My little bro and I made an oracle deck from the stars of Zi Wei Dou Shu (purple star astrology): Six of the stars here
Zi Wei Dou Shu (known as Purple Star astrology) is practiced across China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and much of East Asia.
It casts your birth date and hour into a chart of 12 life palaces (love, wealth, career, health, and so on). Named stars are placed across them, roughly 108 depending on the school.
You can read a Western chart without a birth time, a Zi Wei chart can't be cast without the hour.
For all its popularity, Zi Wei Dou Shu is famously hard to get into. A chart is a grid of star names in text. The stars never had illustrations the way tarot has. We wanted the stars to be learnable by looking at them, so we gave each one a face.
This deck is 72 of those stars, one card each. The names are my English renderings but every card keeps the star's actual chart meaning, hard edges included:
1. Peach Blossom (桃花, Táo Huā)
Love, charm, sexiness.
"Peach blossom luck" still means a wave of romantic attention across East Asia.
2. Great Gate (巨門, Jù Mén)
Rumor, dispute, mystery.
One of the major stars, and a dark one: the star of what's said, whispered, and left unsaid.
3. Wolf of Desire (貪狼, Tān Láng)
Versatility, charisma, ambition.
The most magnetic and most restless star in the system; in a chart it marks where appetite drives you.
4. Integrity (廉貞, Lián Zhēn)
Righteousness, lust, fiery.
The tradition puts discipline and desire on the same star deliberately: one force, two directions.
5. Emperor (紫微, Zǐ Wēi)
Leadership, power, mercy.
The star the whole system is named for, everything else is read relative to it.
- Warrior (七殺, Qī Shā)
Conqueror, authority, arbiter.
It is literally "Seven Killings" - the general's star; in a chart it marks where you fight.
The art dresses the stars across those cultures. Great Gate wears a Vietnamese layered robe and head-wrap, while the Emperor's beaded crown is the imperial dress of both Chinese and Vietnamese courts.
Why an oracle deck from Purple Star astrology?
A chart is fixed. Your birth date and hour decide which stars sit in your palaces, that part is calculation, not chance.
The deck is the free-will half. You're born carrying certain stars, but nothing stops you from taking up any of the 72 as a symbol to work with on a given day.
The chart tells you what you have, a draw is choosing what to reach for.
My little bro is an astrologer and tarot reader, and I build games. Happy to answer questions about the stars or how the deck came together!