Fun with DIY RPG Tokens

Several years back I had a respectable mini’s collection.  I had also invested quite a bit of cash and time into a creating my own elaborate Hirst Arts dungeonscapes.  However that was then.  When my wife and I moved to New Zealand we had to get rid of most of our earthly possessions, my RPG stuff being among them.

I’m beginning a new campaign again after a two year hiatus and was in need of some minis or tokens for our game.  Since I’m on a budget I opted for the latter.  I recalled reading a tutorial by Newbie DM several years back detailing how to make your own tokens.  After a bit of research I found a couple of other helpful tutorials on the same topic and promptly got to work.

I borrowed the basic format from Josh’s blog, but also drew inspiration from Dorkadia.  However I decided to use furniture felt pads for the backing medium.  They weren’t as heavy as washers, they look really nice and they come with an adhesive backing.  I wanted to easily and clearly distinguish between PC and NPC tokens on the one hand and monster tokens on the other.  So for characters I searched for images that included a painted background, like so:

For monsters I chose images with a plain white background.  I purchased 1/2 inch, 1 inch and 2 inch hole punches and felt pads so that I could have small, medium and large sized creature tokens:

Here’s a close up of one of the large size tokens:

I used thick, high quality photo paper rather than card-stock for these to keep the image resolution high.  Likewise, I made sure that all of the images were being printed out at 300dpi.

The longest part of the whole process was locating artwork for these tokens.  I spent countless hours running google searches for Paizo and WoTC images as well as mining images from Deviantart and Pinterest.  However I’m very pleased with the way these turned out.  Not factoring in the initial investment for the hole punches I estimate that the tokens ended up costing my about 21 cents for medium sized tokens, 30 cents for small tokens, and just under a buck for large tokens.