By Peter Chiykowski
Hey friends, Peter here. I’m a writer and game designer, and if you’re anything like me, worldbuilding is the most exciting (and occasionally overwhelming) part of storytelling.
If you’ve ever tried to create a world from scratch and felt stuck halfway through naming your magical kingdom’s seventh royal house, I get it. That’s why I built the Lore Master’s Deck.
Whether you’re a novelist building a fantasy universe, a Dungeon Master crafting a homebrew campaign, or a loremaster who dreams in timelines, this deck is your new favorite worldbuilding tool.
What’s Inside the Box?
Inside the box, you’ll find:
- 300 double-sided cards
- Eight card types
- Four cues per card
That’s thousands of possible lore threads to pull, or 8,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations of prompts for your first lore cluster. One deck to weave them all.
What It Does
The Lore Master’s Deck is designed to help you:
- Build stories forward and backward in time
- Create a new world or deepen one you've already started
- Explore legacy, myth, conflict, and history
- Develop factions, characters, artifacts, creatures, and places with purpose
- Add depth and cohesion to your world’s backstory
Whether you're writing high fantasy, sci-fi, dark fantasy, or even alternate history, this deck supports your lore building by showing how your world’s events, materials, figures, and places connect across time.
You can use it solo or with any other Story Engine deck, including the original Story Engine Deck, Deck of Worlds, or expansions like Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy.
How to Use the Deck in 3 Easy Steps
Here’s how I like to use the Lore Master Deck when I start a new lore thread:
1. Draw a primary card
Pick a card to serve as the foundation of your lore cluster—a Faction, an Event, or a Creature card, for example. This becomes the root of your story.
2. Draw and flip cards to explore the cues
Each card has four secondary cues on the reverse side. Draw more cards and use them to ask deeper questions. What secrets did this faction leave behind? What sparked this global event? What legacy does this creature carry?
3. Follow the icons to build outward
Each card has an icon to help you pick your next one. Want to explore what material an object is made from or what figure is tied to a location? Keep drawing and linking cards to grow your lore web.
You can stop after three cards or keep expanding into a complex timeline of betrayals, bloodlines, and buried truths. The more you draw, the more the story deepens. You can watch a tutorial video below.
This method makes it easy to build lore clusters that connect people, places, and histories throughout your world.
For Writers
Writing fantasy can get messy, especially when you’re trying to track seven pantheons, five realms, and the dietary restrictions of your magical fauna.
The Lore Master’s Deck gives you:
- Momentum when you’re stuck
- Deep prompts for fantasy plots and timelines
- Thematic texture through relationships, events, and traits
Want to know how to write fantasy lore that doesn’t feel like a wiki dump? Try pulling a Faction card, a Material card, and an Event card, and ask yourself: What’s the connection?
For example, one of my favorite prompts led me to create a traveling circus that uses music to awaken ancient gods. That one came from a Faction card, an Event card, and some secondary cues. You can build entire novels from combinations like that.
For Dungeon Masters
If you’re a DM, this is your behind-the-screen cheat code. Whether you run dark fantasy one-shots or sprawling homebrew campaigns, the Lore Master’s Deck makes worldbuilding easier.
You can use it to:
- Generate lore-based story hooks and campaign ideas
- Build interconnected NPC backstories and regional histories
- Create conflicts between factions, figures, and ancient relics
- Design homebrew monsters with interesting powers and properties
Wondering how to write lore for a D&D game or how to write lore for NPCs in a believable way? Start with a few cards and let the connections reveal themselves.
It’s also a great tool for player engagement. Give players their own cards to inspire backstories or tie them into the larger world. That way, their personal arcs feel grounded in the setting.
What Makes It Different
You might be asking, “What’s the difference between lore and worldbuilding?” Worldbuilding is the big picture. Lore is what gives it depth, history, and emotion.
The Lore Master’s Deck focuses specifically on a new lore element: the threads that tie together the stories that explain your world and give it soul. Unlike previous decks in the Story Engine system, this one is about how things connect and what they mean to each other, not just what they are on their own. The deck also lets you get very intentional about what you're creating, allowing you to conjure creatures, factions, artifacts, NPCs, settings, and historical moments on demand.
Each card has:
- Four primary cues on the front
- Four secondary cues on the reverse
- Built-in guidance for branching your lore cluster in meaningful directions
Whether you’re wondering how to write good lore for a game or how to write lore for a world that doesn’t feel cliché, this deck gives you the tools to explore the links between your story and world.
