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erikogan / madness_cards

Madness Cards for Out of the Abyss
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Madness Cards for Out of the Abyss

Tools for building PDF & PNG files suitable for printing on card stock, or sending to a printer of game cards.

Starting with John Scott’s MS Word documents as inspiration, these cards have been reedited, reformatted, and reimagined.

Many of the cards have acting tips for bringing the madness to life at the table as well as in the game.

Example of Each Type of Card

Artwork

Thanks to the artists whose work made this project possible:

Short-Term Madness
“Death City” © 2012-2018 CylionDraw
Long-Term Madness
“Devil 2” © 2016-2018 Skyrawathi
Indefinite Madness
“Give the Power” by M-Delcambre, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Acting Tips Sock and Buskin Masks
Comedy and tragedy masks without background.svg, by The Anome, from original source Teatro.svg by Booyabazooka on English Wikipedia, he:משתמש:נעמה מ on Hebrew Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Downloads

If you are happy to simply download my original release of the cards without updates or changes of your own, see the original blog post.

Otherwise, keep reading to build a copy yourself.

Prerequisites

To build a PDF of the cards requires xsltproc from libxstl2, Apache FOP 2.x, and ImageMagick

PNG files are built from the PDF, and also require Ghostscript.

My own PDFs use the Cochin typeface.

MacOS

I strongly recommend installation via Homebrew.

  1. make and xsltproc are included in the Command-Line Tools for Xcode, which you’ll also need for Homebrew.
  2. brew install fop imagemagick
  3. If you want to make PNGs brew install ghostscript or combined into a single command: brew install fop imagemagick ghostscript

Fonts

If you wish to use the Cochin typeface you can extract the TTF files out of the TTC file in /Library/Fonts/Cochin.ttc. This Gist works for fontforge installed via Homebrew if you change the shebang to use python2.7 instead of python3.

Fedora / RHEL 7 / CentOS 7

  1. [RHEL/CentOS only:] In order to install FOP you’ll need EPEL installed if you don’t already have it: yum install -y epel-release.
  2. yum install -y make libxslt ImageMagick fop
  3. If you want to make PNGs: brew install -y ghostscript

RHEL / CentOS Note: At the time of this writing EPEL installs fop-1.1 and will likely do so for the lifetime of RHEL7. I do not believe I’m using any XSL:FO not supported by 1.1, but it has been a long time since I used 1.1, and I am not explicitly testing on 1.1.

Debian / Ubuntu

  1. apt-get install -y fop imagemagick xsltproc
  2. If you want to make PNGs: install -y ghostscript

Windows

No idea, sorry. FOP is Java-based, so you should be able to download and run it once you have Java installed. I know ImageMagick has Windows support, and I believe libxslt2 & ghostscript have provisions for installing on Windows, though they may or may not require Cygwin.

If someone with a Windows box gets it working, I’d love a docs PR.

Usage

Building the PDF

Provided xsltproc & fop are in your PATH, you should be able to run make and it will produce a PDF named cards.pdf:

% make
xsltproc -o cards.fo cards-fo.xsl cards.xml
fop -c fonts/userconfig.xml cards.fo cards.pdf
2018-05-08 07:37:23.963 java[87241:14203638] ApplePersistence=NO
May 08, 2018 7:37:31 AM org.apache.fop.events.LoggingEventListener processEvent
INFO: Rendered page #1.
May 08, 2018 7:37:31 AM org.apache.fop.events.LoggingEventListener processEvent
INFO: Rendered page #2.
[ … ]
May 08, 2018 7:37:34 AM org.apache.fop.events.LoggingEventListener processEvent
INFO: Rendered page #53.
May 08, 2018 7:37:34 AM org.apache.fop.events.LoggingEventListener processEvent
INFO: Rendered page #54.

About Font Files

If you do not have the Cochin TTF files in the fonts directory matching the names in the fonts/userconfig.xml file, fop will error out with a Java FileNotFoundErrors for these files:

[…]
May 08, 2018 7:42:21 AM org.apache.fop.fonts.LazyFont load
SEVERE: Failed to read font metrics file null
java.io.FileNotFoundException: /Users/erik/work/madness_cards/fonts/Cochin.ttf (No such file or directory)
[…]

In this case you have a few options:

  1. Extract, or buy a copy of the Cochin font files, and place them in the expected locations.
  2. Find a similar, free font and place it in the directory, changing the userconfig.xml file to match. You may have to edit the cards to allow the text on them to fit, since the letter-spacing will have changed.
  3. Modify the Makefile to remove the -c $< so that the configuration file is not used. (Not Recommended. The cards will look terrible.)

About Card Sizing

I used poker playing cards as the template for these cards. The company I used to print mine specified their cards as 63×88mm, with ⅛" buffer lost to cutting, and another ⅛" “for safety.”

I’m very happy with my cards (I chose the 330gsm stock), and would definitely recommend them. If you are using another printer, make sure you check their sizing, and adjust accordingly. The cards should render correctly at new sizes, but you should spot check each card to ensure everything lines up and the text all fits before sending them to the printer.

Building PNG files

By default, PNGs will be created at 1200 dpi, allowing Ghostscript to use 512MB as it builds them. To use these defaults run:

make png

That will create all of the cards (that do not have the enabled="false" attribute set) in the cards directory: cards/card-01.png through cards/card-54.png.

To change the defaults:

make PNG_DPI=300 GS_MEMORY=1073741824 png

Creating New Cards

Unless you merely want to tweak the wording of an existing card, I recommend creating new cards for all your changes. If you are limited in the number of cards you can print, you can add an enabled="false" attribute to the cards you want to leave out. (I have already done this on two cards in the deck, to make room for two new ones.)

Each card is defined by a <card> entry in cards.xml. I happen to think the DTD is pretty straightforward, but there are some points it’s probably worth documenting by example:

<card duration="Short|Long|Indefinite">
  <title shrink="optional attribute: if present, shrinks the text size to try to fit it on one line. Use sparingly.">
    The Title Goes Here and Is Shown At the Top of the Card (The Stylesheet Does
    Not Gracefully Handle Titles That Wrap, So Keep It Short!)
  </title>
  <description>
    <line>
      Descriptions can either contain their text directly, in which case it is
      all run together in a single block.
    </line>
    <line>
      Or they can contain &lt;line&gt;s, which separate text into lines.
    </line>
    <line>Also: &lt;em&gt; and &lt;strong&lt; work as you might expect.</line>
  </description>
  <acting tight="optional attribute: if present, the spacing is reduced up to try to help it fit when space is tight">
    This portion of the card is optional. If present, it appears below the
    description, in the paper section, in italics, with a pair of Sock and
    Buskin Masks to denote acting tips. This section can also include
    &lt;line&gt;s. &lt;strong&gt; also works as expected, but &lt;em&gt;
    romanizes and bolds the text.
  </acting>
</card>

Contributing

New card contributions are certainly welcome. Fixes for typos, grammatical errors, or clumsy wording are also welcome.

I’ve also debated adding a subtle texture to the flat black backgrounds of the cards, as well as changing up the backgrounds of the title bars & duration tabs.

If you’re looking to tackle on any of these, let’s discuss it!

License

Artwork copyrights all held with their respective artist, except where otherwise noted. All other code is distributed under the Affero General Public License v3.0, and is freely distributable under that license.