Tarot-based narrative generation

Abstract

Tarot has been used for centuries as a method to give structure to storytelling, both in game and fortune-telling settings. As such, tarot cards have developed over time, expanding the symbolism and depth of meaning associated with each card. This provides a corpus for a large number of possible stories, making tarot a rich area of exploration for story generation. Therefore, we have created a tarot-based narrative generation system that creates short movie-like story synopses, along with a tagline one might see on a movie poster. This project is in early development; we have created a prototype as a proof of concept. The project exists as a webpage that an interactor can use to draw new tarot cards for the story spread (card layout) and generate new stories from them. In this paper we discuss the details of our system and describe more details about the tarot as a corpus. We also discuss future areas of exploration based on our proof of concept.