thePDV's page

I just thought to mention that to me, any "harrow poker" would likely have evolved out of the core usage, the harrow reading.

No, that's backwards. Historically, the core usage for any deck of cards is gaming and gambling. Fortune-telling comes later. Very few people can (or want to) do fortune-telling, and everyone can gamble, and that won't change much just because the fortune-telling actually works more often than chance; a deck wouldn't standardize if it was only used for fortune-telling, there's just not enough reason for people to use the same deck repeatedly. E.G. You'd see the canon deck, a 48-card deck with TN removed, a 30-card deck with each suit having Law, Chaos, Good, Evil, and Neutral as 5 distinct separate cards, a 10-suit deck with Law/Chaos/Good/Evil alongside Hammers/Keys/Shields/Books/Stars/Crowns, and that's just assuming that the fundamental traits being symbolized have to stay intact to preserve the special divinatory value of the Harrow deck.

It's only with frequent games being played that the deck stabilizes and has a form that's recognizable regionally; travelers wanting to play familiar games with familiar decks across all of the Italies/France/the Germanies/the British Isles/etc. (And historically it basically stops there until you can mass-produce decks of cards, so you absolutely wouldn't have the same deck in Varisia as in Absalom. But you wouldn't have a single unified trade tongue (Common/Taldane) in Varisia and Absalom until you have industrialized long-distance transit, and for the same reason we ignore that and have everyone understand Common, we can and should ignore the regional variants and have everyone use the same Harrow.) We would expect the divinatory usage of Harrow to show up many centuries earlier in Golarion, where it works, than on Earth, where it doesn't, but you still wouldn't get a standardized deck without gaming or some established organization, whether it was a church of Harrowing or a fortune-teller's guild.

It's moderately plausible that common spreads derive from notable poker hands, especially when the geometric interpretation is easily present on the 'poor man's deck' by having the symbol and its location specify the card. But generally I would expect there not to be much correlation. It will be based on what hands are rare and recognizable as special.

The Vudra map from Sixty Feet Under should be added to this CUP. Mostly so the wiki can use it.

Resurrecting this thread because a) no elaboration on the content of the Laws of Man has been published since then, AFAICT, and b) this is one of the top hits for a search for "the Laws of Man".

Skimming other discussions, I think there are two documents which are useful to consult to get an idea of what the Laws of Man might contain.

First and longest, the Revolutionary French Declaration of the Rights of Man. This is wordier and clearly aiming for a more NG or LG outlook rather than Rahadoum's LN, but it has the right mindset of a foundational document for a secular government radically different from any predecessor.

Second and much shorter, the Laveyan Satanism Eleven Satanic Laws of the Earth. Laveyan Satanism I would call TN or CN, but the strongly anti-theistic and self-reliant attitude it displays is good inspiration.

With those in mind, here is my draft of the first few Laws of Man; this is not complete but from the way it's described I'd expect this is at least a third of the total.

1st: Let no man be beholden to a god.

2nd: No man shall place their pleasure above their city's health.

3rd: Let the city strive to mastery of the world and every man in it likewise.

4th: Let no word or thought, of men and for men, be silenced.

5th: Let every man improve themself in every way they can.

6th: No man shall, knowing their own will, be told otherwise by another

7th: Let no betrayer or thief of the commons go unscorned.

...

Xth: Let no man who refuse these laws remain among us.

If both sides are trying to sneak, how do they know where to sneak to?

Take two scouting parties from rival armies. They're both in the same woods, where some objective sits. They also both expect opposition. They are both being stealthy and looking for others who are stealthy. How do you resolve initiative?

I have this same question.