Quick and Dirty Spell Cards!

Creating game materials? Monsters, spells, classes, adventures? This is the place!
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Pholus
Posts: 33
Joined: Tue Mar 06, 2018 8:31 pm

Quick and Dirty Spell Cards!

Post by Pholus »

First off, thanks you ALL for making such a wonderful system. I was looking for a way to contribute and I think one just fell in my lap.

I have been waiting for spell cards for a couple years and while working on a project that required LaTeX and tikz I realized that this was probably the easiest way of making a quick set of spell cards since any card template is easily duplicated in the multicolumn format and the markup language makes cutting and pasting information into the template from the rulebook trivial.

I found some useful hints and sample layouts over at https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions ... using-tikz and stole the design elements and it was off to the races. Because I didn't design it from the ground up there is a lot of unclean math in the template and it will read as silly to a guru but again I wanted to see how fast I could put a useful product out there.

A couple short modifications and a bit of cut and pasting from the Rulebook and about 4 hours of work and I have all spells from the rulebook represented as spell cards. For longer spells I had to edit the description down and note that additional information is in the rulebook. I should note that I had to take the latex source files and call them ".txt" which you'd remove before trying to use LaTeX on them on your home system.

I apologize that I didn't use libreoffice (which I consider a BRILLIANT idea), but no decent card template exists or has been created in the wild and at least LaTex is also an open freely available system. I also understand I pass zero style guidelines -- the sole advantage of my contribution is that it is done and ready to print onto cardstock and use!

LaTeX is free to obtain and easy to use, but it's also not for everybody. I would be interested in continuing the project, making additional spells from the supplements, other classes and the like (and I will definitely be doing it for myself) but I'll wait to see if you all find this initial contribution of of interest first. Cheers!

NOTES:

r1 is the set of cards that use the original full spell descriptions from the rulebook. The text gets microscopic!

r2 is the set of cards where I bullet point the spell descriptions, adding a whole mess of editing and wording issues. These cards should be issued with a disclaimer that the wording of the rulebook outranks anything found on the cards -- they are a convenience only.

I will try to keep the older files archived in posts under the top (which apparently only allowed 3 download files!)
Attachments
bfrpg_rulebook_spells-r2.tex.txt
Current .tex version, remove ".txt" before running LaTeX
(167.15 KiB) Downloaded 323 times
bfrpg_rulebook_spells-r2.pdf
Bullet point descriptions, my best effort.
(171.3 KiB) Downloaded 425 times
bfrpg_rulebook_spells-r1.pdf
Full spell descriptions, microscopic print.
(214.88 KiB) Downloaded 364 times
Last edited by Pholus on Sun Feb 17, 2019 8:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Pholus
Posts: 33
Joined: Tue Mar 06, 2018 8:31 pm

Re: Quick and Dirty Spell Cards!

Post by Pholus »

First impressions after I printed. The text gets way too small to be comfortably read on the cards in places. My laser writer could handle it and I can read it but it is microscopic. I might end up having to do a lot of editing, but that gets around my original goal which was to make a set of stand-alone cards which actually were the relevant sections from the rulebook that could be handed out straight to the players.

Oh well, I will again wait to see what people say first. They're probably okay for me internally...
Pholus
Posts: 33
Joined: Tue Mar 06, 2018 8:31 pm

Re: Quick and Dirty Spell Cards!

Post by Pholus »

Here are some other files from my effort. The r1 LaTeX file (with full spell descriptions) and an r2 file of just one page of cards as a template.
Attachments
blank-r2.tex.txt
A one-page template file. Remove ".txt" before running LaTeX
(9.79 KiB) Downloaded 306 times
bfrpg_rulebook_spells-r1.tex.txt
Full spell descriptions, remove ".txt" before running LaTeX
(180.24 KiB) Downloaded 311 times
Artanisace
Posts: 49
Joined: Sat Apr 11, 2020 4:53 am

Re: Quick and Dirty Spell Cards!

Post by Artanisace »

This is fantastic, thanks a lot man!
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Paladin
Posts: 24
Joined: Sun May 20, 2018 9:33 am
Location: Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Re: Quick and Dirty Spell Cards!

Post by Paladin »

Very nice!
I like the bullet form of the spell descriptions. If I need more comprehensive understanding, I can consult the book itself.
Everything was going well until the Anti-Paladin tossed the Halfling overboard in an attempt to distract the Kraken.
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