Doc's Office Cards

EDIT: I've removed the images for the cards that were in this post. Here's why I got rid of them. I felt like I had to take a stand, and not be that guy.

I'm preserving the text below, but it's probably confusing without the pictures. Not much point in reading this one. I've got better posts elsewhere.



Shadows of Brimstone has a very interesting campaign mode. After each adventure in the mines, you head back to town. This involves a handful of die rolls to generate encounters in the frontier town, so that even the act of stocking up for the next mission remains engaging and mildly dangerous. I'm really enjoying the system.

The equipment and effects that you can get in town are recorded on a handful of 8.5 x 11 sheets. You can copy the relevant details down on your character sheet, but after just one or two adventures your sheet becomes a mess of handwritten notes, abbreviations and eraser marks. Which is silly, since the rest of the game goes the route of having cards for everything. I get a card for my starting pistol, and if I find an awesome alien beam weapon on the other side of a dimensional portal it'll be a card too, but the game doesn't have a card for the modestly upgraded gun I bought in town between my first session and getting that lucky artifact draw. Strange, huh? Clearly just a cost-saving measure because the game was already loaded down with ubercool components.

You know where I'm going with this. I sat down and started making spiffy cards of all the entries on the chart. Without further ado, here's everything you can buy at the Doctor's Office that isn't available as a sidebag token. (I started with the Doc's Office, because our first session went so painfully that our total purchases were just Bandage Tokens and a single Specimen Jar.)

Doc's Office Items:

CARDS DELETED.

Bone Saw, Field-Surgeon's Apron, and Tools of Science are straight from the Doc's Office chart. No functional changes at all (unless you count rounding down to the nearest dollar on the apron, but what else could I do?). Note that, like Gear cards, the listed values are the sale value of the item, which is 1/2 it's purchase price (hence my rounding). So don't try buying them for what's listed there. You make purchases according to the big Doc's Office sheet (usually double what's on the card), and only then acquire cards to represent them.

Which brings up a good point: there are no intentional changes to the functionality on any of these cards. I did have to alter some wording for various reasons, but my stated intent is to make them work identically to what comes in the Shadows of Brimstone box. For example, the Specimen Jar (below) may seem a little odd at first glance since it's now two cards, but if you read them both and think it through all the way, you'll see it works exactly the same way as the item on the Doc's Office chart. I just made it two cards so we could easily track from session to session whether the Jar you're carrying has been taken to Another World yet or not. If a failed mission or town event destroys a Doc's Office or two, you no longer have to try to remember whether or not you sacrificed your Move for a turn in that game session two weeks ago. Plus, y'know, cool monster in a jar art.

CARDS DELETED.

As you've no doubt noticed by now, all these cards have a little "Doc's Office" label on them, so you know where they come from and can quickly look them up on the official chart if anything here is unclear.

Doc's Office Injections:

Injections aren't technically items, so I wanted to make them obviously different so no one would get them confused and try to discard them if an Encounter card (etc) stole or ruined an item, and you wouldn't try trading them with adjacent PCs like an item, etc. I made them half-sized and distinctively colored, so it should be hard to mistake them.

	CARDS DELETED.

Again, these are intended to work exactly as the official chart describes, and are merely meant to be reminder cards that you'd stick in whatever ziplock, box, or envelope you're using to keep all your character's cards together for next session. So, for example, the two injections that cause a Corruption Hit when first administered make no mention of that effect here. I'm assuming that you'll read that on the chart, resolve it as per the rules, and only use this card to remind you of your bonuses during the next adventure.

Doc's Office Miscellaneous:

The Sycorath Injection can cause "Temporary Withdrawls", so I figured that might need a reminder card as well, just to be thorough. Then I noticed that the Plague Tent entry on the Doc's event chart can cause a one-session penalty as well, so, I figured what the heck I might as well make that, too. Apparently I'm using little green cards to mean any non-item modifier that you pick up in town and discard at the end of your next adventure.


CARDS DELETED.

I plan on doing the same sort of cards for all the other Frontier Town charts... and then I will probably have to redo them all when the Expanded Frontier Town releases a year from now. :) Unless it uses cards, in which case I'll need to just pull these down.

In case it wasn't abundantly clear from the rest of the text: Everything in this post is derived from work by Flying Frog Productions. No challenge to copyright is intended. Mostly I just engaged in cut and paste with their art and text. The whole point of this project is to make it easier to play the awesome game that is Shadows of Brimstone.