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As a GM whose strengths lie in preparation rather than improvisation, I'm a little anxious about having to interpret a harrow reading on the fly in such a way as to impart useful information to the players. The thought of me sitting there, leafing through the little booklet, umming and erring, giving overly vague and confusing messages and generally killing the RPing mood is not a good one.
I remember that in at least one old AD&D2E Ravenloft module, it gave the GM instructions on how to stack the deck so that they got spookily (or suspiciously) accurate cards in a reading done by an NPC. Has anyone tried anything similar in CotCT?
EDIT: I probably should have read this thread first, but my question still stands (mostly) unanswered.
I didn't use the harrow cards the first time. I gave everyone a harrow point and had everyone roll a d10 for the "chosen" section. But the next time I'm going to do a few practice runs before the game day. If I am not able to do a reading in a timely manner, then I will have the players draw their cards at the end of a game session, then be ready to interpret what they drew the following week. I want readings to take up, at most, a half hour.
Sorry, my improv skills are full of fail. I'm sure there are DMs out there that have no trouble doing readings as intended. It is a very cool idea and I want to be able to do it as well as I can.
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My improv skills suck a lot, but I'm intending to do an actual reading and just be very... flexible... about the card meanings. Basically I've come up with a few cool fortunes incorporating backstory and foreshadowing I can talk about and I'm just going to use whatever cards come up to select the one I'm going to use and I'll add little flourishes based on the features of the cards that come up to make it sound believable. I've done some practice readings and this has worked pretty well, I've been able to add a few little details that are blatantly based on the cards in front of me without it sounding jarring every time. I'll be starting my game in a couple of weeks hopefully, so then I'll know for sure if it works.
Remember you're not interpreting on a card-by-card basis, you're working column by column, so a pre-written bit of flowing prose about the "Shadows in your past" or whatever is perfectly valid, especially as Zellara is supposed to be an awesome harrow reader, she can see things in the combination of cards that might not be obvious from the cards themselves. The card meanings also aren't set in stone so you can easily come up with your own interpretations based on the name and the illustrations, if it would suit your purposes to focus on the pear on the unicorns head, go for it!
If you want to stack the deck so you get something spookily accurate then the Tarokka method (stacking the reading you want, remove it and give all the cards you aren't using to a player to shuffle) should work but may require a bit more speed and subtlety as you'll have to extract the cards you want from the suit you used in the choosing (you could not use that suit, but players will probably notice and they'll only ever get one harrow point which is kind of lame) and place them in the correct place without the players getting suspicious. If you extract them quickly you can always sort them out whilst a player is shuffling the cards you won't be using. If you have two decks that would work perfectly, but does mean buying two decks. Or you could do the choosing at the end of a session, and the reading at the start of the next...
I just got the deck on Friday, the same night as our kick-off for CotCT, so all I used the deck for was picking the calling cards and the initial reading with the Dex cards only.
This weekend I practiced with the deck and I see your problem. Two out of the three readings I did last night were fine, but the third was pure jibberish - no cards matched or were opposite. I guess I could look at the player's highest ability or alignment and try to weave this into the reading.
As a solution, I'm thinking that when I do my readings I'll winnow the deck down a bit, perhaps take out five or ten cards that won't provide any details whatsoever. This will boost the odds of the more appropriate cards to come up.
Other than that, I'm not sure what you could do except for prepping the cards by stacking them.
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I have run a few practice readings for my (non-gamer) girlfriend, who happens to be very into Tarot. Obviously she's not asking questions regarding a fantasy setting or adventure, but even with real-world applications, I feel I've gotten pretty good at improvising a reading. I would suggest doing something similar before each in-game reading, focusing on the ability that will be the adventure's theme. You might even write up some expanded readings from what is provided in the Harrow booklet or article so you have a bit more flavor at your fingertips for the real reading.
In general, though, I think that actually stacking the deck is both less fun for the DM in that it allows too much preparation and might tick off the players if they catch on. It's never fun to feel railroaded, and a rigged "game of chance" is about as railroady as one can get, IMO.
A fellow GM and I have been practicing. We're taking stories we know well (eg Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc) and one of us asks an in-character question (eg "What is Yoda going to teach me when I reach Dagoba?"). The other then does a reading and gives the answers, along with ideas of how we as a GM might tweak the plot to allow for a cool resonance with the cards.
Practice really helps.
I think you should only stack the deck if you tell the players beforehand. To their characters, of course, it's still a "random" reading...