Utility Decks

Today we are printing up the most recent iteration of our decks. Included are four utility decks. We've found that the useful item and trap decks are incredibly handy. In fact if you've been at any of our events you might have gone home with a useful item deck. We've gone to great lengths to keep them fiction first and therefore system agnostic. But there is no doubt that they come directly from our play of Dungeon World, but having played many, many different systems I know they will end up on the table there as well.

Our utility decks are simple to use. Pull two cards, using the top from one (usually white) and the bottom from the other (color coded - blue = items, silver = weapons, red = traps, purple = enchantment). So you end up with a Key tied with a golden ribbon or a poisoned potion (trap) of ignobility. Each part has some fiction to get your creative juices flowing. Our two new decks have less refined text - getting them into play will help shape that a bit, and they will not have art yet. Cards where art makes sense will be fully illustrated. This is how they break down:

Useful Items

This set of cards gives you 20 mundane items (we currently have over 30 in our playtest deck and more we'd like to add, more on that later). Additionally there are 20 descriptors that can be combined with the items to give you a huge variety of item possibilities.

Traps

This set of cards gives you 20 different traps. On the bottom of each card is a descriptor to make the trap unique.





Weapons

A third deck of cards gives you 20 different weapons, melee and ranged, and pairs them with descriptors to make each weapon special and memorable to your players. No more troves of longswords - you will be a believer in the power of variety! These cards are new so the descriptions are basic and just waiting for fiction to be added.




Enchantments

Our final new utility deck is a bit different than our other decks. An enchantment is a descriptor that can be added to any item or weapon card. Heck, you could add it to a monster or a trap just as easily as well. Our initial deck has 10 cards, each with two different descriptors. That's 20 seed for building unique magic items!



More...

As the campaign unfolds we fully expect to add more and more utility cards to our decks. We have printed up a pile of blank cards to use as inspiration hits to create new utility cards and get them into play testing as soon as possible.

Additionally we are toying with fiction seeds for failures, boons, and curses. Boons and curses might end up as an addition to the enchantment deck - this is still a work in progress.

Budget Man!

One of the big risks in any campaign is having an adequate budget. There are lots of details and they can add up. We recently had some samples sent from our potential manufacturer and the shipping from China was $150! Unexpected. But it gives us a sense of how much it will cost to get proofs before the cards go to print. I've identified five categories of expenses:

• Art & Design - that is everything from the art we commission to the labour to to layouts in photoshop. 
• Production - what it costs to have the cards printed.
• Import - what it costs to get the printed cards into our hands.
• Fulfillment - what it costs to get the printed cards into your hands.
• Promotion - incidental expenses getting the word out about the campaign

For our initial print run I based the numbers on 500 each of the base (160 card) deck as well as two (60) card decks to account for the utility decks and the additional encounters we want to create. The breakdown looks like this:

Our real goal is a run of 1000 each of the same three decks (and actually an additional deck but at that point the cost difference is negligible). The breakdown looks like this:

Notice that fulfillment goes up but most everything else comes down. That reflects more individual pledges being fulfilled from our end.

I also did one more workup, that is for just a PDF deck. There is some production costs involved but no import required. That breakdown looks like this:

It isn't easy to see from the chart, but the pdf deck is about 1/3rd of the cost of a deck, which is why we can afford to throw in the pdf decks with every physical deck purchase.

Once we have the numbers hammered out we can get back to the fun stuff.

Trap Cards

Like our other utility cards, the top (white) half of the card describes a trap an the bottom (red for traps) is an additional feature that can be added to the trap drawn. Each will have a bit of fiction. However, none of the trap cards are illustrated so far, that will be a later stretch goal to have  then all illustrated. But for sure a few of them will get illustrated along the way. Compare with our illustrated useful item cards.

More Colour Art