Deck of Chance

Another obscure item!

A set of eleven cards with things such as plus 2 bonus to attack and damage rolls or minus 2 penalty to attack rolls, arranged with six positive cards spread out on the top, and five negative cards spread out beneath, with the red bicycle cards box with deck of chance written on it above, and beside the deck of chance instruction card, all on a wooden table.

Ooohhhh, this was an interesting one. I stumbled across the instructions for this while researching the Madness at Gardmore Abbey wiki, in search of a 4e Deck of Many Things for myself (DriveThruRPG FTW), and the wiki pointed to the Lesser Deck of Many Things by way of referencing Dragon Magasine 148, which led to the AD&D 2e wiki, used to make this page and physical deck. It also led me to look up items like the Deck of Decking and Tracer Deck mentioned at the bottom of the Original Deck of Many Things page, which settled my nerves in that all of the other items were things like "you have a 25% chance of an unspecified bad thing happening" or "you can predict when an unspecified even will happen in 1-12 months" (deck of fortune telling), but no others are actual draw related items. Except this one. And so, the Deck of Chance finds its way into the physical realm and onto Zebeth! Also that above mentioned Lesser DOMT, and the Aesgareth Deck of Many Things, a deck found in the game Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal. So like the Deck of hazards, we had to make that one too.

But back to this one! We have an item to make, and decks of cards are something we have! The Deck of Chance involves rolling 2d6 and taking the result (.txt instructions), so I decided to use cards 2-12, or 2-Queen for this. The five lower cards are negative, so we used all spades for those, and hearts for the other 6, making this more often a good result, ayyyy! Also the effects only last for 24 hours, but you can cram one onto you every day, a pretty cool item. I'd bring it into current games as a findable item. As such of course, you know you can draw one digitally at the bottom of this page lol

So, a deck of cards! We started by sanding the faces of them all, since the results are short enough to write the entire result on each card, much like the original and epic level decks of many things. I laid out the text in the same way as those again (and to make the instruction sheet different, used one of the leftover cards from the epic level deck since they were the same size!) and wrote out each of the cards, which came out quite nicely ^_^ . I took the instructions from the wiki and wrote it out onto the instruction card since that was nice and short too, and modified the box to fit the 11 results and instruction card inside. And with that, in a quick one-day build, the Deck of Chance was made :D

Built November 2, 2024




Aw yeah you can draw! 		Most of the cards from 2 to 10 spread out above a jack and queen, the jack having half sanded, and the queen being fully sanded to allow us to write on the card.A sheet of looseleaf with the first six cards drawn on one side of it, laying out the text for each of them, which for most cards has -2 penalty to on the first line, and things like armor class on the second line, with two of them needing three lines of text because of an effect to multiple things.

Three finished cards beside their layout on the looseleaf, and a partially sanded ace of diamonds with the word test written on it, for when I was testing how well the pen will write on the cards, all laying on a cardstock working surface.The instruction card beside the text layout on the looseleaf in the last place on the second side, and another card with the golden backed epic level deck pattern above it to show what the back looks like.

The deck spread out with the positive cards above and the negative cards below, and the box and instruction card above all the cards, laid out on a wooden table.