Using blank add-on cards in custom scenarios

[Odie]

I'm re-posting this from Forar off of BGG.

This is a brilliant idea for using the blank cards to make gear customized to the characters and legacies of your games:


"I posted this on the KS comments section and figured that rather than have it buried in time, I'd put it up somewhere it might be more likely to be seen.

You see the "blank gear cards" add on?

Snag one of those. Then, whenever a character in the group retires or dies, take a piece of gear that'd normally be in the random draw pile or in the shops, and print out a version that has been edited to reflect that person. Adjusted name, new flavour text, even a new pic, if the group is feeling ambitious and has a printer that'll play ball.

So instead of (a purely made up):
"Shotgun
Range 3
Damage 2
'The stock shows signs of heavy use, and has notches carved for every enemy killed."
Perhaps it becomes

"Forar's Boomstick
Range 3
Damage 2
'Found behind a tree trunk in the swamps. Original owner unknown, but countless foes met their end staring down its barrel.'"

No change to the stats that actually matter, but over the months and years of play, eventually the deck would come to contain a living history of gameplay adventures and misadventures. Even finding the items again could become part of the story ("How the hell did this get to Cynder??"), and could feasibly be reprinted again to reflect that history (New flavour text: "Found in the swamps one year, glistening in the firelight of Cynder the next, like a faithful hound, it's rarely far from those in need. Scratched into the stock are the owners names: Forar, Graysen, Taggart.")

I mean, sure, making custom gear, enemies and encounters through the blanks is a great idea, but I think they have potential to be something akin to Risk Legacy, where the game becomes 'yours', personalized to your gaming crew, as the afternoons go by.

Another option would be to use a quote from during a game for the flavour text, though that'd change from group to group.

I really like the idea of, if my character should die or retire, that his legacy might live on in the cards. That months from now, another character might be searching through a room and stumble across that tie in card. "... how the hell did this get down here?" Or "Why is this in the shop? Didn't the guy who owned it fall into a lava pool?"
Main problem I can think of would be getting it printed perfectly without a printer designed specifically for such work.

I suppose the same effect could be reached by sleeving all the cards and using thin paper inserts, the same way some people proxy Magic cards for deck testing, but this feels more elegant. Difficult, but amazing if it worked out. "


I'll be doing this for sure.

I think the only thing I would do differently is that I would still make a physical card for the legacy gear, but I wouldn't shuffle that card into the gear deck. Instead, I would use the blank add-on cards and the numbering system, and then just reference the numbered card drawn to a chart of the legacy items I've made that a player would roll on to see what they found. That way, if I have a long list of custom gear, I'm not overfilling my gear deck with extra cards, or giving away the fact that the next card is homemade or customized if it happens to look different. Once the specific piece of gear was determined, I would then hand out the custom card.