Minion Cards
So a few days ago I discovered this thread and thought the cards were really cool, but a lot of them didn’t really feel like minions to me so I decided I’d do my own. I following my stupid idea of following the path of maximum resistance I decided to design my own cards.
There were a couple of reasons to make my own cards, none sufficient to actually do it however. First was aspect ratio, the generator used in that thread generates cards with aspect ratios of 1.43, while actual playing cards have aspect ratios of 1.4. That would cut off part of the top or bottom or leave slivers along the side if printed on blank playing card stock. The aspect ratio of the image was also very wide which I thought was hard to work with.
I spent a few hours in Gimp and came up with this:
The artwork used for this particular card came from the Library of Congress Flickr collection and is in the public domain, but since I ruthlessly stole most of the artwork from sources that make their money from doing art I can’t ethically, much less legally, zip up the whole pack and post them.
Back to my point, I thought this was incredibly cool because I could see a pick up game of Spirit of the Century where the GM deals out a few minion cards, a location card maybe even a plot or two from S. John Ross’ big list. Mix with aspects and boom all you need to do is make an appropriate Big Bad that would use all those things and you’re ready to go.
Anyway, If you are interested in making your own cards here is the gimp Card Template. It includes backgrounds in gray, green, blue, orange, red, purple and black. Which I associate with minions +0 through +6 respectively.
Open the template in gimp (I used 2.2, but I don’t know if it matters much).
- Find yourself an image and crop and/or rescale it to 600×450.
- Select that image and hit Ctrl-C to copy it
- Open the card template and make sure the image layer is the active layer.
- Right click where the image goes in the template and select Edit -> Paste Into. Your image will replace the default image.
- From the menu across the top select Script-Fu -> Decor -> Add Bevel…
- In the dialog box uncheck ‘Work on a Copy’ an click okay.
- In the layer tool find a text layer. Right click the layer and select ‘Text Tool’ Change the text to whatever you want.
- Repeat step 7 for each of the text layers.
- Most of the background color layers are turned off. Turn on the one you want by clicking where the eye icon should be. You can deactivate or delete the other background colors.
- File -> Save As… and you’re done. You probably want to save as both a .xcf file and something more useful like a .png or .jpg file. If you want to make changes, correct typos, etc. you’ll have to change the .xcf file and export it again.
If I get a chance I’ll post the cards I created, I probably won’t post links to the artwork, because some artists might take exception and the last thing I want is artists taking good art off the Internet.