The GameMaster's Apprentice: Base Deck

Sooner or later, you're going to need more story!

COMMUNITY-BUILDING COPIES AVAILABLE! As tariffs strike gamers, and both my job as a teacher and the human rights of many of my students become endangered, this is a rough time. In the short and long term, printing costs may be increasing, but I will not be raising my prices except where the printing cost actually exceeds the sales cost of the product. While I initially made my products free during the first days of lockdown, since I do not see a definitive end in sight here, I instead make this permanent offer: If you cannot afford the to purchase my work, please reach out to me at [email protected]. While DriveThru does not have a 'Community Copies' feature by default, I will do my best to hook you up, no questions asked. We gamers need to stick together.

The GameMaster's Apprentice is a genre-and-system-neutral deck of cards that can be used as either a supplement for traditional tabletop RPGs or as a complete game engine for GM-free solo or group RPGs. 

You can view the cards' complete instructions for free by clicking the preview link beneath the thumbnail above, or view the Quickstart Guide and a set of quick-reference PnP/PoD Instruction Cards here on DriveThru if you prefer (if you wish to purchase the Print on Demand instruction cards to keep with your deck, be sure to combine the order with the deck itself! They are only six cards, and DriveThru will not print orders that small). You can also scroll down to view the card overview image and watch a video of the cards in use! 

On each card is a set of fourteen individual randomizers; with 60 double-sided cards, you can generate literally millions of possible adventures, all without having to hunt through a book or PDF for a single table!

With these cards, you can:

• Instantly generate NPCs with randomized names, motivations, and backgrounds.

• Create random events or story seeds.

• Provide sensory details or random loot for characters searching or stealing.

• Run games without a human GameMaster!

And more--they even work brilliantly as creative writing prompt generators, and have been playtested by 9th-12th grade students of both English and Game Design.

If you want specifics, including examples of how to use the randomizers on the cards, the complete instructions are available in the downloadable PDF preview linked below the cover image/thumbnail, but you can take a look at the overview below to see the quick and dirty version of what is on each card, and you can view a video preview from the original Kickstarter that explains how to use the cards to run a GM-free game or generate a story for a traditional RPG. This video is the second in a series, so if you want to see the first (which details initial generation of the story), check out our website, www.LarcenousDesigns.com! 

These cards were created with the support of over 360 individuals on Kickstarter, and would not exist in their current form otherwise! Thank you!