Visual Novel / The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood

Fortuna at her table

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a work of interactive fiction, developed by Deconstructeam (the creators of Gods Will Be Watching and The Red Strings Club), and published by Devolver Digital.

Two hundred years into her wrongful millennium-long exile, the immortal but depowered fortuneteller Fortuna has reached her limit. Aching to regain contact with the world, she recites a cursed incantation and summons a Behemoth, an ancient being older than the universe itself. The Behemoth, Abramar, is amused by her ambition, and pledges to help regain her power by crafting a deck of tarot cards more powerful than any other. Soon, Fortuna is reconnecting with old witch friends and making deals with the Arbiters overseeing her exile, but ends up caught in the middle of a political struggle that could determine the fate of the Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood forever.

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Tropes:

• Choice-and-Consequence System: The details of the contract Fortuna makes with Abramar and the predictions made during Fortuna's sessions can have long-lasting consequences that drastically alter the story, including whether some major characters live or die.
• Cutting the Knot: The Election Day Episode requires Fortuna to make daily decisions on which of her rivals to hinder, which of the voting demographics to pander to, and which allies to reach out to in order to guarantee success...or she can just use her Reality Warping tarot skills to look at her campaign's future and predict a win.
• Deal with the Devil:
  • Fortuna makes one at the beginning of the game, in order to regain access to magic during her exile.
  • One of Fortuna's fellow witches, Grethe, has made a pact with a Behemoth named Gaethëryan, which is clear by how it's warped half of her head. If Fortuna predicted that the Arbiter Thea would kill a witch, it leads to Grethe getting killed for this act, and Fortuna unlocking Gaethëryan as an arcane focus for her tarot cards. Alternatively, if Grethe lives, Fortuna can help her banish Gaethëryan and receive the arcane focus as a reward.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: While asking Abramar about his past, he can explain that the golden marks on his body are from kintsugi, the art of repairing fractures with lacquer and gold, due to one of his previous pact-makers using his gifts to attain a harem of lovers and said harem using their combined magic power to blast him to pieces when he wanted the payment for their contract.
• Dream Tells You to Wake Up: Late in the game, Fortuna gets a note that tells her to "wake up", and she seemingly does, finding herself back on the beach where she ascended, her friends telling her she almost drowned. They ask her several questions about the "delusions" she had in her supposed near-death experience... Only for Abramar to actually wake Fortuna up back on her meteor. Another witch used this trope as a Bait-and-Switch, sending her hallucinations from her past in order to pump her for information. It's possible to admit to some pretty serious secrets if you don't catch on, which hurt your election chances when revealed. If you've decided that you wanted Power when you sealed the Earth Arcana with Abramar, then, you can wake up on yout own very early and don't spill any real secret to your opponents because Aedana gave you an artefact which boosts your capacities.
• Election Day Episode: The final act of the story is an election between Fortuna and her friends Janice and Dahlia over who should inherit control over their coven from former leader Aedana, who's now just a corpse that acts as a conduit to the gods.
• The Exile: Fortuna begins the game at year 200 of a thousand-year-long banishment from reality, after undermining her coven leader Aedana's authority and accurately predicting when the coven would end.
• From Beyond the Fourth Wall: One endgame option allows for this, in a fashion. In order to save her friends, Fortuna can reveal via a reading that this is all just a computer game, and although it's ending soon and the player will shut off the game, they will all live on in the player's mind as they think of the game and characters once it's done.
• Gender Bender: Fortuna can potentially meet with a potential new apprentice to the sisterhood, who turns out to be pre-op transgender. A little bit of magic tea and some questions about the witch they'd like to become later, and the apprentice is physically transformed into the woman they want to be.
• Gender-Restricted Ability: Only women have the potential to become witches, as explained to a Supernaturally-Validated Trans Person.
• Golden Ending: By running an independent campaign instead of taking a friend's side and having one campaign goal being to use Aedana's corpse in a unique way, it's possible to break Fortuna's contract with Abramar and nullify the Sadistic Choice, granting the "Utopia" achievement.
• Granola Girl: Eva, one of the witches that Fortuna was friends with before her exile, is a vegan that wants Fortuna to predict humanity's distant future because she wants to know how to help as many people as she can.
• Metaphorically True: Fortuna attempts to justify whatever she sacrifices in her Sadistic Choice by claiming that "sacrifice" is not always synonymous with "death". The regular endings prove this to be the case, as whatever's sacrificed isn't gone. It's just that Abramar's the one that owns it now, whether that means having the coven worship him as their new god or keeping a life hostage in order to control Fortuna. How bad this is depends on Fortuna's relationship with Abramar and what she's predicted will happen with how witches and Behemoths treat each other in the future, though Fortuna won't be completely satisfied even in a best-case scenario.
• Mortality Ensues: One potential sacrifice Fortuna can make to seal her contract with Abramar is her immortality. If this is her choice, unless you go for the Golden Ending, she lives out the rest of her normal human lifespan on Earth, though her witch friends keep in touch with her. How she feels about this is determined by player choice and a card reading.
