Gift ideas for your favorite gamer

Dungeon Cat when he was skinny enough to climb in the tree. 

It’s time.

The holidays are nearly upon us. Unless you like getting everything at the last minute, you should already be looking for gifts.

And if your family and friends like to game, we’ve got some ideas.

Custom miniatures

Have you ever visited HeroForge? Visit their site, design your character and then have it 3D printed.

It’s easy, and it’s amazing especially since there are hundreds of options for faces, expressions, clothing, weapons, spells and whatever. If you have a friend who has a tough time representing their dwarven bard or tiefling sorcerer on the table, you can design them the perfect character. They also have gift cards.

Handmade Leather Dice Tray

These things are great for rolling dice, especially if you’re going to play games and you’re unsure how dice will roll on the table surface. The best part: They roll up and don’t take up much space in your gaming bag. Get one here.

Dice

What tabletop player doesn’t love dice? We’re sure every one of us has at least one bag of dice bursting at the seams from the weight of all that polyhedral plastic. Get metal dice. Get true-rolling dice. Get dice of all shapes and sizes. Or visit our pals at Elderwood Academy and get yourself a dice box, tray or book. (Those dudes make amazing stuff.) 

Mimic dice bag

Ditch the purple felt Crown Royal bag, and upgrade to this toothy beast. Made by Ultra Pro and the Dungeons & Dragons team, this little guy has a belly full of your dice, minis and other gaming accessories. Get one here.

Flat Plastic Miniatures

All those miniatures make for a storage problem. We know. We have lots.

 

But our friends at ArcKnight came up with a solution for that: Miniatures printed on laser-cut, clear plastic sheets. And they’re better than your average cardboard pawns because each mini has a front and back, and the clear plastic makes them look three-dimensional on the table. Plus, as we mentioned, they don’t take up much storage space.

ArcKnight has all kinds of sets, but we dig the DM Starter Set curated by SlyFlourish. Get one here. You can also get some exclusive Dungeon Crate sets at the Dungeon Crate Shop.

Dungeon Crate

Allow us to toot our own horn for a second. Every month, Dungeon Crate sends out a box of fantasy RPG goodies. Adventures. Maps. Miniatures. Dice. Tokens. Cards. All the stuff you use on your game table, many of which are exclusive and custom items.

• Every month is different, and every crate features loot you’ll actually use.
• You can subscribe month-to-month or prepay for 3, 6 or 12 months and save some gold.
• A box of loot is an awesome gift for any RPG gamer. Subscribe here.

Adventure Vault

Check out what Dungeon Crate has to offer with this one-off mystery box. It includes a selection of items from our previous crates that lets you sample Dungeon Crate. Plus, it’s cheap, and we guarantee its contents are far more valuable than the price tag. Get one here.

Dice wallet

Show everyone how much you love to roll. Dungeon Crate actually carries two dice wallets: One deluxe wallet (get one here) and one Mighty Wallet (get one here).

D&D and RPG shirts

Show off your love of D&D, Pathfinder and other fantasy RPGs with some awesome T-shirts. Our very own “Player” shirt is currently our hottest seller. (Get it here.) We love this amazing cross between Dunkin Donuts and D&D. (Get it here.) And then there’s the Mimic/Stop Copying Me shirt that only tabletop gamers will get. (Get it here.) 

Character portrait

Your favorite character deserves to be realized with a commission from our pals at Dungeon Doodles. Matt will take your character sheet and turn it into a full-color portrait. Your commission includes the original artwork. Get it here.

Building your campaign world

It’s time. You’re starting your own campaign.

While many of us are happy to introduce players to a published setting like the Forgotten Realms, Golarion, Tal’Dorei, Eberron or Greyhawk, you might want to create your own world in which to do adventure.

But how do you build a campaign world? It seems like a daunting task to create an entire planet or continent or country, but you can do it.

Since we’ve been building the world of Halcyon - check out our adventures and be on the lookout for our upcoming Halcyon world guide - we have a few tips to help you out.

