I’ve heavily revised the Tarokka reading. It started from wanting to use a real Tarot deck, but expanded quite a bit from there.
I use the suit of the first card (from the low deck) to determine where the third Wizard of Wines gem is from four options:
Swords -> In the nest of the Roc of Mt. Ghakis
Wands -> In the Old Bonegrinder
Cups -> Animating Vasilka
Pentacles - The Heart of Sorrow
The second card (from the high deck) determines the identity of the ally, and I’ve removed Sir Klutz, Perriwimple, Clovin Bray and No Ally as options, replacing them with Muriel Vinshaw, Izek Strazni, a special option where the ghosts from the March of the Dead event in Barovia can Inspire the party instead of an ally, and an “unknown” option where I roll randomly for the ally.
The number of the third card (from the low deck) determines the location of the weapon, while the suit determines what the weapon is:
Swords -> Sunsword
Wands -> Gulthias Staff
Cups -> Thighbone of St. Markovia (in this case it doesn’t break after hitting a vampire)
Pentacles -> Holy Symbol of Ravenkind
The number of the fourth card (from
the low deck) determines the location of the Icon of Ravenloft
The number of the fifth card (from the low deck) determines the location of the Tome of Strahd.
The sixth card (from the high deck) determines Strahd’s starting location for the final battle.
For all the locations of the weapon, tome, and icon, instead of 40 options shared between them, each has 14 possible options (one each for ace-10, plus Page, Knight, King, and Queen) with no overlap. That’s a total of 42 possible treasure locations, so I added 2 new ones to the existing 40. But this allowed me to insure that each treasure can only appear in a location that is thematically appropriate to the treasure. No more sunsword shoved in a busted wine casket in the castle or tome of strahd in the hidden cache in the Abbey, the treasures can only show up in places it makes some semblance of sense for them to be in (some of them were still a bit of a stretch, but I did the best I could with what I was given).