Deckbuilding in the Stygian Library: The First Layer

Last week: Exploring the Stygian Library as a Deckbuilding Game

Before we get into our first location, we have one important unanswered question. What are Felix and company looking for, exactly? Let’s stick with Knave 2 (“K2”) and roll on the Books table on page 40. We get 47: hunting. They’re after an ancient tome that details ways to hunt terrible, long-extinct monsters from deep under the sea. At least, everyone thought they were extinct. Lately they have revealed themselves to be dangerously non-extinct, so the value of this previously obsolete book has gone through the proverbial roof. Under The Stygian Library’s (“TSL”) distinctions of how hard a book is to find, we’ll put this at 30: “Obscure information, the sort of thing known only to a few scholars and jealously guarded.” Of course, Felix is happy to grab anything else that looks valuable; but this book is the specific reason his patron sent him into the library.

The Display Case

To begin, we’ll generate rooms strictly by the TSL rules. We certainly could create cards for every option on the primary roll tables, to populate rooms through a deck. And we may decide we need DM-facing deckbuilding components in the future. But in the interest of keeping it simple and iterating quickly, I’m going to limit the deckbuilding to immediate adjudication, and keep it away from elements that might be handled during prep in a non-procedural dungeon crawl.

Felix, Clotilde, and Guinevere crawl through the utility panel and tumble into the library’s first room:

• Location: The Display Case. Interesting Shoes.
• Details: Candle Sticks.
• Random Events: Something turns up - it’s unfriendly.
• An Ink Elemental and d4 Inkblots.

No easing our adventurers into this one. We immediately enter a potentially dangerous scenario, with “unfriendly” monsters present in the space. A few questions immediately present themselves:

• The random encounter is “unfriendly” -- how unfriendly?
• How far away? 
• Who sees who first?

Of course, these are the same questions handled by the traditional D&D rules of reaction and distance. Let’s try handling those with cards. For purposes of testing, I’m using dry erase playing cards, which are readily available online. They can smudge with shuffling, but are easy to erase and reuse. Index cards also work fine as a cheaper option, for those less particular about shuffling hand-feel.

We already know from the TSL result that the ink elemental and its blots are “unfriendly,” so we’ll limit reaction results to the negative end of the spectrum. Using the K2 reaction rules, that includes 2-7, everything from (gulp) “kill the PCs” to “Ignore the PCs.” We label the cards, shuffle them, and draw, for…

Gif by Shivur

“Ignore”! The best possible result. Phew. A TPK in the first room would have been underwhelming.

What do we do with this card, as well as the other reactions that we didn’t draw? Let’s set that question aside for now. Deckbuilders can incorporate the results of a scenario into the fiction in a number of ways. We could shuffle the “ignore” card into our player’s deck, and perhaps interpret its re-emergence later as the return of the original monster. Or we could preserve only the remaining reaction cards, suggesting that future encounters will face a dwindling pool of options. We’ll see if the answer reveals itself as go forward.

How far away are the creatures when the party encounters them? Traditionally 2d6x10 would give us a distance in feet for a dungeon encounter, but I don’t think we need to label 11 cards to resolve this. In many cases, cards are going to want to condense options to relatively fewer, broader choices, relative to dice.

For now, let’s just label three cards as close, medium, and far. We flip a card and get “medium”; the inklings are neither close nor far; they’re across the room, within a stone’s throw, but not right on top of our party.

Finally, is either side surprised? K2 treats surprise a little differently, with an opposed wisdom check (interestingly, this is a lot closer to modern/5E D&D than typical old-school rules). Felix has a +2. The Ink Elemental requires some conversion. We’ll halve it and round down, giving it a +2 on this check. There’s some more nuance suggested by K2 that we may or may not want to use later. For now, let’s just keep it simple and make four cards; monster surprised, party surprised, both surprised, neither surprised.

We draw and get… "monster surprised." The cards are really favoring the party so far. The adventurers spot the ink elemental and its satellite ink blots before the monsters know the party is there. Felix holds a finger to his lips and trio lays low. Since the monster’s default is to ignore them anyway, we don’t need to get into any kind of stealth adjudication. Our party also doesn’t need to spend much time in this space, as Felix quickly surveys the collection of unusual shoes and determines they aren’t worth stealing (per TSL, the value is 100 silver times the layer; since this is layer zero, these shoes are interesting, but worthless). The party uses the candlesticks here to light a torch, which Clotilde will carry. 

With no desire to linger here, the party delves deeper into the library. We’ll roll d20+1 (the layer they’re going to) for a location result of 5 (Chained Lectern) and a details result of 8 (Lamp-Post). We’ll pick up their adventure next time.

OK, So Where Is the Deckbuilding?

So far, all we have really done is replace die rolls with drawn cards. This is an intentionally slow start, because we want to gradually discern mechanics from gameplay, not dictate mechanics to the game and assume they'll just work out well. We'll build in more deckbuilding in future installments of this series.