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(+3)

Crap.  My post got eaten, but I've been developing CASTLE DRACULA on Twitter, and think I'll do that one first. You play an English solicitor, sent to Transylvania to act as an estate agent for  Count Dracula, and get imprisoned in his castle. Basically, you're the previous Jonathan Harker.

Two ideas that other people might want to develop further occured to me while brainstorming; character inventory and a "mini oracle."

Character Inventory: In Dracula, Jonathan Harker's shaving mirror and small crucifix helped him discover what Dracula was and kept him safe. long enough to escape. You could have the player character start with some items–represented with cards, tokens, or just notes on paper–that affect the mechanics of the game. Skipping a tower pull, redrawing a card from the oracle, shuffling a card back into the deck, even modifying what prompt a card asks. These items would have limited uses (tracked by tokens maybe), could be recharged and depleted, or even lost or broken by certain card effects. No idea how this would affect the outcome of the game.

Mini Oracles: For Castle Dracula, I want the player character to encounter the same rooms multiple times, but for the details to be slightly different each time. I want to simulate both the player character not knowing if they're being drawn to certain rooms, just getting lost, or if something is pushing them towards specific rooms, and for them to not know if their memory is faulty or if something is gaslighting them by moving stuff around.

To do that, instead of there being four categories for the four suits, each value of card (or a subset of cards) could have it's own "mini oracle" determined by the card suit. Heck, you could have the mini oracle determined by a die roll (either the one use to set the number of tasks for the day or a new roll), drawing a card (which then gets shuffled back into the deck), or the value/suit of the previous daily task card. For example, 7s could be Master Bedroom, with the same general details. But for one suit the bed is made and in another the sheets are rumpled and the bed has obviously been slept in.

Depending on how many entries the mini oracles have, you could keep the same presentation (four lists of card suits), but if there are a lot of choices or the prompts get long, you might have to make each card value a separate page.

Unreliable Narrator: Lastly, I'm thinking about ways to have the character player destroy or alter previous journal entries. This reinforces the idea you can't trust even your records of events.

Feel free to use, adapt, or ignore those ideas as you see fit. :)