What is the origin of the Deck of Many Things?

Question

The Deck of Many Things has appeared in every edition of D&D so far, and while the exacting particulars have varied, the overall feel of the deck has remained consistent: the rules for how to draw cards, what the cards do, and when and where those effects happen (often immediately and in the presence of the card-drawer) are fairly similar across nearly 50 years since its first appearance in Greyhawk (1975), but never does the Deck of Many Things explain itself as an item - why does the deck exist, and why do these cards have these effects?

Is the Deck based on a real life equivalent? It calls out the usage of a Tarot deck for some later editions, but as I understand it, a deck of Tarot or Tarock cards were historically performing the same function as a deck of playing cards today: they were utilized in an established card game, not as a mystical or "magick" tool. Indeed, when Tarot cards are utilized for fortune-telling in fiction (or if you've ever had a tarot reading) the fortune-telling is never as immediate as what the Deck does.

Of course, this makes some sense for a fortune-teller: if the fortune teller were predicting a massive windfall (or a massive personal loss) for the customer that occurred starting right now, it would be much easier for the customer to identify the fortune-teller as a charlatan, a rogue, a scoundrel who is using the fear of future uncertainty to make money.

Fortune-telling itself usually relies on the vague interpretation of prediction, as well as some psychological elements of fear, uncertainty, and a lack of control... but the Deck, in many ways, does the opposite: it gives the creature control over the Deck, it gives the creature exacting certainty in its outcomes, and not a single card in the original causes fear of any kind. Moreover, the original Deck of Many Things has proportionally far more positive outcomes than negative outcomes (five negative outcomes out of a total of eighteen possible outcomes), making the Deck potentially a risky, but very "fun" element of the game, but also very different from a Tarot fortune-telling, where the cards have a roughly 50/50 chance of telling a good or bad fortune upon each draw. [Granted, the Deck itself claims to have a 50/50 split of good and bad outcomes, but this just doesn't square with the effects of the deck and the gameplay of D&D. Certainly, as the game evolved, this discrepancy almost certainly was noticed but not meaningfully corrected, which means that at some internal level, the Deck is operating as intended.]

So, why does the Deck of Many Things operate as it does? Is there a culturally relevant reason or reasons coming from fiction or real life that Gary Gygax or Rob Kuntz (or Dave Arneson or David Megarry or others that they were playing with those proto-D&D rules in 1972-4) may have had to create the Deck as such a potent, immediate, and yet somewhat controlled type of item? Is it even truly connected to Tarot in any meaningful way, or is the later cribbing of Tarot cards for use with the Deck a kind of appropriation for game purposes?

Answer 1

It originated in Gygax's D&D game, 1974-1975.

In Dragon Magazine #386 (April 2010), Bart Carroll and Steve Winter discussed the origins of the deck of many things, but were unable to discern exactly. Their best guess is that Gary Gygax, a long-time fan of games of all sorts, could easily have looked for a way to add playing cards to D&D.

According to this 2005 post, Gygax was a fan of card games since age five. Another 2005 post suggests Gygax was aware of early wargaming miniatures using playing cards for randomness, in an era before polyhedral dice were common.

The original Deck of Many Things in Greyhawk used 18 regular playing cards. The use of 22 tarot cards for the deck was introduced in Dragon Magazine #26 (June 1979), "Deck of Fate" by Kevin Hendryx. The AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide which added the 22-card Tarot-based deck of many things was published in August 1979, so it's possible that this article inspired AD&D's version as a last-minute addition.

According to Dragon Magazine #315, p.51, the original Deck of Many Things appeared in Gary Gygax's original campaign. Jim Ward, who joined his game in 1974, would use his campaign to playtest items for the game. We might presume from this that the deck of many things appeared in Gygax's Greyhawk campaign at some point between 1974 and the release of the Greyhawk sourcebook in 1975.

Jim Ward said this in a Q&A thread in 2011:

I was there at the invention of that magic item. We tried all sorts of things to avoid drawing bad cards, but Gary stopped them all from working. We all agreed that the deck was just too horrible to draw from.

From the limited evidence, it seems most likely that Gygax started with a deck of playing cards as his base, not tarot cards. They're exactly half good and half bad, and 18 cards makes sense if they originated as four cards of four suits plus two jokers, rather than an attempt to represent the tarot. Gygax wasn't known to have interest in tarot or occult (outside of an interest in mythology and occult-inspired literature).

In this post he asserted that did not believe in astrology or the occult, and so while he would likely have known what tarot cards were, he would not have been a tarot reader. However, he was a known fan of gaming stuff, and there are several instances where he put that into D&D (e.g. mahjong inspired the monk level titles and three of the five chromatic dragons).

While it's not certain exactly why Gygax created the deck of many things, the best we can tell is that he was its creator, and that it was probably inspired to some extent by his long-time love of playing cards, as well as how common cards were so that most players would have them available to use. Why exactly he made it into the game as a random boon or bane distributor, we may never know.