Top 5 Ways to Weather the Global Pandemic

I’m sure we’ve all seen the meme by now, the mock headline that says something along the lines of “Nerds Everywhere Awaken to a World where Sports Are Cancelled and Everyone Stays Inside Playing Games” or something to that effect. Har-de-har-har, Alice.

As a guy who owns and operates one of the very places the media is begging you not to visit, I’m of two minds, here. On one hand, stay at home, yes, do that. On the other hand, um…me and the missus and our dog need to eat, okay?

Suffice to say, I need a few distractions, and I suspect you do, as well. For example, I’m working on my Kickstarter campaign project, Monty Haul, and it’s going as well as can be expected. I’m also playing my first D&D game on Roll20 with Shane Ivey, Chris Spivey, and Megan and Aser Tolentino. If you’re interested in hearing it play out, you can check out Session Zero on the ArcDream website here. We’re playing through one of Shane’s Sword and Sorceries adventures, and so far, it’s very cool.

But what if you don’t have a lot of irons in the fire? It’s easy; just build a fire, and stick some irons in. I’m only sort of kidding. Even if you just do some spring cleaning, like culling old games and sorting dice and organizing shelves, you’ll feel better, more productive, and less inclined to climb the walls, wall crawler. Idle hands, and all that jazz.

Here are my top five suggestions for Getting Your Game On and staying safe. I’m not going to mention Roll20 or playing online; you already know that. Rather, this is about refilling your braincase with stuff to use when all of this Fauxpocalypse stuff blows over and we can all greet the daylight again like squinting morlocks.

DIY Corner: Storage for PolyHero Rogue Dice

Ever since I reviewed PolyHero's Rogue Dice set a few weeks ago, I've been wracking my brains trying to figure out how to get the somewhat delicate Lockpick d20 dice to the table and back without breaking the pick off with my bear-like clumsiness. It's too cool a gaming tool not to take good care of, but as soon as I saw it come out of the clamshell, I thought, "Ruh Roh."

Thankfully, the Lock and Pick d20 came with a plastic insert, molded to cradle them just so in the package to avoid the very breakage I was trying to stave off. That insert came out of the clamshell, and I realized I could make a custom carrying case, built around holding that plastic cradle.

Now all I had to do was find a box. Easier said than done.

DIY Corner: Condition Markers ( A Tabletop Tokens Add-On)

This isn't a full-on DIY Corner, but rather a Supplemental add-on to the post I previously made about making your own tokens for your tabletop tactical play. This method is cheap (relatively) and lets you customize your tokens to match your campaign style, your personal aesthetics, and your part preferences. Also, they cost out to about 27 cents a token. Pretty cheap.

I'm using them and the players are loving them. But I have three spell casters in my group and they are constantly casting hold spells, chromatic orbs, and all of that jive. For large battles and small, you need some condition markers.

Whilst tooling around on the Interwebs recently, I stumbled across a site that was selling pendant supplies (the cabochons and epoxy stickers I use for the tokens being, in the parlance of our times, otherwise known as "pendant supplies"). As I was glancing down the page, I noticed the glass cabochon embedded in a colorful ring, you know, to make a pendant.

It was these. They are bottle caps, painted a solid color and flattened into a crimp so that they can be used for crafting. Or in my case, poisoning player characters.

There are basically two kinds of conditions you need to keep track of; that master list that is printed in every DM screen and on every cheat sheet that exists for D&D these days. And then there's the special effects that get applied to characters like Rage and Hunter's Mark. I haven't added them all up but it's roughly twenty or so, depending on what you need help keeping track of.


These things are easy to get in bags of 100--more than you'll ever need, but if you want a wide variety of colors, you may need to truck over to eBay, where several sellers have multitudes of colors for not a lot of money.

All you have to do is mark them with a Sharpie (and use a fine tip, here, because the regular Sharpies are a little too fat to use on such a small space). In fact, I dropped the past tense on a lot of my tokens and wrote "Poison" instead of "Poisoned." You might think two letters doesn't make a difference, but trust me, unless you have tiny handwriting, it does. And I don't need to tell you to use a light colored Sharpie on the dark caps, do I? Please tell me not to worry.

