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Tabletop Spotlight – SideQuest Decks

3 Minute Read
May 31 2018
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SideQuest Decks are an adventure in a box. On each of these cards you’ll find what you need to fuel a session, if not several–it’s not every day you can get a year’s worth of adventure ideas in a single box.

SideQuest Decks are exactly what it says on the tin. A whole deck full of sidequest ideas. Have your players blown through your prepared material in the first 30-45 minutes of your session? No problem, just pull a card from the deck and it’s got everything you need to build an adventure off of. Take a look:

These are quite good. They are system neutral–and in fact leave a lot of the planning to you, the DM, but they give you an adventure outline. Each card outlines the plot of an adventure–large or small–and has a map to accompany it. You won’t get monsters (specifically) so like the cards won’t say “build an encounter that is four orcs and a bugbear” but it will tell you “the players are attacked by marauders while en route.”

And it’s up to the DM to interpret what that means–which is the best sort of inspiration. It’s having to justify or interpret something that’s already there, and that’s a whole lot easier to do compared to creating something from scratch.

These are also a great practice aid for DM’s looking to up their skill at coming up with things on the fly. Draw a card and see how quickly you can populate it–start with a bare bones, minimum hit all the details on the card

SideQuest Decks

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Need fantasy or sci-fi adventure ideas? Use our SideQuest Decks. Each card is a dynamic adventure!

Draw a card for an adventure outline. The outline includes backstory, ways to get the PCs involved, encounter possibilities, and follow-up ideas. The other side of the card is  the most important map for that adventure. Use maps from other cards as needed.

Each adventure in this deck has a theme that fits its particular deck’s setting. SideQuest Decks are perfect for stocking a hex crawl or developing a side trek on the fly.  You may even chain several together for an entire campaign!

This product revises our prior Encounter Decks.  The adventure outlines were sorted into decks by setting and over one-third are new. The map on the card is also now the most important map to that adventure (previously it was a random map) and about half of the maps are new.

Note: The PDF is set up to be printed duplex (two-sided), 4 cards per page.  So the upper right card on the front side of each page matches up to the upper left card on the back side. There are also white marks near the corners of each card which are guides to use when cutting the cards.  This extra area (1/8″) on the edge of each card is called a “bleed” which is intended to be cut away. It allows a card to still look good even if the cut isn’t perfect or if the front and back prints aren’t perfectly aligned.

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Happy adventuring!

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Author: J.R. Zambrano
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