The ultimate creative jumpstarter for writers, Dungeon Masters and worldbuilders

by Peter Chiykowski

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The Story Engine: Lore Master's Deck* is the ultimate creative jumpstarter for writers, GMs, Dungeon Masters, and worldbuilders who want to fill their stories with rich, interconnected lore. It was created by award-winning author, game writer, and designer Peter Chiykowski, who has successfully delivered 7 crowdfunding projects, including The Story Engine Deck and Deck of Worlds.

Box art and mockup not final. Artwork licensed from the EMBERWIND tabletop RPG.

In development for launch in summer 2023, Lore Master's Deck uses 8 interlinking card types to generate customizable and interconnected prompts for factions, notable figures, world events, locations, objects and artifacts, species of creatures, materials, and more.

The system is powered by your creativity, providing a simple, fluid framework for you to generate lore ideas and connections by creating clusters of related cues.

Each piece of lore you shape links to others, helping you build a web of secrets and connections that holds your world together and makes your setting and story rich, complex, and immersive.

What does Lore Master's Deck do?

Lore Master's Deck helps writers, GMs, Dungeon Masters, tabletop RPG creators, and worldbuilders with a variety of creative goals:

It jumpstarts the creative process, allowing you to bypass anxiety and mental blocks and get straight to the good part: creating awesome ideas for stories and worlds.
It sparks rapid idea generation, using a fast, intuitive system to help you create a web of ideas to explore further in your writing or roleplay.
It lets you map lore connections so you can see the relationships that shape your world and story.
It challenges you to try new things, throwing occasional curveball cues and surprising suggestions to make sure you're always developing your creative range.
It helps you draw a world timeline, using a special mode focused on Event cards to create a satisfying sequence of historical events.
It facilitates "worldbreaking," where you throw a series of catastrophes and crises to stress-test your world and explore how your story and characters might adapt.

Lore Master's Deck is a standalone system that can weave lore into settings in various stages of development, from brand-new worlds to established settings. It can also be paired with The Story Engine Deck or The Story Engine Deck: Deck of Worlds to render your stories, settings, D&D campaigns, and tabletop roleplaying games in greater depth and detail.

How does Lore Master's Deck work?

Lore Master's Deck features 8 types of card that link together to form webs of lore. Each card is double-sided, featuring 4 primary cues on the front side and 4 secondary cues on the reverse side.

Primary cues are short, one-word suggestions to get you started on the core of a new lore element, such as a faction, notable figure, event, location, object, material, species, or trait.

Secondary cues printed on the reverse side of each card provide complex suggestions to flesh out primary cues. Secondary cues take the form of backgrounds, traits, agendas, catalysts, and effects, and many of these cues forge links that connect to other primary cues.

For example, the founder of a new faction may be an apostate from another faction. Their original faction may be responsible for having built a secret headquarters as their base of operations. Those headquarters may house the last population of a sacred species. That species may be the only source of a rare material used in crafting weapons. Those weapons may be crucial to the military strategies of the leader's new faction.

With each card you add to your web of lore, the more the relationships between story elements develop and create a living ecosystem of creative connections.

*The project is set to launch in June 2023 and is still in alpha. Project details may change before launch. Our previously announced project Workshop Deck is still in development but has been postponed for a future launch.