Once marked, a handy cheat sheet (color coded) clips to your screen and you are all set.

To use, let's go to the tactical simulation. Oh, no! Looks like Padraic the Cleric of Knowledge and his trusted man-at-arms are engaged in combat with a Deep One and a Cultist. Jinkies!

Padraic is quick to cast a curse on the cultist in order to help out his buddy. So the cultist gets the metallic orange condition marker, and it's just that easy.

But the Deep One bites Padraic, and now he's poisoned, so he gets the bilious green condition marker and all of his rolls are at disadvantage now! And he keeps that ring until he can clear the condition. Thankfully, a quick prayer to Minerva and he's back in business.

And what about those pesky large (and larger) tokens we've heard so much about? Here's our hapless duo all entangled with a skeleton horde. That's gonna leave a mark!

Good thing Padraic brought his holy symbol on this little jaunt. A quick turn undead attempt and the skeletons back off and start running for the exit. Take that, boneheads! Just put the condition on top of the token and it's the same thing. You can even stack these condition markers up.

Note that if I wanted to, I could totally make a condition marker for Turned Undead. If I wanted to. I do not. But if I did, I could. I'm not even joking about this. I just pick a colored bottle cap, grab a Sharpie, and blammo. Please and thank you. Done and done. But I do not want to do that.

I made five of each condition just to keep everything nice and even. On the off-chance that you care, I will list what colors I used for each condition. You do you, though; pick colors that make sense in your brain.




Blessed--Metallic Gold
Blinded--Black
Charmed--Pink
Cursed--Metallic Orange
Deafened--White
Frightened--Yellow
Grappled--Light Blue
Hunter's Mark--Dark Green
Incapacitated--Dark Blue
Invisible--Metallic Silver
Paralyzed--Maroon
Petrified --Gray
Poisoned--Light Green
Rage--Red
Restrained--Orange
Stunned--Purple

There's plenty of other one-off conditions and lots more colors. I only did what I needed, and I'm going to wait until I need another condition before committing a color.

I really like the home-made feel to this solution. I remember when we had to make our own character sheets. We made our own dungeons. We scrounged everything we were using to play the game. I love all of the accessories that are available for D&D these days, but sometimes, it's better to DIY.

DIY Corner: Inspiration Tokens

One of the great additions to 5e D&D is the concept of inspiration, a way to instantly reward good role-playing, puzzle-solving, decision-making, or any other in-game thing a player does that the DM deems noteworthy.

The current rules suggest using a poker chip to give to the player with inspiration as a token to remind them and you that they get a do-over roll by handing it in.

You're probably award of the multitude of metal coins available to gamers great and small, ranging from the baffling to the bewildering, in a multitude of styles, and that's not counting the metric ton of inspiration counters, coins, tokens and d20 holders that can be found in all corners of the Internet with a simple search.

I'm not knocking any of those things. They are great. I've ended up with a few metal coins and tokens as ancillary throw-in items, and again, they look just fine and would doubtless make perfectly serviceable inspiration tokens.

But I wanted something a little different.

I love the idea of a durable poker chip, because players are, in very general terms, ill-tempered savages. The only problem is, modern poker chips are liberally festooned with card pips, aces of spades, and other gambling symbols, as well as being colorful and cheerful and oh just never mind. You could special order some chips, but that costs a ton of money. Likewise wooden nickles, although if I had my druthers, I'd use them exclusively. They look and feel old and you can put what you want on them. Now I just need to justify spending a hundred and fifty bucks to get 4 Inspiration Tokens and I'm all set!

While we wait for that little miracle to occur, I found a solution in the form of vintage poker chips. I was originally looking for anything that looked old, like something made out of Bakelite, but really quickly I stumbled across these. Look! It's a dragon! Or is that a griffin? They are old clay chips from the 1920s or 1930s. And as you can see, they are perfect.






