For a long time, I have been unsatisfied with the state of game aids in many RPGs. By “game aid” I mean physical tokens that help with or drive the mechanics of the game at the table. Most games have character sheets – beyond that, publishers usually follow one of three approaches.

1. No game aids – not helpful, obviously.
2. Form-fillable PDFs for free download – cumbersome and awful to manage.
3. Ready-made character sheets, card decks, etc. – pretty, but no flexibility.

One notable exception is the Numenera Card Creator by Monte Cook Games and DriveThruRPG. Good job!

Of course, players will come up with their own aids: there are fan-made spell and maneuver cards for DSA 4.1. I drafted a character state sheet for the same game¹. For Shadowrun, I created cards for weapons, and Numenera cards for the thus named game.

Some of these were drawn by hand, but I usually used LaTeX (after initial disappointments with word processors); that is, TikZ does most of the heavy lifting. For a long time, I wanted to try something new: starting with a clean data representation, automatically generate pretty PDFs. Last year, I implemented a prototype for the Demon Hunters game I was running.

You start with a JSON of a character, chapter or item. For example:

{
  "name" : "Spade of Digging",
  "image" : "spade.png",
  "owner" : "Everybody",
  "aspects" : {
    "function" : "Is that rock or butter?",
    "flaw" : "Where do you hold this?!"
  },
  "stunts" : [
    "Gain **+2** when you **Forcefully** **Overcome** an obstacle made of rock.",
    "Your other stunt here.",
    "Your final stunt here."
  ],
  "certified" : {
    "use"    : true,
    "civilians" : false,
    "public" : true,
    "reproduction" : true
  }
}

Being a techy myself I may be slightly biased, but I think this is a much clearer and more maintainable way of saving items (or characters, or …) than form-fillable PDFs or similar.

Some Ruby, erb and LaTeX later, we get something like this:

I quite like how this turned out. And that is for a Fate-based system; the effect is probably a lot more impressive for more crunchy systems! Combine a tool like this with an item database and a random number generator – it was never easier to create the next encounter or crate of loot!

You can find the full tool and more examples on Github.

Footnotes