D&D 5th Character cards - Verity, Level 3 Warlock

Rounding up the Highcliffe City Guard, I decided to add an infiltrator-type character, the kind of that can walk amongst the underworld with ease and disappear without a trace if needs be. And these things come easy for a certain flavour of Warlock.

As the concept was a character with a shady past trying to redeem herself, giving Verity a Criminal background was almost compulsory, and it rounded up her skillset nicely. And with the Pact of the Tome, she has access to a wide variety of spells to expand the utility.

But what really makes the character shine in an intrigue and investigation type campaign are her Warlock powers and invocations. With Mask of Many Faces, she can blend in or disappear in a crowd, Gaze of Two Minds allows her to mentally track a willing collaborator, and Awakened Mind lets her to communicate telepathically with anyone. In a way, these abilities could be seen as OP in this type of campaign, as they can be used to sidestep quite a bit of legwork. but then again that can be said of almost any kind of magic. And as the character still has to do things to get results, getting herself deliberately into harm's way, I feel that this kind of character would give more to this kind of campaign rather than making things trivial. And the fact that one can create this kind of character straight out of the core set of rules -without any clunky multiclassing, to boot- is a good indicator of the versatility of the 5th edition D&D.

Besides, since Verity is a NPC, I can use her to deliver information for the PCs to act upon, and not to worry overtly how she could have acquired such information, as I have decent abilities to fall back on.

'Roguish with a dash of magic' is probably my most favourite character archetype, and I could see myself playing a character like Verity. And although she's built a bit like a one-trick pony, there's still breadth in her abilities to be of use in multiple situations.

D&D 5th Character Cards - Merilee, 3rd level Wizard

What any Watch Constabulary that wants to actually solve any crimes needs is Perky Forensic Examiner, and in D&D, that calls for a Wizard. Specifically, one from the School of Divination. Merilee is all about research and finding things out. She's a bit reluctant to go out on the field, but even there her Portent ability can be of significance.

Like the rest of the Watch members, Merilee was built with default ability scores. She was given the Sage/Librarian background, to really drown herself in digging out any and all esoteric tidbits from the Grand Library of Hieronymus. But although she can be a bit bookish, she's also quite outgoing, especially in familiar company.

Like Wilf, Merilee was raised in an orphanage. She does not quite know who her parents are, but she has made some educated guesses about them, based on her heritage, and has come to a conclusion that her mother was an elven debutante from one of the Nine Houses, and her father a young Neheniri merchant. She has a nice stipend from her parents to live by, enabling her to have her own house in town - which is in process of turning into a library, gradually. She has also noticed that her elven heritage alone cannot keep her all slender and willowy, but that she has to watch what she eats quite closely, despite her sweet tooth. And the fact that Shimmie seems to have an endless store of dates, spiced nuts and pastries with him and is eager to share does not help matters.

Of all the characters so far, Merilee was perhaps the easiest to stat. I think the default scores do give a good spread to play with, and yield to quite balanced characters stat-wise. I was at first a bit meh about the different traditions for wizard, and I still think that there maybe should be a bit more mechanical difference between them, but I have to say I like the roleplay potential for the Diviner's Portent ability quite a bit. No matter how you roll, those stored rolls can be used to good effect. Well, rolls of 10-11 may not be so useful, or at least can be circumstantial, but generally it is a nice little concept.

 

D&D 5th Character Cards - Shimmie, 3rd level Fighter

Next up on the Oldgate Constabulary, I deemed that the PCs might need some extra muscle from time to time, and decided to give them a fighter companion. Here I had a bit of a problem with the ability scores, as I did not quite want to go with the 'tough, dumb brute' archetype, although Shimmie here clearly veers to that direction. But rather than being the drooling 'Yes, Boss' doorstop, Shimmie is streetwise rather than booksmart, and although he bores easily with theory and extensive planning, he can and does use tactics. I also see him actually reinforcing the stereotype intentionally, to gain edge against less savvy opponents. I am somewhat tempted to actually bump up the mental stats a bit, and lower the Dexterity score.

