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Nerdarchy > Creator Spotlight  > Your Custom Card Deck Helps Dungeon Draw Build a Creator Community and Marketplace
Dungeon Draw Kickstarter RPG cards

Your Custom Card Deck Helps Dungeon Draw Build a Creator Community and Marketplace

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I’ve been watching the promotional video and pouring over the details for the Dungeon Draw | RPG Cards Kickstarter. My mind reels with the possibilities. Cards have long been my favorite kind of accessory for tabletop roleplaying games. Many of my favorite types of games are card based in general. Curating a deck of cards to enhance your own RPG campaigns sounded pretty cool. Custom cards, even better. Creating your own RPG cards whole cloth, now we’re getting somewhere. Becoming part of a creator community and marketplace for designing and sharing your custom cards, decks and artwork for others? You really are cooking up a little scheme here, aren’t you Dungeon Draw?

Dungeon Draw is more than custom cards

First off, the basics. Dungeon Draw’s team does a terrific job succinctly illustrating their currently live Kickstarter. The project is well on its way to funding, with a lot to be excited about. Here’s the elevator pitch version:

“Dungeon Draw is a user-friendly web tool made for creating and editing creature reference cards for your favorite Tabletop RPGs (Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, 5th edition, Pathfinder RPG, etc.) on the fly. Using simple menus for adding in artwork, icons, and text for your stat blocks. With a marketplace where you can buy art packs or pre-made reference cards, a build-in Print on Demand service and tools to import your own content. Creating and editing reference cards has never been easier.”

The notable thing here is this project aims to fund an online tool and marketplace, not the custom card decks themselves. Curating, designing and getting your unique deck printed and delivered is a bonus perk! Your pledge helps create an ongoing community and this is incredibly exciting. Creator Bert Verwaest and the Dungeon Draw team lay out the goals and details of their Kickstarter clearly on the campaign page, which you can check out here.

With the most basic support for Dungeon Draw you’ll gain an account to the online platform and deals in the marketplace. I love this idea as an entry point for backers. It really feels like you’re getting in on the ground floor of something with tremendous potential. At this backer level once the marketplace opens you can jump right in there. Start exploring art and templates and designing your own card decks from launch. I can say with 100% certainty that’s what I’ll be doing.

At the highest backer level you’ll get a Dungeon Draw account, six decks and eight print tickets for Tarot-sized cards, plus a custom card template. This level is limited to only a few. But the penultimate level includes the same stuff except the special template.

Imagine all the awesome cards and decks we’ll be making for our games with Dungeon Draw!

  • Cards for all the important NPCs in your campaign world
  • Cards for your homebrew monsters and magic items
  • Cards for the players in your game, immortalizing their characters on cardboard
  • Random encounter decks tailored specifically to your campaign setting
  • Treasure decks curated for your exact needs
  • Reference cards for players like familiars, beast companions, NPC allies and followers

Dungeon Draw Kickstarter RPG cards

In Dungeon Draw’s marketplace you can share your creations with a community and discover other creators work to incorporate into your own cards and decks. Future plans for the online tool include a map builder too.

The design and layout of the card templates included as part of the Kickstarter look sharp and clean, so they’ll be practical at the game table. They also look great, with impressive art for many of the monsters we’re familiar with in Fifth Edition and other fantasy roleplaying games. But if you don’t dig the style, one of the things you can do with Dungeon Draw is modify card art. Problem solved. I don’t know all the intricacies of Dungeon Draw (yet!) but it’s not hard to imagine the cards you can pledge through Kickstarter will be customizable before going to the printer — a service included with most of the backer levels.

And consider this: if the Dungeon Draw tools and marketplace gain steam and continue to grow, is it that hard to imagine all sorts of templates to choose from? You could design your own card games, create your own Deck of Many Things, decks of fortunes and misfortunes. You could make dungeon room decks and build a dungeon one card draw at a time. Heck, you could make a deck of encounters or adventures and everyone be surprised by your next game session — including the Game Master.

I’m really excited to share this Dungeon Draw Kickstarter. Cards make awesome RPG accessories and anytime I see “customize” I’m all in. But cool RPG cards aside I really like the foundation of this project as a community and marketplace builder. Creator marketplaces help grow this hobby we all love and give opportunities for more people to share their creativity and build their own brand.

I’d like to know what sorts of custom RPG cards you can’t wait to create and how you’d use them in your games. Head over to Dungeon Draw RPG Cards Kickstarter here and discover the pledge level that works best for you, then come back here and tell me about your future RPG card decks in the comments!

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Doug Vehovec

Nerditor-in-Chief Doug Vehovec is a proud native of Cleveland, Ohio, with D&D in his blood since the early 80s. Fast forward to today and he’s still rolling those polyhedral dice. When he’s not DMing, worldbuilding or working on endeavors for Nerdarchy he enjoys cryptozoology trips and eating awesome food.

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