GameMastery Cards: A really great gaming aid
If you haven’t seen these already, you should really get over to your FLGS (Favorite Local Gaming Store) and check out a booster pack or deck. Paizo Publishing stared producing their line of GameMastery products a few years back now but the ones that have really stuck out for me (then and now) as an excellent addition to my home-brewed fantasy RPG are the GameMastery Item cards.
I’ve been moving my game and gaming group toward a more tactile-driven game whereby the players have things that they can use for more in-depth interaction within the game. This all started a few years back when my friend Peter Lee and I were talking about using various tokens and other types of markers for the players to use for cashing in favors, or to keep track of their coinage. We started looking at the GameMastery card and I was instantly hooked.
The artwork on the cards is nice and colorful and each card has a stock background depending on what the item is, armor, weapons, potions, scrolls, or other “common” type items. Each item “type” also has a little identifying icon which makes it easy to group or categorize your cards. On the back of each card is a brief description of the item’s characteristics and a “notes field” for writing down any special properties that the GM wishes to assign to the item.
The cards cover a wide variety of items, magical or otherwise, so if you’re looking for a brazier, a ring, potion bottle, scroll, or something as common as a grappling hook, the GameMastery item cards have you covered.
I bought a couple of 2″ three-ringed binders and a large pack of nine-pocket card protector sheets and started to assemble what would become my library of item cards. I divided the cards into three categories: Magic Items, Common Items, and Weapons & Armor. Now whenever somebody in the adventuring group finds an item in a dungeon or other adventure, I can pull out an item card, stick it in a penny sleeve, and make note of any special properties the item has. The players love the cards because they’re able to more easily keep track of what they’re carrying with them.
The GM loves the cards because he can easily see which items can be pick-pocketed from an inattentive adventurer easily. >;-}P~
-Dante
