Boon Cards

Here is a PDF of 9 Boon cards you can hand out to your players during your D&D game. What the hell am I talking about?

Boons won't break the game. They are just little extra bonuses you can hand out to your players when they do something awesome. Say they make a hard choice based on their alignment, for example. Or get a critical hit at a critical time.Or any other awesome thing players do. Players like little rewards like these.

The boons I came up with are as follows:

Action Point: Take an extra action
Bring the Pain: +1 to damage on your next attack
Close Call: Gain 1 Experience Point (note: this is peculiar to Microlite, which uses a 1HD=1XP system; use an XP bonus appropriate to your particular system)
Dodge: +1 to AC for 1 round
Guided Strike: +1 to hit on your next attack
Second Wind: regain 1d6 Hit Points
Stroke of Luck: +1 to any roll
That Was Close: +1 to any saving throw
Try Again: reroll any die roll. You must take the second roll

I haven't tried these out yet, but I'll be testing them in my Kids' Game. I have not yet decided how often to hand them out. My original thought was that it would be something cool to hand out in lieu of treasure, when they defeated a monster that didn't have anything precious to leave behind. Especially with kids, these kinds of rewards can be a bit tricky to balance, so we will have to see.

The PDF has pretty pictures. This file is usable in MagicSetEditor but doesn't have the pictures. If you are an artist and I've used your art and you would like me to remove it, I will. Just leave me a comment or email me at sully33 at gmail dot com.

Do you have ideas for more boons? I'd prefer to have boons that are usable by any character, and not specifically tied to spellcasters or fighters or elves, etc. Leave a comment!

More Fun with Magic Set Editor

I love using Magic Set Editor to create Magic: the Gathering type cards for use in my D&D games. My players get custom-made cards for their magical items, quests, clues, NPCs, and all kinds of other goodies.

Here is a PDF file that features the standard races and classes for Microlite74, in full-text card form, for easy reference for players at the table.

Here is a Magic Set Editor file that contains the cards in the PDF above, as well as cards for PCs (basically four cards to make up a character sheet) and three additional races that I have featured here on the blog: Tieflings, Dragonborn, and Eladrin. This file is useless without the Magic Set Editor program, which is available free at the above link.

Note: the text on these cards are pulled straight from the M74 Extended rules document. The gnome card includes my houseruled MIND attribute bonus instead of the original STR bonus. I'm making no claim to copyright or any bullshit like that. This is just an aid for your M74 Extended game.

Using Magic Set Editor to create D&D Handout Cards

By popular demand...

This card is handed over to the DM when the player uses that particular power (Burning Blade, in this case), and helps the DM keep track of the status effects the power inflicts. I made it and many more with a program called Magic Set Editor.

Magic Set Editor is a program that allows you to custom build cards for a variety of Collectible Card Games, most notably Magic: The Gathering. I have found it to be very easy to create a variety of cards as handouts in my Dungeons and Dragons game, as I have talked about before. As requested by an anonymous reader, I hereby offer a bit of a tutorial on how to use Magic Set Editor to create these types of cards. Keep in mind I am not using it to make Magic: The Gathering cards but rather handout cards for Dungeons and Dragons.

First, go to http://magicseteditor.sourceforge.net/download to download the program. You'll need a printer and some heavy cardstock paper (I use the 110 lb variety; regular multi-purpose printing paper, once cut down to size, tends to roll in on itself. The heavy cardstock will last a lot longer). I also picked up some card sleeves for added protection.  Finally, a good pair of scissors or a razor blade and straightedge to cut the cards out once printed is necessary. I recommend the razorblade over the scissors. Less hand-cramps.

Now, if you've downloaded the program and started it up, it will ask you if you want to create a new deck or open an old deck. Click on the button to create a new deck. You'll notice it gives you several different types of cards to choose from.  Choose whichever one you like; you can always change it later inside the program.

If you're playing 4th Edition D&D, there is probably a good chunk of text you need to put on your handout cards. For this reason, I went here and downloaded a few additional card templates. Make sure that you save them to the same folder the Magic Set Editor program is found in, otherwise they won't be available in the program.

The "Modern Full Text" template is perfect if you need to put a lot of text on a card (such as a 4E combat power card).

Yes, these cards are OSR-Compatible

Also highly recommended is the "Ancient Scroll Style", mostly because it looks really cool as a handout and it comes with a nice font to boot.

Now I need to make a matching Hand of Vecna card...

The other one I like to use pretty extensively (primarily for PC and NPC portrait cards) is one that comes with the program, which is called "Extended Art". It's the opposite of "Modern Full Text", and allows you to make a card that looks like this:

One of our PCs

By clicking on the border, a menu will drop down to allow you to change the color. Clicking on the colored background will do the same, giving you the options of white, green, blue, red, black, artifact, land, and multicolor (note: this doesn't work with Ancient Scroll Style). Double-clicking anywhere a picture would go will allow you to load a picture from your computer and fit it into the frame

Some tips...

When you tell it to print, there is a check-box that will let you put spaces between the cards. Do NOT check that box. It is easier to cut the cards apart without the space. Without the space, if you print on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper, the cards will be perfectly sized to fit into the plastic card protectors. Also, if you do check that box, the bottoms of the lowest row of cards will be cut off.

Copy-pasting from the D&D Compendium (4E) or a System Reference Document (if you're playing 3.x or Pathfinder) will save you a lot of time. It will probably require a bit of formatting to make it look nice, but that's easier than typing everything out of a book.

If you have consumable items that see frequent use, print out several and recycle. It's a big help to have all consumable items on cards; that way, when players use them, they just hand the card in. This eliminates a lot of character-sheet scribbling and erasing. You can put the rules right there on the card, so there's no need to look it up in the book.

Google Image Search is your friend. DeviantArt is your friend. If you have a Dungeons and Dragons Insider account, you have access to all the art they publish in their books and online. There are plenty of other websites featuring fantasy art.  Finding art for the cards is probably the most time-consuming part of the process (one of the reasons I like the "Modern Full Text" template!).

It's not apparent in the images above, but it is possible to include a "Casting Cost" in the title line of most cards (again, not applicable to the "Ancient Scroll" style). I have found it useful in certain instances. For example, in my Castle Ravenloft 4E Session, I put a number in the casting cost area for monster cards to tell me how many times to roll on the treasure chart once that monster was killed. I haven't found uses yet for the various symbols that are available, but I'm sure other people will.

If you haven't already, download a program called "CutePDF" or one like it.  It allows you to "print" a document and create a PDF file from it, and it works quite well with Magic Set Editor.  In fact, when you do so and open the PDF, you can do a copy-paste on any of the individual cards in the PDF document, which how I was able to post the card images up here for all of you to see.

The program automatically sets the borders of the cards to be black. I have not yet found a way to change this, although I'm sure it is a simple fix. Change the borders to white and save yourself some ink.

In Closing...

I hope this post has been useful for some of you DMs out there looking for an easy way to produce good-looking, useful handouts for their D&D game (or any RPG, really). They come in really handy in my home games. I am also contemplating a more complete card-based system for building dungeons randomly, thanks in part to a little inspiration from this guy.