 

Our best advice: Get started. Start by drawing a map. Start with a major conflict. Start with a set of characters. Just start. Once you get the ball rolling, its momentum will keep it rolling through to the end.

Start small. Unless your plans for running games in your world will involve a lot of globe-trotting adventure, it’s OK to start with a town, a city or a country. Map out what adventure may be found there. You don’t have to have an entire planet detailed, especially if your adventures will never go to every corner of the map.

You don’t need everything spelled out. One of the best ways to map out a campaign setting is to play in it. Find out what locales and types of players like, and fill in the details that way.

Pick some core assumptions. D&D’s wonderful Dungeon Master’s Guide has some great ideas for world-building. One idea that explains about D&D’s own settings is setting a few core principles, such as “much of the world is untamed” and “the world is magical.” Create some of your own core principles such as “monsters are everywhere,” “magic doesn’t always work,” “the gods are absent,” “outside of cities, the world is complete wilderness” or “much of the world is unexplored.”

Pick some core conflicts. What is going on in the world? We like the advice recently tweeted by Mike Mearles, D&D’s lead designer and the co-creator of 5th edition: “When creating a setting, remember that people make it come to life, not geography. Start with triumphs, tragedies, and betrayals, not maps.”

Make a map. OK, yeah, we know we just cited a prominent designer saying to forget geography, but for some gamers, it’s helpful to visualize the world. So, make a map. Start with a large landmass, then fill in forests, lakes, mountains and rivers. Then drill down even deeper with cities, towns, roads, bridges and other locales. It will spark some creative ideas about what types of adventure may be found in different locations.

Create a pantheon. What gods govern the world you’re creating? What are their roles? Are there even gods at all? Creating the religious aspect can help shape the world (perhaps each god has a portion of the world they helped create) and shape the people (what factions answer to what gods?).

Include plenty of variety. You can incorporate anything into your world, but to make it exciting, we suggest plenty of variety. Mountains. Islands. Swamps. Deserts. Throw in a little of everything to make the world exciting.

There be monsters. What sorts of monsters are in your world? Are they plentiful? Or do they only live in dungeons? You can certainly populate your world with established bestiaries, but don’t be afraid to create a few monsters of your own making.

Bad guys and bad situations. Of course, there will be benevolent kings, noble knights and respected religious orders, but you ought to identify the bad actors in your world. What secret societies, black cults, undead rulers, nefarious gangs and despotic dictators are active in the world? And consequently, what forces oppose them? A lot of adventure can be found here.

 Check out our adventures, maps, monsters, and more on our website! Dungeon Crate website

10 Places to get maps for D&D night

We dig a good battle map.

While many play D&D, Pathfinder and other RPGs in the theater of the mind, we often lay out maps on the table (or on Roll20) with miniatures and markers to help visualize battles and other encounters.

But to do that, you need a good map.

If you’re running a lot of games, whipping up your own encounters or simply need some inspiration, you’re going to need some new maps. We can help.

We tracked down a host of sources for battle maps. Some are free, some cost a little, but they’re all amazing.

 

Dungeon Crate

Every month, we include an adventure in your crate. And every one comes with some kind of battle map. If you subscribe, you’ll have access to all those maps and adventures. Plus, you’ll get the awesome stuff that’s in the crate.

Dungeon Crate Website

 

r/dndmaps and r/battlemaps

There’s a subreddit for everything, right? These are dedicated solely to maps for RPGs. Many of the links posted are to free downloads. There’s tons of maps and tons of inspiration, and both subreddits are updated daily. Check out r/dndmaps and r/battlemaps.

DungeonMastering.com

The fine D&D blog has a wonderful trove of 387 maps, which you can check out right here.

Mike Schley

The wonderful Mike Schley is one of D&D’s official cartographers, and his work appears in every 5th edition product so far released, as far as we can tell. He sells downloads of his maps on his website, and most are available for less than $2. You can print them out large format or use them for online tabletops such as Roll20. We’ve done both, and they’re beautiful.

