The idea of a vision deck is that it is a set of pictures, typically on card stock, which can be used to generate character ideas or setting ideas or plot ideas, etc.
I was first introduced to the idea of the vision deck years ago when I played Everway.
Here's an example. (please, if you're going to use this particular deck, then buy Everyway. Its a very cool game with many great ideas beside this one and well worth your money. This is posted here only as a reference (i.e.. 'fair use')).
Note that the images are quite vague as to what is going on in them. This is deliberate so that they can be used as a launching point for brainstorming a story idea. Back when I was GMing Everway, I found that I could generate a great storyline for the night in about 5 minutes of real time. I'd shuffle through the cards and pick out about 5 of them that appealed to me for the night and then figure out a link between the cards. The players had lots of complements on the creativity and complexity of my stories. I owe a lot of that to the vision deck.
I think a cool community project would be to create an open source version of this deck which is centered on Golarian themes. I know there are several great artists on these boards and many of them are looking to gain some experience and have offered to do drawings for board members for free. I think this creating this deck would be a note worthy community improvement project for the game.
Thanks
