The Deck of All Things is a browser-based tool to create, customize, and draw from your own Deck of Many Things for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition.
You can quickly draw from a deck of 13 or 22 cards, or from an expanded deck with 50 additional homebrew cards. You can also adjust the number of cards you'd like to draw.
When customizing a deck, you can choose what kind of deck to start with. I recommend using the default (full deck plus homebrew cards).
You might want to exclude the more disruptive cards from a deck, or devise a "cursed" deck that seems to produce only unpleasant cards. To allow this, every single card has been rated in terms of wildness and worth. (Both ratings are, of course, subjective.)
- Wildness measures how likely a card is to disrupt a campaign. This generally corresponds to how powerful the effects are.
- Worth measures how desirable a card is; cards of middling worth include those with effects that are neither good nor bad, as well as cards whose benefits come with a drawback or caveat.
You can choose whether some cards or others are fitting for your deck based on these. Enable the advanced options to see exactly how the sliders work.
By default, the more unfitting a card is, the less likely it is to be in the deck. (Don't worry—there are enough homebrew cards that you'll likely still have a good variety.) If you choose, you can make that probability instead be the relative likelihood for cards to be drawn; every card is in the deck, but unfitting cards are rarely seen.
You can also choose how to deal with specific types of cards that may be undesirable. Not everyone wants to worry about XP or alignment, so I've created alternate effects for cards that use these. If you prefer to write your own replacements (or just remove these cards), you can do this when editing individual cards.
Lastly, a quirk of the Deck of Many Things (which I didn't know about until this project) is that it's possible to draw the same card more than once. A drawn card disappears and (in most cases) reappears with the other cards in the deck. If you want to be certain you won't draw the same card more than once, there's an option for that.
After setting deck customization parameters (or importing a deck), you have the option to customize the individual cards. Edit the name, description, and other attributes to your heart's content.
To "skip" straight to card customization, just choose which card sources to use in the deck customization options, and ignore the other settings.
During card customization or drawing, you can export the active deck to your clipboard. Paste it in a text file to save for later, send it to a friend, whatever.
To import a deck, click the 'Start over' button after drawing, or refresh the page, then click 'Import deck'.
I'm open to adding more cards to the homebrew deck. But the name "Deck of All Things" is just meant as a step up from "Many"—it doesn't literally mean that all possible cards are fair game. There are a lot of custom decks out there with a lot of different goals, so I'd like to explain exactly what my goals are with my homebrew cards.
While most decks I've seen are separate, standalone items, my cards are meant to be added to the official Deck of Many Things. It's an expansion, not a replacement, and so my cards should fit in alongside the official ones.
As such, I've looked at the official cards and used these patterns as design cues:
- Cards are distinct from one another. No cards that feel like alternate versions of other cards.
- Card effects are unusual. If there are spells or other items that provide a particular effect, it's less likely to be worth including.
- Card effects focus on the character who drew them. Cards affect the drawer and not whoever happens to be standing nearby. If any other creature is involved at all, it'll be an NPC of the DM's choice.
- Drawing even a single card is memorable. The effect doesn't need to be permanent, but it shouldn't be something you can just shrug off as if it never happened.
- Effects are indiscriminate; they pretty much always work. The effect shouldn't be entirely dependent on the character's abilities or playstyle, and in particular they shouldn't depend on a roll. No "otherwise, nothing happens."
- No out-of-game effects. Cards affect characters, not players.
- Cards have names—a noun, typically one word, and no duplicate names. There doesn't need to be a strong link between the name and the effect. Card descriptions address the character who drew them in the second person.
I know that some cards don't bullseye every guideline here, but I've avoided straying too far from them.