Inspired by Jon New's Ice Queen rules card, a while back I began designing a template for a rules cards of my own. Rules Cards are the size of character, toad, or alternate ending card but serve a different purpose. Rather than having to page through a rule book or printed pages from a fan designed expansion, a rules card can be conveniently kept board-side for quick reference of encapsulated rules or even all rules if there are few.

I have five House Rules cards I will be releasing one at a time. Four are for House Rules played around the world by various Talisman groups over the last two decades. At least two were very widely played. Thereby, they aren't my original notions, though I have tried to refine them for clean use. The fifth will be something that my group uses often (but not always), and has has already spread to other groups through those who have play-tested its past basics. But first...

The Rules Card Template

The template is wholly my work. It uses no graphics from the FFG or earlier versions of Talisman. However, I attempted to give it motif slightly compatible with the game's varied graphics. I used some public domain and copyright free resources, but a lot of work (and hours) with Photoshop CS4 Extended and commercial plugins went into its development. It is thereby my copyrighted property.

Once the five cards have all been released, I will also release PNG versions of the template for public use by the Talisman community. So long as it is only used as intended, and you don't try to sell cards for that you make with it (for cash or any form of remuneration), you'll get no gripes from me.

Triple Motif, Triple Use

The template will come in three detail motifs - Gold, Silver, and Bronze. For my own purposes, the Gold will be used for Expansion dependent cards, the Silver for independant House Rules, and the Bronze for any other type of information card. This allows players to easily scan among multiple cards for those that might have what they are after. Of course, you can use them as you please, but you might find this approach useful as well, if you're into creating your own expansions.

On the card's back side is an old tome at the center where an Icon can be placed on its cover. This can help identify a particular rules card, and is most useful with Expansion (Gold) dependent cards. The same icon used on the front of Adventure and other cards in an expansion can be enlarged for matching placement on the card's back. When a group plans to play a particular expansion not used generally, any rules card associated to it (among others) can be quickly found.

And so without further ado...

2D6 Combat

This House Rule is definitely nothing new. It has even been discussed at length here on these forums, along with other alternative combat systems and combat add-ons. In minor variations it has been around since at least the first time I played Talisman 2E shortly after its release. I've tried to define and refine its basics and then added a little something my group played in the "old days" concerning auto wins / loses.

Rather than post print resolution graphics on the forum - and bog down everyone's bandwidth - I've uploaded a ZIP archive of the card front and back. You can downloaded it HERE. Give it peek and feel free to offer comments in this topic. I'll be back with the next card posting herein within a week.

Simply gorgeous...

Excellent!

Great write up of a rule we often use! Looks wonderful. Most impressed!

Looking forward to your other stuff and, more importantly, the release of your Quests!

Thanks guys... and I know, I need to get those quest done. The rule's card was easier over the busy holidays for taking a break from the grind.

What? You're taking a BREAK! How dare you?!?

...

Happy Holidays!

Heh heh! Well, sort of... another week (fingers crossed) and the next manuscript will be done... then I can play with the cards some more. Still have to pump out the final space expanders as well. But Barb did buy us the Dungeon for Xmas, so that will be in the plans as well. Only played a cohorts version twice before when it came out.

Graduated Armor System

Once again, I've place this rules card's front and back in an archive rather than post the graphics directly on the forum. You can download it HERE for a peek.

This is based on another longstanding House Rule, sometimes called "stackable armor," that has been played by Talisman groups for almost as long as the game has been around. But the G.A.S. has some refinements to protect players from mistakes (by the probabilities) when using it alone or with the coming "Battle Breakage" rule.

wooow

great,

all expansion at talismanisland will be with a rule in this format

jon , are you agree ?

ravachol said:

Thanks for the praise... but I think I would hesitate in forcing my work as a standard on other creators. The templates will come available in the near future, and people can choose if they'd like to use them.

Nice work again JC.

These would be easy to implement in SE, but the only problem would be that the central boss icon would need to be made as a choice, and you would have to decide on a set number to use.

It would be easy enough to choose a standard one though (Talisman icon?), along with the three colours that JC has mentioned previously.

As JC and I have discussed previously, SE does not lend itself to too much customisation on the fly. That should be left for graphics apps.

talismanisland said:

Yes, implementing for SE is a good step for the many who use it. When it comes time, we can talk more about adjustments needed to make this rules template more friendly to that software. Although I'm not certain what you mean by a "set number to use".

There may be a way to rig it with layers (like I've see you do) and cut out a cirle (?) in the card's back as the center of book's surface. Then on a layer below that is where the custom icon would be place, so it showed through the circle. The icon could also be a transparent PNG or GIF, so only the icon would show. A third layer below that could be the book cover texture that was cut out.

If the icon graphic is transparent, the icon will show with full texture all around it.

If the icon graphic is not transparent, the circle will be filled with the icon's background, producing a cover emblem just the same.

The user could also prep the icon graphic with a 30 degree left tilt to match the angle of the book; I kept that very precise just for this reason in my own work. I'll explain more on this later. It's all doable from what I know in working photoshop and some of the surpising tricks I've seen you pull off in SE.

talismanisland said:

I already have a Talisman silhoutte that can be used as a default icon. I'll make sure that's included when get to addressing adaptation for SE.

I meant if someone wanted a range of icons (as with the old cardback maker) it would have to be a reasonably small amount, and likely rather generic at that.

