Status Rings

Friggin' finally I can put these up on the shop.  At the start of each year I have a list of all the items I'd like to develop into product lines that year.  Most of them get put up in the relative slow period during Jan and Feb but there's occasionally a little hanger-on that takes a lot longer for one reason or another.  This year these were that "hanger-on".  Not for many technical reasons but mostly just because I always had something else I was working on.  Some other prototype or order for a client took priority.  One upshot of that is I've been playtesting these since April or May and they're a marked improvement on the old square tokens.  Being able to drape the ring around a mini helps a lot but even when the mini doesn't work for that they sit under the mini quite nicely too.  Being able to carry them on any given loop saves a lot in labor and materials too, which is a large part of how these are about half the price of the condition tokens now that they're up on the shop!

Map, Waterdeep Topography

After the headache that was my first attempt at a topographical map of the City of Splendors I wasn't exactly eager to take another swing at it.  But after investing all that time and material I'd rather have something to show for it rather than a "Don't Do This" lesson.  It took about a day to rejigger the files and drafts to work with the plywood and I scaled the map down a touch to reduce the number of segments I'd working with.  And I'm glad I went through the trouble because the result is excellent!

I fixed the whole thing on a 1x2' piece of MDF that I painted and sealed to look all water-y.  My signature's looked better but it was just a goofy personal project at the time.  The plywood engraves wonderfully though and all the text (even the teeny tiny street names) is pretty readable if you get up close.  All the tiny details (like the sea caves or trees beneath Cliffwatch) came out really well.  I was close to inverting the image (so the streets would be burned down beneath the buildings, sort of like a relief carving) but seeing the final result I think this was the right way to go.  Cool as having the buildings stand up above the streets would be, it would also mean the buildings were semi-fragile white bits over black streets and it just doesn't quite look right.

It's been a little while since this has been up over our game table and it's been pretty handy to point at (with laser pointers) while we're planning where to go in the city.  So handy that I decided I may as well add it to the shop!

Prototype: Adventure Map

This was just a simple prototype for our current campaign but it's been a great proof of concept.  I drew up the design on the computer then used the laser (of course) to burn it onto the leather and gave it a bit of color with the stain.  So far it's been working pretty great.  It gets tossed around the table just about every week and I haven't seen any signs of smearing or smudging.

5e Spellbook

I can't remember how long this idea's been sitting in my development queue just waiting for everything to come together for it to become a physical thing.  I had to figure out bookbinding, formatting, what sort of information was useful, etc.  I didn't want to just copy paste the SRD into yet another product but it isn't easy to improve on Wizards of the Coast's own products.  This was a prototype but it was building on a dozen other projects. 

And after all that I playtested it on my druid for about a month before calling it good.  The appliques are still solid and what minor looseness there is in the binding comes down to it being a prototype.  It's a solid build and I'm proud to finally add it to the shop!

Coasters, D&D

A long time ago someone suggested I develop some D&D themed coasters (Thanks Runkle!) and it's been sitting on my To Prototype list for a least a year.  With the new printer I realized I could finally crank out a product worth adding to the store and before I'd technically finished the prototype it had already sold.

The coasters are sold as a set of five, each with a different bit of art.  There's the ever popular Yawning Portal, the head of the demon on the cover of the original DMG, Bahamut's emblem, the D&D ampersand, and WotC's Wizard logo.  And each coaster has a tray just large enough to hold a standard set of dice.  They have a little extra finish on them to repel condensation and the plastic's thick enough to be pretty sturdy.  So now they have a permanent listing up here.

Prototype, Leather Journal

Smashed this out over the weekend.  The staining and what all is a bit coarse and rushed but that's just because I was testing the pattern and not the stain.  I'm planning on testing it as my next campaign journal but the pattern worked so well I just might start making them for the shop first.  As soon as I have an opening in my schedule I'll be making a production version to list in the shop.

A book of my own

I've been wanting to make a book for more or less ever.  Writing a book (if not publishing) is something I have a bit of practice at but crafting it into a physical thing isn't something I've ever gotten to do before.

My wife's campaign is due to wrap up sometime this fall and when it does I'll be running a short campaign to introduce my own homebrew setting.  It struck me as a perfect opportunity to make my own worldbook.  Working my off hours or between projects I did all the writing, map drawing, and whipped up the art (with spousal assistance) between April and June.  Wound up with 25,000 words (not counting ~10,000 words copied from FATE Core to cover the mechanics) which makes about 100 pages.  It's slim even for a worldbook but that was intentional.  I was shooting for something our players could flip through in an evening.

We won't be starting this campaign for a few months yet but tonight's our usual game so I'll get to show off the book in a couple more hours.  I'm really excited to see what our players make of it all, not to mention finishing something I've spent so much time on.  I've learned a fair bit about binding books from scratch and expect I'll be doing more of that in the future.  I reckon this was just a prototype to get started.

Coins for D&D

I do love me some D&D props.  I've tried printing currency for our games in the past but it was never practical with the old printer.  This new printer changed that though and after touching up my original models I've got it cranking out reliable coins like clockwork.  It's practically a fantasy mint!

I based the coins off the D&D model (cp, sp, etc) but added the "Dragon" to balance out the high end of the scale.  I've been using them during our own games for a couple months and after some tweaks the coins are turning out pretty practical.  They're certainly more fun (and convenient) than making hash marks on a character sheet! 

So I figure if they're handy for me they'll probably be handy for others.  And if I'm going to sell them on the shop I may as well include a stylin' coinpurse. =)  The standard set is about 1100gp (40 gp and 10 of all the others) which might change as I get feedback.  The listing is available here.