INTRO
SATAH: Welcome to Folio, an actual play podcast about solo and epistolary TTRPGs. I'm your host, Satah, and I'm showcasing multiple possible experiences of self-paced games by inviting guests to play them alongside me so I can compile our stories together. You can support the show financially at patreon.com/foliopod or with a one-off donation at ko-fi.com/foliopod. 
This is episode one of our games of To Honour and Obey, "a solo tarot rpg about an Arthurian lady protecting her own" by Laurie O'Connel. The other two lonesome expectant mothers holding down the literal forts with me are Happy Birthday and Chloe Sobel. I'll tell you a little bit more about them at the break.
GAME: ACT ZERO
CHLOE: Okay.
HB: Alright. We are returning to Folio.
SATAH: Podcaster cursed to live in the loudest neighbourhood of all time.
CHLOE: Yeah. Hi, this is Chloe. I'm playing To Honour and Obey.
HB: And our game for today is Honour and Obey by Laurie O 'Connel.
SATAH: Gonna play To Honour And Obey…
HB: Or– To Honour and Obey by Laurie O'Connel.
SATAH: The tagline of which on the very first page is, "a solo game about an Arthurian lady protecting her own."
CHLOE: "A solo game about an Arthurian lady protecting her own."
HB: Which is "a solo game about an Arthurian lady protecting her own." You know, let's just launch into this by reading the opening.
SATAH: "You were granted this keep only two months ago.
HB: "You were granted this keep only two months ago.
CHLOE: "You were granted this keep only two months ago.
SATAH: "Well, your husband was.
CHLOE: "Well, your husband was.
HB: "Well… your husband was. A gift from King Arthur for some noble act of gallantry and knightly service, no doubt.
CHLOE: "And yet today he is leaving again on some long and magical quest, and you don't know if or when he will be back.
SATAH: "He left you with only two things: a baby boy in your belly and a request to look after the keep while he's gone. If only things were so easy.
HB: "The people here have no particular loyalty to you, and the keep is a wreck, left derelict by its previous occupants.
SATAH: "The crows are flocking, and you know that your enemies are plotting against you. You have nobody here to protect you, only a few maidservants and a husband and family far away.
CHLOE: "But for all intents and purposes, this is your castle, and
ALL THREE: "you will do your best
CHLOE: "to rebuild it and keep it strong.
HB: "and keep it strong.
SATAH: "and keep it strong."
HB: This is an Anamnesis game, which means that we're going to be playing this by essentially drawing tarot cards to figure out what's going on. In our case, we are a pregnant woman in an Arthurian setting who is trying her best to survive… about the next nine months of her life in a honestly quite challenging situation.
SATAH: This game is so out of my comfort zone that I actually got a little bit nauseous. [Laughs] It's beautifully written! But saying that a man… left me with a child?! That I'm pregnant with a man's child?! Genuinely made me, like, deeply physically uncomfortable to say.
CHLOE: I'm so excited about this. I love… I love women struggling in patriarchal situations and I love medieval bullshit. Arthuriana is not, like, my strength, but I feel like I have a good enough grasp of the vibes to really have fun with this.
SATAH: I have nightmares about pregnancy. I really hope that I can get through it. Because I would love to appreciate the, like, writing of this game and other parts of it, but, oh man.
HB: Our deck is separated into five decks. Major Arcana, Wands, Swords, Cups, and Pentacles.
SATAH: Need a tarot deck, piece of paper, a set of tokens of any kind… ooh, tokens.
Got a little glass jar of flower beads.
CHLOE: So I've set up my tarot deck. I could have played this online on playingcards io, but instead I've decided to finally break out my Mage the Awakening tarot deck that I got printed on DriveThruRPG years and years ago, and I've never touched it. And I can tell because when I opened the deck, everything was in the proper order.
SATAH: I am using the absolutely beautiful Wanderers deck by Casey Zabala, which I won in a game on a cottage trip a few years ago, I believe. It has slightly different suits and slightly different court cards, but they all align cleanly to your classic Tarot, so should not be a problem.
CHLOE: Got my deck and I've got- I've got- I've got a coffee, so I'm good.
HB: And we can just launch right into it.
STRENGTH
SATAH: Going to do act zero, establishing the set.
HB: First, what we need to do is define our lady a little bit. And to do that, we need to identify a strength and an enemy. And to do that, we draw from the Major Arcana deck.
SATAH: "Draw a card from the major arcana and place it faced first in front of you. This is your strength. Use the card to describe the talents, qualities, skills, or secrets that you have that you rely on to survive." Cool. Okay. I'm going to shuffle…
CHLOE: "Whenever you use your strength to confront a problem, you will place a token upon the card."
SATAH: These cards have like this beautiful silver, like, filigree finish on the sides, kind of like you'd see a fancy book with shiny edges of the pages? And they're just– they just, like, shine so dramatically while being shuffled. It looks like– it looks a little bit, honestly, what it looks like- honestly, what it kind of looks like is something that would have been in Hannibal. Like, Mads Mikkelsen just chopping really fast– that's the vibe that you get visually when shuffling these cards.
HB: Let's draw a major arcana here.
SATAH: I have drawn the Hermit.
CHLOE: So I have drawn for my strength the Hierophant, a beautiful card that I think would be at home, if the colours were a little different, i n the H .R. Giger Museum.
HB: [Cracking up] It is the Tower. Amazing. Oh, god, what a first card to draw. We g– that's our strength. Oh my god.
CHLOE: So I have to look up what the fuck the Hierophant means. I should know this… and yet.
SATAH: I think just for fun, I'm going to directly consult the, like, guidebook that came with this deck to sort of guide me towards my answers? And so what it says for the Hermit is "directed by truth, following inner light." Interesting. Okay.
CHLOE: Okay. No, this is actually- I think this is relatively easy because Hierophants are, you know, connected to religion.
Very funny that it used to be apparently identified as the Pope in early decks and I'm doing this right after the new Pope got elected. I'm not Catholic or even Christian, but I've been really enjoying the memes about it.
HB: Our strength is the Tower. In the context of being an Arthurian lady, what could this possibly mean? Is it that we have, like, you know… not necessarily any sort of… is it that we are unprincipled? That we have no compunctions? We will just destroy everything if we, you know, really have to? Let's see.
SATAH: The example strengths that are given are, "My blood hums with ancestral magic," "I learned politics at my mother's knee and can read anyone's intentions," and "My obvious virtue and kindness makes it hard to oppose my wishes." So it sounds like I should write sort of a- a statement that sums this up. Something about truth and being guided by an inner light.
The inclusion of "my blood hums with ancestral magic in the example strengths" does… feel like it is giving me explicit permission to sort of genre this up a bit, which I think will genuinely help me be more comfortable with it? And I like that idea, so…
CHLOE: "The Hierophant stands for righteousness, sacredness…" um, so I think in this case– oh, and it also apparently, according to Waite's Key to the Tarot, "it carries several divinatory associations, including marriage, alliance, captivity, servitude… by another account, mercy and goodness, inspiration, the man to whom the Quirin has recourse…" This is fun because– yeah.
So I think that in that case, my character's strength is her faith. And I think that another of her strengths is her marriage. I think that, um… I trust in my faith to guide me– and it's not necessarily like a faith in, like, God, although I think that is an element because, you know, again, this is an Arthurian thing, so that is present, like, the religiosity– but I think a faith in my own mind and intuition? Yeah.
And I think that like– so, despite it all, despite my husband being called away to this, whatever it is that he's doing exactly, I guess we'll sort of find out as this goes on– yeah, I still I have faith in him. And I have faith that I made the right choice by marrying him. Like it wouldn't have been entirely my choice, but I- I think I had the- I had the power to say no. And I met him and I was like, "This is where I'm supposed to be going."
SATAH: "Directed by truth, following inner light…" I think I'm gonna say that I have visions.
And I think they're small. And I think that… because of the the thing of of it saying, "directed by inner light," I do think I want to play with the idea of light and that made me– I was, like, toying around with different sort of ways to say it and I was like– something about, like, "in the light of the sun, I can always see the truth," and I think it's like… [Laughs] I think- I think that I'm constructing Realis sentences in my brain, actually. Like, it's, "I can always see the truth," and then it's like, "I can always see the truth in the light of the afternoon," and then it's like, "I can always see the light of the truth in the afternoon across my bedroom wall," or something like that.
I do have to remember: this is a strength. I'm going to pull a weakness. I don't have to complicate this. This can be relatively straightforward.
HB: "It's associated with sudden disruptive revelation and potentially destructive change." Yeah, I think… I want to say that this means that we have lost everything once before. That we were lifted out of a terrible situation by, you know, marrying our husband. We have a- we are no stranger to hardship. We have a… you know, our keep has burned down before in the past. That is something that, in our short life, we have already experienced. I already have a sense that… the worst has already happened to me once. If it happens again, I will be prepared. I am not, uh… I am not unused to being surrounded by disaster and death and plague and misery.
Maybe it's like the keep that I used to be from got fully razed in a siege? You know, that kind of situation. Maybe my husband is even like, you know, a former enemy of King Arthur that was defeated and, like, added to his retinue. And I happen to be his wife from that same- from roughly that same group of people. Where there's a, you know. My husband is, like, half giant and maybe I'm like… maybe I am his bride who is, like, you know, the offspring of witches or something like that, and there is a really ominous… I have a really ominous ancestry that has resulted in me being on the wrong side of a conflict.
So yeah, I think that's my strength. My strength is the Tower. I've been destroyed once before. When it happens again, I will be ready.
SATAH: [Typing] Okay. I just sort of, like, tooled around with a sentence for a little while, and what I've landed on for strength is, "Visions in the fires of candles in the sun…" oh, wait, I've said visions twice. One second. Let me rewrite this a little… there we go.
"The fires of candles in the sun grant me visions of the likeliest answers to my questions." So it's a very limited-in-scope future reading ability. And I like to think it's the type of thing where, like, if I were to, you know, interrogate somebody by candlelight, it would help me understand if they're lying and that kind of thing? I think that's fun.
ENEMY
HB: Now, we need to identify our enemy.

SATAH: "Draw a second card from the Major Arcana and place it to the right of the first card, reversed. This is your enemy.
HB: "While there are many crows circling your keep, your position, and your son's inheritance, one of them is the most dangerous. Use the card to describe them.
CHLOE: "Whenever the cards confront you with a problem that you do not know how to solve, or you deal with the problem badly, or are forced to act in desperation, you will place a token on this card.
SATAH: "These decisions are up to you, with one exception: if a card is drawn reversed, your enemy always gains a token. Describe how your clever solution to the problem in front of you puts you in a bad situation." Wonderful. I always want tarot games to play with inversions, because I think that that is just such a fantastic element of tarot.
HB: Now, one of the issues that I have is they don't think I can actually draw a card reversed in this deck because I'm using a digital deck and that is not… really a feature of this particular thing. But I think, you know… I don't mind making a decision. After all, I am very good at self-sabotage.
SATAH: Let's find out who this enemy is. I pulled it reversed, so that's looking good.
CHLOE: Oh no! My en– I drew the lovers for my enemy. That's a fascinating pull.
HB: The World! Oh my god. [Laughing]
SATAH: The Moon… that's immediately really interesting to me because of how I invoked the sun as a strength. Like, the fire of the sun. That's cool.
HB: Yeah, okay.
CHLOE: Gosh, okay.
SATAH: Example enemies. "My cousin has always hated me and wants everything I have." "My husband's rival, Sir Nilvain, covets the lands we've been given to protect." "A wicked magician desires me and will do anything to have me in his power."
CHLOE: The lovers. So the Waite associations here are "failure, foolish designs, sometimes marriage frustrated, and contrarities of all kinds." So I think that my enemy here is the man I didn't marry, who I think is also a knight. No, actually, I'm going to go with, uh– he's not a knight. He's a wicked magician because that's one of the example enemies in the booklet, and I'm really drawn to it. "A wicked magician desires me and will do anything to have me in his power," having already lost me to my husband. I think he had plans and schemes going on, and then I did not choose him because my intuition told me not to.
SATAH: What does the book say about the Moon? "Introspect, dream, recollect."
Mmm. Immediately, I'm like… you know, I should do the thing that I was already obviously drawn to do. I kept trying to complicate the idea of having visions being good, because that's often complicated, right? So that's like, you know, can I actually trust them? But I do want it to be a strength.
So I think, specifically thinking of the idea of dreams… and do I want this to be… this is a person. Yes, right. Okay. This isn't a weakness. This is a person. Okay.
If I'm leaning into sort of a fantastical thing… you know, genre stuff… which I guess, like, to be totally fair, this is an Arthurian tale, right? So of course there's magic. Like, that isn't me just, like, throwing a whole new thing in there. i'm just probably going to lean really hard into that because it's- it's- that's where I find a little bit more comfort.
Why was I bringing that up?
The idea of my- my– this enemy being a- a woman who's been appearing to me in my dreams. And I'm trying to figure out if I know what she wants.
I find the conceit of this game so inherently, like, oppressive and suffocating that I really can only conceptualise… or my first instincts of conceptualising an enemy is somebody who is telling me that I deserve more than this and trying to show me a way out, which scares me, but is good. Is that what I want? Do I want this to be like, you know, there's a woman appearing in my dreams being like, "You are powerful. Why is this what you're doing?" Like, "Your husband is not the only one in the home who could save the world."
I have to remember I have a child… and want to be a mother, presumably… [Laughing] It's so funny the- the specific limits of my imagination. Okay.
