One of TaleSpire’s two greatest weaknesses was solved a couple months ago and I only now realized it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/talespire/comm ... er_tokens/I made some paper tokens!
examples of how the tokens look. Monster images are for reference onlyHi guys. I've seen a lot of people asking about paper style tokens, so I went ahead and made some! You can download them from our patreon if you like. You get 3 different sizes - medium, large and big. You can actually resize them even more in TaleSpire to get the right size you need - for example, the giants in the picture here have been scaled up to 2x2 using GM resize.
They work with any jpeg image and they are super easy to customise. You can use creatures, stat cards trading cards etc. We do not supply images.
We have a post explaining how to use them and there's going to be a video walkthrough in the next couple of days.
You can get them at
https://www.patreon.com/Skyden_and_WrenickNote: You need to be running modded TaleSpire using the excellent Lord Ashes Custom Mini Plugin for these to work
This means that, though you still can’t have any kind of terrain and building and prop that you want—which is TaleSpire’s remaining great weakness, which is why we won’t be using it for adventuring but only for city-building—at least now any NPC and creature from the entire TTRPG world can visit you in your domains. Any character from any adventure, even sci-fi ones. Any creature at all. Plus, your own character can look like anything you want, like any image you pulled off the web. We could take advantage of this right away with your current characters: instead of being cropped and shown on the maps as tiny cropped squares, they can be strutting around the world at their full height with every detail of their bodies and clothing and equipment shown. Our parties would look dramatically different right away, and tiny spiders or giant dragons would show at their proper contrast, scurrying around the floor or towering over them. You can already do this in Tabletop Simulator btw, but it doesn’t do any math, so that’s why we stuck with Fantasy Grounds and we’ll keep sticking to it. But at least the paper minis are now available in TaleSpire, so we’ll be getting that feature that way—at least in the city-building phase.
Come to think of it, Tabletop Simulator could be used to deal with TaleSpire’s remaining weakness. Because in TTS you can import 2D maps. So if you want to city-build in Dark Sun or Planescape, or any crazy setting not covered by TaleSpire, you can do it in TTS while importing full 3D paper characters. So it would be a step up from using Fantasy Grounds, where everything including characters must be 2D. So we found a use for TTS after all, and I will make it unlockable when some group starts city-building in a region not covered by TaleSpire’s assets. What we can do at that point is this. Let’s say we want to city-build in Dark Sun. The DS map assets have a particular style to preserve, which is why we avoid using TaleSpire for DS. So we send some of these maps to an image-editing expert on Fiverr to isolate from the maps the various assets: walls, doors, props, that sort of thing. And then voila: you can city-build in 2D, with all the Dark Sun characters, NPCs and creatures appearing like 3D paper minis.
It’s not a PERFECT system, but a perfect system would require an army of 3D modelers to model all the thousands of Dark Sun assets, and that may never happen. Maybe AI can do it. Or maybe someone who loves Dark Sun as much as Beneos loves Ravenloft, and happens to know 3D modeling and be good at it, decides to do it. Or maybe I will get rich and hire people to do it.
Until then, this combination of TTS + 3D paper minis finally unlocks city-building—and thus 4X mechanics—for us across the entire Battlegrounds.
Now I would like to see someone figure out how to import 3D models of buildings into TaleSpire. If we could do that, we still wouldn’t be able to use TaleSpire for every setting, but we should at least be able to use it for the majority of medieval Europe-inspired situations as there are shittons of assets for those in videogames. That is the next step for TaleSpire while we wait for user-created native building blocks to become possible. I will ask the modder if he can do it.
