I always have a hard time keeping NPCs straight when I run a boxed campaign so I decided I would add some faces to the names and made some avatars. I wanted some info to go along with each of them as well so I threw together a deck of cards with the name, profession, location and stats of each of the NPCs. There is a card for each of the named NPCs in Stromdorf along with one for each of the Holtzes.

The style of the cards is a bit more cartoony than I perhaps would have liked given that it's Warhammer, but they are much better than if I had tried to draw them all myself. I tried to follow the descriptions from the source book and I like to think I was mostly faithful given the limitations of the software I was using.

The NPC’s stats are on each card so “clever” players may take advantage of them if they take time to study the cards. Personally I use them by showing the players the card each time they meet a new NPC so they can get a face to go along with the name, then leaving the NPCs that are involved in the scene arrayed in front of me so I can remember who’s there. Overall, I don't think there are any spoilers on the cards, but be sure to look over them before handing them out the the players.

I used Inkscape to design the cards then used an online avatar creator to make the portraits. I spent some time to try and find the author or source of the avatar creator so I could credit them here but the original author seems to have been lost on the winds of the intertubes. After exporting each card from Inkscape, I put them all into a Word document for layout and printed to PDF. I’m sure there is a more elegant solution for card creation, but this worked well enough for me. I looked into Strange Eons briefly before realizing that creating custom card types was not a simple process and bailed out since I needed to get the cards done quickly for my own campaign.

I uploaded the deck (as a PDF) to Hammerzeit in the Background & Locations section so it should show up for download there soon.

Here is a sample card:

I hope at least a few of you running The Gathering Storm find this useful.

Nice one mate. I did some cards for Eye for an Eye and been waiting them to be "accepted" to Hammerzeit. Including stats in the card will help me a lot in tracking things down. What I did for my cards was to leave the bottom half empty so my players were able to write their ideas down during the investigation.

Looking forward of downloading your cards as The Gathering Storm is the next one on the ménu for my group.

Funny and nice.

it's a pity that it seems that Hammerzeit is not updated regularily

It would be a great idea for FFG to create this kind of NPC cards for their adventure and campaign packs, as they would push the already amazing game even further. They add so much depth when you can show a picture to your players (man is a visual animal) and keep it on the table while the PC's are within the line of sight of the NPC. Some subtle visual clues could also be implemented (fpr example a skull earring or a scar).

Why not also just to create a "NPC packs". They could include the NPC cards, backgrounds, drives and quirks as well as standups. These would be a great asset for gamemasters, dramatic personae who we could into our own adventures.

Excellent idea! I might use your cards, or maybe just steal the idea and make my own.

I love the idea. I was thinking that an adaption of the Strange Eons Career Card (for combining alot of information and detail on a NPC - 1 side players and 1 side GM) or Action Card (for a concise and readily available reference - again1 side GM and1 side Player) would work very well. I do not have the skills to do this myself, but as a GM having a rolodex type thing of recurring and common NPC's would be incredibly useful. The type of NPC could be listed as either Typical (an example of an inn keeper for example) or Character (Theodore Rosenkrantz, owner of the Laughing Pony Inn - a set character that has been detailed).

You can never have enough readily available resources - and as you say putting a NPC card (picture, description, habits, etc) in front of players whenever they meet them will help them play the role.

Alp

hi

i'll add it to my to-do list for strange eons

Hurlanc said:

Brilliant! Now, does someone know from where to get portrait pictures for the cards? I ripped mine for Eye for an Eye NPC cards from the google picture search and from Van Helsing the movie , but of course it is hard to share them as they contain copyrighted material. Maybe with Flickr advanced search, hmmmm... Or Is there already an existing portrait database in Strange Eons? Kudos to Lionyx for making the cards, but the art is indeed way too cartoony for the Warhammer world (as Lionyx stated himself too in the original post). I prefer real pictures to illustrations anyways as they make the NPC and the game come alive even more, but I guess this is just a matter of taste.

Edit: Huzzah! Finally they updated Hammerzeit. You can find my cards from the utilities section: 74.53.20.230/hammerzeit/index.php

Mordjinn said:

You could always look around at www.deviantart.com/ , but i don't know how much it's legal to scrub pictures from there.

Since Hammerzeit is gone, any chance on republishing them? Or anyone here who can provide them to me?

I hadn't seen this thread until you posted, but it reminds me: it might not be hard to find someone (or more than one person) who can draw pictures for a bunch of characters to put onto these NPC cards. I could do some. I remember reading somewhere around here someone (who wanted drawing practice) drawing pictures of people's PCs. People wrote up a description and he (or she) drew a picture and put it up in the topic thread.

vendolis said:

i still have the pdf of the 26 NPC cards with pictures (most of those are actors, 1 drawing for the dwarf) in a 9 per page format (A4). You can pm me here with an email to send it to, or to Cell on your vendolis SE Plugin forum (no 'w', i missed it when created the account)

Our GM has been using Paizo's Gamemastery portrait cards for this. I also used them for my Eye for an Eye.

Makes things a lot simpler.

I still have the originals as well a few more that I made for later in the campaign. I'll compile them and post them somewhere that actually exists (google docs should work right?) later today or tomorrow. Also, the link to that flash character editor I linked in the original post now gives a security warning so you may want to avoid it (is an edit post button really too much to ask for FFG?)

I couldn't find the original PDF that I had made but I did find the source images so I threw them together into a new PDF. I made this one larger than the original so it's more readable to print from (turned off image compression). It's much larger, but what's a few megabytes nowadays?

Anyway, here is the link (hosted by google docs): Stromdorf NPC PDF Link

And here's an attempt at linking a sample image since the original seems to have broken:

Lionyx said:

Thanks, i'll find a use for those