Part of the joy of CtD 1e's madness was the cantrip card system. It is not hard, but it does need extra material to play. For the creative, it's a delightful excuse to run off to the craft room and
fuckin' lose your goddamn mind! (There shall be much huffing of glue and doing lines of glitter.)
And then there's the rest of the player base who hate the idea of 'homework', even if it's just art (or maybe especially because it is art?).
So, the basics are not that hard:
Each Art has Five Distinct Named Levels.
Each Realm has Five Distinct Named Levels.
You Get One Distinct Named Card for Each Dot in Your Arts & Realms.
So 3 dot Chicanery Art gets you: 1x Fuddle, 1x Veiled Eyes, 1x Fugue
Three dot Scene and 2 dot Prop gets you:
1x Closet, 1x Bathroom, 1x Guest Room. 1x Ornate Garb, 1x Crafting Tool.
That's an 8 card hand for a starting player, and pretty easy to hammer out as ATCs (art trading card).
The challenge comes with the Bunks deck. I prefer a 15 card deck, 3x each of Dots/Successes 1-5.
That can get into some extra work, as you do want to know the Art "suit," associated Attribute (in case of resists,) and the described Bunk for after the fact narrative purposes.
All in all it's a bit of overhead for drop-in players, recurring NPCs with defined stats, etc.
Quick Substitute Solutions!(Note: Sharpie markers might make life easier here.)
- A regular deck of playing cards. You can use the four suits to cover the four most common Arts in your campaign. Also you can get two Bunk Decks, 3x Aces through 5s, and 3x 6s through 10s. It leaves the face cards and some number card as spares to scribble out Distinct Arts & Realms cards. Covers = 2 players.
- Old spare CCG cards. Magic the Gathering has commons printed and tossed out by the box load, and many FLGS simply don't care if you want to salvage some of their soon-to-be-waste.
MtG has some nice advantages: 5 colors plus colorless Artifact covers your starting 6 Arts "suits." Cards come with Converted Mana Cost for representing Dots 1 through 5 in Bunk Decks. So Giant Growth (G) is a One Dot Bunk for, let's say, Primal.
- Dice Masters Dice. These seem to collect in FLGS as well. And unlike regular numeric dice, their proprietary faces don't really add utility for alternate uses to other games. BUT!, they are tiny and come in so many colors! And most of the dice run the gamut of 3-6 different values. Make the colors ordered to a 1-5 success value and then roll off to determine the Arts suit (and thus Bunk). Throw 15 of these dice in a bag, then draw & roll accordingly.
Repurposing this way helps open the game to more "grab 'n go" play.
Any other creative repurposing ideas?
Oh, I should probably explain how the cantrips cards work, too.
Your hand contains one copy of each Distinct Dot Level for each Art & Realm. Then you got a shuffled Bunk Deck.
Cantrips are: Play an Art, a Realm, and a Bunk together. No glamour paid. Describe your wants, Storyteller describes the actual end results. (Any Resistance rolls dice pool from Art Attribute & Realm Ability vs. resister's Banality.) Discard one card afterwards. (Undiscarded bunks are reshuffled back into the Bunk Deck for randomization.)
Eventually you have to make tough choices on what to discard.
Spend glamour to: add a Realm, add a Bunk (only once), save a card from discard.
Hands and decks only refresh wholly after a Story, which is multiple sessions long. Reverie or Rapture epiphanies only do partial card restoration.
Not a hard system.