The Conservatory by Devin Nelson is not about the esoteric. It is not about magic, or secrets, or what happens after death. These things may obsess the Keepers of the Conservatory to the brink of madness, but they do not concern you as a player. No. Your job in the Conservatory is in keeping the institution upright at all.
Mechanically, the Conservatory is built on very sturdy ground, and thanks a quartet of games for their influence in its opening pages. These four worldbuilding games all share the same general grammar. First, sketch out what you are building, create some moving parts, then put those moving parts through a series of prompts to develop a dynamic, breathing history. Most of these games use a deck of cards to shuffle the prompt order. The particular mechanisms of each game are quite distinct, serving their premise with care: watch a single plot of land over geologic time, or a struggling community over the course of a year, or a peculiar happening and the organization investigating it, or an ever-shifting city anchored only by its details. Each game lends the Conservatory something different and vital to its design without crowding out Nelson’s own voice.
The game's prompts leave the particulars of your institution’s Great Work up to you, as it ought to. The moves titled Advance the Work and A Strange Occurrence are two of seven Actualization Actions that a player might take on their turn. Advance the Work is what it sounds like; take some time between events to eke out some progress on the Great Work you've all gathered to perform. A Strange Occurrence explores what the Work could reveal about the world by describing its natural, inscrutable state. Both of these actions are entirely inventive, there is no oracle involved to prompt or limit the player; you are governed only by the fiction you've already established. The Work is ineffable, completely unconstrained by the text, and as genuine as you make it out to be.
Your institution, on the other hand, is besieged on all sides by the game. When playing with a full tarot deck, there is a 28%–or roughly 1 in 4–chance of pulling a Major Arcana card. The prompt for the first Major Arcana card you draw knocks the institution as you know it off balance; and the prompt for the second topples it completely. This happens every era. It is no small wonder that your society keeps failing, look at its odds! What IS a marvel is that it keeps getting back up, reinventing itself in the next era and striving to recover lost ground. Like its mechanical predecessors, the Conservatory is fated for, if not desolation, then catastrophic change. But the Work is as immortal as it is alluring; it only takes the barest of excuses to turn the next card and begin a new era. It's this repeatable cycle that sets the Conservatory apart from its professed lineage.
There is a sense of hopeful optimism there. “Maybe if we don’t make it, the next generation will.” And a foolishness as well; “it didn’t work out for them, but it’ll be different for us!”
Tarot is perfect for this game; the smith-waite deck is especially appropriate. Not just mechanically–but thematically, historically, muah, chef’s kiss. You’ve got cards chock full of esoterica straight from the horse’s mouth: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the blueprint for secret societies ever after, including a short fuse for destruction and a dozen offshoots for propagation. The history of occult tarot itself is people looking at the deck and going, ‘what if this meant something? No, really-no really, what if it did? What if we formed a society about it?’ approximately one hundred different times. (okay. Not that many. But at least an hour’s worth of times.)
All of which validates what the Conservatory conveys: organizations built for exploring and keeping secrets are extremely difficult to keep alive; and notoriously hard to kill. After all, through thick and thin, no matter what form it takes, we will always have the Work.