A gimmick

30 Jan, 2026

house of cards

for dungeon delving

House of Cards image credit: Peter Roberts

use my card deck encounter table from here. It’s pretty easy work to translate a standard encounter table to cards: lower cards are likelier to pull, as you always select the lower of two draws.
on entering each dungeon room, or whenever you make untoward noise, you must build a new /\ onto a house of cards, building a floor if necessary.
when the house collapses you pick the second highest face-up card as the encounter.
you may collapse the tower early to force an encounter
at the end of the session, the party gains xp equal to the highest number of floors your house had this session, multiplied by the dungeon floor, multiplied by [some sensible amount for old school play]. (I can't be bothered doing the math, sorry.)

Extension: When building a /\ in your house of cards, you may place a die in it (not on the ground floor though).

When the tower collapses, the dice will roll. find the highest result and add it to the damage of your first attack.

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