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Text
An adventurer starts play with a mix of basic skills, some more powerful skills and a few extra items. Players may chose to note or display every skill but basic skills are often assumed to be present rather than being shown:
Basic Skills
- Blade
- Capture
- Gift/ Bribe
- Hide
- Hiding in Shadows
- Ignite
- Ride
- Search
- Stitch
That leaves a typical new
adventurer, (such as the Elf
shown below), to
be displayed as a fairly short list of key skills and essential items:
Skills and Items
- Composite Bow (Tribal Weapon)
- Battle Shield (50)
- Climbing
- Unlock
- Make
Trap
- Disguise
- Dagger
- Longsword
- Frostbite Spell
- Heal Spell
- Rainbow Spell
- Arrows (24)
- Lantern
- Gems (5)
- Star (5 Notches)
- Heart
For players who want to stick to text that is all that is involved in displaying units. Just add notes or simple marks to show when things change and record new skills and items gained during play. Players may wish to add a name and a few biographical details but adventurers can be ready for play within a few minutes.
Graphics
Using graphics the same adventurer looks like this:
Skills and Items
Cards: the choice of images is intended to provide a clear icon/ image that is easy to identify and also indicates the general nature of the skill that it represents. Most of the icons shown above give a good indication of the type of skill that they are likely to be linked to. However, new players can make it easier to know exactly what they are dealing with by displaying both text and an icon on each card. A Heart icon has been included as an option but it is often only shown when needed.
Designs And Design Templates
Players may wish to start using graphic roleplaying with a mixture of icons and text, until they become more familiar with the full range of icons. Some designs are well suited to this kind of approach and can also contain a lot of icons for players who want to display the full range of skills.
Merovingian Crown: the use of a crown or coronet with icons hanging below leaves space for notes and markings. The design can be extended to allow the display of numerous icons. The style is based on a Merovingian Crown that was made to be worn and two votive crowns from the Visigothic Treasure of Guarraza.
Centrepieces
Using a centrepiece/ large image within a design usually means that the centrepiece becomes the focus of the overall design. The Paladin shown below acted as a centrepiece for Treasure's first adventurer. The image includes some of the icons that represent the adventurer's skills. Other icons were placed below and on either side of the Paladin at various stages, including a layout with heraldic banners placed on either side of the centrepiece.
Paladin: the design is based on Kay Nielsen's 'Lad in Battle', (which appears in Peter Christian Asbjornson's 'East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North'), and 'Mort de Roland' illustrated by Jean Fouquet, Tours, (1455-1460). The image was 'drawn' as a vector graphic and the original can be scaled and edited very quickly and easily. On this occasion 'The Paladin' is shown in gold but there are any number of other options.
Design Elements
Some
design elements lend themselves to re-use. This tattoo flash skull
could easily identify an adventurer and be placed on a shield or banner
that made it central to the design. It could also be used as a styled
icon at a smaller size or as part of a necklace of skulls.
Seven Times the Colour of Fire: this image uses the thickened line weight commonly found in tattoo flash, cartoon and comic artwork. The design element shown was first used as the personal mark of an evil spellcaster. Players knew they were on the right trail when they found the skull stamped on documents, embedded in wax seals or painted across a wall.
Drawing v's Painting
Drawings/ vector graphics are scaleable, easy-to-edit and easy to convert. However, it is tricky to add the variety of line weight and brush strokes that create the range of effects found in, for example, comic art. It is possible to mimic some effects by varying line weight to add perspective, using inking to add contrast and filtering images as they are converted to paintings/ raster images.
Paintings/ raster images often require pixel-level editing and, in most cases, cannot be traced automatically without additional editing. However, if you simply want to sketch and scan an image, (possibly revising the sketch in future rather than the scanned image), most painting software can apply a range of further effects at the click of a button.
For the lucky few with copies of Photoshop and/ or a graphics tablet the options are much more varied and it is possible to switch between vector and raster formats more easily.
