The Story Engine: Lore Master's Deck

Created by The Story Engine

Lore Master's Deck is the ultimate creative jumpstarter for writers, game masters, and worldbuilders who want to fill their stories with rich, interconnected lore.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Settle a bet for us + tomorrow's open beta launch livestream
11 months ago – Wed, Feb 07, 2024 at 08:19:13 AM

Thanks so much to everyone who tuned in for our Creator Convo + Q&A livestream last week! We had so much fun answering your questions and sharing some of our behind-the-scenes highlights, including:
  • Me finding the hand-written index card prototype of the original Story Engine Deck
  • The secret project we put away to focus on Lore Master's Deck
  • The process we use to decide which cues go on which cards, and how it's different for Lore Master's Deck than for any deck we've created so far
  • The 2 words we spent the longest time arguing over during the editorial process (more on this in a moment)!
  • And so much more!

Watch the replay if you'd like to get caught up!

Tomorrow at 3pm we're hosting the Lore Master's Deck RELOADED Open Beta Launch livestream, during which we'll be distributing the beta files live and then creating prompts with our copy of the deck. As we were reviewing the replay of the last livestream, we realized we need you to settle a bet for us!




At one point, we recalled the 2 hour friendly debate I had with our community manager/contributing writer Eric Weiss about whether "archive" or "museum" was a better primary cue to include in the Location cards and solicited some votes in the chat.

Eric was leading Team Archive, arguing that it was a broader term that could be interpreted in wider variety of contexts and offer more creative options.

I was leading Team Museum, arguing that museums as public spaces offer more opportunities to tell stories involving a wider range of characters.

The chat weighed in, too, and we agreed to reveal the decision we came to on the beta launch livestream tomorrow! We're hoping you'll weigh in through the community poll attached to this update!

We also hope you'll join us tomorrow and share the excitement of opening your PDFs live on the air and creating some lore prompts with us! Click "Notify Me" on the YouTube event page to make sure you don't miss it.

You can also visit our YouTube Live page to get notified for our full run of upcoming streams!




Send us your questions + join the Lore Master's Deck Reloaded Q&A on Thursday
12 months ago – Mon, Jan 29, 2024 at 09:56:25 AM

Hey backers!

We're excited to be kicking off 2 months of weekly Lore Master's Deck livestreams starting this coming Thursday with a pre-launch Q&A about the updated Lore Master's Deck at 3pm ET. The day after, at 2pm ET, we'll also be doing a live webinar with BackerKit to talk about the nuts bolts of crowdfunding and how you backers were our biggest champions on this project!

For the Thursday stream, we want to hear your questions so we can answer them live! We want to know what YOU want to know about:
  • The deck
  • The design/development/review process
  • The beta process and our collaboration with backers
  • How we iterated on our prototypes to take us from a page of haphazard brainstorming notes in 2022 to a polished deck system in 2024
  • Anything else about the Lore Master's Deck and its expansions

You can get an initial behind-the-scenes look at some of the design process in our closed beta retrospective update and our most recent update to fuel your imagination for questions!

Also, if you missed the campaign and would like to get in on the open beta, you can still make a late pledge via our preorder store and receive the open beta when it launches on Feb 8.

Leave your questions in the comments below or put them in the comments on the YouTube live link. You can also click Notify Me on the YouTube page so you don't miss when we go live.



A little teaser for what's to come!

I was pawing through my old journals looking for a specific set of a notes when I stumbled over the oldest record of my work on Lore Master's Deck.



Back then, I wasn't trying to design a lore-weaving deck. I really just wanted to design a deck for creating interesting creatures for fantasy or science fiction worldbuilding. The page on the right was actually scribbled down hastily in the middle of a game of Oceans (the board game by North Star Game Studio). The game does a great job of representing evolutionary adaptions through mechanics, and my friend Aaron and I stopped to brainstorm some more creature traits that could be mixed into a species-prompting deck.

