Short Story - The Deck of Many Lewd Things

Alright! Managed to squeeze in the rest of the writing/editing for this in the last couple of days!

As for the result...it was an interesting experiment? In all honestly, I'm not unhappy with it, so much as making it truly random resulted in less spectacular effects than expected. The group of adventurers managed, somehow, to pull several fairly tame card combinations. For that reason I left the story open for another 'round' so to speak, if people are interested in seeing that (subject to future voting).

As a basic explanation of what I mean by that, Decks of Many Things are generally 13 cards in total. I decided that 13 possible effects weren't nearly enough, so I may 13 categories, then used a dice roller to first pick the category, then a second roll to pick which of the items/effects under the category from the first roll to use. Aside from a couple of times where I rerolled to prevent duplicate effects, the result were near-totally randomized via the dice roller. (I nixed one other roll, for it being a boring combination with the others, hence only near-total). I made one full 'round' of pulls 13 draws from the Deck.

Unfortunately, luck and the sheer number of options I added meant that some of the more interesting effects or combinations just didn't happen. Only a single bondage item out of twenty possible options got used, none of a few categories (like tattoos) got used, etc. I think another round of 13 would probably cause an escalation much more like I originally envisioned, but I hit (exceeded actually) the word count goals with the first set of 13. So...it is what it is for now!

Enjoy what it is for now, and if the concept is interesting, you can all vote in another round later ;-). I might clean up and show off the Deck itself before then, so people have a better idea what effects might yet happen. On that note, many of the items/curses/changes/effects came from or were based on a sadly dropped project called the Lewd Handbook. It was an amazing piece of work whose creator, sadly, got found out by some people in his/her life that didn't like them doing it. They, to my understanding, were forced to drop the project and deleted it and the discord channel for it. I was lucky enough to have a partial copy from before he(or she) did so.

I think someone has picked it up and is running a Patreon based on it, but given how completely the original creator deleted everything (including their reddit account), I suspect they did so without said creator's permission. Particularly as the original creator never had a Patreon or charge platform for it, it was only a passion project so far as I know. As such, I'm reluctant to share anything more about it :-(. If anyone happens to know more about the situation around it, I'd be happy to attribute any source that can be confirmed as the original creator or an authorized continuation.

Anyway! Enjoy the story! As always, it's attached as a PDF.