Cairn Monster Cards
A downloadable project
This is a compilation of 145 printable monster cards, designed to be easy to print at home, cut, fold, and use in a card sleeve.
The illustrations are from Gourdin Konbo Club's Illustrated Beasts, and the monster details were sourced from cairnrpg.com. I stayed true to the original descriptions on the website but split some text blocks to keep the card faces simple and easy to read.
The text, monster images, and card files are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 international (cc by-sa 4.0) license.
New Design:
I created a new layout for this monster card deck. The goal was to fit all content into a single card size. These cards should use less paper and be easier to print and cut out.
The latest version is v5.
I have included my both a print friendly pdf and my affinity publisher working files.
I am going to leave up most the old design and the new design for you to decide what you want to use.
File Explanation:
-
cairn-monsters-index.json
The raw data of all the monsters, pulled from the Cairn RPG website. -
Monster card template v5.afpub
This Affinity Publisher template uses the JSON file and raw images from Gourdin Konbo Club's Illustrated Beasts to generate the card layout using the data merge feature. -
Monster card stack v5-4-printable.pdf
A ready-to-print version of the full deck. Use this if you just want to print and go. -
Monster card template v5.afpub
The working Affinity Publisher file with all my final tweaks and layout adjustments made after auto-generating the cards from the JSON data.
Deck Details:
- Card Dimensions: Standard 2.5" x 3.5" playing card size
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Working File:
cairn_monster_cards_v2_working-file.afpub– the Affinity Publisher file used to create the PDF -
Data Source:
cairn-monsters-index.json– contains the source data for the monster descriptions. I built a web scraper to pull this data from the Cairn RPG website and used it to generate the card templates.
Download
Comments
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the new art is amazing. great stuff!! i love the idea of having a little deck of cards to draw from for random encounters
Yeah that’s how i like to use the card. I will make a small stack of selects for that session then pull from the deck as we play.
Those look really cool but I don't have access to Affinity. Could you upload the pdf as well? Thanks in advance
Sorry about that. I will get to pdf up tomorrow.
Okay i fixed it. I had accidentally set the PDF to private. Not sure how I did that but it should be good to download.
i dont support AI art but these are nice. why not just find public domain art by humans?
you did do a nice job of making them all look similar in style though
Its a good question. I built a little script using javascript, that automatically generated an image for each card using dall-e's api and dumped the image into a folder for me. Then I built a little work flow with Affinity Publisher, where I can use a template and a csv file of monsters and it will build the deck from the csv and the folder of images.
Ultimately, I did it with AI just as a matter of convenience. I also have a card game idea that I wanted to build using this workflow. This deck was pretty much a test bed to build and test the work flow.
But public domain would be find.
oh ok cool stuff
I have updated my cards now. They all have human made art and there is now a card for each monster listed on the site.
oh that’s cool!