HB: I think the World in this case is… maybe there's a prophecy. Like a prophecy relating to my faith or my bloodline or something like that? Yeah. I think it's that my fate is fixed, is my enemy. There is… I'm no stranger to ruin, but that is because it is part of a prophecy that, you know, my entire family will be destroyed, my fate will be erased. There will be a, uh… there is a sense of unchanging doom about me. There will never be a, uh- there is not a– at least as far as the soothsayers are concerned, everything that I do will end badly, so to speak. I think if somebody tries to divine my future, it will necessarily end badly. Like, it is a, uh, oh, I, you know, "I look into your future and I see a horrible darkness." There is a kind of, uh, there is a kind of shadow falling over me. It is a quality of the- it is a quality of the world. I am- I am sitting in the shadow of terrible things.
SATAH: A woman appearing to me in my dreams. Mmm! I was like, is it she's trying to poison me against my husband or that kind of thing? And then I was like, one of the other sort of key phrases that was included in the interpretation book was, like, to recollect something, to remember something. And so the idea– like, I have visions of the future, right? And, like, playing with the idea of that in that, like, I keep having dreams… that my memories are wrong or confused. Like I'm sacrificing the past for the future.
Okay, again, sort of just playing around with writing it out, seeing what feels good, the enemy that I've come up with is "A powerful witch who visits me in my dreams wants me to give up my past to gain greater access to the future."
So it's- it's the idea that like I'm being visited in my dreams… and I don't know if it's… a real person or if it's just, like, my own dark power sort of, like, calling me closer? And basically is saying, like, "You have these visions of likely- the likeliest answers to your question. You have these powers. They could be greater. It would come at a cost, but maybe it's worth it.
"It is a great cost, though." [Laughs]
HB: We are a, uh… we are a young woman bedeviled by omens. Our fate is… we are a cursed young lady who has to watch out for this seemingly cursed looking keep, which is very exciting to me.
SATAH: Oh, nuh, there is an Arthurian name generator on fantasynamegenerators.com. Thank you, fantasynamegenerators.com. I love you.
My goodness. Affirmations voice: I can pronounce these.
Let's go… let's look up Astigan as a name to see whomst… a Palworld– a Palworld creature? No, I think we're good. Yeah, let's go with Astigan. Lady Astigan… let's combine two of these. Arthridin and Helivir for Heladin. Lady Astigan Heladin. I'm a hermit and my enemy is the moon! [Laughs]
HB: How will we manage the extremely horrific circumstances that we are placed in? Only time will tell. And also, you know, the cards will tell too.
BREAK
SATAH: Hello again! I never quite know how to come into the break for some reason.
If you like Good Society or Monsterhearts– which is actually a pretty good intersection for this series as a whole– let me tell you: both people joining me on this series have some stuff for you on itch.io.
HB is our second ever returning guest! If you're as absurdly delighted as I am by their insane narrative swings, please also go listen to the Unplugged Survivor series where they and Darling Demon Eclipse join me in building out an absurd post-apocalyptica that happens to involve a strange amount of One Direction? You can also hear them on Indie Mixtape, a Moonshot network podcast about indie games, and get all of their games for free at gm36.itch.io. I particularly want to bring your attention to They Call This The City, a game that– to put it as simply as possible– builds a city out of graphs. It is unique and weird and great, just like its designer. I am so, so glad that HB could be here again and oh my god, the stuff that they do in this– you'll hear it.  You'll hear it pretty much immediately. It's incredible.
Before Chloe Sobel came into my life, I missed them so bad. To Honour and Obey was on my list for Folio specifically for when I could finally get her on as a guest and I'm so happy it worked out. He makes games about horror and romance and intimacy and you can find them all on smallstories.io. At some point this summer, they'll be releasing a Gothic fiction haunted house hack of Good Society called Within the Walls, which is so fucking exciting because hearing Chloe go off about, like 19th, 20th century ghost shit is one of the greatest joys that can be found in this life, so her work in that space is a guaranteed treat. You can follow them on Bluesky at smallstoriesgames.bsky.social. I'm pretty sure I said that plug thing right but I honestly wasn't really paying attention to the words I was saying because I was thinking about Chloe talking about ghosts and how good it is.
As for me, you're currently listening to my show– thank you! My name's Satah. I'm a TTRPG editor and designer, podcast wrangler, and musician. My singer-songwriter acoustic goth broadway bedroom doom pop feelings project people you meet outside of bars released an EP at the end of last year and a full length-album at the end of February for record production month. Check out my work at gaygothvibes.online, follow me on Bluesky at posatahchips.gaygothvibes.online, and, I dunno, give me a shout if you need your TTRPG book or podcast edited.
Let us turn now to our tales of woe… probably.
GAME: ACT ONE
HB: Now we enter into
CHLOE: Act One!
ALL: Pentacles.
SATAH: In the Wanderers deck, the analogue to pentacles is stones.
"You kiss him goodbye, playing the dutiful wife until he has gone away like so much dust on the wind.
