Reuniting the Band: A Token Effort

Now that I had workable maps, it was time to get some tokens. “Tokens” in this sense means small pictures that represent a character or monster, and that can be moved around on the map. We use them to determine how far monsters and people can move in one turn, and who is in range to fight whom. In a face to face game you would typically use metal or plastic miniature figures for this purpose. On a virtual tabletop you use picture files.

Some history

Minis (or tokens) were a new thing for my group. Back in the day, when we played face-to-face, we were using 1st edition AD&D rules. Minis and battle maps were strictly optional with those rules. In order to use them effectively, you would need hundreds of them. None of us could afford to buy so many, so we simply went without. I did have some inexpensive cardboard miniatures (Steve Jackson’s Cardboard Heroes), but we only used them sporadically. Combat was largely “theater of the mind”.

For our online game I converted my campaign to D&D 3.5. Since 3.5 relies heavily on miniatures and a battle map, I had to do something about tokens for the characters and monsters. Luckily, I still had the Cardboard Heroes. In fact, I had purchased the complete set as a spiral-bound book at Gen Con the previous year.

Creating a Monster (or a lot of them)

So once again I turned to my trusty scanner. While scanning maps hadn’t worked out very well (see here and here for the gory details), I’m happy to say that scanning the cardboard figures worked quite well. Of course there was a lot more to it than just scanning them. I had to use a graphics program to crop them to a square, resize them, and re-save them, but that went pretty quickly. The results were pretty decent.

While I had the scanner fired up, I scanned in all the monster figures from the set as well. But I only did the cropping and resizing on the ones I expected to need soon. I reasoned that I once I had the scanning done I could finish them as needed. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t waste effort making tokens I wouldn’t use. This worked out really well. Over the years I have built up quite a store of tokens this way.

As you have probably deduced, what I ended up with were “portrait style” tokens. I find I prefer this style over the “top down” tokens because I find it easier to differentiate one token from another, especially when the map is zoomed out, but it really is just a matter of preference.

Over time my collection of tokens has grown considerably. I picked up a couple sets of tokens from Fiery Dragon, which covered most of the common monsters, and that has been a big time saver. I also got some PDF’s from Order Of the Stick that were easy to convert to tokens.

Getting creative-ish

Once in a while I use a monster that doesn’t appear in any of those sources. When I wanted to use the animated skeleton of a horse to pull a necromancer’s wagon, I had to search the web to find a picture of a horse skeleton, and crop and resize it to make a token. Likewise, nobody does tokens of mind flayers or beholders because of copyright restrictions, so I had to find drawings on the web and adapt them.

When all else fails, FG comes with letter tokens. I have used them from time to time, but always as a last resort. Now that I’m used to having a monster’s picture, a letter token just seems a bit jarring.

Other uses

One nice thing about portrait tokens is that when a monster is killed you can rotate the token upside down to mark it. If the token is rectangular and non-transparent (as most of mine are) you can even rotate it 45 degrees so it looks like a diamond instead of a square to make it really obvious.

The last item to discuss is the scale of your tokens. But that dovetails into a discussion of map scale, and I have a fair bit to say about map scale, so I think I’ll defer that to its own blog post.

I hope you found this useful. Please feel free to comment if you have any questions, criticisms, or observations. Thanks for reading!