Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Inventory of Dragon's Demand Campaign Cards

If you're not planning to run the "The Dragon's Demand" pathfinder module, is the Campaign Card deck worth purchasing?  Probably not.

Here's a very basic inventory of The Dragon's Demand Campaign Deck.
  • 11 Item Cards: 4 Weapons, 1 Armor, and 6 pieces of miscellaneous equipment.
  • 19 Face Cards: 8 humans or near-humans, 4 kobolds, 1 dragon, 1 raven, 1 mummy, and 4 demonic-looking monsters.
  • 24 Plot Cards: Quests, plot points, and goals for characters in the campaign.
If you're _not_ running the The Dragon's Demand module, I'd advise you to pass on this deck.  The face cards were nice, especially if you're running a campaign with kobold NPCs. The rest of the deck was useless outside of the context of the published adventure. The items were mostly lackluster, and only feature 1 item type that hadn't been done repeatedly in other card sets. The Plot Cards are all pretty specific to the adventure and its setting, so they'd be really hard to use if (like me) you're not running the module they were designed for. The deck has 54 cards, and less than half of them are viable outside the original campaign.

Why Do I Mention This?

Though I don't currently run or play in a Pathfinder game, I have nonetheless been purchasing Paizo's Game Mastery cards for years. I find the Item Cards and Face Cards very helpful for a variety of RPGs, and have made extensive use of them in the Warhammer FRP campaign I'm running. ("The Enemy Within" is so complex, having visual aids to track the dozens of NPCs is really great.)

Recently, Paizo released the first installment of "Campaign Cards", which are a combined pack of Items, Faces, and "Plot Cards" for use with a specific adventure. Since I have no intentions of running that campaign, I wasn't sure if they'd prove as helpful for general gaming as the other decks have been. I searched online for a card list or other details, but none of the reviews ever mentioned the break down of Items to Faces to Plots. If it had half a dozen plot cards and 40 more useful cards (which it didn't), it wouldn't seem like such a bad deal. So, I bit the bullet and bought the deck. As it turns out, I'm not very happy with that decision.

I'm probably not the only GM who repurposes these decks for other gaming, so I figure posting this card inventory might save someone $10.