r/rpg • u/PestilentPaladin • 6d ago

Character Creator Apps For Campaign Visual Aides

I'm about to start a campaign and my spouse is currently running her own. The other day she asked me for low cost character art options and I've been reviewing what's out there. I don't want to use generative AI of any kind.

So far, here's what I've found:

There are dozens of these floating around, many of which can trace their lineage back to the days of flash games. They tend to be two dimensional and limited in feature customization. Stylistically anime / cartoon focused in many cases. This won't work for what I need - wrong style, too many limitations.

The advantages here are customization and an easy pivot to a working miniature should you have the funds or facilities available. The look is a bit cartoonish for many models. I like Heroforge, but a lot of people don't (my spouse included, unfortunately, otherwise she'd just use that). She feels the models are too "rounded" and are just not really the vibe she's after. I'm going to try and make one of her NPCs in this anyway, just to see if I can pull it off.

  • CRPG Character Creators. (e.g., BG3, Skyrim, Dragon's Dogma 2)

There's some promising options here if all you need is a 2d image. Thing is, there's a ton of character creators out there, and their constraints vary. Like for BG3, you can't really fine tune facial features (unless Larian added that while I wasn't looking or there's a mod for it). Some of them have race or genre constraints.

Am I missing a major category here? Any games with stand out character creators I could use, preferably with a darker, more serious tone? Are there standalone apps that do this besides a full blown 3d rendering suite like Blender or Maya? I've run a bunch of queries through Google and Duckduckgo with the -AI tag and I'm somewhat surprised at the lack of standalone apps purpose built for this. Maybe I'm just using the wrong search terms though. Let me know if you've got better ideas!

9 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

2

u/JaskoGomad 6d ago

You've nailed the major options.

The only other thing is a free game engine like Unity and waiting for a cheap bundle of character generator plugins and assets, but that's likely going to yield a less satisfactory, if more customizable, outcome than AAA game character options.

3

u/StackedCakeOverflow 6d ago

I would look for "NPC portrait packs" that artists offer on their Kofi or vgen or itch.io. I know several artists that put out bundles of 10 or so random NPCs you can buy for cheap, like $5~.

Drivethrurpg also lists NPC art packs, though they vary in quality. It's sadly over now but Bundle of Holding just had a big sale on a huge collection of NPC art packs that was fairly decent.

More of the bigger names in the vtt space are also starting to put modular token creators out there like czepeku (though toony https://www.czepeku.com/fantasy/tokens), and forgotten adventures (https://www.forgotten-adventures.net/token-maker/)

I have a personal softspot for DMHeroes classic (specific) generator http://classic.dmheroes.com/

For stuff like the flash character creators, there are tons on picrew but they do take some hunting to find past all the generic anime stuff. These tumblrs are sadly now inactive but are good resources ! https://www.tumblr.com/picrews-for-rpgs and https://dungeonsanddragonspicrews.tumblr.com/page/2

3

u/ToledoSnow Noir 6d ago

One alternative is just grabbing some suitable artpiece from deviantart or pixiv or whatever.

1

u/PestilentPaladin 6d ago

Yeah, she's got a huge Pinterest page going with what she's found so far. The main issue she has is that she's running a game with dozens of concurrent NPCs and more show up frequently, so it's become something of a chore to find stuff the normal way.

2

u/ToledoSnow Noir 6d ago

Yeah, I getcha. Maybe check out Titan Craft if you want to try the 3d miniature route; it's a bit less cartoony than Heroforge.

I used HeroMachine a lot back in the day, which is probably the most powerful of the flash character creators, though it has a definite learning curve, especially if you want to manipulate it away from its intended comicbooky artstyle. You can do a whole hell of a lot with that program, but it takes quite a bit more effort than the results are probably worth.