HB: "You bite your tongue when he tells you he's going away to fight evil. He is blind to the evil that exists within the walls of his own keep, to the battles he is now leaving you to fight by yourself. But the bards will sing of him."
SATAH: "But the bards will sing of him."
CHLOE: "But the bards will sing of him, and never of you."
HB & SATAH: "And never of you.
SATAH: "And just like that, you are alone."
CHLOE: Alright, now I draw three cards from the deck of pentacles. "Answer the questions they ask and assign tokens if appropriate."
SATAH: "If you do not have an obvious answer to a prompt, draw a card from the major arcana deck. Use this to guide your answers."
CHLOE: It's fun playing an Anamnesis game that is completely a solo game because so far my only experience with the system is Tangled Blessings, which is a fantastic game but also, like, it has duet rules, um and so that is how I have been playing in this system, so it's really cool to get to see, like, not just a different take on the same system, but also one that is, like, a solo game.
HB: Let's draw– I'm gonna do this one by one. Or should I do all three of them?
CHLOE: So I've drawn the two, the three, and the ten.
HB: Let's do one by one.
SATAH: First card is eight.
HB: First up is the queen of pentacles.
CHLOE: So we'll- we'll start with the two.
HB: OH… "You have a terrible secret that you have been trying to keep from your husband since the night you were married. What is it, and how could it ruin everything?" Okay, perfect. Perfect. Delightful. [Laughing] Oh boy.
CHLOE: "As he rides away, you think about the one person you wish was here to offer you support and wisdom. Why are they not with you right now? Do you cave in and in a moment of weakness ask them to come?" I think… I'll just, you know, I'll start dealing with my enemy early and often, I suppose.
I wish that the wicked magician who was a contestant for my hand was here to offer me support and wisdom, because I think the thing is that one of the reasons that he is my enemy now is because we had known each other for years before I ever even knew my husband existed. And we were lovers, and he took it to mean that when the time was right, we would marry.
And I never said this to him– and I think I feel quite bad about it now from potentially misleading him– but I think that I never had any intention of marrying him because I knew that it would only bring me grief. He was wonderful to pass the time with, but not someone to stake my life to.
But he was always very supportive of me and he is, because he's a magician, he is wise. Like, he… ironically, I think, does a lot of divinatory magic and so he's very, like- he's historically been very well placed as, like, an advisor to noble- to nobles. Unfortunately, he could not foresee that I would jilt him. Or he did and he didn't want to believe it.
Um, so that- he's not with me right now because we had a falling out. He's not interested in being supportive to me anymore. He is interested in destroying what I have and potentially making me crawl back to him.
Um… do I cave in? No. I- I stay strong, because once again, I remind myself that this is a bad idea. I rejected him for a reason, and… I also need to like– I think I need to partially learn a bit how to stand on my own. Like, there's part of me that's frightened by being on my own when my husband's not really taking seriously all the danger and threats around us? But at the same time, I think I'm sort of, like, looking forward to, I guess, proving myself.
SATAH: "A maid is standing behind you, holding your cloak and a few other small items. Who is she? Do you trust her?"
My immediate thought, because of her "holding small items," is that we are doing something magic-y. I am just going to look at, like, the numerology page in the Wanderer deck book to see if it, like, has anything to say. "Meditation and reflection." Perfect. Yep, that's great.
Yeah, I have this image of us being in like… the middle of a field. It's probably, like, the middle of the gardens in this estate… let me just double check what a keep is.
A keep is a tower. Okay. Does it necessarily have… like, an estate? Maybe it's just the tower. Yeah, perfect. In that case, we're not in a field or anything. We're on the top of the tower in the midday sun. I took my cloak off because it's so hot. And I'm trying a ritual.
I think I don't normally really do rituals. I might maneuver a situation for my powers to be relevant, like having conversations in the sun or by a fire, but I don't think I often do it on purpose, and I think that just, like, this whole situation has put me in a state of heightened anxiety that I'm like, "Maybe I should try and concentrate on this a little bit more purposefully."
And this is interesting because it also– I think I'm very purposefully trying not to think about this witch that's been visiting me in my dreams, right? Like, asking me to grow my powers, but at the cost of- at a great cost of something. In my past. I'm like, "Nope! That isn't even a problem. That isn't- that's fake."
And so… what is it that I'm trying to answer? I think it's- it's as simple as, like… my husband just left… and I think my visions are often the type that are very immediate, you know? It's- it's harder to know the further out it goes, and so I can't just be like, "Is he gonna be okay?"
But we're- we're standing on the top of this tower… [Typing] when were magnifying glasses invented…
HB: I think I'm going to take a big swing.
I think I'm a werewolf.
