Cheap tools for role-playing games, part 2

This year for my birthday, Brian took me to The Only Game in Town in Somerville, the closest thing we have these days to a local game store. We were there not to shop for games, however, but to pre-order the new Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, an official Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) guide based on the setting of our favorite show in any medium, Critical Role. We have been Critters (the cute name for fans of the show) for several years and already have the earlier campaign guide based on the show, so as soon as I heard about this new one, that was the only birthday gift I really wanted. (We could have ordered it online, but Matt Mercer, the creator of this imaginary world, urged all Critters to buy it from their neighborhood game stores if possible, and, well, we don't argue with Mercer.) We can go back to pick up the book as soon as it comes out in mid-March.

Then, for Valentine's Day, Brian followed up by presenting me with this card (S.W.A.K. stands for "Sealed with a Kobold"):

And inside, it said this:

In short, just as he promised me a rose garden four years ago, this year he was promising me something even better: a D&D campaign based on the Wildemount setting.

Of course, he can't really start planning this campaign until we actually have the new book, so it will take a while for this gift to come to fruition. But he's already started planning ahead by coming up with some improvements to the paper minis he designed for our last, sadly short-lived D&D campaign. Those minis were printed out on a PDF, "laminated" with packing tape, and then placed in stands made from little binder clips. They were cheap and compact, but they had some shortcomings. First of all, it was a fair amount of work to print out and laminate all the monster minis that might potentially be needed for a given game session — and even with all that work, you couldn't be sure of having every mini you needed. If the druid decides to turn into a rhinoceros, or the wizard polymorphs one of her enemies into a snail, it's unlikely you'll have that particular image ready to hand. Also, while the pieces of paper could be scaled up to represent larger creatures, the big binder clips weren't all that much larger than the small ones, so the amount of space the minis took up on the board didn't really reflect the creatures' actual size.

So for this new campaign, he's decided to go with a different, equally cheap and simple design. The minis are still printed out on paper, but they're now simply folded over and taped to a flat, round base of some sort. For these sample minis he made, he used pennies for the humans, which are size Medium in game terms; a poker chip for the horse, which is size Large; and the lid from an empty jar of peanuts for the dragon, size Huge. Should he need to make larger or smaller creatures, he could find appropriately scaled, inexpensive bases for them as well. The lid from a peanut butter jar would probably work for a Gargantuan creature (the largest in the game), while little sequins could work for Small and Tiny ones.

These new minis are less sturdy than the old ones, but since most of the monsters in a game only show up once, they don't actually have to hold up well over time. And they have several advantages over the old design:

1. They're easy to assemble. All that's required is a single piece of tape, doubled over (or a piece of double-sided tape, if you have it) to attach the printed pieces to the bases. And once you're done with a monster, you can disassemble it just as quickly to reuse the base for something else. And you still have the option of laminating the minis you use for your PCs (player characters), which have to last through multiple games, while using plain paper for the others.

2. They're compact. The flat bases used for these minis take up even less room in a box than the binder-clip bases used for the others, and much less room than three-dimensional commercial minis.

3. They're appropriately sized. Each of these minis has a round base that takes up the appropriate amount of space on the battle map for a creature of its size, unlike the binder-clip bases for the old ones. This makes it much easier to visualize, for instance, how many PCs can surround and attack the dragon at once.

4. You can create them on the fly. If you find you need a mini that you don't happen to have, you can just grab a blank one, draw a little image on it (with a label, if your drawing isn't good enough to be identifiable) and tape it to a base. The little "Sir Stick" that Brian has added to the collection above is an example.

5. This is perhaps the best feature of all: You can write directly on the minis. This has all kinds of useful applications. For instance, if you have a whole bunch of identical monsters, you can number them, so that you can easily tell which monster is attacking or being attacked by which PC. With his old minis, Brian would often add numbers to the PDF if he was printing out, say, a horde of skeletons, but this was a bit of a pain to do; with these new ones, you can add the numbering on the spot. You can also use the base of the mini to keep track of any conditions affecting a creature, such as "poisoned" or "restrained." (With laminated PC minis, you can add notations like this with a dry-erase marker.) And, if a creature is flying, you can use a pencil to mark just how high the creature is off the ground, so you don't need to contrive elaborate "flying stands" to raise the minis off the board.

6. However, if you prefer to use a flying stand, these round minis fit very neatly on top of a simple, inverted drinking glass, as shown here with the dragon. Because the glass is clear, you can see the terrain of the board through it and even put other minis under it if they want to attack from below.

For each game session, Brian can create pages with all the minis he expects to need in Inkscape, a free page-layout program. (Here's a sample.) However, his ultimate goal is to come up with some sort of script, perhaps in Python, that can create them automatically. If this works, all he'll have to do is provide the images he wants to use, the number of each creature to print, and the size they should be, and the script will generate the PDFs for him, ready to print.

With these printable minis, his picture-frame battle map, his homemade cardboard GM screen, his turn order cards, and his turn and ability cards, Brian has all the tools he needs to create a memorable Wildemount campaign. Now all we need is the book...and, ideally, some players who can make it to a game session more regularly than once a month.