The Harrow deck is considered to be innately invested with power (that can be read to wrest information about a person’s life, or controlled to subtly influence events), and so must be treated with respect: disrespecting the deck leads to ruin.

The Harrow deck is a sacred tool of Varisian fortune-tellers. They use this deck for a form of divination to tell customers whether they should hope for the best or prepare for the worst. Some of these decks are elaborately illustrated, but most of them are nothing more than paper with hand painted images. The more elaborate Harrow decks are passed down through the generations. Between their heirloom status, and the powers that Varisians believe that the Harrow deck contains, most users of these cards treat them with respect and care

The deck consists of 54 individual cards, each of which symbolizes a topic and moral stance. Each card has a symbol for the six basic attributes of a creature: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. Each symbol is arranged on the face of the card to represent its ethical dimensions (lawful, neutral, and chaotic) and moral dimensions (good, neutral, and evil). The Queen Mother, for example, has a star in the center-left, so it is the lawful neutral card of wisdom.

Each of the six basic abilities also indicates a broader symbolic topic. Similarly, the ethical and moral dimensions of a card represent its temporal position and outlook: the lawful ethic represents past events; the neutral ethic represents present events; the chaotic ethic represents future events; moral good represents a positive outlook; moral neutrality represents an unclear outlook; and moral evil represents a negative outlook. Harrowers that perform a harrowing for evil subjects may do a reverse reading, in which negative cards are bad for the subject’s foes, and positive cards reflect well for the subject’s foes.

One alternative use of the Harrow deck is the sacrilegious gambling game called Towers, upon which Varisians typically frown, as they regard the Harrow deck as sacred.