D&D’s map archive

For a while, D&D released free maps every week on its website. They’re all still available on the D&D archive site, which you can access here.

 Dyson Logos

The king of hand-drawn maps releases a ton of his maps on his blog, the Dodecahedron. They are gorgeous, and a massive archive of them is available on his site.

The Red Epic

Like Logos and Schley, Jared Blando is a great cartographer. He sells downloads and prints of his maps on his website, The Red Epic. Blando also made an awesome book about how to draw fantasy RPG world maps.

Cartographers Guild

This site is a message board and community for mapmakers of all kinds, but many draw beautiful world maps and battle maps. It might take some digging around the forums, but you’ll find some awesome stuff. Check it out.

DeviantArt

No surprise here, but the massive artist community site features a whole lot of RPG and fantasy artists, and a lot of them feature full maps, map tiles and icons/tokens. It’ll take some searching DeviantArt, but there’s a whole lot to find.

October: Cig Neutron, Bingeworthy, Weirdness.

This box was weird. And we mean that in the best way.

For October’s Dungeon Crate, we teamed up with Cig Neutron. To those who don’t know him, Cig is the latest winner of Syfy’s “Face Off,” where special effects artists compete to see who’s the best among them all.

Cig is a big-time gamer (maybe you’ve seen him rolling dice on D&D’s official Twitch channel), and he also created his own universe of weird and wild creatures.

So, we tapped Cig to help us with this box and for ideas to introduce his Sleazy Universe into this month’s adventure, “Drink or Die.”

Let’s dig in, shall we?

“Drink or Die”

Our latest adventure taps into the mind of Cig Neutron, introducing creatures such as binge bugs and buttgrubs to your D&D table. A strange interplanar carnival has invaded a town and it’s up to your party of adventurers to figure out what’s going on. But there’s a catch: Each adventurer wakes up from an epic bender with a binge bug attached to his head. The bugs feed on alcohol, so you’ll have to stay drunk to keep the bug from eating your brain. Our regular four-page adventure booklet is in the crate, but you’ll have to download the complete, 25-page digital crate to play it. (We kinda went all-out on this one.)

Dungeon Crate Shot Glass

The best way to participate in “Drink or Die” is to have a drink. Imbibe a bit with these DC shot glasses. (They even come with a couple dice!) And so, you should get a bonus to your roll for using the shot glass as a dice cup. Take down your drink, use it to roll your die across the table and get a +2 to your roll.

Pumpkin Golem Miniature

It wouldn’t be Halloween without pumpkins. And when evil druids visit the pumpkin patch, they raise giant pumpkin golems from the soil to terrorize the land. This awesome mini from Reaper Miniatures features the evil golem wielding a sickle. We can’t wait to get some paint on this bad boy!

Three-sided Die

When a coin doesn’t have enough sides, but a d4 has too many, this d3 is just right. Here at Dungeon Crate, we love new dice. Even better are special dice, like this d3 from GameScience.

As a special bonus: The surfaces of the die are inscribed with the letters, R, P and S so you can play rock, paper, scissors. (Just so you know, many of the random magic effects in “Drink or Die” require this little die.)

Binge Bug Tokens

How will you know if your character is inflicted with one of Cig Neutron’s binge bugs? By affixing this awesome, laser-cut, acrylic token to its base. The fine folks at Advanced Deployment custom produced these tokens for use with “Drink or Die.” And they’re useful as condition markers if you’re not playing our adventure. The gross little bugs are perfect to mark that a character is poisoned or inflicted with some kind of disease.

“Player” Button

Show how much you love RPGs with this “Player” button from Dungeon Doodles! Everyone loves this design, especially fans of death metal. (Hint: You can also order it as a T-shirt.)

Binge Bug Sticker

Because stickers are fun and these can go on your head.