An adventure spread is an arrangement of cards from The Deck of Many Things card set that you can use to craft an adventure for your D&D game. With this method, the cards drawn determine adventure details such as the situation that launches the adventure, challenges the party faces along the way, and the final obstacle the party must overcome. This kind of spread typically uses the full deck, but you can use a smaller set of cards if you want your adventure to focus on particular themes or adversaries.
Creating an Adventure Spread
To prepare the deck for creating an adventure spread, shuffle the cards, being sure to rotate some cards as you do so some cards will be upright and others reversed (upside down). Then lay out the top nine cards in a cross pattern, as shown in diagram 2. Each card represents a situation, person, creature, location, or treasure in the adventure, using the signifiers for each card described in the "3" section. You can pick any of a card's signifiers for any of the positions in the diagram, so let your imagination wander and build a story that excites you. Treat the cards placed sideways as upright if the top of the card is on the left and as reversed if the top is on the right.
Lay out the cards in this order:
Example
Jennifer is running a game for her players next week, and she doesn't have an adventure planned. She decides to use The Deck of Many Things card set to generate adventure ideas. After shuffling the deck, she places cards as shown in diagram 3. Here's the adventure she creates: if a creature's name is bold, its stat block appears in the Monster Manual unless otherwise stated:
Variant: Dungeon Spread
A dungeon spread is a simpler version of an adventure spread that's optimized for quickly building dungeon-focused adventures. In this variant, you divide The Deck of Many Things card set into three separate decks: a locations deck, a features deck, and an optional story deck. For simplicity, use the literal meanings of the cards in the locations and features decks; these cards are straightforward descriptions of potential locations and of the creatures, treasures, and other features characters might find in these locations.
If you want to create a prelude to the dungeon, use the optional steps that call for the story deck, and give those cards their full range of symbolic meaning as discussed in the "3" section. If you'd rather dive straight into the action, you can skip those steps and omit the story deck.
Dungeon Spread Decks
Using these separate decks, lay out the cards in a slightly modified adventure spread:
Using an Adventure Spread During Play
In addition to using an adventure spread to plan your adventures, you can also use it during play, simultaneously giving the players a glimpse into the future and planning their adventure. An easy way to do this is to plan a social encounter with a fortune teller near the end of a session or play. (The Fortune Tellers table suggests descriptions for seers.) Talking the role of the fortune teller, lay out the cards in an adventure spread in view of your players, narrating as you go.
When your players speculate on the meaning of the cards, use their ideas to interpret the spread. If you embrace their guesses, your players can enjoy feeling clever for figuring out the "real" meaning of the reading—when in fact they've helped create it. You might also deliberately confound your players by steering away from their interpretations as you build the adventure.
| d6 | Fortune Teller |
|---|---|
| 1 | An entertainer at a street fair or civic festival, who emphasizes that this card reading is "for entertainment purposes only" |
| 2 | A professional fortune teller with a shop in a small town, who tries to inject the reading with elements of romance |
| 3 | A seer in a temple, whose eyes are closed throughout the reading and who couches everything in terms of the will of a certain god |
| 4 | A hag who cackles gleefully at every hint of danger or destruction in the reading |
| 5 | A haunted deck of cards that lays itself out and narrates the reading in a distant, ghostly echo |
| 6 | A member of the 11 (an apocalyptic cult described in The Book of Many Things), who stresses danger and destruction in the reading |
When performing this reading, introduce each card as you place it in the spread (you can use the suggested wordings below). Briefly describe the relevant signifier for the card, but don't include any specific examples listed in the card descriptions: