Cards Are Quite Fun

As a player a GM I don’t use miniatures, battle maps and frequently even a map. As a player I am happy to go along with whatever the GM likes, but if things get too tactical I tend to get anti-tactical. In one group I play with they are constantly trying to maneuver for flank and rear attacks. When things turn into a war game start trying to express my characters personality through movement. If they want to build a barricade to hide behind all I see is a stage to stand upon and issue challenges. I love ju,ping on things and striking a pose, well my characters do, I am more likely to fall off anything I jumped up on.

The point of this rambling is that, I have been playing with oracle decks recently and I quite like them. I don’t see cards in the same way as all the other paraphernalia that we can bring to the table.

I have a long history of using card decks. Devil’s Staircase Wild West is entirely card driven, no dice are used at all. The solo oracle from Devil’s Staircase became the underpinning for my Savage Worlds Solo rules.

When I made the Troika! oracle deck it had the most basic of instructions, no real rulebook, everything was on the cards.

This month I put out a supplement for solo playing anything from Delta Green to Call of Cthulhu to Dark Streets to Eldritch Tales. I don’t normally do system neutral stuff, but that is how this one turned out. Last week I updated the booklet, and this week I ended up creating a card deck for it.

The thing about d100 games is that they need a lot of cards to be really random.it isno good knowing that the 00 is already in the discarded pile. You need at least two of everything to ensure all the options remain in play.

So, yes, this is a 200 card deck. At one point it was 400 cards, but I need bigger hands to shuffle them. 200 cards is a nice chunky deck, and I use both sides, just in different ways.

I uope to get these out next week. They work really well with any d100 modern cthulhu game, big or small. If you have Rogue Handler, these cards extend some of the tables in the book, and add more in the way of NPCs.

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