Monday, April 2, 2012

Spell Cards Reloaded

Over at The Aspiring Lich, Chris has produced a mock-up of a spell card design for his Labyrinth Lord games.  Here is an example of one of his cards, a staple for any first-level Magic-User:  Sleep.

I'm a sucker for resource cards.  Years ago, I toyed with the idea of designing a set of 1.25" x 2" resource cards, that included equipment, treasure and spells.

My initial resource card mock-ups are still sitting on a memory stick, somewhere, waiting for my return. 

I'd really love to see a set of spell cards for OSR games, and some appropriate accompanying artwork on each card would be icing on the cake.

Just over a year ago, Sully at A Pack Of Gnolls had a similar idea, for 4E ritual spells, and posted a mock-up of Magic Mouth, complete with some appropriate Dave Trampier artwork.  I was as enthusiastic about spell cards, then, as I am now.

I suggested to Chris that this might be a good candidate for a kickstarter crowd-sourcing project. Thoughts?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

So when I did my tabletop RPG experiment of the Magic Realm rules, I printed up cards for each chit. The cards had a fanciful name, colorful picture and Fight H4* or the like. Fun times.

My favorite maneuver of the evening was when the Berzerker character bashed down the door with a Move T6 "Manly Pose."

Christopher said...

Thanks for the plug! Now I see what you have in mind for artwork; that's a great looking card. Unfortunately having an image for each and every spell would require commissioning an artist to do them. I decided to go just with the single generic spell book image from the PHB, just to add a little spice.

Anonymous said...

I think if the thing is just typing up a bunch of spell cards anyone can do that. If you want a kickstarter project, I'd actually get an artist to draw something for each spell effect. It would be worth the money to buy a product like that.

Included in the card pack should be a fillable PDF in which you can insert your own art and text. This way the buyer can use the same template to create his own spell cards and have them fit into the deck.