Yesterday’s mail had the fulfillment of my pledge to the World Architect Cards. I pledged at the level for a deck of World Architect Cards, and Dungeon Architect Cards, as I missed the Dungeon Architect Cards Kickstarter. It also includes a PDF of the deck and all stretch goals. This arrived May 20, 2016, and the stated delivery date on the Kickstarter is for September, 2016. Way to go and deliver ahead of time!
The Kickstarter was ran by Simian Circle Games, developer of Far Away Land. World Architect Cards is the fouth Kickstarter for Simian Circle Games, and the third to be funded. It took two tries to get Dungeon Architect Cards funded. Far Away Land did not grab my interest, and I missed the DAC Kickstarters. The WAC Kickstarter grabbed my interest.
DAC & WAC Side By Side
I’ve been busy with work and other real life concerns, so I didn’t open it until today. The box used was the right height to hold each deck and the width and length were packed with foam peanuts to hold both decks firmly in place. The tape job on the box plus the label placement hid exactly how the box opened. So I knew the contents should be in good condition.
The Dungeon Architect Cards is a deck of 54 cards with 53 DA cards and one instruction card. The tuck box is unlike any I have seen before, and makes for a tight fit to get the cards out. After taking the deck out a few times, I can already tell that I want a different box. I’ll stop by the FLGS and get a plastic box.
The DA Cards have a room on each side and each side has 12 descriptive words. You draw a card, pick which side to use by choice or coin flip, put it on your map with a description and decide which door to use for the next room, and repeat. There are cards for room, odd shaped rooms, corridors, and intersections.
There are five other cards that are not rooms. The five cards are Dungeon Lore, Settlement, Wilderness, Traps, and Treasure. They suggest ways to flesh out the dungeon and its surrounding area with categories of information and words for each category. For example, the Traps card has trap type, triggers, location, danger level, disarm difficulty, effects, and disarm by. These five cards alone can be used to help generate dungeons and their surrounding area across your map.
Unlike the DA Cards, the World Architect Cards were shrink wrapped and in a standard tuck box and the cards were easy to remove. There are 72 cards with 71 WA cards and one instruction card. I have the stretch goal deck, the way the rewards on the KS read, there is a 54 card standard deck for some pledge levels.
WAC provide locations that are either biomes (forests, desert, mountains, etc.) or builds (castles, bridges, mines, etc.). Each card is double sided, so 71 cards have 142 locations. There are a list of 15 descriptive words and a d6 option for weather. These cards can be used to create area maps, world maps, or random maps for hex crawls or being transported to a new location suddenly. One could also use them to describe illusions.
Some of the locations in the WAC deck are dungeons, so you can use DAC cards to build the dungeon.
Need a quick five room dungeon? Then draw five cards from the DAC deck. Or however many rooms you need.
I have an interesting idea for an experimental campaign. I will do a map and randomly place dungeons and then use the DAC and WAC decks to connect it all. I’m thinking a die drop table using d6’s and the number on the d6 is the location of the dungeon entrance on a hex map. I’ll pick a method to generate the number of dungeons over the map, and a method for how many rooms they have. I’m thinking I’ll use a desk pad for the drop so that their aren’t too many too close together. I don’t have hex paper that big so I’ll use a section of Gaming Paper. This experiment will give me a way to evaluate both decks in a way that will be useful for future use.
I don’t have time to implement this idea at the moment. I need to clean out my garage so I can get my kayak down and enjoy the lake now that the sun is shining.
EDIT: I found that Far Away Land has a YouTube Channel and they have this video on how to use the World Architect Cards.