Story Telling in a Ruin Crawl

[Vidgrip]

Lately, my interest in miniatures gaming has centered around story telling.  When I came across an interesting wizard-themed Tarot deck, I thought it might make a good basis for encounters, stories, and random events.  I made up a table listing random events and discoveries tied to the pictures on the cards.  Well, half the cards, really.  There are 78 cards in a tarot deck.  I ran out of steam half-way through and decided I would just improvise the rest as they happened.  That actually worked fine.



This could be done with almost any rule set for skirmish gaming.  Browsing online I can see decks themed to many different genre including steam-punk, sci-fi, and horror.  Although decks can be expensive, there are Tarot aps for mobile devices too, maybe even free.  In this example, I am using  the Wizard Tarot with Frostgrave rules.   



I played a solo “ruin crawl” using the cards and it was certainly a different experience.  I will tweak things if I do it again (more monsters) but overall I think it was a successful experiment.  It did keep the focus on exploration and story.  You can read about the results here: https://takeittothetable.blogspot.com/2019/02/story-telling-in-ruin-crawl.html

[Elbows]

Awesome.  As both a fan of random decks/encounters, and a fervent fiend of card deck use, I approve of this.  It would also be very fun to hunt down thematic Tarot decks, etc.

[Kitsune]

Good concept. I sometimes use my tarot deck as a random decider during games, when it’s thematic for the character making the choice to consult the tarot, but I’d not thought of using them as an event generator

[Bloggard]

some lovely painting and modelling there too.

[Vidgrip]

some lovely painting and modelling there too.

Thanks. I scratch-built the whole city but most of the better looking figures were painted by Fernando Enterprises. My figure painting is getting better though, mostly due to inspiration from this site.