Conversation Cards

Are you looking for a way to add more description to your game? Why not start with giving a little more character to your characters! It gets tired and stale when characters just ‘say’ things all the time, when they’re ‘friendly’ or ‘hostile’ instead of being ‘an adoring fan’ or ‘concerned and suspicious’.

This is where Conversation Cards come in! These printable cards give characters new ways to ‘say’ things, from ‘chirping’ to ‘stammering’ to ‘threatening’. But they aren’t just pages out of a thesaurus – each card contains a host of other cues for you to use in play.

The first cue is a card’s attitude. Each conversation card has one of three attitudes: passive, submissive and aggressive. These attitudes represent a character’s overall position on a topic; whether they are helpful, neutral, or hostile to it. Each attitude is further broken down into three levels of emphasis: subtle, casual and overt. These levels of emphasis help set the pace of the conversation, with some speeding action up and others slowing it down.

Game masters can either assemble decks ahead of time for important characters that the party might meet, or draw randomly from the full deck of 27 cards when they begin a conversation with someone new. A more complicated character might draw two or more cards, and an evolving conversation might result in changing what card a character is using as their cue.

These cards can serve as a great playing aid for players, too – giving them cues for how their characters might react in different situations – or even just providing them with a list of new words to make use of the next time they get into a social encounter.