Playing Cards

Playing Cards of the Known World

Playing cards are very popular throughout the Known World and are used for all the activities you might suspect: games, fortune-telling and divination, throwing at people, and so forth. Among the less common uses: some people use a personal deck of cards as an elaborate mnemonic device. In this usage, each card might stand for a certain category of things to remember: dates, names, passwords, formulae, etc. Some practitioners of this method scribble notes on the cards themselves as reminders; others have shuffled and shuffled the same deck so many times they need no prompting. The solitary game “Elenath’s Castle” combines the gaming and memory-aid functions of the cards: the act of playing the game is also a meditative technique for reciting the memory cues assigned to each card.

Playing cards in the Known World have six suits and three colors, as follows. The “notes” column indicates what each of the types of cards is typically used to remember when used as a mnemonic device.