PARA -NORMAL RPG (WITH TAROT CARDS)

 

Para is a horror-drama RPG that uses Tarot cards for its action resolution mechanic. In a nutshell, that's it. But though extremely simple in its design, when I played it at Total Con, I found it engaging way beyond its simple mechanics.

First, though I want to make a shout-out to Eerie Games and to John Del Toro from the company. They were extremely friendly, engaged and quite hospitable. I spent a lot of time at the Con, on-and-off stopping by their booth to chat. The publisher is very old-school, and we enjoyed chatting about Talisanta, one of my favorite RPGs from back-in-the-day that I used to GM.

John ran an adventure one evening that he was so gracious to let me join in. I played a kinda maladjusted, goth-type teen boy, who hated his parents, school and pretty much almost everyone else. And he was a pyrotechnic (a talent I only availed myself near the very end of the adventure). Para is about the paranormal and how we respond to it and possibly grown from engaging with it.

The core mechanic is to declare what you want to do, to combine an attribute with a talent to arrive at a success number. You also have an affinity established for one of the Minor Arcana Suits. That is the number that you are trying to get equal to or below from each Minor Arcana you draw. The number of successes you need to get to succeed is determined by the GM, somewhere between 1-6.

You draw three cards for your action tableau. For each Minor Arcana drawn you earn one point for each card at or beneath your success number and one for any cards that have a suit for which you have affinity. All Major Arcana constitute an automatic Success. Thus you can achieve successes anywhere between 0-6. You have the option to re-shuffle when the GM has determined that the action has moved on to its next phase or act. (I didn't, since I'd been drawing mostly high cards and knowing that not shuffling them back in increased by odds for multiple successes per draw.) There's a bit more to the game beyond that, but not much more.

Everything else about the game has to do with motivation, drama, tone and atmosphere. Which frankly, is what RPG-ing is really what's all about IMO. Grade: At this point, I'd have to give it a B+. I need to play it much more before I can actually say I love it. Like yes, love not yet. It should also be said that they already have some other tied-in games for different genres, specifically a cyberpunk-themed game. So I do expect that I'll be visiting this system again in the not-too-distant-future. Enjoy!