The GameMaster's Apprentice 2e: Base Deck

Welcome to Christmas in July! In celebration, this digital title has been marked down by 30%! For more of Santa's savings, visit our Christmas in July sale page.

Time Limited Offer: Check out the Free Preview of the new GMA2e: Post Apocalypse Deck, and Back it on Kickstarter Now through August 14th!

What Happens Next? 

The GameMaster's Apprentice 2nd edition (GMA2e): Base Deck is a system- and setting-neutral deck of cards that can be used as either a supplement for traditional tabletop RPGs or as a complete game engine for GM-free solo or group RPGs. After more than a decade of refining and improvement, the Adamantine-best-selling GMA line of cards is updated and better than ever!

With these cards, you can:

• Instantly generate NPCs with names, motivations, and backgrounds.

• Create random events, story seeds, and plot threads.

• Provide sensory details or loot for characters searching or stealing.

• Run games without a human GameMaster!

And more--they even work brilliantly as creative writing prompt generators, and have been tested, used live, and lauded by gamers, students, and professionals!

Looking for the original GMA: Base Deck, published in 2014? Click here!

You can view the GMA2e's complete instructions for free by clicking the preview link beneath the thumbnail above. You can also scroll down to view the card overview image and watch a video of the cards in use (though, as of this writing, that video is from the GMA Cyberpunk Kickstarter, and uses a slightly older beta draft)! 

On each card is a set of more than a dozen randomizers; with 60 double-sided cards showing 120 unique card faces, you can generate literally millions of possible adventures, all without having to hunt through a book or PDF for a single table!

If you want specifics, including examples of how to use the randomizers on the cards, the complete instructions are available in the downloadable PDF preview linked below the cover image/thumbnail, but you can take a look at the overview above to see the quick and dirty version of what is on each card, and you can view a video preview below from the Cyberpunk Kickstarter, or see several videos from the original 2014 Kickstarter on my YouTube channel that explain how to use the cards to run a GM-free game or generate a story for a traditional RPG. 

FAQ: How does the GMA2e differ from the original edition?

While I am still very proud of the original GMA Decks of all genres, they have always been a passion project born of tinkering–and so I could not help but want to improve them.

Everything critical about what they are for remains the same, but I have made the newest versions (designated ‘GMA2e’ for now) more true to my original goal: Preventing the need to reference tables or look up information in PDFs to make them useful. We removed the tag symbols and some more esoteric and abstract runes/images, and replaced them with 240 unique images to inspire you visually without needing to go do research or write tables up in advance. We also added a field with 120 unique but quickly usable 'scene types' to a bar across the middle of the card, making it easy to just grab an idea without having to interpret anything!

I’ve also learned a LOT about solo gaming and improvisational GMing over the past decade, watching the hobby evolve and continuing to teach Game Design to generation upon generation of high school students! As a result, we've added 120 unique 'stakes' to the Situation block and 120 unique character details to the 'Traits' block to help fill in a missing type of information, and we've also added 'partial yes/partial no' (Yes?/No?) to the Likely Odds block, so the results are more highly varied.

So while there’s nothing wrong with using the old decks and materials, and I still have a soft spot for the Tag Symbols from the old decks, I believe this new version is a huge improvement, and much, much easier to use on the fly, as intended.

What is included in the digital downloads?

Each GMA2e Deck includes both full-color and low-ink Print-n-Play files, PDF instructions, at least one 'Adventure Guide' (a collection of advice for generating adventures with the cards, usually themed around a genre), and a ZIP file of all card faces as .jpg files; while it may not yet be available for all decks, we are also adding a .jpg image of a 'card back' so that VTT users can apply it to their decks. In the same manner, we are planning to add A4 paper size PnP files as a resource for those who would find it helpful!

Do I need the separate 'Universal Instruction Cards' for this deck?

No! That product, a free add-on we developed over time, is only really helpful for the first edition line of the GMA decks, which require more reference to or memorization of tables of information. Since the whole point of the GMA decks was to avoid wasting time digging through PDFs and giant hardbacks to find just one tiny thing, the revised GMA2e cards no longer need them!

How can I learn more if I'm curious or uncertain about something?

Feel free to email me at [email protected]! I'm always happy to chat. 

COMMUNITY-BUILDING COPIES AVAILABLE! As tariffs strike gamers, and both my job as a teacher and the human rights of many of my students become endangered, this is a rough time. In the short and long term, printing costs may be increasing, but I will not be raising my prices except where the printing cost actually exceeds the sales cost of the product. While I initially made my products free during the first days of lockdown, since I do not see a definitive end in sight here, I instead make this permanent offer: If you cannot afford the to purchase my work, please reach out to me at [email protected]. While DriveThru does not have a 'Community Copies' feature by default, I will do my best to hook you up, no questions asked. We gamers need to stick together.