Pick a Card, All the Cards

3DRPG adores deck cards in its D&D campaigns. There’s just something about the physical touch and playing cards’ size that just feels so darn good. Yes, yes – D&D Beyond is an amazing digital tool and one that we subscribed to but nothing sometimes it’s just not the same.

And these terrific cards can come in all sorts of useful types including:

• Spell Cards
• Condition Cards
• Treasure Cards
• Item Cards
• Quest Cards
• NPC Face Cards
• Trap Cards

Lots of talented folks out there producing these D&D card deck supplements too. Pathfinder’s GameMastery series covers alllll sorts of different categories like Weapons & Armor or Essential Equipment.  3DRPG is addicted to Nord Games and the wide range of amazing cards. There are even some pretty handy off-brand options too. Or, you can hop on over to Etsy.com and you’ll find even more creative choices from all sorts of marvelous makers.

However, there always seems to be a situation or two where the party pokes around and makes a great Investigation check roll to uncover a unique object. That may be a simple magic item like a Ring of Protection. Or, it could be something more unique that the DM just spun up on the fly.

With all that, you can also actually create your own cards (which is what we often do). All you need is:

• A clear card sleeve
• An old Magic or Warlord card
• Adobe PDF Pro (or similair program)
• Google Images

The clear sleeve is needed because you are going to be making a front and back to your card. An old Magic or Warlord card is going to be inserted into the sleeve to give your final card some weight to it. PDF Pro is used to create the front image and the back text. And Google Images is going to give you a nice graphic to add to the final card.

In one of our campaigns, our cleric was searching a fountain in the city square and rolled a nat 20 on her Investigation check. DM Ben decided to have her find a mysterious bug. She was super intrigued by its odd appearance and quickly slipped it into an empty potion bottle. Now our player needs a handy item card for reference and to ultimately slip some notes in as she learns more about this peculiar insect.

No problem. We just googled “long, skinny bugs” in Google Images and found a creepy image. That goes on the card’s front. Then we used a couple of different D&D 3.5E PDF templates shared by other crafty Internet gamers to create the card’s front and back artwork/text. Next, you send each PDF through a color printer (cough, cough – like the one you have access to at work). Grab some scissors. And then assemble your card!

See?! We don’t need all our player’s rewards to be digital! Fling ’em a freshly built card across the game table and let them start to build their own unique RPG deck! Pretty cool, right? Now don’t even get us started on digital dice rolling. 😉