That's right! I think I may, uh– I think I do sometimes turn into a wolf, and I am driven to consume human flesh, which is a huge problem. I am genuinely and very literally cursed, and if- I think if people find this out about me, there's going to obviously be quite a reckoning.
My husband, of course, does not actually know this. There is a… he knows about the prophecy, I think, and he knows, you know, that I was found alone in my keep where everybody else had been destroyed by a terrible beast, or ripped to shreds by a terrible beast, and I was the sole survivor found bloodied in a torn dress in the keep. And, you know. Credit to him, he did not immediately infer from that that I was some kind of- that I would turn into a horrible beast sometimes.
And how could it ruin everything? Well, obviously it could happen again. I think I don't precisely know what makes it happen. I don't think it is strictly just the full moon. I think there's a more complicated series of events, and I cannot necessarily predict ahead of time what they will be. I'm going to- I'm going to now and again turn into a beast and just hope that not too many people are killed. Especially now that I'm pregnant, which could be… which could also reflect very badly on my son.
SATAH: I'm so out of my depth… [Laughing] in this  genre. I'm just searching things like, "What year is King Arthur set in?"
Okay. I can't focus too hard on this. I'll go crazy.
Magnifying glasses… have been explicitly referred to since at least 424 BC… there's evidence of them throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean basin over several millennia… great.
So all of this is to say, I have a magnifying glass. [Laughing] And I'm trying to get the sun to light a candle, is what I'm doing. Maybe a couple- like, a few candles. That's- some of the small objects that this maid is holding are… like, various types of lenses, I think, and other candles. And I want to– I'm theorising that if I can get the sun to light this candle, I will be bringing the fire of the sun into the nighttime and then it'll be more powerful? You know?
And maybe I'm also trying to keep some of those dreams at bay. Like I'm like, if I could light a fire with this candle and have it overnight and it'll sort of… keep the sun with me. But I- I want to- I want to have this special sun candle to, like– I think ask myself questions. Like, I- in the mirror. Like, "Has my husband gotten to his destination safely?" and that kind of thing. You know?
A lot of- this is all super theoretical. But this is what I'm trying to do. And so this maid is helping me. And I think I do trust her. I wouldn't do weird magic in front of her if i didn't.
And I think, in fact, like– she was the one- she sort of, like, had been watching me for a while and- and found a way to very politely raise, like, "Well, you know, where I'm from," or, "My mom always found that she could find secrets in rivers," and that kind of thing. Just, like, really talked around the idea that, hey, magic is pretty mundane to me. And we have been, like, quietly getting to know each other and trust each other a bit, and she is now, like, interested in helping me do this, or at least, like, I can trust her to do it.
And I didn't solve a problem exactly, but my powers or my strength did come up. So should I give it a token?
HB: I think this is pretty safely a win for the enemy. Gotta put a token on the World.
SATAH: No, I don't think so, because I didn't actually solve anything with it. I'm just experimenting with it.
HB: Let's try drawing the next card. The Nine of Pentacles. Okay! [Laughs] On that topic, "Your husband has left a man-at-arms to protect you. Who is he? Why don't you trust him?"
Yeah, I think this man is a bandit that my husband defeated in combat, and therefore earned the loyalty of. I think that's just how it works these days, you know? You kind of beat somebody in a duel, and then they're like, "Well, it seems that you're very powerful and strong, and I'm honestly kind of into you now."
And I think that's kind of the vibe here, where he did not take this man-at-arms along, and I think the thing of it is is that– and the reason why I don't trust him– is that it seems he's very displeased at being left here with me. He is like, "Hmm. I was looking forward to going on a quest of heroic proportions with the man that I might be a little bit in love with." And I think he is, as a result of that, kind of very sullen, irritable. I think he gives me strange looks now and again.
And of course, he also suspects that something is amiss with me, which is honestly one of the better reasons not to trust him.
But I think… actually, no, I don't think there's really a problem to be solved here. I simply don't trust him, and that is it. I don't think this is a token for either the enemy or my strength. He is just kind of around here, but it is good to have somebody around. It's just that I feel as though he will either snitch on me, kill me, or do something of that nature, and I think that's, you know, kind of a suboptimal way to be living- kind of a suboptimal situation to be living in.
SATAH: So the next pentacle is a three.
CHLOE: "There is one place in the castle you are afraid to go without protection.
CHLOE & SATAH: "Where is it and why will you never go there?
SATAH: "What danger does ignoring it bring, if any?"
CHLOE: Hmm…
SATAH: There's, like, a corridor that's really windy and has a tendency to blow candles out, and lanterns, if you're sort of walking around at night. They always go out. And there's, like- there are, you know, sconces put at the end of the hall to, like, relight your torch or whatever? Like, this is just a known quantity.
