The Deck of Many Things

You come across a small ornate box

A deck of many things box, with full deck hidden inside.

In your searching of the area, you find a small ornate box tucked into a corner. It is made from a beautiful wood and is covered in jewels, and a small lock holds it closed. What do you do?

This project began, in a way, with the Harrow deck, and I needed to have the regular Deck of Many Things as well, and so I ordered it off Etsy. At this point, the thinking began.

For you see, most Decks of Many Things come with 13 cards, though some can carry as many as 22! I have decided to do both.

So for this deck, working with primarily cardboard scraps and extra cloth I had laying around, I set about making a box with two hidden compartments in it, thin little slots where an envelope containing cards might go. The main box holds the primary 13 cards, but with a successful investigation check (after picking the lock, something the players at the table will be able to mess with directly!), they can find that the inner lining can be removed, revealing the two hidden envelopes inside, containing the remaining cards.

The deck of many things, with the box, and the wish card drawn, moon A scattering of cardboard, arranged to look somewhat like a face holding a smaller pile of scrap cardboard Tall, thin strips of cardboard glued onto dark brown patches of cloth
One inner side of the box assembled, having a slot to place a small envelope of cards The red velvet lining of the box, appearing clean and flat. Think of it like, the box has had the top face of it removed, so basically an open box, except one side is a door. And the bottom face is hiding the cards The inner lining partially pulled back, revealing the envelope behind it. Little fun fact, each envelope contains six cards. There's actually one extra card, a blank one! Oooohhhhh, GM choice.
The box will at some point soon, when possible, be- Oh what is this, a change to the page since 2021? Let there be update!!!! And on August 1st 2024, we found and received wooden veneer online (in A4 page sized sheets!) And on that same day, the two sides of the box were finally glued together (they had been left separate to look less weird to customs when moving to England). And the project surged forward again! To rehash the info that was typed here before, I had hypothesized that creating the interior would be the hardest part, let's put that to the test! I'd also wondered how I might be able to lock it, which has been solved! We have a hinge, we have a lock, and we have the gemstones! Now we need glue-drying time, and also mucking with a ton of veneer.

Also a note kinda in the middle of things here, with the random card drawer at the bottom, while editions 1, 2, 3, and 5 are all almost verbatim identical, 4 is actually quite a bit different, with two version in fact, Paragon and Heroic! However, due to 4th ed being unusual with its sharing, I can't post those. However, they both use only the 22 card versions. The Paragon deck is in Dungeon magasine issue 177, page 57, and the Heroic deck is in the module Madness at Gardmore Abbey, page 30. So you can use the 22 card randomizer at the bottom, and then look up those resources for the rules to those, at least until it's made shareable.

But that aside, it is time to muck with veneer! 		The envelope opened, and the cards partially pulled out, laid on top of the box, still showing the lining pulled back. The box, now completely closed up, being held together with white elastics. The box is brown on the outside with the lip of a red lining showing, with the cards inside. It looks a little bit like a mouth, kinda muppet-like or something. The cards and inner linings have been removed, revealing how the envelopes look with the lining out. From a muppet perspective, it looks like he took his dentures out, kinda light brown gums showing there.
Due to my not having gotten the veneer just yet, the rather rustic looking box, brown fabric and elastics showing, has a scrap of paper taped to the face of it, rather clumsily written with the words ornate box An imagining of the outside veneer, a very light, shimmering wavey patterned wood type, with four blue gemstones and four red gemstones on the face. The blue and red are drawn in a paint program, just filled in circles, with the four blue gemstones being close to the corners, and the red gemstomes making up a smaller rectangle closer to the middle. A gold padlock and latch are drawn at the top of the box, and a dark brown line shows where the lid would be A photo of the cloth covered box interior, this time without the scrap of paper and elastics holding it closed, sitting on top of a plastic package of six steamed beech wood veneer sheets, with beside it a large bottle of gorilla wood glue and painter's touch craft enamel spray, which is toy safe for handling, added bonus!
We tried gluing one side of the veneer on... which went incredibly ripply X|. We then attempted to sand that to make a flat surface, but the half-millimeter thick veneer was not thick enough for that to be possible, and so we peeled/sheared that off entirely. We tested using a sheet of plastic cover from the bookbindings as a permanent plate, but that peeled off incredibly easily, tho that led to it being used as a means of keeping the glue flat while it dries, so good came out of that test at least. Then, after like... 5 or 6 layers of glue to give it a nice thick, hard surface, we can proceed.

With much filing and careful bending with pliers, we managed to bend the upper portion of the hinge mechanism at a 90 degree angle WITHOUT it just snapping off (which I fully expected, so I'm very glad it didn't) just above the latch post. Following this, we thickened up the lid of the box to match the depth just set by bending the hinge, with the result being to embed the metal into the cardboard so only the latch is visible, and as well thickening the lid will mask how thin the sides of the box actually are (due to the hidden compartments), and imply that the entire box is much thicker than it is.

More to come.

Interior finished August 27, 2021




Did you want to draw a card from the 13 or the 22 card deck?
Or perhaps the 66 card Deck of Many More Things?

On top of the veneer sheet package is sitting red and blue flat back plastic faceted crystals, an elaborate darkened brass jewellery box hinge, and a pair of simple brass luggage locks and keys. The box sitting on a cutting board on a table, with white woodworking pva glue coating the front surface of it, and a sheet of clear plastic pressed on top of it as it dries to have it dry as flat as possible. The surface of the box after multiple layers of gluing and sanding flat, now essentially a hard plastic surface ready for veneer.
The upper half of the hinge, bent at a ninety degree angle just above the hinge for the latch, being held by Kabutroid. Behind it is a wooden table with a contraption balancing precariously, detailed in the next pic, and a large black case that contains Kabutroid's files set. A delicately balanced setup where the box is standing vertically on the lid, to press the glued paperboard flat as it dries, with on top of it being a ream of waterproof paper and the set of metal files, which is balanced on the other side by a thin piece of metal railway, itself standing on a small card box to make it the same height as the many things box. It looks ready to fall over if you so much as breathe on it. And it did actually, but after an hour or so, which was plenty enough time for the glue to set, so good enough!


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