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https://github.com/stuartpb/mad-max-tarot-design

Musings on how an artistically inclined person could approach illustrating a Tarot deck with a Mad Max theme
https://github.com/stuartpb/mad-max-tarot-design

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Musings on how an artistically inclined person could approach illustrating a Tarot deck with a Mad Max theme

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# mad-max-tarot-design



Musings on how an artistically inclined person could approach illustrating a Tarot deck with a Mad Max theme



## Background



I find the Mad Max series, as a body of work, fascinating. Starting as a miniscule-budgeted Australian independent film, helmed and crewed by some who had never even worked in entertainment (George Miller having been a doctor before the first film's debut), the quiet, almost meditative staging of the first *Mad Max* would go on to see its marginally-standout protagonist recast, at epic scale, as *The Road Warrior*, in a world gone from somewhat unkempt to completely destroyed. Many of the same elements from *The Road Warrior* would be revisited, like a ballad retold in oral tradition, for *Beyond Thunderdome*, in a secondary explosion in scale, replacing *Road Warrior*'s mall-outfitted armies with full-on, Hollywood-blockbuster set pieces and costumes (In terms of this trajectory, the Mad Max series bears similarities to its contemporaries in the Evil Dead series, with each installment giving a fresh opportunity to explore new territory and techniques, with a revamped personality in its protagonist.)



As the Mad Max films mutate and change in lore, aesthetic, and skill, on through the Best-Picture-nominated *Fury Road*, the franchise remains exemplary of some of the most laudable, and often elusive, characteristics of storytelling. Each film in the series has dropped us into a setting alien to our own, with warped-beyond-recognition societies and linguistic structure; yet, without pausing for exposition or translation, it communicates its world to the audience in a way that, while each new element is *surprising* to us, is well within *understanding* once it's encountered. Our first instinct, when prompted to envision a world in the death throes of peak oil, wouldn't jump immediately to prisoners on poles lashed to the grill of a jalopy, or a mobile Marshall stack with a fire-ejaculating bungee guitarist rider; however, once presented with them, they don't jar the expectations for which the audience been set.



Anyway, given this epic-poem-like nature of the series, and its penchant for re-imagining how occult traditions and rituals would re-form after the decline of civilization, I've always felt it'd be apropos to mix its visually-striking gallery of themes into the Major Arcana (and Minor Arcana, if you've got enough totems left over). Searching the Internet, it'd seem I'm not the first person to have this idea, and at least one artist on Tumblr has put out [a pretty good deck for *Mad Max: Fury Road*](http://sempaiko.tumblr.com/post/144424578452/mad-tarot-these-are-going-to-debut-at-animazement).



However, while I think that deck has some really great cards in it, I feel like limiting the deck to only the latest Mad Max movie is cutting out basically all the most iconic elements of the series, while requiring some of the most potentially-impressive cards to be filled out by *Fury Road*'s bit players.



In light of that, I've been churning in my mind for a while now card designs for two different decks, having just rewatched *Fury Road*'s three predecessors, while simultaneously playing through Avalanche Studios' expanded-universe video game tie-in for it. I feel that there are icons in *both* these sets enough to put together some awesome, thematically-exploratory cards, and I can't sleep until I've written this down.



## Design Restrictions



Here are the rules I'm following:



- Cards in the `original-trilogy` set don't incorporate anything from `the-game`, or vice versa (beyond the scarce few elements that are shared by both, ie. Max himself).

- So as to not step on any toes, neither set references anything from Fury Road (beyond the extent to which the cutscenes from The Game do so, ie. War Boys are OK, but no Immortan Joe or Imperator Furiosa).

- No subjects appear more than once - if you name your favorite character from *Road Warrior*, they're either on one card, or none (though there should be a place for all the big players *somewhere*).



I'm going by the A. E. Waite numbering for the Major Arcana where Strength is 8 and Justice is 11, because if you're doing a themed Tarot deck and you're not following Waite-Smith, you might as well just draw random pictures.



## Contributing



If you think I've overlooked something major, or just generally have a better idea anywhere (there are definitely some spots that could be better), file an issue / pull request on this repo to discuss it.



## Using this to actually make cards



It'd be pretty ridiculous for me to try to assert some sort of copyright on a fundamentally derivative work like this, so I'm not even going to try. If you go ahead and actually *draw* these cards, let me know (issue, pull request, Twitter, any of that)!