You have great affection for your friend when she tenderly enters your arms: but the joy that you two will have will not endure because she will deceive you.
one of the fortunes in Ragemon le bon
Ragemon’s Roll is a game from the Middle Ages. It’s fascinating in-game and as inspiration for the texture of the game - because it’s a roleplaying game.
In the category of games it comes from, there’s a series of fortunes written each as short disconnected verses. The players go around and get various fortunes, spinning some narrative or playing some part based on them. These fortunes in some cases are selected by dice, similar to many modern rpgs, but another common trick is to have a series of strings attached to each verse, and to tangle them up - the player picks one of the string ends and traces it back to find the verse it’s attached to.
The tangled web of strings is evocative of contemporary treaties and legal documents that could end up being marked with pendent seals from many witnesses (an equivalent to signing it) - and the name may originally come from such a legal document1. In any event, the idea of this complex nest of relationships is the basis for the term rigamarole - meaning incoherent or complicated processes.
The tangle makes it so that theoretically they had no idea what they’d land on… but in practice, that’s not true, is it? If you’re particularly good at spatial logic, or able to surreptitiously get a longer time to look at the cords, or just find one that’s not very tricky, I imagine you’d be able to pick your results with some ease. And the host or someone who’s played this game many times before may be able to recognize the strands almost like marked cards, and to know what all the possible options are.
In short, a group or part of a group playing this might be able to make the game as “random” as a Ouija board - fudging events one way or another.
And this is particularly interesting with many fortune’s focus on describing what different types of man and women are like, and playing out matters of love and romance. It’s easy for the game to let a group express thoughts and ideals about potential romantic partners2, or to experiment and think about life from a different personality or gender. And whoever can steer what opportunities come up can really puppet master things.
I've also been really intrigued by using the string mechanic in the game somewhere, as a nod and bit of period texture. It is a bit tricky as that’s a really hard artifact to make.