However...
Yeah, the one thing that I find difficult is the organization of the monsters in the manual. It is the one thing you need to keep coming back to. The entries in the manual are really useful, the monsters are not a collection of stats, they are a collection of story starters, hooks if you will. Each one has its own bit of fiction and a number of custom moves (things it does) that help a game master run an exciting and challenging encounter. Brilliant!
So the monsters are organized alphabetically by settings. Which is cool at first, at least until you start to use them. I tried shoving bits of paper in the book, flipping through for something random (cause who doesn't love a little random encounter action?), and even writing down some of the info in my notes. There must be a better way.
I'm working on my fronts one night and it hit me that I could simply put all the text onto cards. Then I could shuffle selections of them for random encounters, I could keep them with my notes, and I could even grab just the ones I want for future encounters I might have planned. So I spent a night cutting and pasting and putting together a deck to use. Then I sent it to my buddy who has a better printer - he thought the idea was excellent suggested we kickstart it. He would do the art in the style of the Dungeon World manual, and I'd do layout, promotion, research, etc.
So here is where we are at. I have found a supplier that will make the decks at a reasonable cost for great quality cards. The cards will be tarot sized so that you don't have to squint to use them. And we also have two other randomizer decks (traps and useful items) that we would like to produce as stretch goals - they are currently being play tested. We've been using the encounter deck for a while now and they work great. I have one for each campaign I run! I even have some custom cards which would be for the expansion decks we have planned. Yup, we have big ambitions.
So we are happy to just use these decks ourselves. But we think that the idea is solid and that it would enhance any game master's game. If you agree then we'll see that through the kickstarter campaign. Our goal is a 500 deck initial run, and we don't want lots of stock left over. We can easily increase this to 1000 decks, but 500 is the minimum to make this doable with shipping, kickstarter fees, add-ons, etc. We also believe we might need to hire and artist - there are a lot of cards here. The basic set is over 150 cards!
Ok so that's the story so far. We'll keep this blog updated when the kickstarter goes online. Our target for that is mid-Feb.
Frank