And so most people just traverse it. It's fine. Like it isn't awesome, it's annoying and it's dark, but most people just traverse it.
I… don't trust like that. [Laughs] I think even, like… maybe I- I was always a little trepidatious walking through it, and then one day as I was walking, my candle went out and as my eyes adjusted, it just, like… the moon was fully framed in this window at the end of the hall, part of the thing that like lets the draft in. And I was just seized with this terror, considering, like, my enemy being represented by the moon, you know, that I was just like… nope! This is the moon's hall. The moon watches here. And absolutely not. I'm not going there.
And I think that this- this, like- I can still get everywhere in the castle, but it does mean that at night, I have to take long ways around often. Like, this is, like, a sort of central hall, and I often have to, like, take much longer routes if I'm going between places alone. And I think I will go with other people, but I still prefer not to. [Laughing]
"What danger does ignoring it bring, if any?" I don't think it brings any danger in particular, at least not yet. Maybe in the future it will? Like, maybe I'm right that this is a bad omen and scary? But right now it's just a hall. That might come up later.
I guess I could say there might be some– there's social danger in that. Like, I annoy people by wanting to take long routes around. I maybe even sometimes ask them, like, if they're bringing food to me late at night or something, I might ask them… for not ask them, but heavily imply I would prefer not- for them not to go through that hall.
And… it definitely will become, like, a place that people can gather and be assured that I will not overhear or see them. I don't know that we've gotten to a point where, like, I'm in active danger from any amount of conspiracy at the moment, but, like, that's in the air for sure. That's all there.
CHLOE: I think that there is a tower room that I refuse to go to, because something in me just says that that place is dangerous. And the thing is that it is also dangerous to ignore it.
I think there's maybe a legend that someone died horribly in that tower room and that their ghost haunts it, and I don't know if that's true, but there is something… corrupted about that room. And I do not want to go there. I have no interest in it.
And I think it's also– it's… my husband's sort of private sanctum? Like, that's where he keeps a lot of the things that are most precious to him. And it is in some ways a relief to have him gone so that I don't have to argue with him about why I don't ever want to go into this room.
SATAH: And my third pentacle is… the four.
CHLOE: Ten.
HB: The page of pentacles. "There is an activity that you are fond of that you cannot perform whilst your husband is around for fear of his disapproval. What is it and why are you looking forward to doing it again?" Hmm. Let's see. Let's see, let's see, let's see… [Laughing] let me check the safety tab of this recording again.
CHLOE: "The steward of the castle looks at you with calculating eyes. What does he want from you?"
I mean, I think what he wants is for me to be too ignorant a housekeeper to notice that he is… I think, taking the people who– I think basically taking the, like, the peasants who labour for this castle for more than he should.
He thinks that I won't notice. He doesn't want me to notice. He wants to believe that I'm not intelligent. And, hone– you know, mileage may vary on how intelligent people think I am or how intelligent I am, but I can tell that he is cheating people, and that eventually this is going to be a problem.
HB: Okay. The activity that we do that our husband does not approve of is that I think we like to take solitary moonlight baths out in the nearby body of water. So in this case, that would be, I think, the nearby river.
And our husband objects to this on a number of criteria. The first is that we have to do this alone. The second is, of course, that we are washing ourselves in essentially a public place. And the third is, of course, that this is all a ritual in which we call out to the Virgin Mary who lives in the water.
Of course, we are– myself and my husband are both good Christians. However, there is a certain mismatch in our particular interpretation of Christian doctrine. In our case, we do believe in the Virgin Mary who lives in the nearby body of water, and he is… perhaps a little disquieted by it. I think to him, this reads a little bit like idolatry, or at least different from the kind of rites that he is accustomed to performing., and I think he, on some level, distrusts it.
However, I think for us, I am going to mark a token on my strength, because I think once we set our mind to it, once we realise that there is a kind of opening that we could just, like, you know… go and do it again, and that this would soothe our anxiety about, you know, where everything is going for us, I think we head out there and we resume our ritual. We, you know, experience communion with the Virgin Mary, we feel refreshed. There is a… I think we feel good for the first time in months, where there's a sense of, I'm here, I'm in the lake, I'm having a good bath, and maybe it'll all be alright in the end.
And we come back, and I think the man-at-arms we are tasked to lodge with notes that our mood is substantially lifted for the next few days, and is, of course, immediately reflexively suspicious of this. He, of course, has heard about the prophecy. He wonders what could possibly be going on.
SATAH: "As you stand by the gate, a man watches you from a window. What about his gaze makes your skin crawl?"
