Monday 18 March 2024

Jessie's Prints - Episode 39 - Index Card RPG Card Back Stamps

This week, I are mostly been printing... Stamps!!

ICRPG CARD BACK STAMPS - Thing 6545499

My recent foray into the Index Card RPG system (ICRPG) involved a lot of DIY card making, which I love.

However, during play this presented a problem in that all my card backs where blank and indistinguishable from each other.  What I needed was a simple stamp which I could apply to my card backs.  

I find it useful to categorise my cards into one of 4 types:

  • People - NPCs, Villains, Bio-forms
  • Places - Locations, buildings, Landscapes 
  • Objects - Things, weapons, loot, traps and trinkets
  • Monsters - Stuff that wants to kill you

This would help me to keep my ICRPG cards organized and reduce seek times to a minimum and thereby make me look like a great DM.

Tinker Cad to the Rescue

My experiments making a plaque for my Cowboy Bebop Swordfish II model taught me that this was going to be easily achieved.  

Step 1 - Make a black and white image in GIMP where black is what you want stamped and white is what you don't want to stamp.  This image is then reversed and saved as a JPG or PNG.

ICRPG Card Back Stamp - Places

Step 2 - Use convertio.co to convert your JPG or PNG into an SVG which can then be imported into Tinkercad.

ICRPG Card Back Stamps - Tinkercad

Step 3 - Import your SVG into Tinkercad and scale it to fit inside your stamp pad.  Make sure that the stamp is at least 4mm high and that you create a backing plate at least 1mm high to connect all the pieces of your stamp together.  Position the stamp so that it intersects with the backing plate and then group the objects together.  Export this as an STL for your 3D printer.  

ICRPG Card Back Stamps - Ready to Slice

Step 4 - Make a wooden backing plate and handle for each of your stamps.  If you get into ICRPG you are going to be making a lot of cards and doing a lot of stamping so this step is essential for long lasting stamps.  I made mine out of some scraps of hardboard I had laying around and I glued some pieces of old broom handle onto the backing plates before supergluing my stamps together.  

You could of course model the whole thing in Tinkercad.
 
ICRPG Stamps - DIY Handles

Step 5
- Stamp Away!! - I bought some cheap stamp pads from AliExpress less than £1.50 each and they have lots of different colours to choose from so you can have a different colour for each card type.

 
ICRPG Card Back Stamps

Buy Me a Coffee

I have shared the stamp patterns on Thingiverse, so if you like them, download them and print your own card backs.  Support the channel and please leave a tip in the jar or use the paypal tip link.   

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