When only 2 People show up for the Game

I believe it was called Arcadia. Does it still exist? Is it still an active line? I have a pack or two of cards and no one else in my area got them. No one else knew how to play nor did they care. Maybe I shouldn't have either, but it seemed like a cool idea: play an RPG with nothing but a deck of cards.

WotC seemed to do just that but something was lost in the translation. You were just some omniscient wizard with a deck of spells and you lowered your opponents life with creatures and magic and so forth. What happened to the Dungeon Crawl, the Politics, the Dwarves and Elves? They disappeared with this new kind of game. This Collectible Card Game eliminated that part of Role-Playing that made it Role-Playing: the roles.

But that was the purpose. It wasn't meant to be exactly an RPG. It was meant to be a diversion while waiting to play. Then others came along, and Arcadia was one of them. It tried to head back to the original plan. It tried to head back to the RPG realm in an effort to bridge the gap, and to be a new game in its own right. But the rules seemed obscure and what your left with are some cards that don't quite go with what you've got and you'll have to get more and more decks in order to play, but that's marketing, and a different story.

Instead, of continuing this tiring exploration into my own game cupboard nostalgia, why not get into something new. Are you listening, WotC? If indeed the Arcadia line of products are dead, who ever their creator was (White-Wolf?), then perhaps it is time to reintroduce the idea of the packaged random adventure. What I mean by this is a deck of cards with a dungeon and/or town to put together, a number of NPCs or creatures, and the treasures, and the story.

Let's just set a price, $5. The deck contains: 4 NPCs, 8 Creatures, 4 Treasures, 36 Land Cards, and 2 Cards for the Story. In 52 Cards you can create an adventure that you aren't even too sure what will happen. You could even run yourself through the mix. A one person adventure. How will it work?

The NPCs will be labeled A, B, C, and D. Each letter is pulled from a specific pool. "A" cards will always be innocents. These will be the victims, or the unharmful NPCs in the story. "B" cards will be shop keepers, or tavern owners, or people with information. "C" cards will come from the pool of heroic help. These will be the NPC that might help the player along in the story. "D" cards will be the villian, the main bad guy in some context or another. The 2 Story cards will call upon ABC&D to tell the story and lay out the treasure and the goal. Shuffle the lands and start to play them out in a grid of 5 by 6 cards. Eight of the cards will be marked with encounters which will be Creatures to face in the dungeon or cavern. If you flip all the cards over you have a town on the other side.

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