Lately, we’ve been playing a lot of Monster of the Week. I’ve found that MotW is great for campaigns that run about 6-10 games max, but if you wanted to run a longer story your hunters tend to get way over-equipped pretty quickly and have to either be swapped out or put in the back seat and have one of their followers take point. That didn’t really sit well with me or my group, so I worked out another way to do experience in a slower, but still pretty fun way.

What changes from the core rulesets:

• No more marking experience. If a move would have you mark experience, instead you may gain back either 1 health or 1 luck (at the player’s choice).
• No end-of-game experience voting. This was a hard hit for me, as this is one of the most charming parts of MotW. But it was contributing to the “too much, too fast” problem.
• Leveling is “milestone” and only happens at the end of a mystery. As a longer campaign may have dozens of mysteries, this only happens when the current one is totally resolved.

How Tarot Leveling Works:

So, first you will need a tarot deck. I use only 42 of the cards, namely the major arcana, the suits (king, queen, knight, page), and the aces. I leave out of the deck the number cards (2-10) for each suit. Each one of these cards has a different leveling option (see the table below). Once a mystery is complete, I shuffle the deck and deal out one card to each player.

Cards come in two varieties: