Love it or hate it, “The Deck of Many Things” is that one magical item that sows chaos into any D&D campaign, leveraging a party’s greed against their better judgement.

Chances are, if you have a few D&D sessions under your belt, you’ve come across this fascinating magical deck of cards at some point…where they come from is still a mystery; we only know that A) it can appear anywhere, at any time, and B) there is not necessarily just a single deck in existence, as multiple people can have “a” deck in a given moment.

To quote Laura Bailey: “Who the hell is making all these cards..!?”

Who knows.

But we all have stories to tell about them, don’t we?

During “Tomb of Annihilation”, our party found a Deck of Many Things in a dwarven mine, which was my first time encountering the peculiar deck…my character, who was a compulsively-curious Warlock, drew 3 cards:

First, he became absurdly rich…then he got a magical weapon…

…and then he got subsequently transported to an extra planar prison, never to be seen again.

So yeah…bad judgement.

Meanwhile, the Bard hedged her bets with two cards and got a free traveling companion, and got insanely ripped with muscles.

It was at this point we retired the Deck.

But I’m curious to hear the stories people have had with the Deck of Many Things…the insane things that have happened to their characters when they drew from the Deck, or the lore that they ascribe to Deck, and where it might have come from.

I’ve heard some pretty interesting theories, so share below.

The Deck is too disruptive.  It's something you should only add if you want to end the game, otherwise it's too likely to screw things up.

Quote from 6thLyranGuard >>

The Deck is too disruptive.  It's something you should only add if you want to end the game, otherwise it's too likely to screw things up.

 Cast it into the fire!

I think the deck can work for one shots very well, but will rarely work for a campaign. Maybe for campaign endings but that's it in my opinion.

I once gave the party I DM for a deck of many things. The character wielding the deck was able to draw 2 cards. The first card made a fiend become their enemy. The second card made all their magic items (including the rest of the deck they were still holding) disappear. 

There was a really good thread on the utility, if any, of the Deck in this thread:

https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/dungeons-dragons-discussion/dungeon-masters-only/109600-when-is-a-good-time-level-to-introduce-the-deck-of?comment=1

Basically DMs very invested in their game world's present story arc (and probably players) are very against the Deck.  Me, I recognize it as a literal game changer, and can actually be used to randomly through new plots into a campaign that has otherwise run it's course.  

The discussion didn't get into the sort of "lore" of the Deck, like where it came from and such, I'd be curious if anyone really did "run" with the deck and traced its origins or what have you.

I ran a level 20 one-shot that took place in a cursed shopping mall (it was Christmas- themed and the players had to face the terror of last minute Christmas shopping for a king who forgot to get something for the neighboring king and war threatened to break out if a satisfactory gift couldn't be found). I used the Sane Magic Item Prices guide to make a bunch of shop inventories and gave the players a bunch of starting gold with which to buy equipment and eventually the gift (and I rigged traps that would enchant players and force them to spend a certain amount of gold at a certain shop on a failed saving throw). They fought their way through the mall and found the shop with all the nicest, most expensive magical items, one of which was the Deck of Many Things, which as soon as I put it on the shop inventory I knew the players would want for themselves, so I put next to it "Price Negotiable".

As I predicted, they got a suitable gift for the king after fighting the Pit Feind that was trying to boycott the store, and they had fun wheeling and dealing with the shop owner in order to get the Deck, and they brought both back to the castle. 

What followed next is possibly one of the most fun, most D&D things to have ever happened in any game I'd ever run. 

They presented their gift, and in the conversation following the completion of their quest, they convinced the King to draw cards from the deck with them. It was the end of a one shot, so all the players had an understanding that they were all just doing it for fun. One of the characters lost all their worldly possessions, including their portion of the keep the king rewarded them with, which collapsed. The king became an instant 7th level rogue, one of the characters got a free Wish that they decided to hold onto for later, the barbarian got her soul imprisoned in another plane, and the bard was instantly declared the most hated enemy of the kingdom. 

I thought it was just going to end there with the king saying "seize him!" and that would be the end of the session, haha, fun time. Except the bard caused a distraction and ran for it through the castle. I thought "ok let's play along here and see how this plays out". The bard had some solo time running though the halls eventually finding a place to hide and a disguise to wear and tried to make it back to the party, meanwhile the party was like "oh, we're still playing!" and decided that since only a wish spell could reveal where the barbarian's soul was taken, and they had one, they decided to use it to find out. I hadn't planned for this at all (not complaining) so I said the first thing to come to my head which was that the barbarians was imprisoned in a vast clockwork prison in the plane of Mechanus. I figured that would be met with a "oh, cool" and then we'd finish up, BUT that was when the fighter and the druid realized that the gift they'd gotten for the king was a Well of Many Worlds, which they could conceivably use to reach the plane of Mechanus, so they began to enact this elaborate scheme to steal it back from the king they must gave it to at the risk of starting a war with the other kingdom to get their friend back. 

The rest of the session played out much longer and much wilder than I originally planned it it was so fun that I'm thinking of finally writing a sequel adventure in which they do go to rescue the barbarian's soul, the bard all the while being hunted by the King's men. 

It was a great moment, brought to us just by putting the deck of many things in front of the players and letting them do the rest. There's absolutely a time and a place for it, and as long as you and your players have an understanding that no matter what happens to their characters, everyone's just having a good time, it can be very memorable. 

So my group has been playing over Roll20 & DNDBeyond since the pandemic hit. This last Christmas the DM offered each of us a chance to pull one card from the DOMT just as a fun Christmas thing to do. I pulled the Idiot card. Keep in mind, my cleric's Intelligence score was only a 9 to begin with, because he was raised in a very small very isolated village and hadn't been exposed to much book learnin'. So my Int dropped from a 9 down to a 5. That was scary.

But, it was also an interesting role playing challenge. I mean, I still had an 18 Wisdom, so I wasn't completely useless. I could still function, I could still sense when something was wrong, I just couldn't put those feelings into words. I could heal, and I could defend, but I could barely put a sentence together. I could still recognize my friends, I just couldn't remember their names. Over the next six months or so I really came to enjoy the calm simplicity of Anzio's perspective on things. And every once in a while, whenever I did something notable or had a breakthrough of some kind, instead of awarding me a point of inspiration, the DM would allow my Int score to go back up by 1. I'm back up to an 8 now, which is fine. 

So yeah. I think the Deck is a bit tacky as far as magic items go. But it's a classic. It's a first round Hall of Famer. You haven't really played D&D long enough until you've messed around with the Deck.

Two different groups over time. 

Fun times!

Donjon: You disappear and become entombed in a state of suspended animation in an extradimensional Sphere. Everything you were wearing and carrying stays behind in the space you occupied when you disappeared. You remain imprisoned until you are found and removed from the Sphere. You can't be located by any Divination magic, but a wish spell can reveal the Location of your prison. You draw no more cards.

Flames: A powerful devil becomes your enemy. The devil seeks your ruin and plagues your life, savoring your suffering before attempting to slay you. This enmity lasts until either you or the devil dies.

Idiot: Permanently reduce your Intelligence by 1d4 + 1 (to a minimum score of 1). You can draw one additional card beyond your declared draws.

Moon: You are granted the ability to cast the wish spell 1d3 times.

Jester: You gain 10,000 XP, or you can draw two additional cards beyond your declared draws.

I don't think I'll ever use this magic item, just because it would mess with my story-based campaigns way too much. I made a combat version of the deck, though, if anyone wants to see it.

The Deck insinuated itself into a character's backstory. We were having a moment of table talk about how my character's family got rich. Someone brought up Critical Role because we were playing in Exandria. Apparently there's a moment where one of the characters offers a draw to some NPC beggar, and the beggar gets the card that grants wishes. One of the other players said it was his head-cannon that that beggar was my character's ancestor, and it stuck.

P. S. so far as lore goes, I'd want to imagine the Deck as if it were the one-electron-Universe... There can be as many packs of cards as there are players of the game writ large, but they all contain the same set of cards, so a draw from one deck precludes the same card being drawn from a different one. It would probably be a bookkeeping nightmare to attempt to enforce, but I enjoy the thought experiment.

Every group I have run campaigns for finds the deck. But it's not complete. I changed it into a magical map where they have to collect the missing pieces before the deck mends itself. The map glows at the edges so players have a direction and never know who or what has the missing pieces. 

I scatter 3 pieces across the world and it gives players a path to find them if they really want it. 

Only one group so far has completed the deck. Two are currently working on it. 

The player who did get the deck used a card to change a decision on history. He decided to change that he picked a different item instead of the deck. It changed a ton of things. People died instantly.  Not the players though. It was a blast to have to rewrite 8 months of the game on the spot.

So the deck is a great item. Just be prepared for the cards and what they could do. 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!! Never use it unless you want the campaign to end and to ruin everyone’s characters!!!

It creates so many great hooks. We did it (8-man party lev 4-5 in a one-shot) as a liquid version, a fountain imbued with wild magic. Everyone decided it best to only drink once, resetting a full 13 card deck eachtime. I used mine to pump the magical water into our very dead fighter after she ate an adult blue dragon's lightning breath and bring her back to life. She came back normal, as far as we know, anyways. One member got Knight, which replaced a lev4 fighter who ironically got the Void. One got Throne which is a fun one for a lev4-5. One got Jester and shot to level 6 and the other,  a wizard, got Sun and went to level 9, and got a-randomly rolled- evil Robe of the Archmagi. He's not evil. And now we'll be guarding it from powerful necromancers until we can get it redyed, or taking it back by force if it's stolen from us. Did we get lucky? Sure. Could it have evaporated the magic items or all the gold of a lev4-5 character? It could have, but is that really that bad in the long run? YMMV, but to me there is no downside to the deck at any level.