It would be possible to add a transparent pic, like you do with the card portrait, but as seen on the forums, a lot of people have trouble with transparencies and the like.

We can ponder that later

Okay, I follow you now. As to a selection of icons, perhaps a talisman silhouette plus those icons already present in the Windlass font? Would it be easier to use those straight from the font as another text layer on top of the template? That might be an adequate set of easy ones to use in addition to any underlay of a custom one.

Rather than use icons, I have been wondering about creating a "Talis-Dings" font with images like those used in the expansion symbol and the sundry icons I added to the latest working copy of SE's extension. It would be a much easier way to add expansion and required icons too...

Excellent idea, Jon!

On another tangent, one of my many other little projects is an expansion of the base WIndlass font to include all necessary characters for foreign language translations of cards. ITB has a French and German in process, though both were on hiatus over the holidays. The Slovak, Czech, and Spanish projects kind of petered out, but maybe they'll pick up later. The "Windlass-Extended" takes the back seat to other projects with a deadline of "someday." I had already planned to move the dingbats to a secondary font called "Windlass-Dings" and the swooped special characters to "Windlass-Caps" or something.

Again, the font approach sounds like the way to go. Instead of updating a limited set of icons in graphic format, for the future all you'd need do is add to that font and do updates of one external file. When it comes time, I'd like see what you do with it.

ADDITIONAL: When entering text into SE, is the a way to give people the control to rotate the angle of a text block? Or is there a way to hard defined the angle in the code? Just thinking a head to dealing with that angled old tomb.

Polish and German version of WIndlass (made by others and stremlined by me) exist in the translated versions of the Talisman extensions. It would be a cool thing to make a fully international version of Windlass eventually as it would certainly reduce file sizes! I am toying with another way to localise the SE extension, but I haven't quite "got it" yet.

As for angles, yes this can be done internally (and possibly externally). If you look at the Character cards, they have rotated text for the Strength and Craft attributes etc.

Excellent all around. Then a font full of icons would be the way to go. One more question.

Can the opacity as well as the color of a text be controlled?

Battle Breakage

Again, this is not a house rule that I came up with. It has been around since at least 2E. It is the chance of a Weapon or Armour breaking and become unusable in Battle, though there is also the option to have it repaired... even those that are Magic Objects.

In Talisman's past, in some commercial expansions, breakage occurred through random draw of a card that told you so. Players with a background in RPG preferred something less disconnected from actual use.

Connecting breakage to Battle/Combat rolls is problematic because of Talisman's 1D6 combat system. Chance of occurence even based on rolling a natural 1 is much higher than realistic. Instead of an automatic break upon a bad Battle roll, a second breakage roll is added on the roll of a 1 in Battle or in Armor use.

This geometrically reduces the chance of actually breakage from 16.7% (rolling a 1) to about 2.7% (rolling two 1s in a row) and doesn't require using non-standard dice. Chance of breakage is thereby tied to actual combat and is lower. I've refined it, adding rules that address magic Weapons and Armour, which have eve less chance of breaking (around half that of an Object Weapon or Armor) and a repair option (through the Enchantress). They're magical afterall, right?

You can download the archive of the card front and back HERE. It should be noted that this house rule concept was one of the least widely played and appeals mostly to players with a heavy RPG background. Pure boardgame players disliked it.... sometimes intensely.

I'm not really sure about opacity to be honest.

I was thinking that we might have to settle on a colour which "looks" right on the cover. Perhaps in adding the vectors to the font they might be aged or embossed in some way...

EDIT

Just saw that you added the new card to the mix. Very nice, but I am not struck on the Shield motif as it reminds me of a very angry Pacman! You may have already tried it, but perhaps a broken sword might be better if you have it?

talismanisland said:

Okay, though I don't know how to add an "aging" effect to a vectored character inside a font. I'm still new to font editing (using Font Lab Studio for Mac).

talismanisland said:

Heh heh... Pacman! I'll peek at it again over the coming days and see about a broken sword instead.

Defensive Combat

This one isn't as old as the others, but it has been around for a while. It likely was another attempt patch to the old problem of auto-lose, auto-win combats that Talisman is well known for since the old days. It's basically a chance to save your bacon when you have no chance whatsoever of winning a combat... and we've ALL been there!

It's based on something I saw among 3E players, and I tried to refine it a little myself. If you haven't noticed, the house rules I've been coverting to cards have sort of a descending order. I wouldn't say this one was disliked, but it certainly wasn't used as much as the others to my knowledge. Have a peak HERE and I'll be back with the 5th card, one of my own creations purely, in a couple of days.

True Fate

This is the new one created by me in cooperation with my players group. Obviously by its title, it was created specifically for use with Talisman 4ER. It is the last of the five House Rules based Rules Cards I will be releasing at this time, and you can access its archive HERE.

Within the coming week I will begin preparing the rules card templates in PNG format for the general fan community to use. I will seek hosting for them at TalismanIsland.com.

Additional: I have redone the back of the Battle Breakage rules card with a new (and hopefully better) icon. The original archive has been replaced and you can download it HERE.

I like the new back for the Breakage rules! Much more striking!

Very good. The next thing to consider is how you would like them packaged for Talisman Island. Do you want to just load them as is, or should I prep them all in one archive? I had not plans to include documentation; don't know if there's any point to that or not.

I think they would be better as one archive, with some form of note as to the whys and wherefores, just like you did in the first post in this thread.