangerous, filled with gambling, bars, high-stakes games, high rollers flaunting their wealth, desperate folks putting it all on red, cheats, organized crime, vaults, heists, the works.
The Dragon’s Hoard is a vast pile of treasure slowly accrued over multiple lifetimes — protected by a dragon3. A dragon who is both extremely powerful and extremely motivated to protect their loot.
The Expedition Base Camp is gearing up for an adventure that’s either going to be incredibly lucrative or nobody will ever be seen or heard from again.
A Rick’s Cafe is a classy bar in a desperate location, filled with a steady supply of wealthy marks passing through and shady characters stealing from them.
A Bank is a secure vault where the wealthy keep their money, providing financial services and security.
The down on their luck end up in Skid Row, a part of the town given over to the poor, homeless and mad.
Treasures
The Cursed Treasure Hoard seems life-changing at first, but its negative effects are subtle and insidious.
The One-Sided Coin, Marked Cards and Loaded Dice are invaluable tools for folks intending to cheat at games of chance.
Names
Tresor, Lucky, Skarb, Dargums, Khajana, Kinz, Bahati, Felicity, Clover, Chance, Penny, Evangeline, Desdemona, Azar, Murphy