I download the Mouse Guard playing card set (available from here), scrubbed all the text off the conflict cards, and put my own text on instead. I did it for two reasons. First, the text was rasterized, and as a design professional this offends my soul. (Just kidding, I don’t have a soul. But text through a JPEG meatgrinder like that. Ouch, man. I appreciate why it was done, but I can still hear a sad little dirge for every artifact-laden letter-halo.) The second reason was because I didn’t find the text entirely helpful. I want each card to convey the following information:
- What the concept is for the move. For example, what sorts of things can you model as a Defend action?
- Short advice on when it’s beneficial to script that move, or why you would want to script it.
- What kind of roll you need to make based on what your opponent scripted. The existing cards do this, but not in a way that is easy to absorb. I don’t want to read blocks of text — I just want to know whether I’m rolling independent or versus. (The independent Ob can be incorporated into this data “for free” so it might as well be there.)
- Special follow-on effects like the bonuses for Maneuver margins and the regeneration from Defend.
I think they turned out pretty well (PDFs linked below).
I’m trying to put together a Roll20 game of Mouse Guard, and it supports decks of cards. I was also… underwhelmed by the conflict cards from the wiki (it’s a fantastic PDF and I’m truly grateful for the work that went into creating it). Thank you so much for you work!