Here is a live unboxing of the new Story Engine creative deck, the Lore Master Deck. I've previously used the Deck of Worlds on another live stream and have a quick overview video on the original Story Engine deck available as well. I'm quite a fan of the product line.
The Lore Master Deck: Weave Your Lore
I ordered the Lore Master deck via its Backerkit campaign back in July 2023. It arrived on Christmas 2024 and I was very excited that Santa brought it early.
Let's dive into what came in the box.
I ordered the main Lore Master deck, which features 300 double sided cards, the three Lore Master expansions and three "Bridge" expansions each of which has 60 cards. I also got two enamel pins.
The Main Deck
The main deck consists of eight card types:
- Faction cards represents organized groups of people.
- Figures represent individual people.
- Event cards represent important historical moments.
- Location cards represent landmarks or geographical areas.
- Object cards represent significant items and artifacts.
- Material cards represent physical materials and resources.
- Creature cards represent animals, plants, and other life forms.
- Modifier cards represent generic terms that can be used to alter any other card type.
Each card type has an associated icon, pictured in the center of the cards. If you have some familiarity with the other decks then you might recognize that some icons are shared with card types from the other decks - Object cards in here use the same icon as Anchor cards from the Story Engine deck, Locations use the Landmark icon from Deck of Worlds, etc - This is because the cards represent very similar story telling components and overlapping the icons in this way allows you to integrate the decks together very seamlessly. The cards are double sided with the secondary side being a white background and the primary side has white text with a card color as the background. The above image shows the primary side of each card with the exception of the lower right card set - The modifiers have white backgrounds on both sides.
The secondary cue side of each card. These are used to modify the primary cues of cards of the same type. Let's go over how these cards are designed to be used.
Lore Clusters
A Lore Cluster is a small grouping of cards consisting of a Primary Cue modified by four Secondary Cues. Typically, each Lore Cluster can be expanded into another new, connected Cluster. Let's look at the first Cluster I made from the unboxing video above.
Here we have a Faction card. The Cue "facing you" is considered "the" Primary Cue. I chose to use Diaspora - We will ignore the Cues that aren't facing us (Tribunal, March, Covenant). I then drew four other Faction cards and used the white Secondary side to pick Secondary Cues to attach to our Diaspora - The Secondary Cues will have types associated with them. As you can see above, we have four Secondary Cues from the white side of four other Faction cards.
- Trait - Lovers of food or drink.
- Trait - Rite of passage involving a creature
- Background - Created or bred a creature.
- Agenda - Complete a collection.
Some of those Secondary Cues also have card icons on them. These will be used to create new Clusters. If there is one icon, you draw a card of that type and select a Primary Cue to use. If there are multiple icons separated by a slash, you pick one card of each icon and select one of them to use. If there is a plus between the icons then you would use one of each card represented. Already we have selected multiple cues involving a creature but we also have some unrelated cues to flesh out or Faction. Let's take the trait "Rite of passage involving a creature" and expand that into its own Cluster.
We drew a new Creature card and I selected the Bat Primary Cue to use. Next, I drew a Modifier card and selected a Cue to use. The Modifier Cue will always, when space permits, connected adjacently to the Cue from the Cluster that we are expanding. So above, the Clairvoyant modifier has its arrow pointing from the Diaspora Cluster to the Bat Cluster, sitting directly next to the Rite of passage involving an animal Cue indicating that the Bat is the animal in question. When a new Cluster is created from an existing Cue, we will always use one Modifier Card and three Secondary Cues from cards of the same type. The cues for the Bat Creature card are:
- Modifier - Clairvoyant.
- Background - Valued for an ingredient or reagent.
- Trait - Very long or irregular breeding or migration cycle.
- Trait - Bears single offspring or lays single egg.
In the image of the first two Clusters you can see some arrow tokens above the cards. Included in the main deck is a bag of Link Tokens that can be used to draw connections between clusters that either can't be placed physically next to each other or instead of building a new Cluster. In the Diaspora Cluster we have the top Cue that also mentions a Creature - Instead of making a new Creature Cluster for that Cue I've used the tokens to indicate that the Bat is the same Creature that Cue references. There are corner tokens and straight tokens and they come in four colors. The Guidebook gives us an illustrated example of their use.
Now let's draw a Material card to be the item that the Faction wants to Collect. I chose Poison.
First we draw another Modifier. Our Poison is Tangy.
- Modifier - Tangy.
- Background - Discovered or developed by accident.
- Background - Responsible for the properties of an object.
- Trait - Notorious taste or smell.
The Poison is responsible for the properties of a Staff.
- Modifier - Luminous.
- Background - Used as evidence in the trial of a figure.
- Background - Buried with a figure in their grave.
- Background - Modeled after a creature's natural defenses.