"As you stand by the gate, a man watches…" like, a window, like, in my… in this castle? Do I just live in part of the castle? Where- where is this- where's this man? Is he in my house? Because I don't like that.
I'm gonna pull from the major arcana, because this– the- the setup of this, I'm really unsure of.
I've pulled the Hierophant. Hierophant. Why do I– I'm always bad at pronouncing that.
"Hierophant, spiritual authority." Oh, shit. It's a priest. [Laughing] Or something like that. Like… yeah. Okay.
As I was sort of implying with, like, I won't just talk about magic to everybody, it isn't… like, I, uh, witch- witchin' is looked down upon. [Laughs] I think it's one of those things where, like… I- I know. I cannot stress- I cannot stress enough that I just am so– I don't know this genre very well, and so I'm gonna say some stuff. I'm gonna say some stuff that is true about my world that might not be correct for your standard Arthurian legends, and at's okay. Clearly I'm being defensive about it, but I know it's okay because I'm playing a tabletop role-playing game.
But I think it's the kind of thing where like– uh, I guess I'm a little bit inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series… but it's not as strict. It's like– it isn't that men who are magic users are respected and women aren't, but I think it's a class thing in part, you know? It's- if you are, like, a wealthy man or woman of means and it's almost, like, a leisurely intellectual activity, magic is cool.
But a lot of magic is seen as, like… the more utilitarian stuff is really looked down on. Like, people who are using magic to speed up labour, especially, like– you hear tales of a woman being caught using her, like, elemental water powers to do laundry a little bit more quickly so that she can, like, read a book by the lakeside? And it is, like, something that is talked of with disgust.
And it- I clearly, I mean- I have this castle. I live in this castle. My husband has this castle. But I think that what that would imply is that my background is not quite as royal, and so it's something that I would have to be very careful of.
And also, like, I'm not just doing fancy party tricks. I bet that that's something that, like– a woman of my social position doing magic at a party to, like, do some lights and stuff would be, like, gently, condescendingly almost applauded. Like, "Ohh, that's lovely. Look at her fun little trick." It's like learning to play piano and only showing it off for… clout. Kind of thing.
My magic isn't like that. My magic is not a party trick. It could be, I guess. I could be a weird human lie detector, but I think I'm not interested in playing around with it like that.
This man doesn't know all of this, but I think that my behaviour has started to get a little bit stranger, right? It's been a few weeks since my husband left, and I'm emboldened by my trusting relationship with my handmaid who will help me do weird magic.
And I don't think people necessarily know that I'm doing magic, but they do think that I am eccentric, and increasingly so. Very particular about fires being lit, how they're lit, what order they're lit in, when they're put out.
And it's just enough that if some sort of priest, we'll say, heard tell of this, he might start to get a little bit suspicious that I've got some, uh, dirty magic going on. Perhaps even… ooh! It's– I'm very focused on fire, apparently, so that's- that's givin' some devil red flags, you know? That's- that's some pact with the devil type shit.
So, yes. This is a priest. He's in my house?? The "watching you from the window" thing has really tripped me up, clearly. But I guess he could just- he could be visiting to make sure that I'm okay..?
Or maybe he's, like, visiting one of the servants, basically, right? Like the people who work in this castle. He's visiting to be like, "Oh, your mother died three months ago. I'm just checking in to see if you're okay," and while he's been doing this, he, like, hears some of this gossip.
And I have been just walking around, I think, inside of… the fence? The walls. I'm standing by a gate when this happens. So I think I've just been walking around the inside. And I look up and he's just staring down at me in deep suspicion. And I don't know what I've done wrong, but I do feel that I have done something deeply wrong, and that's unnerving. And I just duck my head away from him and keep walking.
HB: So yeah! First month. Didn't go so bad. Could have gone worse.
OUTRO
SATAH: This has been Folio, an actual play podcast about solo and otherwise self-paced TTRPGs. To find where you can find the show, check out foliopod.carrd.co. Sign up as a paid member at patreon.com/foliopod to vote on games and get early access to the bonus feed with edited audio-only versions of livestreams a while after they happen and occasional other stuff.
HB has games at gm36.itch.io and you can hear them on Indie Mixtape, a Moonshot Network podcast about indie games.
Chloe has games at smallstories.io including the upcoming Within the Walls, a Gothic fiction inspired haunted house hack of Good Society, and you can follow them at chloesobel on Twitter or smallstoriesgames.bsky.social.
I'm Satah and I have games at satah.itch.io. You can find my work generally at gaygothvibes.online and follow me on Bluesky at posatahchips.gaygothvibes.online.
Next week, HB and Chloe and I will continue our games of To Honour and Obey by Laurie O'Connel. Everything I mentioned here is linked in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening, and take care out there.