The Turning and the Arcana: Should Some Stories Stay Buried?

This post has been a struggle to write, but I think it’s necessary to document everything I’m doing. I put The Turning out there, available for sale, which means anyone can get their hands on it, break it apart, and start playing. For me, a brand-new game designer, that’s incredible: a validation that the hours of research, writing, rewriting, tweaking, and doubting myself might actually be worth something.

But at the same time, there’s a definite knot of trepidation in my gut. It’s hard to describe, but it feels like a pinched little twist of dread, whispering that maybe I was wrong to put the game out there. I do remind myself that no one is likely to notice it since I’m a complete unknown. I could always take it down and bury it again. That thought helps me sleep at night.

The source of my dread circles around one question I can’t push away:

What if what my so-called “cousin” Joe has been telling me is right?

If you’re just catching up, Joe isn’t really a cousin, at least not one I believe is related to me by blood. They showed up claiming some family connection, but even that’s murky. They found me after I went public about the photocopies of a centuries-old box of letters and documents I’d received from my mom, which later inspired The Turning and the entire five-game Saga of El Castigo. Joe knew details in those pages I hadn’t even shared yet, which is the only reason I gave them any of my time. Since then, they’ve become this strange voice in my ear, warning me about what I’m doing, yet also encouraging me to keep going. Sometimes they’re helpful. Sometimes they sound like the villain in a pulp novel. It’s like having a creature on my shoulder, flipping from angel to devil in the same conversation. And I can’t always tell which is which.

Their most recent drama? Joe told me I had no idea what I was putting into the world. That was the phrase, nearly word for word.

I pushed back, naturally. What am I really putting into the world? It’s a card game. It’s a story built from some fascinating source material. Sure, making games out of a strange pile of 19th-century letters and clippings about a place called El Castigo is a little unorthodox, but every creator takes inspiration from somewhere. This story landed in my lap. That the boomtown supposedly existed in the desert and then vanished is not that weird. Plenty of towns faded away in the Old West. A lot of stories got buried, lost to time or to the wilderness. I’m only pulling one back into the light.

Joe disagrees.

A few weeks ago, they recommended I read The Secret History of the World by Mark Booth. I’d seen it before in the same used-book bins where I found Swedenborg and Manly Palmer Hall, so the title didn’t scare me off. Since it was free on Amazon, I downloaded it. I’ve read plenty of esoteric texts: half of them want you to believe there’s a secret code behind everything, the other half read like the rantings of megalomaniacs inventing their own mythos, and sometimes the line between the two is impossibly thin. Still, I picked it up, because Joe made it sound essential to understanding their anxiety about The Turning.

When I asked them, plainly, what exactly was so dangerous about making a game out of these stories, Joe went graphic. They told me, “the puppets are better off not knowing about the hands up their asses.”

Come on, dude.

Joe’s main problem is that I tried to stay faithful to the shapes of the Arcana symbols used in the game. I thought they were interesting, an authentic visual anchor for the story’s mood. Cards, talismans, wooden discs — these things are tied to gambling and ritual, to fortune telling and the desperate faith you’d find in a dying mining camp. They’re symbols, nothing more.

Joe insists I’m wrong. They say these shapes are more than symbols, that they operate on people in ways I can’t even comprehend. That they carry something older and meaner than the tale of a dried-up silver mine and a burned-out town.

I pushed back then, and I still push back, because I cannot believe a set of geometric marks on cardstock can do anything more than amuse or intrigue. But even while telling Joe they were being paranoid, a tiny voice in me wondered. Because claiming to understand what you don’t understand is its own kind of arrogance.

I have to ask myself honestly: what if Joe is right?

What if there is more to these symbols than I realize? What if repeating them in a modern context is like winding up some old machine that’s been quiet for 150 years?

I’m trying not to get carried away. I want to believe I’m too rational for that. But Joe’s warnings still creep into my head, usually at night.

And I’ll be honest, there’s a mischievous streak in me that kind of delights in the possibility it could be true. That maybe I’m opening Pandora’s box. I guess it’s the subversive part of me that’s always gotten me in trouble, a little voice cheering from the corner while the rest of me worries.

The last thing Joe told me was a warning that now the game is out, I should expect strangers to contact me. They said there would be people with oddly specific questions, asking about the letters, about the rules, about how I pieced it all together. They told me to be careful with whom I share the photocopies, because there are people who might see far more than I do in those smudged pages.

I’m not the sort to slip easily into conspiracies, but something about Joe’s tone made my skin crawl. And yet, who doesn’t love a good conspiracy theory, right?

Still, that’s the part I’m taking seriously. For now.

I haven’t handed out the full photocopies to anyone except my mom, who ended up with the box after it arrived at her place. She didn’t even know about the documents at first; they were buried in a crate of family memorabilia. I’m probably the first person in decades to lay eyes on them.

So that’s where I’m stuck. I’m proud of The Turning. It’s a solid design, and I think it captures the atmosphere and moral stakes of what happened in El Castigo, even though I have to remind myself daily that those events were real. Real people lived, schemed, and died. Real people vanished, with nothing left but a name scribbled on a map, then crossed out.

But what if Joe is right?

What if I’ve built a doorway instead of a game?

The rational part of me laughs that off. This is a product. A creative project. A story dressed up in cards and rules, with a bit of mystery for flavor. The more cautious part of me isn’t laughing. And that little devil in my head is still giggling in the corner, rubbing its hands together.

I keep looking at the Arcana symbols. They’re classic, perfectly suitable to the time from which they came. I know them well enough now that I could draw them blindfolded. I tried once as a test, and the lines fell exactly where they should have. That spooked me. I can draw, but I’ve never been that accurate, especially drawing blind.

When I built the game, I had to redraw those symbols again and again to keep them as close to the originals as possible. I thought it was a mark of respect. Joe thinks that was a terrible mistake, that their power is carried in the precision of those lines.

I don’t know how much I buy into that. But the older I get, the more I realize certainty is a luxury — and I’m no longer certain.

I want to tell people to go play the game. Experience the story. Dig into the puzzle of El Castigo and see what truths they can uncover. But I also want to tell them not to look too hard, not to dig too deeply into things that might look like coincidences, but maybe aren’t.

Joe thinks there is danger in telling the story this way, in letting players wander through a landscape built from symbols that might have once belonged to someone — or something — else. That sounds far-fetched. But then I remember what was in those letters, the talk of control, of signs, of ownership.

Maybe it’s only a game. Maybe it’s something more.

If you’re reading this, you’re part of that question now.

I suppose I should hit publish. But if you don’t hear from me for a while, remember Joe’s advice. Be careful who you trust with the game, and if anyone asks you about the shape of the Arcana, it might be safer not to answer.

For all our sakes.