Has anyone ever attempted the gargantuan task of creating their own mundane item cards (perhaps with Strange Eons)? What I mean are Item cards for weapons, armor, tools, etc that the character is carrying kept in a stack. It is probably too much of a pain in the arse to make multiple cards of every piece of gear (especially when considering different rarities/quailities of each), but as an aspiring new GM it seems a cool idea to have a stack of what the character is actually carrying. As a GM you could already have item cards prepped for the adventure, a.i. a stack of 3 cards representing what can be found in the Manor's stables, etc.

If anyone has done this, what problems arose? Players buried under a stack of item cards? Never having the right item cards already made?

i've done it to a degree. i haven't done every item. but i did do weapons, shield and armour that were relevant to my group. i also do quest items.

the nice thing about it is that if a character drops his crossbow to swap to a melee weapon then the player drops the card on the table near his mini. if he doesn't pick it up at the end of the encounter he forgot it.

not had a problem with clutter.

My GM uses Paizo's item cards, and I have started to follow suit in my game. It makes what you have on you a much more tangible thing.

There is a company that makes these already, i think they are intended for Pathfinder but they dont have stats on them so can really work for any game. It is called GameMastery Item Cards. They are quite cool, come in decks and have things like:

• Rope,
• Travelers cloak
• Backpack
• Thieves tools
• Flask
• Hooded Lantern
• etc.

They are from a company called GameMastery and are at most hobby shops or online.

Gitzman

I have thought about creating a full set of SE item cards so equipment can be held as a characters (or locations) available equipment (or plunder).

It is a mammoth task to include every "item" but slowly plodding along will eventually provide a really robust euiqpment deck of cards.

Cheers

Gitzman said:

Just to clarify, Paizo is the company that makes them. GameMastery is the brand.

I use Strange Eons to make talent-sized cards represenging different healing herbs (from the Omens of Faith box), and use Paizo cards with inserts on back for Healing Draughts for example. I plan to use cards for horses/mounts if the heroes start using them consistently.

I only do that for these sorts of "special items" so there is no "look up time". Since armour and weapons effects generally can be recorded on character sheets, I don't do that for those more mundane things. There's no reason you couldn't, particularly if it was an item with Fast or similar qualities to remember.

Rob

Strange eons has an item extension. That works very slick. Before we went components lite, I had them for healing draughts. Stuff like that would be very handy (like the fortune cards we made).

I'm with rob on this issue. The character sheet serves as a good reference and reduces clutter for mundane items.

I think the giant list of equipment in Liber Fanatica 8 could use a couple of cards. We did one up for Wine of Dreams for example. I think for any expendable items that have a "rule effect" this would be handy. gallery.rptools.net/v/contrib/emirikol7/

jh

It think it would be very sweet if FFG made an "Items Vault" they could include plastic coins (assuming that that is feasible, they'd have to produce tones of these) and a deck of Item cards giving 3 copies of each (sticking with their rule of three), maybe more for the more common items like Hand Weapon. It could also include more pet cards like horses, birds to name a few. A deck of 50-100 cards would be more than enough although this is not taking into consideration items of different qualities.

I know that many people may feel that this would become bulky and awkward, however I believe that there is a real market for this. As to if they will do this I'm quite sceptical so I feel that a community effort to create a deck of item cards to go along with Emrikol/Jay's expanded items list would be fantastic. I am in the process of adding items to my Fantasy Grounds 2 program but you'll have to own a copy of it and have the WHFRP 3e rules yourself to join games once I get them off the ground.

I've been rather ill lately and my computer crashed a week or so ago so progress has been slow. I hope to run a game for RDP listeners in the months to come so this is a task I am trying to slowy get done.

I think the Items on cards is a great idea and should be explored further..

The Strolling Bones said:

Trust me, as someone who uses cards for regular items, 100 isn't enough to handle gear.

For items of different quaility/rarity - I had thought of laminating all self-printed cards then checking the appropriate box on the card for Average, Rare, etc with a non-permanent marker. This would cut down on the number of cards needed, but add the expense of lamination. Another idea was to use a tiny plastic paperclip on each card pointing to the appropriate quaility/rarity box or perhaps have different colored clips with each color assigned to a quaility/rarity.

I've thought about going this route. I liked the idea of everything being tangible. I even purchased some Campaign Coins a couple of packs of Paizo's items/weapons decks. The table clutter really shot up several notches however, and in the end we decided to scale back.

I can see this kinda strategy working with a game that's less component heavy at it's core (i.e. OD&D), but I may have to save item cards and the like for special, plot specific stuff.

clutter is a valid concern.

i have my players hold their action cards as if they are playing a card game. this keeps them off the table unless they are recharging. i'm looking forward to gitzman's character sheet being completed so i can reduce the cards in their hands by removing the ones included in his sheet.

the party sheet stands upright and has paper clips to denote the position of the track.

with regard to item cards they sit in a pile next to the character sheets, held items and armour are flipped face up for reference. the cards i created are the size of talent cards. i found the official cards to be needlessly large.

once i bring gitzman's sheet into the game the item cards will simply sit over the area he has allocated for weapons and armour.

On the wrong cpu to post the SE image, but I went the Mundane Item check route used by many modern settings -- believe the idea was first introduced to me in a World of Darkness game. It fits the abstract nature of WFRP nicely.

Mundane Item

You reach into your pack to pull out the right tool for the job. Roll [f][m]:

[su]: You have the item handy, but it's the last one. You have the item this time, but need to restock before you can pull that item again.
[bo]: You have a few more of them, probably. You have one for now and can roll again next time you need it.
[fa]: You don't have the item.
[ba]: If you rolled [su], the item is of Poor quality. If you did not roll [su], you don't have the item handy and you're not sure why you thought you did. The stress of the situation must be getting to you. Speaking of which, suffer 1 Stress.

If the player specifically has purchased the item, then this mechanic/card isn't used for the situation. But it works nicely for the "did I remember to bring a tinderbox, candle, short length of rope, or other item I probably should have unless it was misplaced~"

The Strolling Bones said:

This would get my money.

And coins.... Boy do I want coins. You'd think it would be easy to pick up some bronze/silver/gold coloured coins SOMEWHERE on the web, whilst getting what you want AND not spending a ton....

Apparently not.

Try a combination of Paizo's item cards and perhaps these for gold and silver coins....regular old pennies could be used to represent brass.

GoblynKing said:

Why is everything in the US? Pah.

Though buying them directly from Eagle Games gets you free shipping on orders of $30 or more (which is two sets of coins). Wonder if that's world wide shipping...