Prep Porn
Ready for session #2! This is what the NPC count looks like for a crew of 7 PCs. They’ve already wound up a number of off-camera clocks and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when they tick down.
Prep Porn
Prep Porn
23 thoughts on “Prep Porn”
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You mad man! Love those 17 points.
Beautiful. What paper did you print those on? Do you care to share the art?
Mark Wiand, pale yellow/cream cardstock I picked up sat Staples. As far as art goes, I’ll put everything up online when I have time later in the week and link to it here.
Thank you! You, sir, are a gentleman and a scoundrel! 😀
Rad! I need to put some thought into some props while I’m preparing to run Blades.
Sub
What process did you use to get that engraver style on the portraits.
Adam Brimmer, I run them through a program called Filter Forge. Tons of different user-made filters, and you can adjust settings on each one individually. I used the “Engraving” filter and tweaked the line density until it looked decent at print size.
Your Prop Porn makes mine look like a dodgy back alley brothel. Well done Jason! I’d be very happy to play in your game, so inspiring!
Wow man, this is super sweet! Did you find those portraits online?
Yannick Massa, yeah, lots of searches for “19th century noble,” “Victorian mug shot,” etc.
That is so amazing. I can’t even.
My heart!
Here are the files, .indd and pdf, in the “Blades in the Dark” folder. There’s also a separate folder of just the portrait images, in case anyone wants to use them. I’ll be adding to that as the cast of characters expands.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2b7zzqa8spq11xv/AABMoiyqunPrp-aAIkuhpLLfa?dl=0
Sincerely, thank you so much. These are great!
You’ve saved me so much work. You’re a fine Spider.
Legend
Amazing! Here I was wondering when I was going to find the time to dig up a bunch of portraits for my new campaign starting Friday. Now I don’t have to! I felt moved to go and buy Freebooters on the spot as some small recompense.
Thank you for sharing Jason. Inspiring.
These reminded me of the various cards from A Study in Emerald board game, which could be used for character art.
E. g. boardgamegeek.com – A Study in Emerald
Beautiful! Thanks for sharing! I wanted to create some more portraits and found out the same effect can be achieved in Gimp (free and open-source) using Filters > Distorts > Engrave… using the maximum height setting (16).
I want to know what the Seventeen points of Azarax is?
Ryan Chatterton, at the outset my players chose Cultists as their crew type. That led to discussing the nature of their god and the cult’s motivation. Someone named the god Azarax, and together they decided that rhe main tenet of their faith is “control through suffering.”
At the same time we were talking about crew names and as an example I said, “For instance, there’s a gang called The Bloodletters and another one called The Six.” So one of the players said, jokingly, “How about The Seventeen?” And of course it stuck.
Further discussion revealed that their long-term goal is to bring Azarax into the world by creating widespread suffering through control of key figures or positions in Doskvol. They decided that The Seventeen refers to seventeen specific points of power, and one of the players sketched that diagram. The first seven points, colored in red, represent the seven PCs. The remaining points must be discovered during play, by researching arcane texts, making offerings to Azarax, etc.
It’s great because it sets up a very clear structure for me to create tiered opportunities, and they have a lot of flexibility in terms of how they choose to go about discovering the points. Point #8 is Cortland of The Lost, hinted at by the phrase “He who ties each sin to a stone,” which the Spider discovered in a fragment of an ancient Iruvian manuscript.