Coming soon to DriveThru RPG: World Building Cards. No description, no mechanics, no stat blocks; just a name, picture and some world building questions, making it completely system neutral and super easy to use for world building.
Set 1 (WBC-01) will have 60 cards drawn from issues 1-4 of Session Zero and have a small price (probably $1.00).
These will be in PDF form for you to print and cut. Print on heavy paper, or (as pictured below) print on regular paper and insert into a card sleeve in front of a land card from that popular card game.
This is an early draft that doesn’t have all the information that the final product will (It’s a Session Zero product, so it’ll have a symbol indicating which issue it was drawn from, a “type” icon and possibly another feature if I can get it to work as I intend through play testing).
The current draft of instructions tell you to deal 5 cards to each player and the GM, pick two or three (depending on number of players) you really like and discard the rest, then pick one more out of the collective discard pile. Finally, shuffle all of the chosen cards together and the GM deals one out at a time to ask and answer questions that will build a new world. It increases player buy-in by allowing them to choose aspects that they would really like to see be made part of the world.
Projected release: Mid to late July
Nice!
Why not do print-on-demand, though? When I looked into it, it seemed pretty straightforward for standard-sized cards.
that sounds really cool! sign me up!
I haven’t looked into POD yet, but I’m going to next week while I’m on vacation. There’s still a lot of time between development and release that it’s possible, but I don’t want to get anyone excited about it only to turn around and tell them it won’t be available in that format. Ideally it would be available in both formats.
Jeremy Strandberg, a quick look on DriveThruCards makes it look super easy, but the price point would be much higher for a set of physical cards printed on demand. Is $7.49 too far out of range for a 60-card product like this (I paid $8.99 for 62-card “It’s not my Fault”, which I love)?
I’m in, and would gladly pay for a physical deck of cards.
Brian Holland seems legit. If I was going to use these, I’d pay that much for the convenience.
Probably best if you let folks buy the PDF version, and give a coupon for the pod if they do so.
Thanks for the feedback all. POD was in the back of my mind but not really something I’d thought about doing. If it turns out to be as easy as it looks it opens up other possibilities that I’ve been considering, both inside and outside of the Session Zero brand. I’m still writing SZ4 right now, but as soon as it’s released I’ll go into production of WBC1.
Yeah I was thinking about that too Jeremy Strandberg.
I wonder if these would actually be better suited as a kind of “World Playbook”, that can be filled out at the table and become a sort of tome of history for a campaign.
I would buy the hell out of this. How big is each card? You could print onto index cards with the right printer.
Hmmm, not something I would have thought of David Perry. I think it would be difficult to randomize them if they were in a single “playbook”. You’ll only have 12 of them (with the current math in my instruction set, which is subject to change) which would mean you’d have 48 sections “unfilled” in playbook format. You could always use them to make your own “Tome of History” though (which sounds really cool!)
Peter J, they would be “standard” poker sized cards: 2.5 ” X 3.5 “
I love this and have been planning something similar. Very well done.
Thanks Edward Hickcox! I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Making it an extension of my Session Zero brand is natural, and I already have a lot of content ready to go because I’ve already purchased the artwork, etc. for my zine. I think I will probably do a new card set after every four issues, (but I don’t want to get ahead of myself).
I actually thought of something similar to this a few months back.