Kickstarter of the Week: Random monster card decks from Nord Games

You never know what you’ll find out in the world.

And Nord Games has just the thing to help.

If you need some ideas to facilitate random encounters or fill quickly-created dungeons, take a look at these wandering monster card decks for Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder.

Nord is producing 16 new monster decks: Four each for the D&D 5th edition core rulebook monsters, Pathfinder’s first Bestiary, Frog God Games Fifth Edition Foes book and Kobold Press’ Tome of Beasts book.

Each book has been broken into four separate decks: Dungeon, Wilderlands, Waterways and Underground.

In each deck, the cards detail several random encounters along with flavor text. Each entry on the individual cards also tells you where in the book you can find the monster stats.

That’s so great.

Best of all: They already did the challenge rating math for you, so you can incorporate these encounters into almost any game pretty easily, whether you’re populating a random dungeon where you’ll know the challenges OR you want them to stumble on a random encounter.

I envision a party traveling and stopping to rest. As DM, I know I want to challenge them with something as they rest, but do I really want to cook up an encounter on the fly? Pull out the deck, pick a card and send it their way.

Easy stuff.

I’ll admit a little bias: I have Nord’s critical fail, critical hit and luck decks, and I think they’re so well done. I love them.

It’s also cool they’re including several different worlds and rulesets.

As of this writing, the Kickstarter has pulled in more than $10,000, which is far beyond the initial $2,500 goal. A pledge of $12 gets you a single deck, and $42 gets you four decks.

If you want all 16 decks, you’ll have to pledge $160.

There are also options for retailer pledges.

The campaign lists no stretch goals, but you can add on treasure decks for $12 each.

Check out Nord Games’ Wandering Monster Decks right here.