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11 September 2024
Lots of DnD plates are spinning in the air these days for ol’ DM Ben. Let’s take a peek at what he’s got in the hopper.
3DRPG’ers know that currently, most of our time is split between developing The Forgotten Rails hovertrain setting and building new encounters for our ongoing work campaign. We love the free Acquisitions Incorporated DnD 5e module, but a tremendous amount of home-brewed content is also intermixed. Hopefully, you are also using some of our NPCs and one-shot ideas for your campaigns!
So, we love face cards, mainly because our players never write things down or remember everything. Some might say that makes our players lazy, but we only play once a month, so DM Ben isn’t too hard on the gang. Still, it sure is convenient to drop a face card down on the table anytime the players interact with key NPCs. Plus, y’all know we love cards in general, as evidenced by our ongoing use of FelraiderRPG’s fantastic card-building tool set.
Typically, we go to our Pathfinder and Skeleton Games face card library, but alas, they haven’t released any new decks in quite some time. It’s a huge bummer because their artwork was excellent. However, one day, DM Ben stumbled upon Inkwell Ideas’ website and was flabbergasted at all their cool NPC deck themes!
He purchased some of their slick Sidequest decks at Gen Con many moons ago, but these talented creators just inadvertently fell off his radar…until now!
Inkwell Ideas has 14 Portrait Decks in total. Each card contains a portrait on one side and complementing background and personality information on the back. DM Ben plans to eventually put all their Face Cards in a binder, sorted by race/character class.
So, what decks did we snag for starters? We grabbed seven of them, but it’s silly that we didn’t pick up all fourteen themes. Here’s our initial haul:
Why just those seven? No idea. They just “spoke” to DM Ben. 😉
So, let’s do a couple of examples of how we utilized all this new TTRPG content for our DnD campaigns. Let’s start with our “innocent” old lady in the woods, who is really a terrorizing witch and a main villain in our storyline. We needed a face card to represent each version of her form. She uses the tears of captured kiddos to portray a sweet grandmother; in actuality, she’s as evil as they come.
Easy peasy as we found this lovely gentlewoman portrait in the Coastal Townsfolk deck. Look what a welcoming soul she is!
However, her actual form is that of a spooky Night Hag. So, we grabbed another creepy face card from the Desert Townsfolk deck. See how her evilness is beginning to shine through?! Inkwell Ideas’ face card is perfect for this home-brewed villain!
So, if DM Ben already has the name, personality, quirks, etc., for an NPC, he simply picks out the best portrait and then slips it into a single-sided card sleeve. However, each portrait card has a wealth of pre-prepped info on the back. So, if you don’t have time to formulate a particular NPC’s name, personality, quirks, needs, secrets, languages, backgrounds, or, in some cases, even their stats, these decks are perfect for you!
It turns out DM Ben has been slacking on our campaigns’ NPC face cards. He needed the following to catch up on our campaigns:
Yikes! Just look at all those NPCs that needed a face to the name! Inkwell Ideas had memorable portraits for everything except for the Troll and Construct, and we probably could have gotten those from their Monsters deck. Thankfully, our existing Pathfinder face cards library took care of those stragglers.
Any of these decks will make excellent stocking stuffers for our upcoming 2024 Holiday Gift Guide which is already in the works since 2023 Wish List was such a smashing success. So, beat the Xmas rush and pick up a few decks for that special someone (including you). 🙂
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