A Walk in the Dark A look in to the mind of an RPG designer

      

9Aug/12Off

Light and Dark Fonts

It's been over a month since I posted? Gosh, I've been busy... Sorry.

A long time ago, for an alternate reality game that... well... failed miserably, I created two custom font sets. I actually used these two fonts in "trailhead" packages to start the game, writing the entire sender's address label in the corresponding font.

I expected the folks at UnFiction to take a few days to decode it. It took them hours, maybe less.

Since I imagine that some of you DMs out there might be interested in writing things, like for puzzles, in a cryptic font but may not have the time or inclination to create your own font to do so, I thought I'd provide these two.

"DLI Lightscript" was made to be used by an angelic, apparently good/lawful organization; it was designed with smooth curves and lines, portraying a certain level of symmetry. Almost mathematical, if you will. Numbers are included as well, and the symbols appear similar except the pips are solid black I think.

"DLI Darkscript" was made to be used by a shady, apparently bad/evil organization; it's chaotic, with no sense of rhyme or reason. No curves in it at all, entirely made by sharp lines and hard corners. Even the line thicknesses vary between characters. It's kind of a mess, but it was made to be that way.

Both files are provided as Windows TrueType (TTF) fonts wrapped inside a RAR archive.

If you do use this, I'd be really interested in knowing how. Let me know!

 

15Apr/12Off

The DnD Pantheon

The D&D 4E Pantheon... Well, most of it anyway.

Yesterday I was in a strange mood, so I decided to try and practice a little with my non-"drag clip art around" skills in Fireworks and Illustrator. I'm trying to expand my skills, get some more practice in drawing and in raw vector manipulation, so my maps and such can be a little more robust and unique.

Looking for something to do, I came across the "Deities" section of the semi-official Dungeons and Dragons Zazzle site. When I saw the first one - Asmodeus - I thought to myself "Yeah... I can do that."

Several hours later, I had all sixteen done.

The majority of them involved not much more than dropping a rectangle or circle and then screwing with the bezier anchors, plus a lot of polygon unification and "punching". Some of the more complex one involved drawing a base vector with the vector path tool and then modifying the points to match the image reference. Vecna was probably the hardest in this regard, adn Tharizdun took me the longest of all due to its complexity. Corellon, Pelor and Erathis were quite entertaining because I put a stupid amount of time to make them mathematically accurate and symmetrical.

Like I said, I did this for practice... But now that I have them I can't help but share them. So here are all 16 deities, provided in native Fireworks PNG and Illustrator 8 formats. The base image is about 700x700 pixels but it's vector so it should be very easy to scale to any size you want.

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Deities - Fireworks PNG

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Deities - Adobe Illustrator 8

I hope that someone out there can put these to good use.

Filed under: 4e, Art, DnD, Drawing, RPG No Comments