By Deirdre Brooks (xenya@teleport.com)
Wizards of the Coast does not sanction this file (but some of them think it's funny :-)
This is the collectible trading card game you've all been waiting for! You and your opponent are Mystics in the Realms of Dineria, where you will use spells to summon monsters, siphon territories for power, and use fireballs to burn the other guy to a crisp.
The Starter Packs, at $8.50 each, come with 55 cards each, sufficient for a player to begin playing. The boosters, at $3 each, have 12 cards in each package. Expansions designed around a theme will follow every few months.
The cards were produced on contract with Global Graphics, a printer specializing in cardstock products. It is, alas, another Pentex subsidiary.
Black Dog and Global Graphics have placed more than a few surprises in these decks:
The first and simplest trap are the colored paints used on the cards. They are actually highly addictive, euphoric, wyrm-tainted chemicals which remain inactive until they contact human sweat. A small bit from each card touched is then absorbed through the skin. One Starter pack will create a dependency in a normal person within three or four days of handling the cards. The more the cards are handled, the less effective they become. Within a few weeks, new cards must be purchased or withdrawal will set in. This has encouraged the suggested strategy of building multiple decks, which gives players reason to switch to a "fresh" deck between games.
The next level is a bit more insidious. At least one card in every pack is a Wyrm Fetish of some sort (Gnosis of 4). These Fetishes induce feelings such as greed, envy, covetousness, etc. They encourage the players to buy more cards, and most especially encourage more Fetish-cards. The Fetishes can be identified in a fairly simple manner: They are the Rare cards. Some Uncommons have been spotted to be Fetishes as well.
With a few cards, the effects are not obvious. With more than ten, the personality changes a bit, with more than fifty, the change is marked and obvious. The more they have, the more they want. A curious purchaser can become a greedy collector within days due to the snowball effect.
In the expansion sets, different sorts of Fetishes have been added. This practice was not so obvious until the recent release of Ancients. One of the most popular is a Fetish that calls to those who do not own it, and gives them the feeling that they'd be so much happier with the card--that their decks, and their lives (in that order) will not be complete without it. That they must stop at nothing to get that card. The other person must make contact with the card for it to take full effect, but even with proximity a small attractive glamour is operating.
In addition to widespread use of that, many of the boxes were also Fetishes. These would activate around a lot of people, and exert a strong attractive pull to obtain as many of the cards as possible--via purchasing, or even worse methods. Black Dog also produced far less supply than they expected the demand to reach, thus increasing the resentment of those who got few or no cards. Those who did get enough, sold them for usurious prices.
The side effect of this was that orders for the next expansion, The Shadows, exceeded those for Ancients by several multiples. After taking the orders, Black Dog announced they were reducing the production to 25% of original orders. This would create an even leaner market for the next expansion, although the smaller run was nearly twice that of Ancients.
The boxes will be the same sort of Fetishes as the previous release. The card Fetishes, on the other hand, will be heterodyne with the effects of the previous cards, in effect behaving as amplifiers. This should drive the players into orgies of all kinds of nasty, corrupting acts--they hope for a high murder rate among players of the game.
They're planning worse for Necropoli. The various chemicals used in the cards should combine with the special chemicals on the Necropoli cards to transform the most enthusiastic players into Fomori of a very special type, nicknamed "Card Sharks" by Magadon Industries.
Card Sharks will possess odd illusionary powers not unlike those of the Seducers. They will disguise themselves as normal people, although their true appearance will be of a powerfully-built, grey-skinned humanoid creature with vicious claws and teeth, and incredibly heightened senses. Their illusionary powers allow them to cause the pictures on the cards themselves to come to life, although each use of this power costs a point of Willpower. The illusion behaves independently until somehow dispelled or defeated.
The creator of the game, Charles Heathcliffe, is actually a Syndicate barrabi, master of the Spheres of Mind and Spirit. (In Werewolf terms, he has several gifts which enable him to summon, control, and dispel spirits. He may also step sideways. In addition, he is can mentally control others, read their thoughts, and travel astrally outside of his body.)
Charles worked for Pentex before he was recruited by the Syndicate, who taught him about all kinds of neat things. At Pentex, he was a highly successful--and extremely predatory-- businessman. After spending several years working for the Syndicate, Pentex requested his return. At the same time, Corruption--The Defiler Wyrm seduced him to become a Nephandi. Shortly thereafter, he approached Black Dog Game Factory with the proposal for his first game in Heathcliffe Hobbies' CardLords series of games. They accepted his proposal and this is the result.
There are more HH games scheduled in the future. The next will be released shortly, and will be based on the best-selling Black Dog TaleSpinner game, Vampire: The Hidden. It will be called Dark Wars, and will have an entirely different set of imperatives built into it.