There are a lot of other styles out there, moons and stars, owls, laurel wreaths, sailing ships, lighthouses, and so on and so forth. You can find them in groups of 1 to 12 (or more) and they are relatively inexpensive. I scored a lot of around a 140 chips for twenty bucks plus shipping. With so much surplus chip action at my disposal, I decided to experiment a bit.








Beige is boring. I wanted something that looked like a metal coin; that would be cool. However, I don't usually like the resulting texture of metallic paints, so instead, I used Rub 'n Buff. It's a wax polish with metallic pigment. It comes in a variety of colors, but I'm using silver.

To apply, you just need a little dab. That button will completely cover four chips, and then some. You can apply it with a brush or a sponge, but I think it works best if you do it using your finger. You get a feel for what it does and according to the manufacturer, the more you rub it, the more buff it gets. That feels like a come-on, but you never know with this stuff.

I apply the Rub 'n Buff in linear strokes, all going the same direction. This is because doing it the other way makes for an uneven coat. The goal is to lightly hit the surface, ignoring the small grooves that make up the dragon (griffin?). Do one side at a time, waiting for it to dry each time. It doesn't take long. Then you go around the edge and you are done. Unless you don't want to be.

You can do a thin wash and hit the groove if you want, or you can get a soft sponge and push/press the silver leaf into the grooves, and then smooth it out again. You can even paint the whole chip beforehand. You have options, here.


Now, let's talk about the aforementioned "variety of colors" that Rub 'n Buff comes in. This stuff is designed to add accents to furniture and other decorative pieces. In a weird fit of pique, I bought a set of 12 different tubes, just to try them out for myself.

 This is one of the many shades of gold they make. They work as well as the silver leaf and look pretty good. I put a black wash on the chip before I applied the Rub 'n' Buff so that the dragon (griffin?) would stand out more.

This is their antique white finish. It's intended to be a highlight for distressed wood. It's not metallic and the results are not good. But this is what it looks like.

This is their Spanish Copper, and I expected it to be more metallic than it was. The light is great on this chip, but under normal conditions, it's very dark and not so great.

This is another of their gold colors, this time over a red chip (hence the color of the dragon [griffin?]) They have like four different varieties of gold, so it's really just a question of brightness and personal tastes. I prefer the silver, but that's me.

Here's one I did for my ongoing Eldritch Piracy game. I did a black wash after the Rub 'n Buff dried, and the results were so-so. Better to paint the chip before and then do a light drybrush with your finger to apply the silver.

There is also a patina color that you can apply over their metallic brass. I tried it, but you have to be very sparing with it, and I could never get it to look right. But if you can, I'd do these chips in Grecian Gold and hit the anchor with a touch of the patina and call it a day.

And if you want to get really crazy, here's a two-color Rub 'n Buff project, using Silver Leaf and Antique Gold. I primed the chip with flat black, and lightly applied the silver leaf. When it was dry, I carefully, oh so carefully--maybe too carfully--hit the anchor with the gold. It looks okay, and with touch-ups, it'll look super swell.







The colors of Rub 'n Buff that yielded the best results for this particular project were the silver and gold, hands down. But your mileage may vary. You could even paint them (and seal them) some other color. Silver and Gold are the two colors of Rub 'n Buff you're most likely to find in craft stores. Anything more exotic than that and you'll have to mail order it.

One quick warning about these chips; they are durable, but not indestructible. I've dropped a chip from a height of about five feet onto a concrete floor and it shatters like rock candy. For flipping across the table, they hold up just fine.

I think these inspiration tokens add a little something extra to the game; it's not a prop, but it's more than a check box on a character sheet. And there's something tactile about handing it to the DM to get that extra roll. Everyone's game is different, but these suit my play style perfectly.

DIY Corner: Dice Trays

Have you priced dice trays lately? They are ridiculous.

They look cool. True. And they are quite useful, especially if you have one or more players who like to give their deice the ol' spin "for luck" and send their bones skittering across the room. But the cost is outrageous. Twenty-five dollars for a wooden version of the Monopoly Box Lid we used to roll six-sided dice into? Thank you, no. I'm sure the product is very good, but for that kind of money, I want a little control.

