Ask the Sky

Ashcan edition — the book is complete and playable; it is not finished.

You play alone, with a notebook. You propose, and chance decides: the two outcomes you hold out to the coin, what a card means tonight, what you put at stake — you are the one who invents them, and the tarot and the coin only choose between them. From that come the choices that cost, the failures that are hard, the victories that blaze.

No character sheet, no numbers, no catalogue of actions, and nothing that grows in power. A roleplaying game played by writing — and its verdicts are not up for negotiation.

The rules are learned by playing, one part at a time, and you play a real scene from the third one on. After that they are forgotten.

The default world is called the Free Lands — a fallen empire, flying vessels, a mother city named Nandésis. But the engine carries any world at all: that is what one of the appendices is for.

What you need

• A notebook and something to write with.
• A tarot deck of 78 cards — a Rider-Waite-Smith off the shelf does the job very well.
• A coin.

No knowledge of the tarot is required: an appendix introduces it for whoever is discovering it.

Play a scene before you download

One page of the site has you play a scene in twenty minutes with nothing read beforehand — it lends you a deck and a coin for the length of it. The whole book reads online too.

Play your first scene · Read the book online

What the download holds

• Ask-the-Sky.pdf — the book, English edition.
• Liseciel.pdf — the same book in French, where it is called Liseciel. French is the source; the English follows it.

The EPUB, a play aid on double-sided A5 and a blank standing page to print all live on the site.

Ashcan edition

The illustrations are not final, passages will be rewritten, the final layout will come later. The book circulates in order to be played — and it changes: an online log says what moved, and when.

Licence

This book is made to circulate: play it, print it, lend it, share it as it is, freely, as long as nothing is charged for it and my name goes with it.