One of my main GMing strategies when I run a D&D or Pathfinder campaign goes something like this:
- Give the PCs the deck of many things.
- Wait for them to draw from it.
- Have fun with the results.
If I ever doubt this strategy in the future, I just need to think back to a Pathfinder game in 2017 which cemented this as a terrific strategy.
The Setup: The PCs, a group of high-level mythic characters, ventured into the Abyss to rescue an entire city that got sucked through a hole in reality.
The PCs were living legends, both on the Prime Material Plane and beyond. Two of them had the divine source mythic power, which meant they had a group of followers to whom they can grant divine spells. They hadn’t truly met with failure for a very long time, so they got a bit cocky.
Maybe that’s why… The PCs noticed a group of shadow demons and, rather than killing them or avoiding them, tried to recruit them as allies. One of them sent the group of demons to their base in the hopes of converting them to followers. Teranthia, the PC who recruited the demons, did tell them not to kill anybody, but it’s hard to get chaotic evil fiends to keep their word.
The demons lied. Uninterested in an actual alliance, the shadow demons possessed numerous dark stalker followers of Teranthia. When the PCs came back to the base, the demons forced those dark stalkers to stab themselves. Their resulting death throes didn’t succeed in killing the PCs, but did start a massive fire in the city and killed several of the group’s followers. Half the group ran off to get help, while Teranthia, faced with the fact that her actions had just killed a bunch of people who had placed their trust in her, reached for the deck of many things.
Two cards. She took a chance that two draws would give her the means of saving the day. The first card was the Throne, giving her a keep and a permanent +6 to Diplomacy. So far, so good. But then she drew Talons, destroying all her magic items – including her beloved flaming halberd and her rod of the serpent. So while the city burned around her, all of Teranthia’s magic items crumbled to dust.
Then the magic of the deck really got going. The genius of the deck of many things – the thing that makes it so incredible – is the existence of the Moon card. The Moon grants 1d4 wishes, and you have a 1 in 22 chance of getting it. And once the bad stuff really gets rolling, that card becomes more and more important. So even as the deck destroys your life, you know the Moon is somewhere in there, giving you a chance to fix it all.
So they tried again. Teranthia’s best buddy was a talking horse named Claude. He served as her ultimate enabler – somebody who sticks by her no matter how self-destructive she becomes. At Teranthia’s urging, Claude chose to draw three cards from the deck. First came the Fool – lose 10,000 XP. That’s bad, but at 15th level you can get that back in a single encounter. The came the Void – body functions, but soul is trapped elsewhere. Claude went comatose, and nobody had the wish spell needed to figure out where he went.
The rest of the PCs returned to the scene to find one of their companions sitting among the remains of her ruined magic items, with the other effectively dead.
Then I rubbed salt in their wounds. As a self-admitted cupcake GM, I don’t get too many chances to really pour on the tragedy. In this case, I might have gotten carried away. See, I turned the one good result from the deck draw into a mixed blessing.
Teranthia’s draw of the Throne changed reality so she now became the leader of the city that she had put so much effort into saving. However, reality has a certain balance to maintain.As a result, the city’s previous ruler – an ally of the PCs – keeled over and died.
End results: a bunch of dead followers who did nothing wrong other than to trust their beloved leader, a lot of missing magic items, a dead NPC ally, and a party member who isn’t dead but technically might as well be. And it all came from the hubris of one PC, with a little help from the deck of many things.
The beauty of the deck is that nobody intends to start drawing willy nilly – they just wind up there when the situation gets desperate enough. And when things start really falling apart, the only way to bail yourself out is to keep drawing and hope for the Moon card…
Babbling Brooks 