In Stock at the Fantasy Shop

First up, I have to thank Charles Akins over at Dyvers for diving into the vast sea of OSR blogs to give a short review/overview of what's out there. It really was an honor just to be nominated.

Now, on to the content. A while back I wrote a post about using DIY tokens to track item consumption in D&D games. Even though there's a serviceable Avery template for printing the tokens out ahead of time, I still needed a way to print out "blank" tokens on which to swiftly write things like "severed bear's head" on the fly at the game table. Hence, this:

I settled on a 1.5 x 1.7 size so that the tokens would be a little taller, which makes them poke out of the top of the page for easier retrieval. 

Then, I thought, "might as well stock up the local town merchant while I'm at it." At first, I was using text-only tokens (because my artistic abilities are limited to remarkably lewd stick figures), but then I decided that they needed a little visual panache. Fortunately, the tremendous Telecanter of recedingrules.blogspot.com and the rip-roaring Roger of rolesrules.blogspot.com  have both made some nifty Creative Commons/Free Use artwork available. I also ganked a particularly saucy picture of a potion from ackegard.com by Hakan. Don't worry, I printed a link to Hakan's site on the token card. I'm a helper.

Open these in a new tab to marvel at the delicious fruits of my labor. Or just, y'know, download them. If they prove useful, I'd love to hear about how you used them in your campaign.

I'm a long way from being done with the basic set of dungeon-delving equipment, but this seems like a decent start. I hit a snag when the best source of equipment images I've found turned out to be a bunch of scans from the 3.5 Edition Player's Guide. So, does anyone know of a great source for free-use images of dungeony gear?

Encumbrance vs. Inventory

Who doesn't love the simple encumbrance system that James Raggi gave us in Lamentations of the Flame Princess?

Dickheads, that's who.

Seriously. Calculating encumbrance was an exercise in tedium even for the slide-rule carrying dungeoneers in the early 80's. Besides, what RPG enthusiast isn't already well-acquainted with the first cousin of Raggi's system, the video game Inventory.

We grok this shit at the cellular level.

This elegant solution still suffers from a common problem at the game table, though. People forget to write crap down. A lot. Plus, brace yourselves for this, some buttface players will occasionally lie about what their character is carrying.

Others have attempted to tackle this problem before, notably Faster Monkey Games with their Tracker Tokens product. 

It's a good idea, but a little too static for my gaming needs. Players can't be counted on to carry exclusively predetermined items. I mean, they're tooling around a dungeon with backpacks full of goblin heads, blocks of demon-cheese, and pretty much any other frightening garbage that seemed like a good idea to pick up at the time.

Never fear, three-ring binders are here. More specifically, you can print out whatever inventory items you want on this free template from Avery, and have each player store those suckers in one of these inexpensive 30-pocket binder pages. 

What's that, you say? "Doesn't the LotFP encumbrance system have exactly 30 slots?" That's right, and you're welcome.

  +  

= easier organization than an OCD hooker.

The pockets and the template items are all exactly 1.5"x1.5", which is also conveniently the perfect size to hold poker chips. I'm having my players use poker chips to track the number of arrows left in their quivers. How many arrows fit in a quiver? Twenty. Do they make another binder page that holds exactly 20 chips? You're damn straight they do. 

I recommend printing tokens out on cardstock to make them more durable than mere paper. I still need to kludge together a blank template that just has a dark border around the edges of each token so that I can print out a bunch of blanks before the game. That way, I can just write random item descriptions directly on tokens mid-game, rather than having to type them up and print them out.

I have to say that I really enjoy the tactile element of handing a token or chip to a player when they purchase gear, and having them hand it back to me when it's been used up. You can even get cutesy with the players by using inventory items printed with custom templates, like this one that looks like it's dripping with blood.

Plus, there's a certain dark glee to be had when the party is five levels deep in the dungeon, and the players look down at their inventory sheets to discover that they're dangerously low on torches.

Good times, good times.