Choosing a Major Arcana

Players each choose a major arcana that resonates with them.

This is like choosing a Class in a class-based RPG: your Major Arcana represents the broad archetype into which your player fits, and provides a variety of abilities and skills within that archetype.

The Major Arcana available to the players are:

Each Arcana provides a handful of changes to the game: The Fool, for example, can treat "The Fool" as a wildcard, and gains the Lucky ability.

Each Arcana also provides a Skill: The Magician, for example, has "This Was All Part of My Plan". The Skill is intended for use outside of combat, although the Skill can be used in Combat with the Movement/Skill Check ability.

Each Arcana has a suite of Arcana Abilities. At the beginning of combat players will be selecting 2 (or more) of these abilities.

These are powerful combat abilities that only your Arcana can use, and you can choose a different set for every combat situation you encounter!

Each Arcana Ability comes with a Corruption Upgrade: you can mark Corruption Points on the Corruption Upgrade. When all three of the Corruption Circles are filled, you gain the Corruption Upgrade, which makes the Arcana Ability more powerful AND gives you that Arcana Ability for free, every combat.

Arcana Are Not Gendered

The High Priestess card seems feminine, The Fool card seems masculine, but the Arcana don't specify which gender the character playing them is. A male High Priestess is entirely valid. If it makes you more comfortable, you may choose to call the Arcana "The High Priest" in that case.

The only Arcana that are explicitly gendered are The Empress (feminine) and The Emperor (masculine) respectively, where the gender is the whole point of the card. The Empress is the card of femininity, so the Arcana is feminine. This doesn't imply biological sex, but in this case it would, in fact imply gender: The Empress is not likely to be non-binary or masculine, unless they're actively suppressing their Arcana. (also: The Empress is not yet a playable Arcana, so it's kind of a moot point.)

Like a Class? What Do You Mean?

So, the game Dungeons & Dragons, the predecessor to most modern tabletop TPGs, introduced the idea of Character Class, which is a broad archetype for your character. There are lots of different characters you can be as a Fighter: a lone wolf with a cape rolling in to a dusty frontier town, a three-foot-tall powderkeg with a broadword longer than he is and a Napoleon complex, or a man named Gary from Accounting who just happened to find a sword behind a photocopier and is now the Chosen Gary. Regardless, as a Fighter you're always going to be good at swinging a sword and smashing up goblins.

Class indicates some things about your character, like what abilities are avilable to them when they fight, but you're free to interpret any other details not otherwise specified.

But Class Leads to Exploitation of the Proletariat by the Bourgeoisie!

Whoa there, Karl Marx, we're talking about RPG classes, not social ones.

Can I Make My Class Even Classier By Listening to Jazz and Drinking an Old Fashioned?

Yes.