Dungeon Crate in the Making

Filling a box of loot seems easy: Pick some cool items, drop them in the box and send them off.

But it’s not.

Don’t get us wrong, working on Dungeon Crate is the coolest job in the world. It’s also lot of work.

Let’s give you a little behind the scenes look into how we put together your boxes of gaming loot every month. The Dungeon Crate you opened this month started several months ago.

We’re D&D and Pathfinder and RPG players with decades of gaming experience, and we know what we like to use when we play. If you’re anything like us, you’re going to love it, too.

The first thing we do is find a theme. Recent themes included Dungeon Lifestyle and Thieves. Once we have a theme, we start dreaming up ideas about what items could go into the crate including adventures, tokens, miniatures, terrain, cards and tons more. (If you subscribe, you know exactly what we’re talking about.)

And this is where we get a little pie-in-the-sky.

We come up with wild ideas about customizing items or dreaming up items that don’t exist. But here’s the cool part: A lot of times, those dreams actually come true.

Let’s look at the thief crate.

That started with our adventure, Against the Dead Hands, and ended with some awesome custom items.

We were finishing up the adventure’s final details while we were putting the box together, but we had an outline that got us thinking.

What monsters and NPCs were in the module? What was the story? What other pieces could we fit into the box that would complement the adventure?

One of the pieces we thought of early was the Dead Hands coin. The thieves’ guild that takes a starring role in Against the Dead Hands was first mentioned in the previous adventure, Xander’s Lost Orb, so we already knew a bit about them.

Could we make a custom coin for the adventure?

We started talking to our friends at Advanced Deployment and found out, yes, they could totally make us an acrylic token exactly like what we wanted. Awesome.

Meanwhile, our list of items for the box was getting bigger and bigger. We figured out what would work and what wouldn’t and started contacting our pals at Reaper Miniatures, Nord Games and elsewhere to get the items for the crate.

We also wrapped up editing the adventure and sent everything to our shipping facility.

We’re proud of that last crate, and it’s one of the most packed we’ve done.

Our next crate, done in partnership with the fine fellas at Nerdarchy, is shaping up similarly.

We’ve dreamed up a host of items, several of them custom pieces, and we’re trading ideas back and forth with the guys at Nerdarchy to make this a truly awesome crate.

We’ve been working on it for awhile and are just know locking down the details. And yes, we’re already getting items for crate after that as well as plotting out the next several crates.

If you want to know what to expect in your crates, there’s lots of information available. We review the crates every month right here on this blog, but there’s also tons of unboxing videos and reviews out there, too.

If you do a little homework, you’ll know exactly what to expect even if each month’s contents are a surprise. (That’s kind of the fun of it, you know?)

We pack tons of value into each crate. The actual retail cost of each crate is typically double what you pay, so you’re getting a deal.

If you’re already subscribed, we can answer your questions. We’re as communicative as we can be on social media, our e-mail newsletters and especially if you contact us in person. By the way, if you reach out, you’re talking to an owner, not some faceless minion. That’s how much we care about our customers.