You'll notice in the picture on the left that I wrote down some brainstorming categories to help shape the brainstorm. In particular, the categories focused on "Utility" (is the species useful in some way to humans or sentient species) and "Connection" (which explored social behaviors and bonds within the species, as well as larger connections to the ecosystem and setting). These categories made me realize how much more interesting creature creation gets when you looked at the lore links between the species and the world they live in. This eventually grew into the link cues mechanic and the broader deck concept: a set of card types that explore the interconnectedness of creatures, material resources, locations, events, factions, figures, and objects.

It was a long road connecting an impromptu mid-game brainstorm to the final format of the deck, and I'm excited to bust out my journals and prototypes on livestream and share the process.

In particular, there are three creative lessons I want to highlight:
  • Pay attention to what excites you. There's a reason certain topics, projects, and ideas get your neurons firing, your heartrate spiking, and your imagination bubbling with new ideas. If I hadn't acknowledged the excitement and asked a friend to indulge me in a brainstorm while the lightning was flashing, Lore Master's Deck wouldn't exist.
  • Write down your ideas and revisit them. You'll record 100 "bad" ideas for every "good" one, but you don't find gold without digging through some dirt first. Collect all your raw ideas and pan through them later looking for the bits that glimmer. Scrub away at those. Interesting "bad" ideas are often just first drafts of "good" ideas.
  • Talk through your ideas with different people. From the first brainstorm for this project with Aaron, to explaining the concept to our project director Miroki, to co-creating prompts with backers, to working through revisions with the sensitivity readers and our community manager Eric, the biggest breakthroughs always came from presenting my ideas and getting an outside perspective on what was wonky or working well.

We'll get into this more during the livestream! Until then, make sure to subscribe and hit "Notify Me" on YouTube and register for our BackerKit webinar!

A funny BTS moment + livestreams are back for our open beta series!
12 months ago – Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 11:41:35 AM

Hi Lore-Weavers!

I'm thrilled to announce that we just delivered our files to the printer to kick off the open beta period, and we're bringing back our popular livestream series once again!

We'll be hosting an open beta pre-release livestream on February 1, where we'll be taking your questions about the deck and giving a rare behind-the-scenes look at the development process. I'll be cracking open my personal journals to show you how we grew from the first inklings of this project (an impromptu notebook brainstorm in the middle of a board gaming session) into a 3,750-backer project on the frontpage of BackerKit.

Let us know what questions you want answered in the livestream in the comments below!

Click "Notify me" and subscribe to us on YouTube to make sure you don't miss us going live.



The open beta will be delivered via BackerKit digital download to every backer or preorder customer who pledged for a PDF or physical copy of the main deck.

Backers can still update or upgrade their pledges to gain access to the open beta of the main deck. Just check your final pledge contents to see if they include the PDF of Lore Master's Deck.

Or if you didn't back the campaign, now's your chance to place a preorder via our preorder store!



We'll also be clicking "Distribute" to send out the beta live on February 8, followed by some live lore-weaving powered by your choices in chat.

Again, click "Notify me" and subscribe to us on YouTube.




A funny behind-the-scenes full-circle moment

One minor change I didn't talk about during our previous BTS update: we renamed the Trait cards.

This wasn't an easy decision. It turns out that it's a bit of a funny one, though.

We got some helpful beta feedback from a few people that it was confusing to have some secondary cues labeled as traits while also having a dedicated card type called Traits. A good point! So I did some brainstorming on alternative names.

Trait cards featured one-word descriptors that provide an initial detail for a primary cue of another card type. For example, the Object cue "sword" might suddenly become a "PARASITIC sword." In some cases, the card was providing a trait, but in other cases, it felt more like it was putting a spin on a card.

We spent almost five days going back and forth on the question of whether the new name should be Modifier, Descriptor, or Wildcard. I could tell I was in that deep-in-the-weeds stage of overthinking, but I'm glad we put as much care into the decision as we did.

