Prop Help

[Montar]

Hi everyone,

I don't have a ton of artistic talent, but I've always wanted to make some props for my games along the lines of what you see in published adventures.

What I'd mainly like to make is parchments, scrolls, letters, etc. with appropriately themed writing on them (runes, symbols, glyphs, etc.). How would I go about producing these kind of props? Are they doable in something like Photoshop or Publisher? Is there, perhaps, some kind of software out there that specializes in this kind of thing?

Any help is muchly appreciated!

 

[reanjr]

Hi everyone,

I don't have a ton of artistic talent, but I've always wanted to make some props for my games along the lines of what you see in published adventures.

What I'd mainly like to make is parchments, scrolls, letters, etc. with appropriately themed writing on them (runes, symbols, glyphs, etc.). How would I go about producing these kind of props? Are they doable in something like Photoshop or Publisher? Is there, perhaps, some kind of software out there that specializes in this kind of thing?

Any help is muchly appreciated!

If you have a bit of money, the best thing to do is to purchase parchment printing paper and look into symbol fonts. Also check out Kingdoms of Kalamar fonts for their alphabets. They have about 10 distinct alphabets that could be used for symbols.

For designing your own symbols, you'd probably want something like Adobe Illustrator. It's designed to create vector graphics which is perfect for symbols. Photoshop could also be used, but it's designed for raster graphics, so it would be more difficult to get your ideas onto paper using it. Publisher is designed for layout (for instance a magazine might use publisher or a book - strangely it is really designed for "publishers"). It's use for what you want is somewhat limited, though probably better than Photoshop.

But, if you are a big MS Office user and have never used Adobe products, Publisher will have a significantly lower learning curve. Adobe and Microsoft have VERY different views on user interface design.

 

[Montar]

Thanks Reanjr, I very much appreciate the help!

 

[Redrobes]

I must disagree with some of the previous post. I think that creating vector media takes ages and gives a very limited range of options. The biggest problem is that it immediately cuts you off from using all of the images to be found on the web, digital photos and scans from old books etc.

Using raster graphics does not at all stop you from printing artwork so long as the resolution of the original artwork is reasonably high. For tip top crispness about 300dpi (or higher) should be used to print artwork but for a quick prop in a game im sure that you can manage less.

This is a quick page that I made with ViewingDale + PSP using free art from the net.

This image can be printed out from the ViewingDale at any resolution and it will stretch all the images which make it up to correct scale.

The parchment icons were taken from Liams site of old books which is a fabulous resource for public domain middle ages books which he scans in and keeps in a database with high res versions.

http://www.fromoldbooks.org

It took about 15 mins to do this. I would not like to attempt to do this with a vector editor. ViewingDale is a fantasy map making software but it can make very small maps too - like maps on a bit of parchment. Since you can import any image to use as its icons then you can import text, fonts, parchment borders, runes and any other symbols too.