In April 2023 we presented the all-new GameMaster’s Apprentice Deck Bundle featuring the complete GameMaster’s Apprentice line of idea-generator cards by Nathan Rockwood at Larcenous Designs. For tabletop roleplaying GMs, solo gamers, or writers – for any creator seeking inspiration – the thousands of snippets in these digital GameMaster’s Apprentice decks suggest story seeds, encounters, characters, and randomizers at the flip of a card.
The GameMaster’s Apprentice Base Deck is a genre- and system-neutral deck of 120 printable cards that can be used as either a supplement for traditional tabletop RPGs or as a complete game engine for GM-free solo or group RPGs. (You might have seen it in mid-April as DriveThruRPG’s Deal of the Day.) Each card presents many individual randomizers: die rolls, difficulty and reaction generators, yes/no, a scatter direction, runes, elemental symbols, encounter tags, names, random events, sensory snippets, belongings, story catalysts, locations, virtues, and vices. The accompanying Adventure Guide helps you interpret the symbols and tags. You can generate literally millions of possible adventures, all without hunting through a rulebook.
These cards help you run games without a human GM, and they work well as prompt generators for creative writers. Instantly generate characters with randomized names, motivations, and backgrounds. Create random events or story seeds. Provide sensory details or random loot for characters searching or stealing. And with the seven additional 120-card standalone theme decks in this offer, you can use one deck alone to create a pure genre narrative, or mix and match the decks for cross-genre mashups.
There were three card decks in our Starter Collection (retail value $30) as DRM-free .PDFs and as separate .JPG images for use with virtual tabletops: the complete GameMaster’s Apprentice Base Deck and the theme decks for Fantasy and Age of Sail Deck. We also include Nathan Rockwood’s ALONe Solo Game Engine, a solitaire RPG system that uses the GameMaster’s Apprentice decks.
Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price also got our entire Bonus Collection with five more 120-card decks worth an additional $50, including Sci Fi, Horror, Weird Horror, Steampunk, and Demon Hunters (a deck custom tailored for the Demon Hunters: A Comedy of Terrors RPG, co-designed by GMA creator Nathan Rockwood).
Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) went to this GameMaster’s Apprentice offer’s pandemic-related charity, Direct Relief. Direct Relief sends protective gear and critical care medications to health workers, with emergency deliveries to medical facilities across the US and to regional response agencies across the world.