In the end, we went with Modifier. The new name avoids confusing references to other cues labeled as traits, and also highlights how these cards modify or put a new spin on other cards. Even now, Modifier continues to feel like the right decision, and the new name has helped me think about the utility of this card type in new ways.

But get this: a week after we decided on the name Modifier, I rediscovered my old development journals for Lore Master's Deck (from before it was even called Lore Master's Deck).

I found my earliest card-type brainstorming notes.

It turns out that I wrote down "Modifier" right at the beginning of this project and forgot.


I also found a different notebook with the first brainstorm that turned into the prototype for the Creatures deck that turned into the seed for the entire Lore Master's project, but that's a story I'll save for the Feb 1 livestream!

It's funny how things come full circle.

Thanks so much, and hope to see you on the livestream!

A behind-the-scenes look at how your feedback shaped the deck
about 1 year ago – Thu, Jan 11, 2024 at 02:03:31 PM

Hi again backers!

As the deck designer, I thought it might be interesting to share a behind-the-scenes look at how the closed beta feedback helped shape the version of the deck we'll be sending to print shortly! One of the things I love about crowdfunding is being able to receive feedback from the people who are most invested in the project, and getting to share the nuts and bolts of the development process with them.

I also thought I'd share the news that we'll be releasing the open beta to all backers on February 8!


Okay, let's dive in to the feedback and revisions.

Closed beta feedback was incorporated into Lore Master's Deck in early December.

We made a lot of small changes to specific cards and bits of the guidebook that I won't get into, but I wanted to share some of the broader categories of changes we made and how they've improved the deck!

We overhauled primary cues to avoid repeated words

In the alpha and beta we'd selected a limited number of words to repeat within the primary cues for Factions, Locations, and Materials because we wanted certain essential cues (e.g., "guild," "school," and "stone") to appear more often than more niche words (e.g., "coterie," "farmhouse," and "foam").

There are two reasons I did this in the alpha and beta:
  1. I wanted the probability of a given cue being drawn to reflect the prevalence with which certain structures and concepts recur in life and fiction. Often the words I repeated were broad words that make for good blank canvases to fill in with secondary prompts, so they take on new meaning every time they appear. 
  2. Repeating essential cues had been helpful for Regions and Landmark cards in Deck of Worlds, where one world map might need multiple towns, forests, and seas.



There was helpful and consistent feedback in the beta that this repetition of words felt limiting and deck users wanted access to a wider variety of cues. It also helped me realize that Deck of Worlds was a very different kind of project; the Region and Landmark cards include artwork to differentiate repeated words and make each instance feel unique.


The feedback helped me realize that Lore Master's Deck is a new format that would require new design solutions.

So we did some additional writing sessions to replace all repeated entries within a given card category with new material that felt equally strong. We also really worked our thesauruses to look for ways of representing some of these prompts through additional synonyms.

I'm so, so happy with the new material and I can see how much value this variety adds to the deck! Thanks to everyone who sent in notes about this.

We overhauled primary cues to reduce the number of words that also appear in The Story Engine Deck and Deck of Worlds

A few noted that a small number of essential primary cues in Lore Master's Deck also appear on cards in previous deck systems we've published.

There's a delicate balance when you're developing a new standalone deck system that builds on existing decks: you want to present as much new material as possible, but also need to cover some of the same core concepts as the previous material. Because Figure cards are an intentional analogue to Agent cards from The Story Engine Deck, we needed to include essential character types and social roles, like "healer," "researcher," and "soldier." The same went for Locations (which parallel Landmarks/Regions from Deck of Worlds and Anchors from The Story Engine) and Objects (which also parallel Anchors from The Story Engine).



