Tags
Kjeldoran Dead, image copyright Wizards of the Coast
I was invited out to check out a d20 fantasy game the other night with one of my regular players. I had the night off and it coincided with when he runs his Eberron campaign, so I took him up on the invite and took the role of a gun-toting goblin guide for the evening. The game was a lot of fun, but unlike any of my groups, this group used battlemats (actually mostly the Paizo flip-mats) and tokens (not miniatures).
But some of the tokens looked really REALLY familiar.
Turns out the DM had bought a 1″ square hole punch at a craft store and had attacked his old Magic the Gathering, World of Warcraft, Vampire and other Collector Card Game collections with said hole punch and made a thousand or so counters for his game. Horde of skeletons? No problem, they were all from magic cards (I recognized a few of the old ice age skeletal types in the horde that attacked us).
Personally, I didn’t even know that anyone even made a 1 inch square hole punch. Supposedly they also make inch and a half, and 1 inch circular ones, but he couldn’t find a 2 inch square punch for making Huge size badguys.
So after the game I went home and dug around through all the various card packs I had received for a variety of failed CCGs as freebies at various GenCons over the years and have a pile of them to give him at our next Street Fighter game. With one $15 purchase at the craft store, he’s managed to turn all these crappy old CCGs into something pretty cool.
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
Recycling CCG cards may be cool, but it’s still hit and miss.
Fiery Dragon produces printable tokens tailored specifically for monsters in the MM, up through Paragon tier so far.
So when you crack out seven different goblins, you’ve got specific art for each monster… cutters, soldiers, hexers, warchief, archer and so on. And if you need fifteen goblin cutter minions, you just print ’em up.
The tokens are printed as squares, but I prefer circles and just use a circular punch. The tokens are available as PDFs or as a collection of individual graphic files (TIFFs) and a template file… get the TIFF version and you can load up a sheet with exactly the monsters you need.
Thanks, Carl.
I have a few of their (FDP’s) battlebox products, but since I never play D&D or any other RPG with minis or a grid, the primary utility of the Battleboxes has been the Condition and Action cards and the awesome character tracker pads for the DM.
I can’t heap enough praise on Fiery Dragon – especially as a Canadian company that survived the d20 era, but the benefit of these tokens is they were even closer to free than the FDP counters for the players involved who had piles of magic cards (and doomtrooper, spellfire, XXXenophile, and Jihad, and so on…) so it actually made use of a resource they had no other use for. In my case it means I finally have someone who will consider it a gift instead of a snub when I hand over this huge shoebox of free CCG cards I picked up at GenCon over the years.
And it was cool to see Kjeldoran Dead on the field.
Hey, this is a great idea!
My wife is a scrapbooker, and she has a lot of punches of all different shapes and sizes.