How can I make alternative characters for BatHotH?

Question

The people who I play Betrayal at the House on the Hill with are also the same groups that share my love of Supernatural. We'd love to make some Dean, Sam and John Winchester characters as well as some for Bobby, Jo etc...

How can I best do this? I found this article on Board Game Geek but it doesn't give me much of an idea as to how to make them on the pentagons (one aspect of the game I find very cool), just on how to replace the current ones with cards and paper clips (ugh!).

Is there a website/service where I can print cards or some such?

Answer 1

Getting custom printing of arbitrary shapes on arbitrary materials is hard to do, even in this internet age of CafePress and print-on-demand book publishing.

One thing that's easy, though, is making custom stickers: go and Google "sticker maker", and it will show you sticker-making machines. Those machines take any shape of cut-out paper, and make the back sticky. Print out your own custom character card with your favorite image-editing software (possibly scanning in the Betrayal at House on the Hill character boards first for a template?), cut it into a pentagon, cut out a pentagon of tagboard, then use the sticker-maker to make your print sticky and stick it to the tagboard. (For a better fit, make the sticker bigger than it needs to be, and don't cut the tagboard until you've put the sticker on it.)

This is morally equivalent to getting a Glue Stick and making the sticker yourself, but I've found that the glue in sticker makers is generally better than glue sticks, and sticker makers will apply the glue precisely to the edge of the paper. Depending on exactly what thickness of tagboard you find in your local art supply shop, you may need to layer them to get the right thickness for the clips that come with Betrayal at House on the Hill.