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"The Manual"


Greetings Adventurers !

Quite often I receive some questions concerning the creation of new Talisman-Cards. As a matter of fact, new cards can be created quite easily if you just follow a few simple principles....

First of all, you need some card-frames as a basis to paint the cards on. I have included four blank cards on this page, and these should help you to find a start.

For working with Graphics, you inevitably need a Graphics-Tools. Great help for some tasks is already MS Paint (the painting programme included in Win95 or Windows), but you will need at least one other program to do the cutting and placement of images. At this point you might get a shareware copy of a Tool like "Paint Shop", and together with MS Paint this will suffice to do everything you need (although I am using I Photo Plus which was included with my Scanner to do more difficult graphics-cuts.).

Next you need and idea what kind of card you want to create and find the right graphics for this card. Usually a Scanner is of great help here, since you may use it to get images you want to use from illustrated books etc. Otherwise, the web is full of images, and you may also grab images from your favourite computer-games by using a simple picture-grabber. If you have an image, insert it into the card, but leave enough space for the text above and below the image.

If you have placed the image, the wording comes. For the wording I mostly use MS Paint, since itīs quite uncomplicated to use. First, you insert the name of the card (using Times New Roman 10, bold). Next comes the type and priority-number (Times New Roman 8). And finally you insert the text of the card (Times New Roman 7 - you will have to insert the "7" manually, since it isnīt listed). When entering the text, first type down the whole text-field. Beware at this point, you are working with graphics ! The text must be perfect before you close the text-window, otherwise you have to erase it and type the whole thing again ! Before you close it, go to every line and add spaces between the words until the words are equally distributed among the line - this gives the card a better apearance. When any text wasnīt centered properly, you may still move it by placing a box around it and moving it in a simple drag-and-drop.

After these steps, you should arive with a card ready to use. But be careful when printing the cards to keep them in the right scale. Some printers or Graphics-Tools tend to enlarge the printing, so you will have to experiment until the scale is right.

If you want some Backsides, I have some of them here !

I hope you will enjoy building cards, and I am most eager to see the products of your imagination !


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Kulkmann@aol.com

Copyright © 1999 Frank Schulte-Kulkmann, Trier, Germany