Actual Test: Deck Of Worlds

I need to build out the surrounds about my starter town - and what just arrives in the door? The Story Engine and The Deck of Worlds. I set the Story Engine aside for now because the Deck of Worlds was exactly what I needed to shake some life into a regional hex-crawl. I got this from a kickstarter where it scratched two itches, that of dabbling novelist and also of dungeonmaster. The sub-title across the front of the box says 'the deck of endless world building' and I can see this getting a lot of use if it works.

The box comes with an 8-page booklet, 6-pages are the instructions - how the deck works, creating microsettings, interpretting a microsetting, creating a world map, building nuanced worlds, multiplayer rules and how to combine with the Story Engine deck. My campaign is manifesting as a zoom down into a region, based around a tavern in a fly-speck town. I have a global scale map, but I need to build out a region, so we are going to try about half of these.

Besides the instructions we get 6 stacks of cards - Regions, Landmarks, Namesakes, Origins, Attributes and Advents. Each deck is square with nice, non-specific art - not as clearly fantasy-land as the Izirions West Marches Location Deck - but it is supposed to be more universal than that. RPGs are just one subset of users.

The process from the instructions is to:
1. Draw a Region to establish terrain type
2. Draw a Landmark and tuck it beneath the region so one of the two options is showing to give a point of interest
3. Draw a Namesake and place it so either the region or landmark is named with one of the four options to create in-world names
4. Draw an Origin card and tuck it under the region or landmark to leave one of the four options showing and detail the history of the location
5. Draw an Attribute and do similar to give the present day features
6. Draw an Advent card and place it the same way to finish with 'gunpowder' - crisis points or looming change

For a blank bit of the map I had nothing in mind so I just drew openly which serves as a good demo. I pulled a mountain card for Region, then a Landmark card with the Dump option which seemed interesting. The Namesake card had 'of Orchards' which I applied to the Region (Mountain). Next the Origin card has an option of 'abandoned when mineral deposits ran out' which I applied to the Dump to explain that - its a slag tip. The Attribute card had an option of 'known for rare wildlife' that I also applied to the Dump. An alternative on that was 'known for vineyards' which could have applied to the Mountain but then we have vineyards and orchards and not much more interesting for that. Lastly we draw an Advent card which gave 'people are demanding reparations from a former colonial power' which fits neatly to post-mining dump.

Interpreting this we have a mountain, once known for its orchards, perhaps still with some remaining, but mostly featuring the devastating remnants of a mining operation by a former imperial power. The slag tips are home to some strange creatures - perhaps rust monsters, xorn or other mineralvores? - and the locals are beginning to coalesce into demanding the imperial power fix this. Neat, I can work with this.

Re-focusing on our initial task, of laying out the lands around our starter town - here the selections were guided by what I knew already but I also got a couple of interesting revelations. I knew it was a town on a cliff so Region (City) and Landmark (Slope) were fixed; similarly Attribute (Strong Winds) stemmed from the cliff. The towns name 'of Broken Promises' is intriguing - what promises, broken by whom? I knew that there was an abandoned hold at the top of the town, but the Origin card reveals it was 'home of a vanished people' - so not part of local political or recent events, this is old, from an earlier time. Interesting - particularly when combined with an Advent card that has 'sightings of rare creature are making headlines' - are the old residents returning?

Broadened out to the surrounding regions - I picked the 'region' cards to match the global map from a delta at the coast back through a bayou to a swamp for the large regional wetlands south of the river. Our northern edge is the river and to the south our bounds are a coastal rainforest and inland hills.

Running through the process for all of these turns up a bunch of interesting things with plenty of adventure potential.
- down in the delta a community of exiles is engaged in a great work
- in the bayou by the town some old relic is lost in the waters and people claim the stars are going out
- the swamps to the west are undergoing an ecological catastrophe which is bad because it is the origin of rare herbs
- to the south east, earthquakes are revealing hidden sections of a ruin occupied by fighting monks
- to the south west the hills are marked with ancient structures which have started generating contaminated run-off. Are the structures in the hills causing the problems in the swamp? Is this linked to the sightings in the city?

All together this is really quick to do, generates tons of hooks and gives a nice depth to each location such that they are more than single-dimension stage sets and they will stand up to at least some poking and prodding by adventurers.