Cup & Talon

I named Cup and Talon for the oldest tavern in my fantasy campaign ... The same one I've been mentally bumming around in since I was sixteen (as of this year, I've been mentally bumming around in fantasy taverns for more than half my life, and I guess that's worth a font name if anything is).

The font began as just a doodling exercise. I'm really, really terrible at actual calligraphy, so I was trying out a new wedge marker and attempting to make a reasonable, light handed calligraphic script. I failed at that, so I just let the sample languish in one of my writing notebooks. Recently, while doing some housecleaning, I ran across it again and decided to play around with it in Photoshop, experimenting with a new kind of stressing I wanted to try, with a kind of textured series of horizontal lines "showing through" where the image is weakest. The combination of good stressing effects, a little vertical rescaling, and my mediocre calligraphy made for a font I'm suddenly very fond of - a sincere if inexpert fantasy font, just about right for the signage and paper menus in my oldest fantasy tavern (there were a few shameful years in my life where I cared if it was "historical" for an RPG tavern to have paper menus, but I got over that with a vengeance and now most of them even offer cheap hot wings on a Tuesday night). Cup and Talon is a full-keyboard font with assorted extras tucked in, including curly quotes and full dashes.

If you're interested in licensing this font for public or organizational use, email me at and be sure to specify the font's title. I'll respond with instructions.