Shimmie was also created using the default ability scores. And since his backstory was inspired by the Midnight Oil song Jimmy Sharman's Boxers, I gave him a slightly modified  Gladiator background, although in a way a Folk Hero might have worked as well. And like with Wilf, for the ease of play I chose him the Champion fighter archetype, which gives mostly static bonuses.

Although Shimmie is rather easy-going and even cheerful in familiar company, he's quite reluctant to talk about his past before joining the Watch, for which he has quite respect for.

I'm also considering implementing a house rule that allows the final blow to render the target unconscious rather that dead to only apply to weapons causing bludgeoning damage. Any other weapon can be used in this way too, but they are less suited for it and thus attacks to knock out are done with disadvantage with these weapons.

D&D 5th Character Cards - Wilf Mulberry, 3rd level Rogue

Even before I had the books, I had decided that I would try an urban campaign this time. And rather than having the PCs be some miscellaneous vagrants who just happen to stumble upon stuff, I wanted them to be a part of the establishment, in order to give them clear reasons to investigate the strange goings-on in the city. Thus was born Constabulary of Oldgate of the Highcliffe City Watch.

For the first character, I wanted a rogue who would work on the right side of the law. Initially I was on the fence whether Detective Wilf Mulberry was to be a Halfling or a Gnome, but then the tinkerer aspect of Rock Gnomes sealed the deal. And the +2 to intelligence was not to be scoffed at, either.

I gave Wilf a modified Acolyte background, being brought up by the church of Hieronymus, the God of Knowledge, with his sister, thus gaining proficiency in History and Insight. However, unlike his sister, Wilf never felt that his calling was to devote his whole life to the church, and although he still is quite reverent towards the ideals of his patron God, he wanted to find another way to utilize his skills and knowledge in the wider world.

Wilf is quite serious and a bit of an introvert, and tends to get carried away in finding mechanical solutions to problems both in his career and in his personal life, to the consternation of his colleagues and Captain Anneke in particular. He is easy to be underestimated or even ignored, a fact that he has used to his advantage in several occasions. He is usually moderately but neatly dressed, but rather than his own fastidiousness, this has to do with the diligence of his landlady, an elderly Coastlander widow who seems to have taken Wilf as her pet project.

Wilf was built using the default ability scores, as I wanted to see what kind of characters these would yield. He is also not very optimized, as I did not want NPCs that would easily outshine the PCs, and also ones that would be relatively easy to play, mechanically speaking. Had I made Wilf a PC, I think I would have gone the Arcane Trickster route rather than the Thief, and would probably have made him a Forest Gnome instead. But to round up the group of investigators that make up the Constabulary of Oldgate, he's a fine addition.

D&D 5th edition Character Cards

Ever since we pried open the 'Holmes' D&D box back in the day, and jotted down our very first RPG characters, DIY was the name of the game. I'm not sure if that edition even had any pre-printed character sheets, and if it did, photocopying them would not have been a walk in the park it is today. But we had pencils, and paper, and later whole notebooks to fill up with all the character details. So maybe it's a remnant from those days, or maybe it's just the way my brain functions, but even today if I need to really grasp how a RPG system - well, at least the character generation aspect of it - works, I do it best by designing a character sheet. For me, that is the way to see what is essential, and how the different parts mesh up with each other.

So, as my interest towards the 5th edition of D&D increased end eventually led me to purchase the rulebooks - first full core rules of any version of D&D I've had, by the way - the first thing I needed was some character sheets. At first I toyed with the idea of using some pre-made sheets, but then I remembered an idea I had had for Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, character cards for the NPCs where at the front side would be the name, picture, and similar information that the players could see, and at the other side there would be all the relevant game statistics for the GM. Of course, in WFRP the game mechanics are much more easily condensed than in D&D, but that just added one extra bit of challenge to the project. Of course I could not hope to cram everything in a space that would be slightly smaller than a regular postcard, but I figured that I could fit enough shorthand notes of the relevant information, and to find the rest of the stuff from the rules during the game.

The watercolour splash background for the character illustrations is a visual cue from the rulebooks which I liked; it also frees me from trying to come up with backgrounds for each image. In fact I made a couple of such shapes, and saved them as a mask layer in a PhotoShop document, so that I can easily give each splash a colour scheme that fits whatever character they are used for.

