Is this a nifty visual aid to give my players?, Or have I watched The Matrix too much? Options

[ShadowDragon8685]

I spernt the last hour and a half cobbling this together from my pdf of On the Run, as an introductionary image to put up in the online room's map when I start the game. (IF I start it, but...)

Basically, is this teh awesome, does it set the scene (I tend to view Shadowrun through some Neo-tinted glasses, so please forgive my ass-piracy of The Matrix font,) well? Does it look Shadowrun enough? Will it get the message across?

Does it catch you?


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v323/Sha...etMrJohnson.jpg

[hyzmarca]

The giant matrix rip off font does ruin it when he says that his name is "Mr. Johnson".
With a giant wacky fon't like that you'd think his name would be something more shocking like "Frankenstein" (from Death Race 2000, of course) or "Dracula" (The original, although he'd be a human with a red font). Mr Johnson is just too subtle and low key for a gigantic font that screams " you should be peeing in your pants now".


Other than that it works quite well.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Ummmm, Hyz?


You.... Do know.... What Mr. Johnson is, right?


If that's not enough call for a font that screams "You should be peeing in your pants", I don't know what is...

[Arethusa]

He knows what it is. He's saying it clumsy, heavy handed, prescriptive, didactic, ridiculous, and impossible to take seriously. Or maybe I am. Same difference.

[Squinky]

Ouch, little harsh urethra?

I think it looks decent enough. Sometimes you just need to go with things and not over-analylize things. Most likely your players aren't going to give it too much scrutiny.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I made it that way to be a visual cue of "the music takes a decided turn for the unhealthy." You know, the music's volume cuts in half and it's pitch goes way into the bass, and despite the fact that Mr. J is speaking in a perfectly civil tone, all of the members of the audience get clued into the fact that he is Big, Bad News.

[hyzmarca]

The thing is that "Mr. Johnson" is a generic alias used for every person who hires shadowrunners and it was taken from the generic alias for someone who hires whores because that is what shadowrunners are.

By saying that his name is "Mr. Johnson" he is saying that he wants to hire some whores to do the whoreish things that whores do but the whores in question already know that or else they wouldn't even be talking to him. It isn't a big revelation but the font presents it like "No, I am your father".

[SL James]

[Lazerface]

Just tone down the color of the font is what i'd do. And if you own adobe photoshop you can try and give it some effects. When I do handouts I generally put them on small cards with a title and a picture and put a coloured chrome effect on the title.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I don't have Photoshop, sadly. If you'd like to give it a go, I'd be rightiously glad. Chrome, eh? That could work...

[ChuckRozool]

Off topic...

Gimp or Gimpshop, they are free...

Other than that, I personally don't understand what it is you are trying to do...

---End of Line---

[Crusher Bob]

I assume he's trying to put together a intro phamplet to SR, that has some of the nifty SR art and some simple intro text so that the players have some idea of the game, without looking through the books. A sorta short combo of the color plates that were in the middle of various SR books combined with the intro short story. So you can, say, run a demo game, pass these out, and have all the PCs have a good mental picture of what SR is like.

[Kanada Ten]

I showed it to one of my players, and she said, "Hey, cool."

[ShadowDragon8685]

[bustedkarma]

I dig it.

on the font topic, there is a SHADOWRUN and DECKER font floating around on the interweb. They both look pretty sexy.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I must search for them, then.

Google Knights, CHARGE!


(But, the Matrix font looks shexay, dosen't it?)

[ShadowDragon8685]

Okay, that was a short charge. They were both found on the first try, the top hit, from dumpshock itself. Charge of the google knights? Maybe a jousting practice-run of the google knights.

Are we thinking of the same fonts? They don't seem too sexy to me. I was hoping that the Shadowrun font was the font they use when they actually print the word "Shadowrun" on the cover of the books. With the dragon S and all.

Oh well, they're not nessessarily bad fonts, so... I guess I can use 'em next time I do something like this.

[bustedkarma]

This Google Knight is swimming in the Sea of Bliss that is Google Earth. GOD, I love that app.

[John_Wicker]

[SL James]

It's also known as the FrizQuadrata family of fonts, which is what I used when I made my own "sourcebook" on my PC, although I still have both Francis and FQ on my old Mac.

They still use FQ in the PDFs and the books even though it looks different now than they did until about a year ago (basically, when Loose Alliances came out). The paper is also cheaper, but the fonts are still generally the same. I think part of why it looks different is because they've added several more fonts in addition to FQ/Francis, which was almost exclusive in older sourcebooks. Things end up looking slightly different as a result. Slight, but different.

FQ doesn't show up anywhere in SR4 though, so it's probably gone for good (It uses the AGaramond and Garamond families, Klavika family, Univers, WeltronUrban, Armada, and Arial. (A)Garamond seems to be the new FQ).

[eidolon]

Hey, I dig it. I love it when people put effort into things to make the game better. Don't dismiss effort, that's what I say.