The Roc Deck

The Roc Deck is a different take on the standard 52 card deck.  You're free to create your own games or use it as part of your own game.  It was designed to be an in-fiction game to add some flavour to something as common as a deck of cards.

• Make a new Traditional-Style card game or gambling game.
• Design a solo game.
• Add some in-fiction gambling to your TTRPG session.
• Use as a replacement randomizer for the standard 52 card deck in Solo TTRPG/Journaling games.
• As a prop for scifi/fantasy films/photos where traditional cards would look out of place.

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History:

(Excerpt from Aerix Federation of Planets Cultural Compendium 78th Ed.)

A Roc deck (also known as a Rog, Raque, Rock, Rak or Houses deck) is a common deck of playing cards favoured by starship passengers and crews to pass the time on long interplanetary transits. These cards owe a lot of their widespread popularity to the lack of any alphabetical or numerical language making them immediately localized to players across cultural barriers.

The origin of the Roc deck is widely disputed and many cultures and races claim to be the progenitor of the cards but the true origin is unconfirmed. The strongest claim is by the Hanish culture but it predates their admittance to the Aerix Federation so the records are unreliable. 

Roc decks are practically standard issue for anyone spending time in interplanetary transit. Star freight crew members will keep their personal deck in their work clothes pockets for something to do during downtime. Many games have been devised using the standard Roc deck including various solitaire games. The most common deck is one produced by the Mynex Entertainment Corp. Known for it's minimalistic look, the design of which has gone largely unchanged for nearly 100 AY. 

A Roc deck consists of 45 cards with 5 suits. Each suit has it's own set of  'face' cards, a three suit card known as the Tall, a two suit card known as the Banner and a one suit card known as the Hold in addition to shared cards. Shared cards are two or three suit cards with one or two suits of two different suits. Some games use the cards with two of one suit and one of another as lesser face cards called Ambassadors.

Suit	Traditional Name	Common Name
	Hist	Blades
	Bonn	Shields
	Trite	Ships
	Shao	Coins
	Krit	Shards

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Common games played with Roc Decks:

(Excerpt from Aerix Federation of Planets Cultural Compendium 78th Ed.)

Bartish Hao: A gambling game where players take turns and pay into a central pot to one card at a time to their hand. Any player collecting seven or more of one suit is eliminated. The last player left collects the pot of money.

Houses: A common betting game where players make sets from a 5 card hand dealt out each round. The value of each hand depends on the sum of each suit in hand.  If a hand was to have 4 Shields, 2 Shards and 3 Blades, the hand would be 2,3,4.

Hands are compared and the strongest hand takes the pot. If two hands have the same strongest value, compare all hands again at the next lowest rank. In this way, a weaker hand can succeed in spite of stronger ones.

Maloon: Players are dealt hands of cards and take turns placing one of their cards in front of themselves or another player. Any player who has a suit with a sum divisible by 5 is eliminated. A common variation is played in teams where the sum must be divisible by 10.

Drocht: A solitaire game. A player lays four cards in a 2x2 grid and draws three cards into their hand. Cards from the hand can be played to the table adjacent to the cards already on the table. When a horizontal or vertical row has five or more of a suit, it's collected and a single point is scored. If any of the inital four spaces are left empty, they must be filled fist.

Gurr (or Gurring): Not as much a game as a form of fortune telling or divination. The subject draws three cards from the deck. The order the cards are drawn is as important as the cards themselves. The reveal cards are laid on top of each other such as all suits are visible and form a (possible) 3x3 grid. The suits and their position on this grid are used to interpret a forture for the subject. While these interpretations can be wildly different, common themes include: 

• The topmost row relates to the subject's present. Moving down the rows represents looking forward into the future.
• The leftmost row relates to the universe's influence on the individual and the rightmost the individual's influence on the universe.
• The suits have generalized meanings as follows:

Suit	Meaning
	Aggression/Danger
	Defensiveness/Safety
	Movement/Change
	Stability/Order/Fortune
	Instability/Chaos/Misfortune