So far in this journey back into tabletop gaming, I’ve relied on mapping out tactical combat using paper-glued-to-washers tokens as described in one of my early posts. These have worked out well for the most part, but I’m considering going with an alternative for a while to see how that works out.
Some of my tokens are wearing out or separating (maybe I should have used a hot glue gun instead of a regular glue stick); they take up a lot of space in my (now multiple) divided storage containers if I try to sort them into different compartments, and they’re not always easy to pick up off the gaming surface. Mainly, though, I just want a little more simulated, kinda-sorta visual depth on the game table.
Actual miniatures – especially in quantity enough to run typical D&D adventures, which often feature a wide variety of types of creatures to interact with – would be prohibitively expensive, as nice as it would be to have them.
So to kick off our soon-to-be D&D campaign I’ve skimmed through the Phandelver adventure included in the Starter Set to figure out what monsters I’ll need tokens for, and I’m making stand-up paper miniatures for them. Armed with a pile of photo printer paper I picked up at a discount a decade ago and haven’t used much, a fresh (but soon to be depleted, I’m sure) set of ink cartridges, and a simple paper trimmer I picked up at Walmart, I started looking for printable paper figures people had already made.
Almost all of my needs were met by Printable Heroes. The free items there would have provided a large number of figures in themselves, but I decided to pay into the $2 tier on the related Patreon page to get a little more variety. Most of the files from PH are PDFs with interactive features, so they need to be opened in a desktop PDF viewer rather than in a browser-based solution. That most likely means Adobe’s reader, but I prefer Foxit PDF and used that successfully.
You’ll start out with a sheet that looks something like this:
The goblins and the bases on this page do not print by default; rather, you click on the ones you want to print to activate them. In many cases multiple clicks will cycle through color variants of each item. When you’ve made your selections you might end up with something like this, assuming you need three goblins and want a couple of different colored bases:
If you preview the print output, you’ll see that it will only print the selected items. This is perhaps not the most efficient use of paper, but it does save using expensive ink to print more items than you actually need. Make sure when printing that scaling is at 100% and there are no special sizing options turned on in the print setup.
All told, I ended up printing almost 30 pages of PH items! I skipped printing the paper bases as I plan to use a different method of basing them.
But there were a few NPCs and monsters I needed for Phandelver that weren’t available on the PH site, so I needed to roll my own on those. I found a few different useful tutorials like this one regarding how to custom-make paper minis. But as I’m one of the three people in North America who lacks a legitimate or pirated copy of Photoshop, I went with free software I do have installed: Paint.NET for the monster images, and LibreOffice Draw to build the fixed-size framework to outline my tokens.
First I fired up Draw to create a re-usable basic template, downloadable below. I laid out a pattern for standard-sized figures and another for larger figures like ogres or supers with growth powers, modified slightly from the tutorial in that I went with 3/8″ tabs on the edges instead of 1/2″ ones to match the layouts of the PrintedHeroes ones. These are achieved using the box tool to outline the necessary area – draw the box, then right-click while it’s selected and choose Edit Style from the menu, hit the Transparency tab and select 100% transparency, and set the outline to whatever color you want. Then I used the line tool to draw the center fold point and the tabs at the edges, ending up with something that looks like the image to the right. I drag-select all the parts of the small template and hit Ctrl-Shift-G to group them, then do the same for the large template. I save this as PaperFigTemplate and have linked it here for anyone who’s interested to download.
Starting from a copy of my template file, I went into Draw again. I knew I needed one large creature and six normal-sized ones, so I selected the smaller of the two templates and copy-pasted five more instances of it. (As a shortcut, I could select the smaller frame, then hold down control while dragging it – instead of moving the existing object, this will create a copy of it at the new location.) I arranged everything on the page to make sure there’s no overlap and no space between items.
I decided to label the front-facing tabs on each item, in part so I didn’t have to keep referring back to my scribbled paper notes while searching for images to fill the tokens with. Using the text tool and setting it to a small enough font, my document then looked like the one to the left.
Now I needed to spend some time finding usable images for my minis. Fortunately there are official sketches of most of them on the D&D Beyond site, which I proceeded to pillage because these are for personal use only. Taking the Owlbear as an example, I download the image, opened it in Paint.NET, and used the magic wand tool set at a low threshold to select all the empty background. The Owlbear had an empty area between the legs and the shadow drawn under it, so I held down Ctrl and clicked that area to add it to the selected region. Hitting the delete key erased the background and left it transparent (as denoted by the checkerboard pattern shown below) so there’s no danger of the white background overlapping stuff that should print in the final document. At this point I also cropped out some of the extra whitespace around the edges of the image, though it’s not strictly necessary.
I saved the resulting file in the PNG format (GIF would also work), not as a JPEG – which does not support transparency. Next I went to the Image menu and selected Flip Vertical. A click to the little “Properties” button in the lower left of the Layers pane allowed me to adjust opacity, which I dragged down to around 130 (roughly 50% opacity). I saved this version, also as a PNG, with a name like “owlbear_flipside”.
Back in Draw, I drag-and-dropped my main Owlbear image onto the document (I could also have inserted it using “Image” under the “Insert” menu). The image then needed to be sized to fit into the layout for the large token, so I dragged the Owlbear into the bottom of the two large sections on that template, and hit F4 to open the Size and Position dialog. Making sure the “Keep Ratio” box is checked, I began to experiment with resizing the image to fit. Most of the creatures I planned to portray were taller than they were wide, so I would start by setting the height to equal to or slightly less than the height of the area (1.5″ normal size, 3″ large), depending on the amount of empty area around the edges of the image itself. Since my Owlbear image was fairly wide, I started by adjusting the width first instead, and ended up settling on the measurements shown below. On one or two of the other images I ended up doing a little manual dragging of the edges of the images to tweak the size just slightly.
Next I inserted the flipside Owlbear image and set it to the same size, then draged it to the upper large image block of the large template. I tried to get it positioned so that the flipside image would appear at approximately the same place on the back of the mini as the main one would appear on the front, but I didn’t have to be too exacting on this since I’m going to leave these minis in rectangular form rather than trimming the edges into the shape of the character depicted. Had I desired to do so I could have used the Size and Position window again to adjust them to a higher precision.
After repeating this process for all the normal-sized minis that will be created on this sheet, I saved and printed. The end result is shown here, along with one of the PrintableHeroes goblin sheets:
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a few hundred paper cuts to make. Next time: Making ’em stand up!