Welcome back - we will end our time in the 30K universe today, finishing our look at the Horus Heresy skin of GW’s Triumph and Treachery supplement.
Last post included a look at the original supplement and what changes were needed to make a 30K version, as well as looking at what components needed to be changed. This post will deal with the design of the pieces and their production.
DESIGN
The first decision was to determine the visual look of the skin. This was fairly straightforward, given I wanted to emulate the look and feel of the 30K Redbooks.
The two major styles used in the books are 1) the red pages with various seals used for the covers and interstitial pages and 2) the aged paper pages with red border and sepia images used for the content.
I opted to use red border and sepia backgrounds for the front of the cards and the red page and seal for the back. I spent some time looking through the Redbooks and eventually found suitable images from Book 3 - Extermination.
I used this format for both the treachery cards and the turn order cards. The font was chosen to match the Redbook font and the turn order images were taken from the various Blackbooks.
I then realized I would need a place to store all these cards, so for bonus points, I designed two tuck boxes, one for the event cards and one for the turn order cards.
I then moved on to the tokens. As mentioned last post, I opted to use the idea of glory and honor as the ‘currency’ to spend. The original game had 3 denominations, 20, 50, 100, but I simplified it to 50 and 200. This would make design and production a little easier and frankly, worked just a well for game play purposes.
Given there are quite a few number pieces of lore that one could use to represent glory and honor, such as purity seals, countless honor or campaign badges, custom livery, personal banners, company banners, etc, the decision of what to use was largely driven by available components.
I found a diamond shaped token for the 50 point denomination to represent an honor badge - the kind Marines weld onto their should pad with a name or motto carved into it.
The second, 200 point token, was a simple rectangle to represent a company banner (the kind that might be hung in one of the massive halls either onboard great chapter battle barges or fortresses. I opted to include both a loyalist version and a traitor version. I took a ton of inspiration from various banners I saw online, particularly from Titan banners. I also leveraged some of the Space Marine, Imperial and Inquisitor decal sheets from GW.
The color choices, again, reflected the color palette of the Redbooks. The Latin in the loyalist banner roughly translates to “For the Emperor” and “Eternal Brotherhood”. And for the traitor banner, it says, “Let the Galaxy Burn” and “For the Warmaster”. I had an absolute blast designing these two pieces!
The last element was the name. I wanted to keep the same naming structure as the original: two opposing words describing the outcome using illation - Triumph and Treachery became Brotherhood and Betrayal.
PRODUCTION
Before beginning any of the design work, I did give a little thought to what putting this into production would look like. At first, I thought of a do-it-yourself approach and while I have access to enough equipment that could make a credible set of cards and tokens, they would, sadly, still fall short of a professional set of cards and game pieces.
Fortunately, I came across a number of sites that make off-the-self blank components for board games but will also take custom artwork and print finished components (mostly for prototyping new board games).
After a little due diligence, I found a little family run business out of Washington that was reputable and affordable. After reviewing their component selection, and choosing things like card size, component types and finishes, I downloaded their templates and got designing!
The total output was:
36 treachery cards
This matched the number in the original supplement
(and happened to be the max number of cards you could fit into a tuck box)
36 turn order cards
I needed at 18 cards for each of the original legions
(plus a few more for variant lists e.g. Black Shields)I needed another 8 or so for the non-Marine factions
I used the rest for deamons (which can now be used for Deamons of the Ruinstorm) and, even though not currently playable factions, a card for the major xenos races (just in case)
2 tuck boxes (previously shown)
40 honorifica tokens and 24 banners (12 loyalist, 12 traitor)
This would be enough pieces to account for ~5000pt worth of units destroyed
The total cost of production was ~US$50 - money well spent!
Finally, here are the actual cards and tokens.
My gaming group uses these every time we play 30K and having professionally printed cards, with rules and flavour text that fits into the 30K univsere, really elevates the experience.
Thanks for looking!