To make sure Lore Master's Deck offered as much new material as possible, we crosschecked every primary cue with every parallel card type we've released to date and replaced as many repeated cues as we could. We also tagged cues depending on whether or not they appeared in The Story Engine main deck, story expansions, Deck of Worlds, and worldbuilding expansions so we could ensure that no single card featured more than one repeated cue from a specific deck system.



When we launched the Lore Master's Deck campaign and alpha, I estimated the deck had roughly 10% repeated cues.

After our closed beta revisions, doing some quick back-of-the-envelope math on the 2,400 cues in Lore Master's Deck, it looked like ~2% of cues appear in another main deck, and another ~2% appear somewhere in another deck system's suite of expansions. We managed to cut that number to less than half of what it was before.

Again, we replaced these cues through additional writing and brainstorming sessions, followed by more crosschecking sessions, followed by more writing and brainstorming sessions, until we were satisfied.

Cutting down overrepresented primary cue categories

Another behind-the-scenes development nugget: When I design cards, I usually develop conceptual categories to help structure my brainstorms and ensure that every card features a variety of cue types.

For example, during the alpha, the Factions deck was designed so that every card features a military faction, spiritual faction, political faction, and secular faction.



Object cards featured one weapon, one tool or piece of equipment, one wearable item, and one wildcard (which might include vehicles, oddballs, or overflow ideas from other categories).



The boundaries between these categories are permeable, but it's a helpful starting point for ensuring card balance and ensuring some structure for brainstorming. And for the finished deck, it ensures that every card draw covers a variety of creative needs.

There were two card types where we heard consistently that there were too many cues on a given category.
  1. For Factions, we heard that there were too many military-focused cues.
  2. For Creatures, there were too many plant/fungus-focused cues.

My philosophy is that when a tool or structure stops being useful, you should either adapt it or set it aside, so I adjusted how I was prioritizing categories for these card types. We kept the best material in each of these categories and cut the weakest material, then wrote new material to replace it that covered new conceptual ground.

I want to give a special shout-out to our community manager Eric Weiss, who really fleshed out some new community-focused categories for the Factions deck. His additions, like "neighborhood," "diaspora," and "borough," really touched on new ways of recognizing groups of people with a common interest or experience.


We're really excited for you to explore the new material we developed!

That's all for now! I hope you enjoyed this peek behind the curtain! Let me know if you have any questions in the meantime!

Review + production update
about 1 year ago – Tue, Jan 02, 2024 at 09:46:07 AM

Hello backers!

As we kick off the new year, we wanted to share an update on the pre-production process, which has been moving along smoothly!

Beta feedback was incorporated in Lore Master's Deck in early December. We made a lot of small changes to specific cards and bits of the guidebook based on your feedback, as well as a few broader changes to the deck, mostly focused on eliminating repeated words and adding more specialization to differentiate Lore Master's Deck from our existing deck systems. The deck feels even richer and more varied, and we're excited to share a coming update with a more detailed look at all the ways your feedback helped shape the deck! We also wanted to say thank you for all the notes of appreciation and support you included to your feedback forms. As we work through the long slog of small changes and fine-tuning, it means a lot to hear about your excitement for the deck!

Sensitivity readers have reviewed all decks, expansions, and guidebooks! They are currently doing a review of our box art, add-ons, and revised materials. Their notes have been extremely helpful for understanding how the deck's and expansions' cues touch on the more sensitive aspects of worldbuilding and story-crafting, and guiding how to reframe, rephrase, edit, or contextualize our cues to make sure the deck both represents and respects a variety of lived experiences.

Proofreaders have finished reviewing all decks and guidebooks! We're just about to compile all of our add-ons, boxes, and packaging for them to review. When that's all done, we'll likely do another round of spot checks on everything before packaging files for the printer to review in mid-January.

That's all for now! We'll follow up soon with a more detailed breakdown of changes to the deck, along with timelines for the open beta, PDF delivery of expansions, and charging cards for add-ons, shipping, and taxes. In the meantime, don't hesitate to send us a message or comment below with your questions!