Writing Tools: Story Engine Lore Master’s Deck
I’ve accumulated a large collection of card-based writing tools, each of which is useful to different parts of my writing process. So I’ve decided to do a series of posts about the various decks I own and how I use them in my writing.
The latest card-based writing tool in my stash is the Story Engine Lore Master’s Deck. This is a quasi-expansion to Story Engine, which has been one of my go-to decks for quite a while. While Story Engine primarily focuses on a fairly straightforward, linear plot, the Lore Master’s Deck is geared toward worldbuilding, with a focus on figures and factions, but also including objects, materials, creatures, locations, and events, and an eighth card type for modifiers.
Unlike the original Story Engine, the Lore Master’s Deck cards are two-sided. The front, or colorful side, features four items that correspond to the card type. The back of each card provides four details that are appropriate to the card type. Some of those details, however, refer to other types of cards and prompt you to draw a card from the appropriate deck and add a detail from the colorful side of the card. For example, one of the Faction cards has a faction of “Union,” and another has a detail of “have a secret base,” referencing the Location cards. You might then draw a Location card of “Oasis,” and then develop the details of that oasis and how it is connected to or conflicts with the Union’s secret base.
I did my own draw of cards (pictured in the second image) for a character I was working on to test out how this deck worked. (Note: some of what follows is potential spoilers for the third Sure Shot book, though it’s mostly in a format that may or may not be recognizable by the time I finish writing it!) I knew the character was a film producer (on the bottom of the brownish card on the left), so I drew some other Figure cards to flesh him out a bit. From these, I got the details of “Lover of music, art, or literature” (perfect for a film producer), “Always carries a keepsake of an event” (referencing an Object and Event), “Escape a recurring dream or nightmare,” and “Get revenge on a figure or faction” (referencing a Figure or Faction). I knew who the Figure that the last detail referenced would be, so I added that (Thespian, with the Modifier of Narcissistic). I then added the Object and Event called for by that detail, and got “Token” for the Object and “War(s)” for the Event.
This was all starting to shape up for what I needed, but I wanted to explore other bits of the lore it suggested. So I decided to draw an Event card to expand on the recurring dream or nightmare. In this case, I was a little torn between Wave and Hurricane, but I went with Wave. I got the Modifier of “Mystifying” and added details of “Happened overnight or caught everyone by surprise,” “Involved a lot of shameless profiteering,” and “Destruction or abandonment of a location.” Since that last card called for a Location, I added “Villa” there.
Then I added the Faction of “Militia,” because I’d decided, based on the war token that the producer carried everywhere, that the producer and the thespian had served together in World War II and were part of a local VFW. I added a detail from a Figure card there, for “Betrayed or denounced a figure or faction,” as an indication that perhaps that revenge the producer wanted was because the thespian had turned their mutual war buddies against the producer.
Finally, while I felt like I had a decent sense of the producer’s motivations and the backstory between the two characters, I wanted to tease out a few more character details for the producer. So I pulled the “Idealist” Figure, added the modifier of “Cracked,” and picked out some more details from the Figure deck, including “Received a vision of a future event” (which I chose to tie back to the Mystifying Wave and the recurring nightmare), “Always wearing gloves and/or a mask,” and “Personality or physical traits of a creature.” The Creature card I drew was “Feline.” In this case, I took the last element a little less literally and decided that instead, because the producer started concealing his identity after that Mystifying Wave, he was mistaken for a cat burglar, which tied into the other elements I’d been putting together as a result of the cards.
In the end, this draw led me to write up about 800 words of backstory between the two characters, using almost everything that I’d drawn. I definitely made some slight tweaks to the details (the shameless profiteering wound up being that the thespian profited, at the producer’s expense), but essentially, I was able to use the majority of what the cards had suggested. There are bits and pieces that I did that didn’t quite adhere to the instructions for the Lore Master’s Deck, but at the same time, those instructions are guidelines, and one of the most important lines in the instruction booklet suggests that you can always tweak things!
One of the expansions I got with my Lore Master’s Deck is the Story & Lore Bridge Expansion, which allows you to use Story Engine’s plot-based system with the Lore Master’s Deck by adding some new cards to the Story Engine decks that reference some of the card types in the Lore Master’s Deck. I haven’t tried this part out yet, but I like the idea of taking the linear plot structure from Story Engine and throwing in some bits of lore! (I also got three other expansions, for Gods, Symbols, and Names, the last of which is more about titles than given names, but those didn’t fit well with the genre I was working on this time, so I haven’t played with them yet!)
I feel like the Lore Master’s Deck definitely lends itself more toward worldbuilding than character or plot development, but as you can see from my example, you can use it to concoct some backstory elements and motivations for the relationship between characters. You might also use it to develop factions characters belong to rather than the characters themselves, and you could also use it to create an event, an antagonistic creature, a Macguffin (with Object and Material cards), or a significant place for a story or game. So there are a TON of different options you can use the Lore Master’s Deck for, either in conjunction with or separately from Story Engine!
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