My players are terrible about keeping track of who is carrying what. They’ll take note of items they collect as they go along, but decisions about distribution tend to not get made and inventory lists on character sheets don’t get updated.
This is a particular problem for healing potions, where they know the group as a whole has six of them, but nobody will decide in whose backpack each of them resides. Being an item whose location can be critical during combat, it’s rather important to know which character has how many. I wanted to try using some props to sort of gently force the issue by adding some visual interest; my basic idea went something like this:
- Each character gets a little plastic bag or some other container for her potions
- When a potion is found in-game, set out an appropriately-labeled potion prop, which they can choose to hand to whichever character they want
- When a potion is used, the prop gets returned to the DM
- If, at the end of the session, a found potion prop is still unclaimed… it also gets returned to the DM!
I seriously considered just using a sampling of the several collections of 3d printable potions on Thingiverse, but I wanted my potions to actually look like clear glass with liquid inside and the 3d prints didn’t seem like they would lend themselves to that look. On the flip side, all of the appropriate little glass bottles I could find turned out to be rather expensive, especially in the quantity I would need to make my potions in a reasonable number and variety.
A Jar-ring Discovery
Given the choice between a look I didn’t like and an expense I just couldn’t justify for the project, I simply set the idea aside and found other things to work on. But around September of last year, the local Dollar Tree revamped its crafting area, and to my surprise they had started stocking exactly what I needed! Three different sizes of little glass jars with cork stoppers, six for $1! I could use the large and medium ones for the more powerful healing potions, and the smallest for everything else! Of course, they only had 2 packs left of the little ones that I needed the most of, and they were sold out at the three other Dollar Trees I drove to. Then it turned out they didn’t get them in often, and they tended to sell fast when they did… so it ended up taking me until mid-December to acquire a decent sized collection.
Making Labels
With a pile of tiny glass containers on hand, I now had to think about what types of potions I was going to make props for, and how many of each. I started with the potions the characters were already carrying – at least, someone was allegedly carrying them, but nobody knew who – and skimmed ahead into the Storm King’s Thunder book we’re going to be running next to see what was needed for that. Finally, I found a list of standard 5e potions online and decided to make 2-3 of most of the items there just to plan ahead for possible future adventures, added-in side quests, etc.
I pulled up the structured drawing program from LibreOffice and used its built-in shape and font tools to quickly put together a printable page full of potion labels.
For the healing potions instead of marking them as standard, greater, and superior, I decided the better solution was to simply label them with their associated dice rolls. I initially planned on trying to cut out the little curved corner pieces on every label with a razor knife, but I wasn’t very good at actually doing that, so I ended up just snipping the corners with scissors and leaving them un-rounded.
I’ll include a link here to the actual document. It uses a font called Tolkien which I found on the interwebs years ago and is probably still out there somewhere. If you don’t have that font, you’ll probably get an error opening the file, but with luck it will revert to Arial or some other default, which you can change to suit the look you want.
Potion Labels for LibreOffice Draw
After printing the sheet out on normal paper, I prepared it using the same method DM Scotty used in labeling his own (much larger, actual-liquid-filled) potion props: basically wipe a very watered-down tan onto the paper to give it a parchment color without covering any of print, let it dry, and coat both sides with matte Mod Podge (paid link).
Potion list on hand and labels ready, it was time to start mixing some chemicals! <Mad-scientist cackle>
Alchemy 101
Armed with containers, I next had to find something to fill them with. I needed lots of color variety and varying transparency to maintain visual differences between types of potions. I wanted something that would harden inside the bottle so it wouldn’t spill if the cap came off, but which would look like liquid until someone tried to slosh it around. To this end, I tried a number of experiments, most of which I completely failed to photograph while they were in progress.
- Clear Elmer’s glue mixed with paint or ink: This would have been the cheap, easy go-to method, but I didn’t have a good way to squeeze the color-mixed liquid into the little vials that would keep it from getting all over the mouths and necks of the bottles while going in, resulting in “liquid” that defied gravity. (In retrospect, it would have been interesting to try letting the Potion of Flying dry upside-down…) It was too thick for a regular dropper, and I didn’t have any kind of usable paint dropper type squeeze bottles available.
- UV Resin: I’d bought some clear resin for my 3D printer and thought it might work to mix colors into that and sit them in the sun to dry. Paints wouldn’t mix with the resin at all – they just floated on top – but inks worked well. Ultimately I decided to save the resin for use in the printer, though.
- Acrylic resin: The two-part clear stuff you find in the artificial flower section at Walmart. I’d bought a box of this a while back to try to use on those modular river tiles I still hope to make someday, but I decided to go ahead and use it here. I mixed up a whole tub of it, then divided that out into a bunch of individual plastic cups and added different inks (because paints didn’t mix in well) to each one for color. This was thin enough to suck up into a little dropper and squirt into the bottles cleanly, so it’s what I ended up using for the bulk of the props. The main problem I ran into with this was that when trying to mix in more than one ink color, it tended to gravitate toward a murky grayish-brown rather than the expected hue. I also tried mixing in some glitter, but it tended to settle before the resin dried.
- Dollar store glitter glue: This was a late addition after I’d run out of the resin but still had a lot of potions to make. I didn’t want to spend the money on another resin kit, and had more or less exhausted the color possibilities with the inks I had on hand anyway. These did have the air-pocket problem I’d seen with the Elmer’s – probably more so – and for the most part I just had to live with that where I couldn’t get a toothpick to swirl it around enough to fill the bubbles in. But the colors were bright and sparkly, the glue containers had long tips that allowed for squeezing out the glue completely inside the potion bottles to avoid anything sticking the “empty” parts. I also found I could squirt two colors into a bottle and use a toothpick to stir them around into a sort of nebulous multi-colored swirl.
Even with all these materials available I still didn’t really have enough different looks to make every kind of potion distinctive, so I hit on the idea of also coloring the corks. So, for instance, all of my potions of giant strength use the same colored glitter-glue swirl, but the corks on the stone giant ones are dry-brushed gray to look rocky, the fire giant ones have red corks, etc. I didn’t think of this until after some of the corks had been super-glued in place so the colors don’t all show through the neck of the bottles, but it still worked to further distinguish the different concoctions.
Drink Responsibly
Labels were cut out and applied using Aleene’s Tacky Glue (paid link). Almost every time I affixed a label the edges would start to peel up after a minute or two, but if I pushed them back down at that point they would stay in place.
Shown above are single examples of each potion I made, though there were also a few I put in jars with screw-on lids, and a few experiments and leftovers I didn’t use but kept around in case I needed placeholders for some other sort of potion in the future.
In the end, I filled up one of the cheap tackle boxes I normally use for minis:
