I wound up going in and filling out the online list of my RPG collection on RPG.net, which you can view here. Sometimes I forget (1) that I have some very strange, obscure stuff in there, and (2) just how many books I’ve sold off over the years. I own almost no Palladium stuff now, a lot less GURPS and Tri-Stat, and a whole heck of a lot more indie stuff. Anyway.

I wound up doing some brainstorming for Dandelion Complex, Raspberry Heaven’s twisted younger sister game, and I think I’m seeing the outlines of the game I want. It’s going to also use playing cards (I’m seriously thinking of putting them into the same book anyway), albeit in very different ways. Characters have cards dealt to them face down, and they can spend them on different things, whereupon they pick a card to turn face-up. For random events you check the card against a table, but certain cards will cause things to happen in the game regardless of what the character is trying to do. Additional cards are earned by pleasing the teacher NPC, a la Maid RPG.

Although I came up with the idea for Dandelion Complex as a game that would in some ways be a polar opposite to Raspberry Heaven (instead of Uno… 52 Pickup), they’re turning out to both be playing-card-based pickup games that actively defy any substantial attempts at preparation. They’re even starting to reference each other, since RH’s character color is perfectly usable in DC, and DC’s tamer random event tables could be used to get out of creative blocks in RH.

On a side note, I decided to get a box to hold my two decks of cards for these games. I was looking online and kept seeing boxes with capacities topping out at around 85 or so, but when I got to a local comics shop to look at them in person, it turned out that these are mostly sized for cards with protective sleeves on, so one of the boxes I picked up can easily fit three standards poker decks. The plastic cases meant for baseball cards and such that claim they’re for 100 cards could easily hold twice that for playing cards.

Cards found around my house last night:

• A deck of One Piece playing cards in a plastic case, from a grab back at Anime Palace.
• The cards from the combat game that’s included with the Dream Pod 9 Project A-ko RPG
• A set of Clow Cards (from Card Captor Sakura), printed in Japan and bought well before the series came to the US. Now I kind of wish I’d bought that book they did on how to use them for fortune-telling. (Though as it turns out someone’s working on an English fan translation).
• Six different Brawl decks.