A Character for Every Season

[SkyeSilverwing]

I am quite fond of my printable Monster for Every Season Miniatures, but I feel like some characters deserve better than "generic human paladin number 4". So I was thinking, why not include a character creation software to make, pose, and equip characters in the OotS style? It would be great to be able to set up my players minis in a way that best reflects their loadout, style, and personality. Seems to me that after VTT ingegration last year, a character maker is a logical next step.

[firelistener]

There's a video game called Wildermyth that uses paper cutout models for the characters. When they animate in combat, the whole character cutout jumps and stretches to simulate attacking or casting a spell. Something like that would probably be simplest to implement in a VTT, and you wouldn't need to do very much besides importing the character art as-is. Sounds very doable to me.

[Atranen]

I'll add my support for this. The Monster for Every Season are one of my favorite gaming products; easy and fast to make, tons of variety, easier to see from a distance than metal or plastic minis. I don't know how feasible it is and Rich has lots going on always. But if this were to happen, I'd buy it.

[Jaeda]

The more recent versions of RPG Maker have a tool for building character sprites and I'm sure that other similar tools exist. The main idea is that you have images for different kinds of body parts (base, eyes, hair, shirt, etc) and they are layered together to form the character image, which then is saved to a file. The RPG Maker community has people who create parts for these tools to give you more flexibility when using the tool. I'm not completely sure on the limitations of the tool (since it is specialized for making things in the formats that RPG Maker expects), although similar tools might be slightly more versatile. You would still need someone to create a suitable pallet of parts. The tool itself would be relatively easy to build, but the graphical resources take time.

The monster for every season pdfs are composed of vector graphics and some tools like Inkscape (https://inkscape.org/)can extract them from the file. Vector graphics are basically directions for how to draw an image, unlike raster graphics which are pixel information. This has some advantages if you need to resize or rotate parts (with the RPG Maker tool, you might need different swords or whatnot for different poses because the angles are different, but with vector graphics, they can be easily rotated). The downside is that combining the parts is more complicated and you would probably need to include a bunch of metadata to describe how different parts should relate to each other.

If you just need a couple customized miniatures for your group, you're probably best opening the pdfs in Inkscape and grabbing the characters who have the parts that you want and recombining them together. If you want a tool for creating a whole village of unique NPCs, you should ask how strongly you want the OotS feel and what tradeoffs you want to make.