The Corrupting Deck
distributed as 52-Card Pickup Survival Edition
The party game you already own. Any deck. Any room. Any number of players, including none.
Grab your friends! Scrounge whatever junk the room has lying around — that's your pool. Deal yourself three lives, and see if you can make it to the end of the deck.All you have to do is not lose.
flip the top card
Ellium Leisure · 49th printing · FM-52
What you were actually holding
A party game played with a normal deck and whatever junk the room contains. It is also the only safety measure you will be issued, and nobody is going to tell you that.
Threats conform. Environments blend in. The room you are in right now may already be one, and if it is, no alarm sounded and nobody is coming, because from the outside nothing is wrong.
A safety measure that has to be requested is a safety measure that arrives late. So it has to already be inside, everywhere, disguised as the kind of trash nobody bans, nobody burns, and nobody thinks to take away from you.
The deck divines the hell you are in. The suit is the direction the failure comes from. The number is how far along it is. Fifty-two pages account for the most common. That is not a fraction of what is out there. It is what fits in a booklet you would find funny.
It looks like a joke because a joke gets carried home, left in gloveboxes, read on toilets, and remembered drunk. A warning gets filed.
The four suits
Where the failure comes from
The flesh volunteers for structural work. It produces more of itself than requested. It is being finished as something else, and the finishing is the problem.
The space is longer at the end than it was at the start. The level is coming up, patiently. The structure has learned to keep its occupants, and it calls this care.
A wrong past, gaining signatures. It happened, and nothing will agree with you that it did. Something is being removed from the record while you watch. Possibly this.
A better body, honestly offered. Growth, offered as salvation. It does not want you dead, it wants you kept. Everything it offers is real. All of it is bait.
The classes
What can be ended, and what cannot
There is nothing to seal. Survive it or take the hit; either way it is discarded. These do not get removed from the world. They get outlasted.
It can be ended permanently, by one of three routes. A hunter you survive but do not seal is shuffled back into the pile. It will return. They are noted for that.
The four Aces. Pay a toll or take it as a hit. Either way it fires. Whatever you are braced against will shield you from its own house's ending. Once. While it is facing you.
Two jokers. One is a lever. One is a bill. The manual is unusually quiet about the second one, and says so.
Sealing a hunter
Three answers, each costs you something different
Spend the named objects, in the count listed. Silent, cheap, and entirely dependent on what the room happened to give you. The counts come from reports, not from science.
Perform the listed act, exactly, aloud. Feeling ridiculous is part of the mechanism, or at least it was part of every report where the agent survived.
Pay the number, silently, or discard a life. Always available. This is the only route the Continuity stands behind without reservation, because it is the only one that runs on a printed number instead of testimony.
There is no free way to end a thing. The files are unanimous on that, and the files disagree about everything.
Past the line
The standing verified count is eleven.
Reaching the seal target is a win. You may stop, and stopping banks it. This section exists because some of you will not stop there, and the files would rather you did it correctly than creatively.
The agent's file does not say she stopped. It says she kept reading. Nobody has verified twelve.
They say these books are entertainment
Every card points at a file.
Fifty-two threats, and behind each one an account written down by the person it happened to. The deck is the index. The files are the archive. A membership opens all of it, and a new file lands every week.
It is free because a price is a place to stop, and you do not get a place to stop.
While you're here!
Fresh delights, added all the time. Come back often. You'll want to.
or wander off — the archive · the store · the intake · IN-0001