Utility Decks

Today we are printing up the most recent iteration of our decks. Included are four utility decks. We've found that the useful item and trap decks are incredibly handy. In fact if you've been at any of our events you might have gone home with a useful item deck. We've gone to great lengths to keep them fiction first and therefore system agnostic. But there is no doubt that they come directly from our play of Dungeon World, but having played many, many different systems I know they will end up on the table there as well.

Our utility decks are simple to use. Pull two cards, using the top from one (usually white) and the bottom from the other (color coded - blue = items, silver = weapons, red = traps, purple = enchantment). So you end up with a Key tied with a golden ribbon or a poisoned potion (trap) of ignobility. Each part has some fiction to get your creative juices flowing. Our two new decks have less refined text - getting them into play will help shape that a bit, and they will not have art yet. Cards where art makes sense will be fully illustrated. This is how they break down:

Useful Items

This set of cards gives you 20 mundane items (we currently have over 30 in our playtest deck and more we'd like to add, more on that later). Additionally there are 20 descriptors that can be combined with the items to give you a huge variety of item possibilities.

Traps

This set of cards gives you 20 different traps. On the bottom of each card is a descriptor to make the trap unique.





Weapons

A third deck of cards gives you 20 different weapons, melee and ranged, and pairs them with descriptors to make each weapon special and memorable to your players. No more troves of longswords - you will be a believer in the power of variety! These cards are new so the descriptions are basic and just waiting for fiction to be added.




Enchantments

Our final new utility deck is a bit different than our other decks. An enchantment is a descriptor that can be added to any item or weapon card. Heck, you could add it to a monster or a trap just as easily as well. Our initial deck has 10 cards, each with two different descriptors. That's 20 seed for building unique magic items!



More...

As the campaign unfolds we fully expect to add more and more utility cards to our decks. We have printed up a pile of blank cards to use as inspiration hits to create new utility cards and get them into play testing as soon as possible.

Additionally we are toying with fiction seeds for failures, boons, and curses. Boons and curses might end up as an addition to the enchantment deck - this is still a work in progress.