• Natural Elements: Magic, including Fortuna's infused deck, is fueled by four basic elements: Air, for stability; Water, for emotion; Earth, for strength; and Fire, for growth. The deck Fortuna crafts must start with a card that's purely attuned to Air, due to Abramar giving her access to only one element in that tutorial, but by choosing specific divinations in readings, later cards can have mixed affinities that can affect what interpretations are accessible during future predictions.
• Plant Person:
  • The fourth potential candidate during the Election Day Episode is Cupressa, an ancient witch that's completely forsaken humanity to become a tree with the face of a woman, who believes that the human qualities of her rival candidates like empathy and ambition will prevent them from acting completely selflessly and impartially. She's also hiding the fact that she's in love with former coven leader Aedana.
  • One reading of Jasmine's future can predict she gradually merges with her magical garden to become one of these. This eventually happens if you make that choice, due to Fortuna's Reality Warper powers, but not until after the events of the game.
• Prisoner's Dilemma: Wunn essentially forces Fortuna into this during the lead-up to the election. She offers her services to magically sabotage any of the other candidates, but makes it clear that if you don't take her up on her offer, she'll give the same offer to the others.
• Production Throwback:
  • When designing a new card for Fortuna's tarot deck, one of the backgrounds is The Red Strings Club itself, and three of the arcane focuses are "The Bartender", AKA Donovan from said game; "The Astronaut", AKA Liam from Gods Will Be Watching; and "The Florist", AKA Sebastian from Eternal Home Floristry (part of the Essays on Empathy collection). The player can also obtain a super arcana named "The Coppersmith", featuring the character of the same name from Dear Substance of Kin, a game found in the same collection.
  • If Fortuna "predicts" that her main friend group will get closer following the introduction of a fourth member, this person will turn out to be Larissa, the marketing director from The Red Strings Club.
• Reality Warper: Upon making a contract with Abramar, he notes that Fortuna's newly-enhanced power of foresight doesn't just read the future; it rends the cosmos themselves in order to make her predictions truthful. Fortuna is horrified when she eventually realizes that this isn't a new change, and she was always a "writer" of the future instead of a "reader", because it means she's responsible for giving her sister Patrice the powers of a witch and a fated death from bone cancer during a reading.
• Sadistic Choice: In order to complete her Deal with the Devil, Fortuna must choose one of three things she will inevitably sacrifice: her immortality, her coven, or the one she loves the most. With the latter two, Fortuna can try to justify her choice by stating the contract doesn't guarantee death, just "sacrifice"; it's also possible that they could split apart due to something like ideological differences.
• Seers: Fortuna is one, channeling her powers through her tarot deck. When she was merely a child, she predicted how her older sister would die, and claims that she's never made an incorrect prediction since. It turns out, though, that she's really been a Reality Warper all along.
• Schrödinger's Question: Some readings involve events which happened in the past, and whichever option you choose becomes retroactively true. This is actually what is happening in-universe as well, as the readings magically "stitch together" reality so that those things occurred. Fortuna is, at first at least, more than a little freaked out by this.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the unlockable arcanum for Fortuna's deck is the Penitent One from Blasphemous. Dialogue with Grethe can also mention an "Inquisition of Cvstodia."
  • There is a scene in which a character wonders aloud about the next Dennaton Digital game, explicitly referencing Hotline Miami.
• Stepford Smiler: One of the first readings of the story is a visit with one of Fortuna's old friends, Dahlia, who wants to know the truth of how Fortuna's been holding out all these years. Fortuna offers to just tell her, but Dahlia insists on using the cards because she's worried that Fortuna might be lying to even herself. No matter what card is placed in the appropriate position, it shows that Fortuna's been suffering, such as stating how much she resents her friends for not advocating for her when she was banished or how she used to mutilate and regenerate herself in anguish...but since Fortuna is also the only one that can understand her new cards, she claims that it didn't work and she can't do readings on herself instead of being honest.
• Supernaturally-Validated Trans Person: The potential apprentice witch that Fortuna can meet with is a transgender woman. Other witches immediately identify her as female because only women have the potential to become witches.
• Tarot Troubles: Gameplay is centered around crafting your own tarot deck and telling the fortunes of the guests to your asteroid home. Depending on the cards created and where they're drawn, Fortuna can make various life-altering predictions, such as judging whether a magic garden refuses to grow because of sabotage, malnourishment, or weeds.
• Third Eye: The Behemoth that Fortuna summons for her Deal with the Devil has one, as well as an eye on its chest. Upon making the pact with Abramar, Fortuna gains one herself, but is able to hide it when dealing with visitors. Depending on your choices, you can also slot in Aedana's third eye into your own, giving you even more clairvoyant power.
• Tragic Villain: Louise is a very nice, shy woman. She is also tasked by Aedana with provoking World War III, something she very much doesn't want to do, but is threatened with exile if she doesn't comply with her orders. This makes her turn to Fortuna for advice, and how it resolves can vary based on the reading you perform.