I've made up several decks for hirelings. 1 stack of 20 standard level 1 characters, 1 stack of 20+ mercenary soldier squads (each soldier named and everything) and 1 stack of 20 dungeon lackeys (torch-boys, pack haulers, specialists of various sorts). The plan is to shuffle them together and each game month, if anyone wants to recruit, draw a certain number of cards from the big deck depending on which town the players are located.
I've has some more deck thoughts. I read an article in "Fight On"--an old-school D&D fanzine, published through Lulu's print-on-demand service--about a guy with a deck of miscellaneous stuff he deals out. It ranges from a bag of ashes, to a set of +1 leather armor. I think having a deck of random stuff might be awesome beyond words. You could throw in maps, clues to where dungeons might be, possible patron leads, plus all sorts of mundane but potentially useful stuff.
At one point I was thinking of having a random event deck, mostly stacked with "world around you" events. Perhaps a faminine might hit at all food and maintenance might be doubled, or maybe vikings attack, or the truce with Old Ones breaks down, or a new monster clan moves to the Badlands.
Is this one deck too many? Or can there ever be too many decks?
I got a kick out of the 'deck of random encounters' that we used in the Trolls campaign. It was funny to see everybody treat a couple of peasants out digging mushrooms like they could well be some demonic warlock and it's bound demon plotting a trap on us. After dealing with the random 'bonus' cards in Slipstream, I'm convinced that there can never be too many decks.
ReplyDeleteWith the random item deck I was thinking you should be constantly adding to the deck to keep it mixed up. I was also thinking it might be kind of nifty to maybe lay out some guidelines, and encourage the players to come up with new item cards to add to the deck on a regular basis. I'm sure we've all come across snazzy items in other games that would make good additions to the random deck.
Of course, you're right. What was I thinking? You just can't have too many decks.
ReplyDeleteI recall a D&D campaign years ago. The DM was looking through an old dragon magazine I had, and happened to find one that had a card stock 'Deck of Many Things' in it. He asked if he could use it and I said it was fine. When the game started, the party found a Deck of Many Things. The more experienced players, of course, kept the hell away from it. One guy, a person relatively new to the game and playing a particularly dim dwarf fighter, took the thing for himself. At least once a game, he would draw a card (and let anybody else draw it if they wanted). He had unbelievable luck, never pulled any of the 'you are totally screwed' cards, and any bad cards he pulled were overshadowed by the good ones. Kept the deck all the way to the end of the campaign, even tried to convince the main villain to pull a card in the hopes he would pull a bad card to end the final battle in short order.
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