It was just after Christmas, and I was in the process of finishing a long Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and was reflecting on the notable experiences. One of which was the Deck of Many Things. It's infamous in role-playing circles. It consists of 22 cards, each of which has a different effect upon being drawn. I decided that this would be an interesting project, since at the time there was no proprietary representation. However, as always I required a twist, I decided to challenge myself to try a limited color palette, adopting the mantra 'less is more' and sporting simple but powerful imagery over more detailed but less striking images.

As usual, I started every card with a rough sketch of what I wanted the thing to look like. Some went through many revisions while others simply worked right away. I knew I wanted the deck to have a pseudo modern look, and sought to achieve this by using vectors. I broke the images down into pieces and inked them, afterwards, I scanned the sheet and used InDesign's live trace to smooth out the artwork. I reconstructed the images in InDesign, tweaking colors as needed. I also chose an appropriate pattern and a texture overlay to make the artwork look less plain.

One of the challenges with the project was simplicity. I knew at the outset I wanted a trichromatic scheme. However, I wanted the moon to be special. In-game it grants wishes, so to show its unique properties, I gave it a ‘spot color' of white. The void card causes effective player death, so I opted to knock out the color red and give it a simple black design to make the card look more sinister.

At first the deck was printed with a plain white box, however after Critical Role featured the deck on their show (to my complete suprise) demand for the deck skyrocketed. I upgraded to a custom box as well, experimenting with spot UV.

I also got a ton of requests to make foil version of the deck, which after working out some issues, I eventually did. Also as I began to produce more decks, I was able to experiment with different types of cardstock. I eventually settled on this nice linen texture.

I am pretty pleased with how this came out. The design feels professional, clean, and effective. It was pretty easy to actually put together after I figured out what image would be; the hardest part was be nailing down the imagery for some of the more abstract concepts. But after that hurdle the project kind of just fell together nicely.