At long last, and mostly down to disruption to services due to strikes around the Christmas and New Year period, I have got my hands on the Deck of Worlds. Its the result of a Kickstarter I backed last year by the same team who created the The Story Deck. Both of these boxes of prompt cards are now sitting very proudly on my bookshelf and will be getting some use over the weekend.

The entire concept is that there are different cards for types of location, something significant there, an adjective or property that can be applied to either, a peculiarity of the region, and something that is happening there. These can be shuffled and interpreted in all sorts of ways – and in particular I think they’ll be useful for world building in my games.

As an experiment I ran through the cards and came up with a combination that I turned into the following description:

In a windswept forest lies the ruins of a forge and workshop that legend declares to have once been the home of unknown gods. When the wind whips round and the moon is bright, the sound of roaring flames still lingers here. Animal life that comes close to the ruins seem to become confused while near, but soon recover when they leave.

I then fired up Dungeon Alchemy and created the image in this blog post – showing a clearing in a hilly forest. Within it lies the ancient forge, bits of fallen masonry, an abandoned temple building behind it, a well and an overgrown path leading away into the forest. I’ll post the finished map when I’ve added a few more trees and bushes along with some ideas for encounters. I might even use a version of it in one of the D&D games I’m currently running as it has turned out rather well I think.