The Deck of Illusions

A curious thing

A deck of illusions, showing the available cards remaining.

A deck of bicycle cards, with Deck of Illusions written on the front, on a beige surface.

The cards removed from the deck, and sitting beside. They are blue with a somewhat room-like pattern on the back.

The cards all spread out on the fabric, many of them still covered, but showing about a dozen of the cards remaining, a goblin, a beholder, erinyes, an orc, a knight and four guards.

And another deck did come into her possession, a Deck of Illusions. When a card is dropped, an illusion appears. What it is, has yet to be seen.

An unexpected find in our campaign, the party decided it made the most sense to give it to me. The image of a random creature or creatures appears, and does what you ask. Interesting, interesting, what can distract and how?

And also, I should give you the rundown of how this deck came to be. It doesn't use the full deck, so I like... would need to make a deck un-regular-deck-of-cardsable (evidently retaining multiple use capabilities has importance to me), so I like wanted to see if I could avoid buying a new deck for it. Off to the thrift store! And into the thrift store we went, and inside the thrift store we found, a deck of cards. Nicely worn, some of the cards almost unreadable, in a way. I'm not sure if it sat out in the sun for weeks on end, or if they've gotten wet multiple times over (without warping somehow, I dunno, zoom in and check them out), but they were old, rustic, and fit the bill perfectly. And so, we went about writing all of the various creatures on their assigned cards, a Red Dragon, a Kobold, an Iron Golem. And the cards can only be used once, so it must be torn after being drawn. A curious artifact indeed.

Another note: So when I got this deck from the thrift store, it turns out it was slightly smaller than a regular, purchasable deck of cards here (of the places that all seem to sell the same thing). Now, I had transformed two regular card decks into harrow decks, to give out what have you, and also so I have a scrap deck in my pocket, that I don't care about it getting damaged and stuff, dropped into a puddle or something. Now, I wanted one of those to have just an elastic around it, like... ok, the deck from the thrift store was just wrapped in a pink elastic band, still have it actually as of typing this (May 2022). So anyways, I thought that was just nifty, a deck wrapped in just a band, nice and accessible and stuff. And I like shuffling them on the bus and stuff, get people's attention. Don't worry, I got a guy, remember? Anyways, so I thought it was nifty that it was wrapped in an elastic, so I transfered that method of transport over to my harrow deck, and I had this spare card box that I could use for the deck of illusions! So that worked out well. Also, the cards are blue, but they're in a red box, which is a little bit trippy, but that kinda works with the motif of illusion. Also the cards are slightly smaller like I said (and also some were taken out), so they sit nice and loosely in there and are easy to shake out. Also the slowly-getting-mangled aspect of the box as a smaller and smaller deck goes inside of it seems kinda fitting to me, for a deck constantly having cards removed. I dunno, it just works, so I'm happy with that.

Obtained in campaign in late 2021, with the cards appearing March 28th, 2022.

The updated cards laid out in rows on a white crocheted rug from hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs, with the two jokers at the bottom below them.

The cards with the a blue, densely star patterned back sitting in a stack beside the box, showing Deck of Illusions written with the words Deck of above the king of hearts on the box, and Illusions written along the right side of it, sitting on the white rug.

Lil bit of an update! So in the 2024 DMG, they changed... essentially everything, all of the cards are entirely different, minus a handful like Erinyes and Iron Golem, so it made sense to just entirely make a second deck with all of the new creatures. Strangely, they no longer made the 2's Goblins and Kobolds, I guess to un-nerf the deck a bit, though I feel that got rid of some of the humour draws, but oh well. Also, they just arranged them in the Dungeon Master's Guide alphabetically and with a d100 percentage table, rather than a deck of cards conversion, so I mostly just wrote them alphabetically onto the cards as well. Strangely, a rare few like Adult Red Dragon and Bugbear Warrior happened to match up to the 2014 list by complete chance lol. I did however swap two sets of cards, because Erinyes and Incubus just felt better to be on a female and male face card respectively, so we just swapped them with the creature beside them, Ettin and Iron Golem. That aside, the 2024 Deck of Illusions was created!

THIS set of cards appeared on December 22, 2024.

..... Didja wanna draw one? (2014 version)