On the game mechanics side, I tried to keep the information simple and modular, so that a character would have only those weapons they are likely to use, spellcasting stats are of course class-dependant, and so on. I would of course need to have a separate sheet to keep track of current Hit Points, used HD, and spells and Spell Slots for casters, but other that that, I think most things are being covered.

One way to take this even further would be have the same style for the 'Name' side of cards, but have a different reverse side for detailed NPCs (antagonists or those likely to tag along), background NPCs (with motivations and RP cues), and monsters (mostly combat stats and tactics).

Ruins & Ratmen Cards: Necromantic Warbands

Yeah, I cheated with this card -
the pose just did not fit on the regular imageframe.

After a bit of tinkering with the numbers and abilities, - and having a moment of dread as I made some upgrades to my Open Office spreadsheet and managed to make it buggy at the same time, namely it showed no values for some of the Special Rules - here are the finalized versions of the initial Necromantic Warband Troopers and Personalities.


The models themselves are a mixed bag: Zombies, Skeletons and Human Thralls are old Citadel minis, as is the Wight, although somewhat modded. (I have been drooling after the Otherworld armoured skellies, but as of now these will have to do.) All the Ghouls and the Necromancer are from Reaper, the Terror Wolf - really great model - is from Gamezone, the Dread Wolf is one of my own sculpts, and the Vampires are from Foundry's High Elf Nobles range. Elves, yeah. Who do they think they're fooling?

Alright, now they need some opposition, and next on the menu will be the Zealot warbands, with Battle Clerics, Undead Hunters, Paladins, Holy Sisters and Flagellants. Although I need to get the Sisters painted first. And to find - or sculpt - a flintlock musket for one of the Hunters...

I Intended to have each image here individually, but apparently that's not possible

Song of Blades and Heroes - B&W Card

Although I like my figure cards a lot as they are, now that I've gotten my ink on again, I also wanted to try my hand on the Black & White versions. For now, I wanted to keep the basic layout of the B&W cards, especially because it would allow me to use the same OpenOffice files as with the 'regular' cards, and just use a different master to make these kind of cards. Or at least that was the idea. However, since I sometime along the way decided to use absolute image paths in the spreadsheet, I would either have to add a couple more columns for the B&W images and warband insignia, or rework the image paths. And since there's no real need to do these kind of cards in the bulk, I'm not sure if I'm going to bother. But I had to crank up at least one, to see what the final cards would look like.

Okay, the upper row seems fine, but the bottom of the card needs some work. It's too busy. And it would be nice if the image could be a bit bigger (My home B&W laser barely managed to draw the finest lines). Maybe if I spread the Special Abilities so that they are in two columns, nix the insignia seal or at least make it much smaller. I will most likely return to this at some point, but as of now there are other fish to fry. And in any case, I would need to build up far more substantial image bank to be used with this style of cards.

Ruins & Ratmen cards - Cropping Images

As I implied in a earlier post, it was somewhat difficult to gauge a size of an image in PhotoShop. I had made a Crop tool preset with the proper dimensions and resolution, but some images were still a bit off sizewise when placed on the cards. So, I printed a small guide featuring the 'image frame' from the cards, and the dividers of the PS Crop Tool. To these, I added some guidelines about the relative eye level of human-sized and small creatures. With this visual guide, it's quite a bit easier to get images that have the same scale from one card to the next.

Okay, the Pit Fighter image is not the best example because of it's unusual pose, since the width of the image is the deciding factor here, not the figure height and eye level.

Ruins & Ratmen cards - test run

I finally had the opportunity to do a test print of the cards, having just acquired a corner rounder, and apart from some issues of black ink overprint that I have to look to, it was smooth sailing. Print looks good, texts are legible, and even the radius of the corner cutting tool worked out. The hardest thing seems to be to estimate the sizes of the images of the figures, as they look the best at slightly smaller than the figures actually are. Also with this method there's no chance for last minute adjustments when placing the images, the process takes the .psd file as it is, and places it to the preordained coordinates. So any cropping and scaling has to be done to the PhotoShop file, and then hope for the best. But I'm already working on a guide to help me visualize the proportions and placement of the figures.