(P)Review: Jason Tagmire’s Storyteller Cards and SC: Fantasy

When I heard that Jason Tagmire, designer of the retro-pixelly deckbuilding card game Pixel Lincoln, was doing a new Kickstarter for a fantasy-themed deck of Storyteller Cards with art by Campbell Whyte (the Australian artist behind 8-Bit Dreams, a series of 365 daily drawings inspired by old Nintendo games), the combination of factors seemed so perfect for NerdSpan that I impulse-queried Tagmire to see if he had any review copies to send out. Turns out, final artwork for Storyteller Cards: Fantasy is still in progress, but he was happy to send me a copy of the original Storyteller Cards to look at.

Storyteller Cards and Storyteller Cards: Fantasy share the same basic premise: a deck of functional playing cards (i.e. there is a suit and rank in the upper-left corner) that doubles as an inspirational tool for writers, artists, gamers, families, teachers, actors, and everybody in between. In the original deck, each of the 54 cards (including Jokers) features an absolutely bizarre, but ludicrously charming, illustration showing a character performing an action with an item in a location. The corners of the cards, aside from the rank and suit, contain three more modifiers: an emotion, a letter/color combo, and a season. Each of these elements is totally unique, with the exception of the emotions. Even the icons depicting the seasons differ, in case you wanted to use them in your games.

A sample card from the original Storyteller Cards deck.

Yes, I said “your games.” Storyteller Cards isn’t a game in the traditional sense; it’s more of a game system that can be used to play all sorts of traditional and homebrew storytelling games–or non-storytelling games, for that matter. Tagmire has released the Storyteller’s Manual, a free PDF that includes about 1.5 dozen potential activities, and a lot of them are fun, but they’re really just there to get you started. Once you start coming up with your own games to fit your own friends or hobbies, the sky’s the limit. For instance, Tagmire told me that some DMs use the Storyteller Cards as a sort of character or loot randomizer for their Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying games. For a more in-depth look at the original Storyteller Cards, take a look at my review on Entropy.

Storyteller Cards is a versatile deck, but for the gamers and fantasy geeks, Storyteller Cards: Fantasy takes it to another level. In this new deck, the elements on the cards have changed slightly to make them more specific to the fantasy and roleplaying theme: now, your character represents a fantasy race/class combo, they get both an item and a weapon, and the corner modifiers have changed to: a coin, showing both a face and a value; a number on a 20-sided die; and a combat resolution icon showing either a sword, scroll or shield.

One of the new cards from Storyteller Cards: Fantasy.

These rejiggered elements are much more game-y, for lack of a better word–heck, I can imagine building a full-scale roleplaying game system using nothing but these cards–and it shows in the variety of activities Tagmire has unveiled so far from the new Storyteller’s Manual. The games in the original storyteller’s manual, though fun to play, tended to be variations on the theme of “turn over a card and add a sentence to the ongoing story.” The new games are not only more creative and versatile, they also look like they’ll function better even in groups who don’t like improvisational storytelling. They include:

Divvy in the Dungeon by Jason Kotarski: 2 players compete over the treasure from a recent dungeon crawl, represented by the coinage on the cards. Involves a very cool bluffing system that combines rock-paper-scissors (the combat resolution icons) and a more traditional card game (the suit and rank on the cards).

Scapegoat by John du Bois: 3-8 players have all had a hand in a murder, and the constables are questioning them. The characters and other elements on the cards represent clues that appear to implicate the active player; on your turn, you have to creatively turn the evidence around to deflect suspicion onto one of your rivals.

Party On! by Alex Strang: This 2-4 player game is the most complicated one yet, and seems to involve a mix of tactical positioning and freeform questing in the tradition of Barbarian Prince.

Dueling Djinns by Scott King: 3-6 players are djinn competing to be the first to grant 3 wishes. Mixes elements of Say Anything with the ability for losing players to duel for the right to grant the wish.

Make It Up by Joe Moore: A series of small improvisational exercises.

Scroll, Shield, Swords by Ryan Sanders: A 2-player game that is similar to Rock, Paper, Scissors but with a twist borrowed from Egyptian Ratscrew: it doesn’t matter who actually played the card that won the duel. Instead, the first player to shout out the winning symbol (or the losing symbol, depending on the suit) is the victor.

The original Storyteller Cards is a blast with the right group, and a surprisingly powerful creativity booster, but Storyteller Cards: Fantasy looks like it could be called The Gamers’ Deck. In other words, it takes what’s already a great product for a staggeringly wide audience and turns it into something that’s a bit more geared toward the gaming audience. The tradeoff for the slightly reduced versatility is the increased potential for original gameplay that is captivating beyond the story being told. If I had to pick just one deck, I know which one I’d choose.

There’s only about a week left in the campaign, so be sure to check out Storyteller Cards: Fantasy on Kickstarter today.