You can use the card's magic as soon as you draw the card or at any other time before you die.įlames. Reality's fabric unravels and spins anew, allowing you to avoid or erase one event as if it never happened. Only a god or the magic of The Fates card can end this curse. You take a −2 penalty on saving throws while cursed in this way. The card's medusa-like visage curses you. You can't be located by any divination magic, but a wish spell can reveal the location of your prison. You remain imprisoned until you are found and removed from the sphere. Everything you were wearing and carrying stays behind in the space you occupied when you disappeared. You disappear and become entombed in a state of suspended animation in an extradimensional sphere. Otherwise, this card has no effect.ĭonjon. If you single-handedly defeat the next hostile monster or group of monsters you encounter, you gain experience points enough to gain one level. If you are true neutral or unaligned, this card has no effect on you.Ĭomet. Lawful becomes chaotic, good becomes evil, and vice versa. Your mind suffers a wrenching alteration, causing your alignment to change. Unless the card is the Fool or the Jester, the card reappears in the deck, making it possible to draw the same card twice.īalance.

Once a card is drawn, it fades from existence. If you fail to draw the chosen number, the remaining number of cards fly from the deck on their own and take effect all at once. You must draw each card no more than 1 hour after the previous draw. Otherwise, as soon as you draw a card from the deck, its magic takes effect. Any cards drawn in excess of this number have no effect. Most (75 percent) of these decks have only thirteen cards, but the rest have twenty-two.īefore you draw a card, you must declare how many cards you intend to draw and then draw them randomly (you can use an altered deck of playing cards to simulate the deck). Usually found in a box or pouch, this deck contains a number of cards made of ivory or vellum. We’ve beaten around the bush enough though, what exactly does each card do? How does it technically function as a magic item? Here’s the current rules for the 5th edition deck of many things: Only draw cards if you’re comfortable losing your current character. Each card could literally kill you, gain you a level, make you wildly wealthy, kill you, start a side-quest, enlist the aid of a faithful knight, kill you, drawing a card could instantly kill you.ĭrawing cards from the deck is like playing Russian roulette, you could win big but the chances of just straight up dying are high. Hide it away or go hog wild and start drawing. If you find yourself holding the deck of many things, you’ve got two options. The deck isn’t going to make these adventures for you, but it does the groundwork for you to take the campaign in a new and interesting direction. Drawing a card could mean an adventure to recover a player from an extradimensional space, a long adventure fighting against a malevolent devil or previously friendly NPC, or even a fight against one of the players as they suddenly turn evil. Often, the deck will simply change the direction of your campaign. It’s like throwing dynamite into a crowded room just to see what happens and should only be done when the alternative is players losing interest in your game. The deck of many things is a useful tool for making a D&D 5E campaign exciting again, and generally livening up an adventure that has grown stale. If you’re running a longer game or any sort of campaign where you care about the plot DO NOT USE IT. I’ve seen some DMs simply offer up the deck of many things as an option because it’s funny, and it totally can be for a short campaign. The deck of many things is a powerful artifact, there’s no real way for your players to acquire it unless you intentionally want them to have it. Some of the D&D deck of many things 5E campaign cards are good, some are bad, and some will completely derail your campaign. Whenever a player draws a card something happens depending on the card drawn then disappears. What the deck is though is a whole heap of chaos. The cards themselves are a lot like tarot cards, sharing the same back but each face bears a different symbolic figure. The D&D deck of many things 5E has gone through many iterations, sometimes it’s 13 cards, sometimes it’s 22 cards, sometimes they’re made of vellum and sometimes they’re made of ivory.

What does the deck do? How does it actually work? Pick a card if you dare as we go through everything you need to know. And while it has gone through various changes it has remained true to its core concept of throwing a big pile of chaos into a stale campaign.

This innocuous deck of cards has had countless incarnations, starting all the way back in the very first Grayhawk supplement for 1st edition D&D.

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