I’ve been thinking about tarot cards as a storytelling tool for a while. Not fortune-telling — story-finding. The Rider-Waite deck is essentially 78 preloaded archetypes with centuries of interpretive weight behind them. That’s a creative resource, not a parlor trick.

So I built Mystic Web Tarot — an interactive widget that lives right here on the site. It has two modes, and the second one is the reason it exists.

Tarot Reading Mode

The classic experience. Pick a spread, flip your cards, read the interpretations.

• Single Card — a daily draw for quick guidance
• Three Card — past, present, future
• Five Card Cross — the deeper dive: core issue, challenge, foundation, immediate future, and outcome

Each card shows Rider-Waite imagery, upright or reversed, with meaning text pulled from the full traditional descriptions. When all cards are revealed, you get an overall interpretation that synthesizes the spread as a whole.

Story Mode

This is the part I actually built it for. Same deck, same flip-and-reveal mechanic, but the spreads are designed for writers:

• Character Profile (5 cards) — Core Self, Shadow, Driving Desire, Fatal Flaw, Hidden Gift. Build a protagonist from archetypes up.
• Three-Act Plot (5 cards) — The Wound, Inciting Force, Crucible, Dark Night, Resolution. A full story arc seeded by chance.
• Scene Seed (3 cards) — Setting Energy, Character State, Conflict Catalyst. Enough to break open a stuck chapter.
• Story Prompt (1 card) — A single archetype as raw inspiration.

The narrative notes at the end aren’t generic summaries — they’re written to connect the specific cards you drew into a coherent creative brief. Reversed cards get shadow notes that suggest suppressed or distorted versions of the archetype, which is often where the most interesting fiction lives.

Download Your Reading

Every completed reading generates a report you can download as Markdown — ready to drop into Obsidian, NovelCrafter, or whatever you draft in. The story mode exports are structured as creative briefs you can hand to an AI collaborator or use as a writing prompt.

Try It

Or open it directly at carlo-v-santiago.com/widgets/tarot/.