After starting some earnest homebrewing efforts for magic items in my campaign, I was getting frustrated with the limited options for item cards I could give to my players. I am not great with illustrator/photoshop, have terrible handwriting, didn’t particularly like the form-fillable cards I found online, and the homebrewery/GMbinder templates I found are better as pages out of a book than single cards imo. So I decided to make my own item card generator using LaTeX.
This template gives a (semi) form-fillable base that should work for any magic item. All the fields included are toggle-able, so you can select what fields you want to populate, it accepts item art so you can include a visual cue for your players (but still works without it!), and will auto adjust the length of the card so that you don’t have to worry about dimensions.
It outputs both a PDF (for printing) and a PNG (with transparent background for digital sharing) so you can choose the format you prefer. It also allows multiple cards of different sizes on a single document in case you want to print out all your items at once. Attached is an example of the png from one of my items (all my item art is ai generated, I can’t draw worth a lick).
I am not sure how big the intersection is between fediverse users, DND nerds, and people who use LaTeX is, but I am squarely in that camp. I hope that people find this useful, and would love feedback if anyone has suggestions!
Regarding not being familiar with LaTeX, I have already successfully used this template alongside chatGPT to convert items from a block of poorly formatted text to a finished card in just a few minutes. All you have to do is feed chatGPT the item’s description and the contents of the TeX files contained in the package (itemcard.tex, itemCommands.tex, tcolorboxSettings.tex) and it will do a pretty bang up job of formatting your item to match the template.