Performing a harrow reading: My own tips

[alexperience]

Hi everyone, I am a person who favors structure and I have difficulty being creative and improvising on the fly, so I have made up these tips to help anyone else who is like me. Please feel free to offer me advice or your own tips from your own experience performing Harrow Readings and Harrowings.

For my, and possibly your convenience, I have made a spreadsheet with the card interpretations, as per the Deluxe Harrow Deck manual PDF available as a free download on the Deluxe Harrow Deck product page, and a Pathfinder Wiki page with summarized interpretations. If I have infringed on any copyrights, please let me know (via private message to make sure I get it) and I will remove the link below immediately, and please forgive my ignorance as I meant no harm and mean to gain no profit from this.

The spreadsheet is available here if you would like to use it:

Google Drive shared Harrowing Spreadsheet

The spreadsheet highlights the cards revealed with a trump order of importance.

• First: Role Card Match
• Second: True Alignment Match
• Third: Opposed Alignment Match
• Forth: Misaligned/Partial Match
• Fifth: No Match

For ease of readings, I interpret only the most important card of each column. If there is a tie, I interpret a card with the same attribute (Intelligence, Charisma, Strength, etc) as the Role Card of the character. If there is still a tie, I use the card with the closest alignment (1 Step away, 2 Steps away, etc) to the character getting the reading. Finally, if there is still a tie, I make an arbitrary call on what may be most relevant card to the question/harrow reading.

I also add a few more tweaks for flair:

• If while shuffling, cards fall out of the deck, I say that the Gods have rejected those fates and I keep them out of the deck.
• I regularly alternate shuffling my cards face down and then face up to keep my cards from bending a certain way. When I do this in front of a character, I role play that it is to maintain balance of the fates.
• I also like involving the characters deity in the reading, saying "Shelyn is telling you that ..." or "Pharasma wishes to warn you of ..."
• When I reveal each column (past, present, future), I have gotten better at recognizing matches quickly, so when a card is a non-match, I flip face down to make it easier for me to read the correct cards, which are face up, back to the character.
• Finally, when an entire column (past, present, future) reveals all non-matches, I flip them all face down, and continue to draw on top of them an entirely new column, until I have at least one match.

Thanks for reading my little blurb. Hope to hear your feedback.

[alexperience]

In case the link doesn't work:

Excel Sheet here

[Moppy]

Thanks for providing this. It looks very useful.

However, it's hard to read. The spreadsheet displays as discrete pages rather than continuously. You may wish to review the sharing settings. It looks like this:

http://imgur.com/6ekPLjK.

[icantfallasleep]

I've noticed this as well. Google renders the file as a PDF. But you can choose to download it and open it in Excel, and it seems to render fine.

[Moppy]

So I worked out why this is happening.

If you create it in google docs and share it from there, you get a proper spreadsheet.

Yours however seems to be an .xlsx (whatever that is) and is stored in google drive, not docs, so that's why it's rendering as a pdf.

[Moppy]

Turned it back into a Google Doc, so it actually works in a browser now (offline too, once you've synced it. However, you need Chrome if you want to use google docs while offline).

Harrowing Spreadsheet