There's a ton of videos on YouTube that show you how to very complicatedly make dice trays. You can sure do that if you want to. But I don't have the time, the patience, or the tools. I just have the vision, in my head, of the dice tray that I want, and I have a 40% off coupon for Michael's. That's more than enough.

And I have made a couple of dice trays out of picture frames. One of them is quite cool; it came with plastic pieces on the corners that resembled metal brackets, and so it was halfway to looking like something found in a dwarven keep to begin with. The problem with picture frame dice trays is that they are elusive, unless you want to break glass, fish pieces of glass out of a crevice, and yadda yadda yadda. Basically, you need something deep enough to act as a reservoir for the dice, but the glass has to be behind the wood completely, so that when you unscrew the back of the frame, everything comes out nice and neat.

I know you think that's easy to find, and if you're looking for regular picture frames, you're right. But we want high (or deep) side walls, and those frames only come around once or twice a year. I suspect they are being bought up by gamers for the explicit use of turning them into dice trays, because as picture frames, they are kinda crappy.

Here's how I solved that problem. I can make a dice tray for about five bucks, unless I need to buy a can of spray paint. Then it's, I dunno, seven bucks or something. But the thing is this: my dice tray is one of infinite possibilities. Any color I want, any interior felt I want, stain or paint, simple or complicated, I am only beholden to my level of craftsmanship.

I start with these. These are "Art Panels" made of wood. They are designed for decoupage, painting, or any other Summer Camp Craft idea you want to use them for. Wood burning. Is that even a thing, still? I don't care.

Wal-Mart sells the 10" square frame with just enough lip on it to qualify as usable (right). Dollar General sells an 8" square that is chunky and deep and just right for a DM to have behind his screen or any table where space is a premium (left).  For the pictures below, I will be using both, as I did not get complete pictures from either build.

These picture frame/art panels are made of cheap bass wood, and are made about as well as you'd expect. The thing you want to look for is actually not on the front but on the back. That's the interior of the dice tray. Look for rough spots or splits on the inside, or at the corners for a misalignment.

Inside here, in the corner, is a rough spot where the wood was split, or a knothole, or something. Ordinarily I wouldn't have bought this, but it was the last one, so I am just going to take extra care with the steps below.

First thing to do is  sand the sides down, to make them smooth to the touch. I use a heavy grit sand paper to lightly and quickly knock out any rough patches. I also put a little more pressure on the edges and the corners to soften and smooth them down. Finally, I sand down the inside walls of the dice tray, getting as much inside the corner as I can. This takes all of a couple of minutes, and really helps later when you're applying paint. The finished tray looks nicer, too, and is less of a lethal weapon. See where the edges are rounded and smoother?

Before you go any farther, it's best to make a template for your felt insert. To do that, get a piece of regular cardstock (the kind you do papercrafts with) and measure it carefully and cut it to size with an Xacto knife or other straight edge. For the 10" frame, the interior is 8 1/2" square and for the 8" frame, the interior is 6" square.

Note: it will not fit. It just won't. It never does. But go ahead and make your square cardstock match your seemingly accurate measurements. Now, try to slip it in. Did it hang on one side? Two? Those are the sides you will trim by minute increments using your straight edge. And don't cut two sides at once. Cut one side. See if it fits. If it does, cut the other. If it doesn't, trim some more. It sounds tedious, but it only takes a couple of minutes to adjust. Just go slow and take your time and don't get in a hurry. When you're done, you should have a square piece of cardstock that falls right into place and requires the flat side of your hobby knife to lift up out of the dice tray. That's what you are looking for.

Once completely sanded, I like to prime the tray. This takes a couple of passes to get even coverage on the inside and outside walls of the tray.

I spray the inside, but just to overspray the inside edges and corners. Occasionally I will sand back the primed dice tray with fine grit sand paper to keep the smooth surfaces.



Once the primer is dry, you're on your own. You can paint the tray a solid color, or use a faux finish of some kind. You can create a "theme" for your game or a particular character. I've done everything from faux marble to hammered metal (and there are tutorials online for anything like that you want to do). But for a first-time project, you may just want to go with staining the wood.



This was a tray I made for my player who has a warlock that made a pact with The King in Yellow. I used antique silver Rub 'n Buff to make the edges shiny like worn down metal. This may be the coolest tray I have done to date. It got gasps and profanity when my player brought it out at the table.

This tray was made just so see if I could do it. I wanted to make a faux marble finish, like the old Vampire rpg books, you know, green mausoleum marble. It turned out better than I could have hoped for. You can't see it, but there are some flecks of blood in one corner.

Here's the wood, stained and sealed with a gloss coat. It looks surprisingly good. I've also done several dice trays using the 8" art panel that turned out gorgeous with a couple of coats of stain and some intentional sanding back to distress the wood. It really picks up an antique or a nautical appearance.

This was the first dice tray I tried. It's got one coat of stain and a flat sealer, because that's all I had. And you know what? It's just as nice as the others. This does not have to be a complicated project.

If I'm staining the wood, I don't prime the tray. I use a gel-based stain, and it's pretty cheap but it's also a little finicky to use, so I will just wipe down the tray with a damp cloth to remove the dust and grit and let it air dry before applying the stain. I always apply heavy and wipe it off, and do a minimum of two coats to really bring out the grain of the wood.



While the paint or stain is drying, you can start on your felt insert. Craft felt is very inexpensive and comes in a myriad of colors. You can buy it with a sticky back, and it's a little more expensive but also easier to work with. Or you can get regular felt and trust your glue-fu. Don't worry if you mess it up. Felt is cheap. Cardstock is cheap. Glue is cheap.

If you are using adhesive felt, peel off the back and stick the cardstock insert to it. Don't use the edge of the felt to save cutting; the felt edges are wonky. Stick the square down so that there's at least a half-inch of felt or more around each side.

If you're using regular felt, first apply a thin, even layer of Tacky Glue or your favorite craft glue. This, even coat. Use scrap cardstock to scrape it thin if you need to and be sure to cover the whole surface of the card. No globs, no glorps. You are going to stick the cardstock insert to the felt and use a heavy cylindrical object to smooth the cardstock out so that you don't have bumps in the felt on the other side. No bumps in the felt is your only concern right now. Also, excess glue. Wipe up any oozes immediately. If you'd used adhesive felt, you wouldn't have to do this, but no, you wanted teal felt in your wooden dice tray for some unfathomable reason, so here we are, rolling felt and wiping up glue.

After the felt and the cardstock are one, take your straight edge and your sharp craft knife and cut away the excess felt. You may have to adjust the fit as with the insert above. That's okay. It's also okay if you cut a hair too much and there is a gap. You can center the felt in the middle of the tray and no one will notice the gap. I know this because the first one I did had a 1 mm gap and I've been using it for years and to date no one has noticed, or cared.

Before you apply the felt to the inside of the tray, you will want to seal the wood and your paint/stain job. You can use flat or gloss, and the choice is entirely up to you. But I'd recommend two coats just to be sure you get everything.

Now you can put the felt in. Simply apply more glue and repeat. Again: no bumps. Use a Sharpie to roll across the interior and remove lumps. Something else you can do, if you are afraid of commitment, is to not fasten the felt to the cardstock. I have found that the backing on the adhesive felt cuts great and if you are diligent and patient, your felt will slide into the tray and stay there, even when you want to turn it upside down and shake it. Now you have a rolling surface that you can swap out as the mood strikes you.

Last thing I do is probably not strictly speaking necessary, but it's classy and we are all about class here at the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker. Take four 1" furniture pads and affix them to the corners. Yes, those are the same non-skid pads I use to make tokens with. Just stick them into the corners, slightly offset from the edges, and you are done.

