Artist/Illusionist Playbook, Continued
Playing with the source files to give my artist/illusionist playbook a more official format. Still not 100% on some of the abilities, but I like the general feel of it.
I’m not brilliantly familiar with InDesign, so this is turning out to be an interesting learning experience.
#ArtistPlaybook
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0w0-06KlXTeN09GcFd2TXpGNHc/view?usp=sharing
I really like it! I feel you’ve managed to keep it within the spirit and theme of the setting and have done a great job of adding some very novel special moves.
Justin Ford thanks!
To be fair, most of these moves are heavily inspired by suggestions from the community or moves from others playbooks.
As I said, I’m still working on some of these. Tortured Artist in particular isn’t sitting quite right, and I need to give Artistic Fugue a long hard look… and probably define what a Dark Masterpiece is 😉
I was going to add that just suffering harm everytime you over indulge with Artistic Fugue is kind of boring, but it seems like you’re way ahead of me.
You accidentially replaced the word Artist with Coiner a bunch of times (I assume you’ve been playing around with the name, or borrowed the template from another template?) and I guess some of the abilities are a little wordy, but otherwise I’m really liking this!
Stephen Davey to be honest I’m not sure if the harm belongs in the Artistic Fugue at all, I added it as an afterthought.
The general idea of the ability is that the player occasionally wakes from their trance to find they have created a creepy artistic artifact.
I’m still figuring out what to call the playbook, to be honest. Coiner was the latest I was playing with, but it strikes me that simply calling it the Artist might work quite well.
And I totally agree about the “wordiness”, I’m trying to figure out what the best way of trimming it down without losing flavour might be, I’d never quite appreciated how hard it must have been for John Harper
What was the thought process for dropping the dream scape elements? I actually quite liked them and am a bit sad to see them go.
Chris McDonald I was quite fond of them too, to be honest, but they didn’t feel like they fit the rest of the setting, and I felt like the whisper should really be the Most Magicalâ„¢ of the playbooks.
I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a Porté-esque(1.) advanced art which lets the player interact with the Ghost Field in those ways.
(1.) from 7th Sea
Maybe just give them the ability to produce art that can “map” the ghost field or includes elements of it? Perhaps an ability that primarily works via flashbacks to portend future events via the ghost field?
Justin Ford they both sound like cool abilities, but do you feel they’re missing in this playbook?
With portraiture, quick-study and some positioning (e.g. trapping a ghost who knows the area you want to cross), you could create a near-perfect map of the ghost field.
I did think about whether some sort of prophetic ability might fit the playbook, but I wasn’t sure whether it even fit into the world at all.
My general thought was to try to give the playbook tools which players could combine to achieve various things.
My Hawkers group actually just sold Ivuvian-demonically-cursed painting tools to one of the City Council. I’d be VERY interested in what you have on this playbook for reasons of inspiration – do you have a link to share or is not done enough yet?
Kickass picture, by the way. Wish I could figure out how to alter photos to look like this myself.
Matthew Vincett that sounds awesome! There’s a link to the .pdf in this post actually, you should be able to click the picture you mentioned and see the latest .pdf
As to the picture, I tried to put all the suggestions I had found for how to achieve it in this post : plus.google.com – Blades in the Dark Playbook Portrait Art Style I thought it might be neat to…
I got my best result by doing three layers of decreasing posterization, with some 3:2 gaussian blurs, then giving all of them except the lowest an inverted grayscale mask… and finally using Seth Weinberg’s cutout filter solution as a multiplier layer on the whole thing.
I use GIMP though, so you might have an easier time of it if you happen to have Photoshop handy.
Renaud van Strydonck I actually asked SPECIFICALLY because you said you used Gimp. I use it too. Thanks for the info, I’ll give it a shot!
Now a second question if I may: how’d you make your playbook look EXACTLY like the book’s? Was it another gimp job or did you use word/other program settings?
Matthew Vincett, I got the Tinker level from Kickstarter, so I got most of the source files from John Harper to work with. I basically grabbed the necessary pages off the InDesign file and edited them to suit my needs.
So basically I went for the laziest possible option 😉
If you don’t have the Tinker files, I had actually started assembling the necessary pieces in Gimp by grabbing the pages of the .pdf, then using an inverted greyscale layermask to overlap all the playbooks and get the “template” free of any text… there has to be a better way than that, to be honest, but I’m something of a n00b at this.
Renaud van Strydonck You’re likely less of a noob than me. And no, I’m not a kickstarter backer at all. Guess it is the hard way for me, then.
tbh: I wasn’t even going to get that technical with it. But now that I see other people doing so I feel personally challenged to up my game.