All Dark Sun Fonts and colours

Setting
#1

Hi All:

I was just wondering, does anyone have already set up a list of the Dark Sun fonts and colours used in their game modules and supplements?

I’m sure this has been asked before, but I’m struggling to locate the information elsewhere, so I thought I’d ask here. I know Papyrus is the internal title font, and either Palatino Linotype is the main font. But what about the rest?

Packard Antique for the original material. For the font colour, I go with CMYK 0,78,94,23. Not sure how accurate that is, but it’s pretty close to my eyes.

Papyrus (Papyrus, Papyrus ICG and Papyrus LET) , Bard, Calligraph421BT, and FZ Hand 16.

Resources>Font>Tablelands Font Art by Diesel LaForce, font by Gabriel Eggers. There is another font out there called “Diesel” but it does not have numbers.

De Vinne Ornament D Regular - is used for Dark Sun logo.

This was discussed recently over at Reddit .

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#2

I had read on a different forum that the original boxed set used packard antique for the internal font. I use it for all my Dark Sun games and to my eye it’s identical to the one in my books.

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#3

Yup, it’s Packard Antique for the original material. For the font colour, I go with CMYK 0,78,94,23. Not sure how accurate that is, but it’s pretty close to my eyes.

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#4

Beside Papyrus (Papyrus, Papyrus ICG and Papyrus LET) and Packard Antique, other fonts used are : Bard, Calligraph421BT, and FZ Hand 16.

No idea about the colours.

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#5

Could always try a color scan and sample, if a non faded original source could be found.

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#6

I know it’s a bit necromantic of me, but i going to bring this one back from the dead.

This was discussed recently over at Reddit.

I wanted to add that the following fonts being used to this post:

De Vinne Ornament D Regular - is used for Dark Sun logo.

Diesel - is a font someone here created that is similar to what is used on the maps

(I wasn’t able to get numbers and other non-alphabet characters to work in Excel with this font. Just for those characters I use Viner Hand ITC.)

Also, for that orange color at the top of the 2e books I was able to get the hex value in GIMP as f9a26c

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#7

Thank you.

We do a lot of thread necromancy here. I think it’s a distinctive thing for this group. :wink:

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#8

Arise, I say! Live again this year!

More info:

Check out @Ruhl-Thaun_Sage’s Tablelands font in resources. Here:

https://athas.org/resources

Just search on “font”

It is similar to the Diesel font, but has all the numbers and other punctuation marks. Which I was using Viner something for.

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#9

Huh, that reminds me that I recently taught myself how to use FontForge to create new characters in a font set. Nice software, a bit tricky to export a new font to a computer usable file, but if one reads the docs and online help stuff it can be figured out after a bit of experimenting.

#10

There have been a few interesting pieces of font creation software out there. FontForge was one. I also remember Adobe Fontographer from the late 90s, which was similar.

Making letter forms is a very specific area of specialised graphic design (Typography), and it has countless subtle rules that most people take for granted. (em width, anyone? Tracking?)

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#11

No kidding. Even a casual skim over typography rules felt like a deep dive, lol.

#12

Type design is it’s own special branch of graphic design. I’ve studied it enough and spent enough time editing and copying fonts by hand to have a pretty good foundation, but real font designers tend to make their entire careers out of it. There is a huge lexicon of terminology relating to the different parts of the letters, the types of distinctive shapes used in lettering, and various styles which is all wrapped up in historical and cultural context.

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#13

Papyrus was used for 3rd edition, Dark Sun; I have yet to find Diesel’s original-font used in the first box-set maps.

Besides I did a presentation copying that font for high-school once (hard-copy by hand).

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#14

He did not have a font, it was all hand drawn. There are several folks on the baord that have created a version as a font. One is called diesel.

#15

Diesel hand lettered. You should be able to tell pretty quickly that this is the case as no two letters are exactly the same. There is actually a huge amount of variation in them.

#16

I made this a wiki page so the first post can be edited by anyone to keep it updated.

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#17

I knew he hand-drew each letter; I found a font called, “Tablelands”.

He did hand-draw the Tyr-Region map and the Conan the Barbarian-map too.

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#18

Yah, Tablelands is the font I designed.

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#19

For the late 2e revised edition, it looks like the typefaces were:
cover and section headers:
Papyrus
logo and section headers:
Herculanum
section headers:
Maiandra GD
body text:
Optima (redesigned as Optima Nova)

(All these are available to buy online. I’d add links, but I’m restricted as a new user.)

(Edit - Links added below by Neujack)

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#20

Hey Windslumber! Welcome!

PM me the links directly, and I’ll add them here. :slight_smile: