Chapter 3: Balance

Quick Nonplayer Characters

When you need to create a nonplayer character, draw a card and let it inspire distinctive features of the NPC. For example, if the card depicts a person, the NPC might resemble that person. If the card features symbols, perhaps the NPC's clothing or jewelry incorporates those symbols. If the card has a divinatory meaning, that meaning could inform the NPC's name, personality, or goals.

Idea Decks

Consider building multiple custom decks to keep on hand for quick inspiration. Depending on the cards you have available, you might build decks of specific characters, creatures, events, spells, treasures, or anything else you need.

Filler Scenes

Use cards to fill in the narrative of your game. For example, you might ask each player to draw a card at the beginning of the session; then, you or the player (or both of you working together) can use those cards as brainstorming material, setting the scene at the start of the session or describing an event that occurred during a period of downtime between adventures. Alternatively, you can draw cards during the session to help you generate story beats during an ongoing adventure.

Inspiration for the DM

Another way to use the inspiration deck is to make its effects available to monsters and villains. In this variant, each time a player expends inspiration, the DM also draws a card from the deck. Rather than adding it to the communal hand, you keep that card secret until you play it on behalf of one of the characters' opponents.

You can play your inspiration cards soon after drawing them or save them for use in major encounters. Note that saving your cards might make players more reluctant to use inspiration, worrying they need to conserve it for later encounters. Your players are likely to follow your example, so if you want them to use their inspiration cards freely, you should do so as well.

Top Card: The Challenge

At the beginning of each day of a journey, a player flips over the top card to determine what happens that day. (Players should take turns at this.) Use that card's imagery or symbolic meaning to inspire a choice or challenge the characters will face that day. The card could represent a site the characters come across on their journey, like a ruined tower or a fork in the road, or a situation the characters are asked to resolve. You decide the scope of the decision the characters must make. You can ask them to make a simple choice ("Do you want to take the path along the edge of the cliff or climb down the ravine to walk along the bottom?"), to make a single ability check (use the Typical DCs table in the Dungeon Master's Guide), or to navigate their way through a small dungeon or an encounter (which might involve multiple ability checks or even combat). Let the character of the player who flipped the card be the focus of the day's events and make any required ability checks (though another character can help, at your discretion).

Whatever choice or challenge you decide the top card represents, the characters' success or failure while dealing with that situation determines how you read the bottom card.

Bottom Card: Reward or Ruin

Once the situation presented by the top card has been resolved, the player can flip over the bottom card. Then it's up to you to interpret that card as either a reward or a ruin based on how well the players resolved the day's top card. If you're using cards that have a different meaning when they're upright versus upside down, ignore the cards' orientation.

Journey Spread Example

Here is an example of how you might interpret cards from The Deck of Many Things card set in a journey spread, with interpretations informed by the card descriptions in the reference book:

How It Works

Construct a deck of about twenty cards that each represent a creature (see the "Constructing Your Deck" section below). When an encounter occurs, shuffle the deck and draw a number of cards equal to the number of characters in the party. Use one or more of these cards to build the encounter, using the guidelines in the "Choosing Monsters" section below. When the encounter is over, discard the cards of any monsters that were killed, so they won't be drawn again.

Constructing Your Deck

An encounter deck consists primarily of cards representing monsters. You can use cards from The Deck of Many Things card set, oracle cards, playing cards, cards from Magic: The Gathering, or even index cards with your handwritten notes. Any kind of card works as long as each card can correlate with a specific monster. You can also add special cards for unusual events, as detailed below.

Evolving the Encounter Deck

Evolving your encounter deck fosters a sense of progress, creating a rough narrative arc as the adventurers explore an area. You can evolve the deck to make encounters progressively harder, or you can change the flavor of encounters, such as adding creatures from a particular environment.

One way to accomplish this is to build two encounter decks. Draw cards from the first encounter deck, and when you remove cards from that deck, replace those cards with an equal number of random cards from the second deck. This method is particularly effective if the second deck has a markedly different theme. You might start with an encounter deck featuring mostly dungeon scavengers, like rats and carrion crawlers, then slowly add in cards from a deck made up of Undead creatures and cultists.

Alternatively, you can use special cards such as noncombat encounter cards to tell you when to begin shuffling in cards from the second deck. For example, adventurers exploring a sylvan woodland might encounter mostly elves and Fey, but you might include a noncombat encounter card representing the party's discovery of a scorched clearing. After that encounter, you can start shuffling in cards representing gnolls and hyenas—the cause of the destruction.

If you have a goal card (see the "2" section above), you don't want the adventurers to reach the goal too early; don't put that card into the deck until the characters defeat one or more creatures from the second deck. At that point, shuffle the goal card into the second deck.

Sample Encounter Decks

These sample decks, best suited for 4th- to 6th-level characters, feature monsters from the Monster Manual and Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse. If you don't have Monsters of the Multiverse, omit those cards from the deck.

Entries with a multiplication sign indicate that the card represents multiple monsters. Monsters in the same group are assigned cards with the same face value (for example, all bandits are represented by king cards), but not all monsters with the same value are a group (the owlbears, for example, hunt alone). This makes it easier to see when you've drawn multiple cards that form an encounter.

You can use these decks as examples for building your own. You can use them separately when the characters are traveling through suitable terrain, or you can combine them (see "2" above), so characters who are exploring a forest (using the forest encounter deck) slowly discover the vile demonic influence corrupting the place as you shuffle in cards from the corrupted lands encounter deck.