These trays are cheap enough that you can make one for every player and for yourself without wracking up enormous debt. Five trays cost me as much as one of the deluxe fancy-schmancy trays on sale across the Interwebs. If you use the 10" square panels, they don't take up too much room in storage, either, stacking nicely on top of one another. The are lightweight, but strong, and don't move around on the table, thanks to the feet.

My players love their trays and use them for every game they play. Good dice rolling habits cannot be learned early enough.

DIY Corner: My DM Creation Toolbox

One of the things that make me productive as a creative person is that I know myself well enough to know how I work best: surrounded by toys and little distractions. If I'm fomenting a  brainstorm, I tend to fidget, especially if I have a lot of ideas and I need to sort through them. On top of that, I've got juuuuuuust enough A.D.D. tendencies that I need structure to reign in the chaos. That's partially why I'm so attracted to bullet journaling and I've written about it twice now.

Whether I'm sitting at my computer or at a table, trying to come up with brilliant ideas, I like to have certain things at hand. I got tired of having all of my loose items in an unruly pile around my computer, or worse, having to chase down things like dice for randomly and obsessively rolling four d6, over and over, and taking the highest three dice, or rolling two d20 and saying, "advantage," and "disadvantage," over and over again. See, I've got special dice for that. My creation dice, which don't hit the table; they are for when I need to roll random numbers during the creation process. I mean, what's the use of having eleventy-thousand goddamn dice if you can't compartmentalize them, thus giving you the impression that your habit is not, in fact, out of control and you need help...anyway.

I came up with this idea and I really like it. It's not a million dollar innovation, but more of a Life Hack. It works for me, and if you see any use or value to it, it will by necessity be something you have to modify to make work for you.

This is my DM Creation Toolbox. It's tidy, and portable, and it looks pretty cool. I can drop this in a knapsack if I'm on the go, or (most often) it just sits on my writing desk, waiting patiently for me to crack it open.

The design on the front is very earthy-crunchy, but also...if you kinda squint at it...that could also be a deranged monk's interpretation of Dread Cthulhu. There's no way I'm covering that up.


The box is one of the many craft items I bought at one of the big box stores. You can find them with interesting frequency because, apparently, the whole of America needs a camouflaged stash box for their weed. The big box stores are, weirdly, cheaper than online, probably because the boxes are hard to ship. Whatever. You can choose from a ton of designs, or you can pick something you hate and mod it for yourself. There are a ton of videos that show you how to do this. For me, it was more important that I have a finished interior that looked like a book on the outside. So this is what I went with.

Inside, you can see it's crammed full of stuff. This is just about everything I need to get the old creative juices flowing. All that's missing is a notebook or a journal to write stuff down in, or doodle, or make lists, or whatever I need to do.

I find that graph paper helps me organize things the most. Lines are fine if I'm writing something, but often with gaming I need to make lists or charts or doodle a little map or practice map hatching or any number of other things that graph paper makes so much easier for me. I don't like the dots. Can't use them. Too loosey-goosey. I'm a grid man. Okay, enough navel-gazing. Let's break this down; my E.D.D.M.C. (that's Every Day Dungeon Master Carry, for those of you who aren't fully aware of the Gamer-Prepper Sub-Culture out there).

These are Rory's Story Cubes. You can find out all you want to know about them right here. They are very cool; these dice all have pictograms on them and you can buy thematic sets to roll and create random elements to incorporate into a story. They were designed for kids to teach them story-telling skills, but I've never seen kid one play with these things. What I have seen is forty-year old game masters swear by them. I have a set of nine, custom selected for their content, which is Fantasia, Mythic, and Medieval. They are sold in sets of nine and booster packs of three. There are also branded sets that come with this cool little carrying tray.

 To make these work, I'd roll as many or as few as I wanted, and then sort of sift through them to see if anything made sense. It's a lot like rooting through sheep's entrails, but not gross, or as ambiguous. The images are pretty recognizable, but also open to interpretation. For example, you can see the birdcage with the open door. That could be an escape, or it could refer to something that has escaped, or maybe something that was taken. You've got options.

