Welcome to the Official Spellfire Website!

Since the game of Spellfire has been turned over to the fans for its continued growth, you have permission to create your own Spellfire cards for casual play. Such “custom cards” are also being made for official tournament-legal sets. In both cases, certain guidelines must be followed due to the fact that Spellfire and all associated D&D elements (artwork, characters, graphics) remain the intellectual property of Wizards of the Coast and/or the relevant artists/designers.

Intellectual Property: When making a custom card you have permission to use any previously printed TSR artwork/graphics provided that you give credit to the illustrator/photographer somewhere on the front of the card. Such a reference should read “Illus. © [artist’s name]” or “Photo. © [photographer’s name]” and be printed in a font color that permits clear visibility (white text on a dark image, black text on a light image, etc.). When non-TSR artwork/photographs are to be used in the creation of custom cards, you must obtain permission from the individual or group whose work you would like to use. You must then give them credit on the card as described above. Finally, note that any card texts submitted for online Spellfire booster sets become public domain at the time of their submission. The creation of a balanced play environment requires that we have the flexibility to alter and modify card texts after submission and this precludes the possibility of submitters retaining any intellectual property rights under these circumstances.

Legal Distribution: Given that all custom cards, whether personal or part of the official on-line boosters, are property of Wizards of the Coast, the creation, showcasing, distribution, and printing of such card images in any form (digital or otherwise) must not be associated with any monetary fee. Though you as the illustrator of a card or designer of a card not submitted to an online booster can hold a claim to your intellectual contribution to a custom card, this is partial and secondary to the rights held by Wizards of the Coast as owner of the game. Thus, you may not accept payments for custom cards; if you wish to distribute custom card images or printed versions of custom cards, you must do so free of charge. Note that paying a printing company for high quality prints of custom cards is permissible since the payment rendered is for a service (printing) and not for the cards themselves.

Legal Violations: Any violation of the abovementioned guidelines places the entire future of Spellfire in jeopardy. Failure to comply with these guidelines will result in fans no longer being able to use TSR art or Spellfire icons/logos. In other words, the creation of custom cards will no longer be permitted by Wizards of the Coast. In an effort to prevent this from happening, we would ask that an instances of copyright violation or illegal distribution be brought to the attention of:

Hayden-William Courtland
hacourtland99(at)alum.vassar.edu

CREATING CUSTOM CARDS

In making custom cards there is a great deal of flexibility that is permitted by this creative process. Thus, minor variations in design are not of great concern. Nevertheless, a sense of continuity is important given that each cards is to be part of a larger world that is the Spellfire collectible card game. The following guidelines are designed to help keep custom cards true to their printed predecessors.

Card Graphics: While you will have to supply the image for you custom card, all of the other components (icons and fonts) are available for download at Spellfire.Net in the custom graphics package.

Card Attributes: The standard card size for Spellfire is 6.2 x 8.7 cm (2.5 in x 3.5 in). Thus, all custom card images should have these dimensions when ready to be printed. The standard size for the Spellfire text box is 5.8 x 2.3 cm. For card text, the Spellfire font (Oliver Hamm) is used, though Palatino is substituted for the card type icon’s level/bonus. The font sizes used vary and depend on the size of the image in its original editing size.

Making Custom Cards:

As mentioned before, there are numerous ways to go about creating custom cards. This 6-step guide is designed for the individual who is starting from scratch and needs a step-by-step walkthrough. This being said, the description that follows will discuss making cards with Paintshop Pro. Certainly, Photoshop can be used, but Paintshop Pro is available in a timebomb shareware format that can be downloaded from www.jasc.com. Thus, for the individual with no money, this is how we’ll proceed.

Step 1 - You have to start with an image you want for your card. Now, I’m not going to go into the details of getting a good image (though this is an extremely important part of the process), but I will mention that for photographs you want a good quality shot. That means no blurriness and good lighting. Now, whether you start with a photograph or piece of artwork, you need to scan the picture into your computer. This is another important stage and I recommend scanning images in at 150 or more dpi.

Step 2 - Open your image in Paintshop Pro and look at it. Is it sharp and pretty? If not, stop now and start again. It’s only going to get worse in the cardmaking process, so make sure you’ve got it as good as you can at the start. Next, size it properly at 382 x 530 pixels (realms have these dimensions reversed). In doing this you should first consider cropping the picture to obtain the correct size. You can then resize the picture to get the right dimensions, but too drastic a resize with cause you to lose picture quality. Having said this I strongly urge you to avoid enlargement resizes entirely.

Step 3 - Now you add the text box, card type icon and world logo by opening each image (one at a time), copying it, closing it and then pasting it as a layer into your existing card image. Once pasted, you can simply drag each image into position. The text box should be equidistant from the bottom and the sides of the card, but you might want to leave a little extra room at the bottom for the copyright credit (this wasn’t a concern for the original printed cards, but must be inserted now. See Legal Considerations).

Note: The card icons available for download have a white background around them. To remove this, click on the magic wand tool of Paintshop Pro. Then click on the white portion and drag it off the card. Any remaining white parts left behind can be erased with the eraser tool after you zoom in on the area and hide the other layers.

Step 4 - Having completed the basic card you can now add the text. Start with the card type icon text (card level/bonus) and use 22 point type Palatino. Next add the card’s name using 18 point Spellfire. Then go to the expansion/name. The font size should be 12 point, but the font itself will vary from set to set for the official on-line boosters. The remainder of the text (text, copyright text, card number) should aim for 12 point Spellfire (use Palatino for copyright text) but can be adjusted later depending on how much text you have to fit into or under the box. Be careful you don’t go too small for text box text, though (no smaller than 10 point), or you won’t be able to read the card’s abilities text when you print the card out in its final form.

Step 5 - For the finishing touches you should look for aberrations, marks, and other anomalies that are unsightly and try to fix them with careful graphic manipulation. When you’re all finished, save the image leaving it in its original Painshop Pro (PSP) format in case you later discover a mistake you need to rectify. Now you perform the resize on the image to make it print at the correct size. To do this go to the resize window and convert the file to an actual size of 150 dpi with dimensions 2.5 in x 3.5 in (use the opposite dimensions for realms). Now save the card as a JPG with a different name than your original PSP file. It’ll tell you that you have to merge layers to make a JPG, but that’s fine (you’ve still got the original PSP version).

Step 6 - At this point you’ve got a nice custom card which you can display on the web. I’ll bet you want to play with it, though, huh? Not a problem. We recommend you print the cards on sticker paper so you can paste them onto old Spellfire card backs for gameplay. You can print your card on a color laser printer, but remember that JPGs are a compressed format and can give highly irregular results in printing. So, I recommend you take your card to a professional printing shop. Depending on which shop you use they may tell you to save your card in another image format. Good thing you kept the original PSP file!