Sparks

& More!

Sparks™ fonts are paper miniatures, in font form! Just install the fonts on your computer, and you can print out pages and pages of paper minis in any scale you want, from astronauts to skeletal necromancers to doughty Dwarf warriors to Bigass Ogres to ninjas and giant robots! They're Windows TrueType fonts; read all about them, download the freeware set, and tell your friends!

High Fiber was designed for character-sheet graphics, which meant I needed it very narrow (to squeeze long skill-names into cramped spaces) and reasonably legible. To make it, I sat very still, and very straight, and clenched my butt the whole time, thinking of white bread from a bag. It's the closest I ever hope to get to neat handwriting! Freeware.

Futurex Apocalypse is my contribution to the "Futurex Project" at Apostrophic Labs. I dragged Futurex Bold into Photoshop to work it over with a rusty chain and a tub of acid. The result, Futurex Apocalypse, is now yours. Freeware.

The Temphis Runes are what I've been wanting to build ever since I first learned to make fonts; Guardians of Order gave me an excuse to finally do it. It's a complete family of eight fantasy rune fonts in a variety of styles, from calligraphic to "sans-serif" and handwritten. It includes a PDF Rune Guide booklet, a set of printable Rune Cards, and new insights into Uresia: Grave of Heaven, a fantasy world I wrote for GOO's Big Eyes, Small Mouth roleplaying game. For more Uresia fonts, check out the cool Uresia Arcana mapping set, too!

Yank and Newfie are freeware handwriting fonts. My wife, Sandra, is a genuine Newfoundlander . . . and Newfoundlanders call Americans "yanks," so it was easy coming up with names for these two fonts!

HexPaper is 62 characters that let you make graph paper on your printer, including hex grids (a gjillion styles), quad paper (both simple and divided), and isometric (for making those cool "Ravenloft" style angled floorplans). Click Here!

Flagstones is a graphic-design aid for those who like to make cool dungeon floorplans in miniature scale (and it's useful for a large variety of creative game-related projects). Whether you play with dungeons (and dragons) in an RPG or in games like MB's HeroQuest, this little font is a useful creative tool. Click Here! Freeware.

Knits & Scraps is one of many fonts you'll find here with an emphasis on goofy warmth. In this case, I took inspiration from basic typewriter styles, but softened and loosened with lots of angling in the serifs, loose-handed cornering on the curves, and a casual baseline. Freeware.

Merchant Copy is a dream come true if you've been seeking an accurate three-style family of point-of-sale receipt fonts. What's that, you say? You haven't been? Well, okay, but if you ever do ... this isn't just one font scaled in three ways; it's three distinct fonts re-creating modern receipts from scanned samples. Freeware.

Ten Ton Ballyhoo is a double-dose of grungy stress-font joy, a thrashed-and-faded design with weathered dropshadows, upper- and lowercase characters, and (best of all) a complete set of alternates for the alphabetical and numerical glyphs, so those doubled letters (see the T's, n's, L's and O's in the title graphic) don't suffer from Identical Stressing Syndrome. Freeware.

Iron Lung is where my love of stressed poster fonts collides with my love of carved/engraved designs, resulting in a heavy metallic clang. Freeware.

Wolves & Ravens is a simple fantasy font based on a player handout I created for a fantasy campaign - a cryptic message on a footbridge, an omen of things to come. The style is meant to suggest the kind of quasi-runic lines that may result from letters carved hastily with a dagger into the soft wood of the bridge rail. Wolves Engraven is a textured variant; both are freeware.

Thunder Thighs It's a freeware full-keyboard set (with extras) and a dropshadow variant, a playful, heavy-duty caps font that hearkens back to 1970s cartoon logos and other friendly things. It's one of my favorite of my newer designs; it's just all chunky and harmless. Recently, it even made its way onto some bookshelves as the header font in a troll sourcebook for the Hero Wars RPG.

Spacedock Stencil is a stencilized, slightly stressed adaptation of a classic typeface that has long been associated with space-adventure fiction (used for signage in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Space: 1999, the Star Trek films, and many others). I'd seen mock-ups of stencil versions before as standalone works of graphic design and set-dressing, but nobody bothered fonting it! So, I went in with a carving knife and a photoshop filter and viola. Freeware.

Barrelhouse was designed specifically for the ship cutaway graphic in Caravel, beginning as a standalone logo design meant to evoke carved wood and perhaps a whiff of salty spray. Freeware (all-caps), with an expanded registered version available.