Today's featured card is the Unburdened. I am a huge Clive Barker fan, and therefore I love the Hellbound Heart aka Hellraiser. Inspired by the movie, I wanted to show skin being shed, and as I thought about what meaning this image could have, I pictured our faces as the source of our identity. This brought me to the image you see here, which is an illustration of a scene from the 1960 French film "Eyes without a Face."
Upright
You are shedding your immaterial burdens, possibly as a result of a constant breaking of your own rules. You need to remain steadfast in your decisions based on morals or personal ethics to regain your footing and rebuild yourself from there.
Inverted
You are free from material burdens. You value the intangible, such as relationships and trust. But you may be at risk of losing your financial freedom as a result.
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For our secondary discussion, I want to to discuss the manual that will come with this deck.
For my previous Tarot Deck, I included a flyer with short adjectives describing each card. As this is an Oracle deck, and each card has not one, but two in depth meanings, I really needed to expound upon this manual.
At the bare minimum, I'm looking at 30 pages for just the descriptions of the cards. I've also written an introduction that explains the usage of all of the stretch goal items I wish to include, acknowledgements for the backers of the project, some card spreads, and game rules should you want to use the deck for some fun.
I'm not guaranteeing that all of it will make it into the manual, because the more I put in there the more design time and printing costs go into the final product.
I also played with the idea of making the first half of the book upright for the upright card meanings and the back half inverted, but am now thinking it would be obnoxious to try to find a card in two locations rather than just reading both descriptions in a single place. It would also cause havoc for my table of contents.
What are something you like to see or find unnecessary in your Oracle deck's manuals? What's a must have? Please explain in the comments below.
