Quest!

As part of the project I want to rework a lot of the cards and how they work. I did originally consider just using the existing card designs, but they are looking dated and didn’t allow for the extra cards or data that I have in mind.

There are a few areas that I wanted to look at when reworking the Event cards.

1. Stats. The original version of the spawn cards included stats and special rules for each monster, which is fine when you have 2 or 3 types appearing, but when you get to higher level tables it starts to get ever so crowded on those cards. I ran an experiment and you had to make the font so small it was nigh on impossible to read. It also makes it difficult to update monsters when you’re fiddling with the rules. This does mean that there will need to be reference sheets for the monsters though. But that’s a later problem.
2. Level. The original cards had no indicator of what level they were supposed to be for, so if you created your own using that layout, you could accidentally end up with a really unbalanced adventure one way or another
3. Keywords. I have this thing about an adventure or story making sense, weird I know. the original Monster tables were a complete mash of races. I know some other creators have one a great job with race specific tables, but I figure, if all the Event cards are keyworded it will be easier to generate random dungeons that actually make sense without needing a GM.
4. The Gold icon. There was just something about that Gold coin that I found hard to read…

So, taking a leaf out of our design books at work, I used one of the largest spawn groups from the tables as a reference point and started to play around with some new layouts. So far, this one is winning. The red area will be cut off in the printing phase.

I decided to do away with the photos to save some space. The gap at the bottom is reserved for special rules for a card, for example you could give a group Ambush to show they were prepared for the party, or maybe this is a very poorly prepared set of monsters, so they are already injured from a previous fight and start with fewer wounds than normal. There may also be other events triggered by this one, so it could ask you to search for X event and immediately play that as well (then reshuffle of course!).

The keywords at the bottom allow for simple categorisation of the card for an adventure, or for adventures (or other events) to modify this card further; for example there may be a grudge match between Pestilens and Eshin, so they also fight each other if they can’t get to the adventurers.

The small number you see down the bottom will be a unique number for this card, allowing for some adventures to use a predetermined set of cards.

Now all it needs is a back design!