Most of these elements are usable as-is in a fantasy role-playing game. You could do much worse using them for designing an evening's encounter.

 These little gems are an interesting idea that I fell in love with. They are called The GameMaster's Apprentice.  If you like DMing on the fly, then these are your cards, for sure. The deck I have here is nautically-themed, for many reasons I won't go into, but there are actually a number of genre-flavored decks that will suit your needs.

Basically, each card is loaded with a series of choices, random words, things, decisions, conditions, moods--everything you'd need for "out-of-your-ass" gaming.

 

I actually use the cards to jump-start conversations with myself. There are descriptive words, small inklings of plot ideas, character names, and even abstract concepts. Each card is double sided, and there's fifty-plus cards in the deck. I've only used a fraction of the cards, but they are great for getting out of your head and chasing down new ideas.

 You can buy the cards at drivethrucards.com and while they aren't cheap, if this is something you think you'll use, it's a good investment with a lot of replay value. Oh, and here's another tip from Captain RetroGrump. The box to put the cards in costs a dollar extra. You may think, "That's bullshit! I'm already paying twenty bucks for the cards!" Don't be me. Buy the damned plastic box.

You see this box in my hand? Yeah, I had to make that. I didn't have another plastic box to put the cards in, and I have never been a "rubber band them up" kind of guy. So I spent half a day downloading a card box template, and then cutting it out three times because I couldn't get the edges to line up right and also I had to fold it differently to fit the deck, which is slightly larger than a regular deck, and yeah, my tuck box looks cool, but you know what? In time, labor, materials, and effort, it cost me $28.47 to make. Know how much a plastic deck box would have cost me from DriveThruCards? A buck.

 These dice are weird. The white one is a Tarot die (from the set I reviewed, here) and it's the one with the most interesting set of faces on it, representing the major arcana. Their poor design is my delight! The other two dice are made out of boxwood and they are pressed layers of wood. To know what number is showing, you count the pieces of wood. The one on the left is 1 and the one on the right is five.

I like these dice because they are odd, and because they force me to look at what I am rolling and also, they are pleasant to hold.  They have replaced the Fidget Cube I had in the kit, which had a little too much going on for me. What does that say about me when the Fidget Cube is such a distraction for me? Don't answer that.

You always need dice. These are my "creation dice." They are simple. They are easy to read. They are the right dice for this process. Also, a lot of them are black and white. This is no accident.  Sometimes you need to just make a decision and go.

Fun fact: I have two differently-colored d10 dice that I use for rolling percentiles. I don't have a tens d10. I call black high, like in the good old days, and roll percentile dice like that. It's not a big deal, but it really connects me to my dim and distant gamer past in ways I don't quite understand.

 Yeah, those are fake coins for FRPG games. Don't judge me. I sometimes practice sleight-of-hand when I am thinking, and I like working with these coins. They are thematically appropriate, and easy to manipulate.

They also feel good in my hand. I know they aren't real gold, but the pouch of coins is pretty iconic in fantasy gaming, and so when I am putting treasure in a dungeon, more often than not, I'll have the bag out, jingling it like a goofus.

 

This is a mechanical pencil, a Zebra 301, because I love their pens and pencils; so clean and professional-looking.  Next to that is a ball-point pen that looks like a Harry Potter wand. It does not look professional and I don't care. It's my idea box. The pen is for concrete ideas, and the pencil is for doodling, sketching, mapping, etc.

Most of the time, I just use the pen, because I'm a nerd, but I need the pencil for drawing stuff. I just do. I may be adding another pen or two for lettering at some point, because I have room, but right now, the pen and pencil I have cover about 90% of my needs.

And that's it. The whole thing weighs about as much as a hardcover book, which I'd be carrying around, anyway, so whatever. I mostly enjoy how it tidies up my work space, but I have to say, there's something cool about having a hollow book with gold coins and a magic wand inside.

I've seen this idea before as a character kit, for players, but I've never seen anything like this for Dungeon Masters. Have you? Is this something you'd put together for yourself? Drop me a line or show me pictures if you have.