I won’t say I came up with this idea, cause I didn’t but I thought I’d show these around. I picked up a sheet of foam core $2, a roll of 1″ magnetic strip $3, a bag of 12″ sticks $2 and black magic marker $3 and some plain ol elmer’s glue and fashioned these status flags.
I cut out 1″ square foam core pieces, well technically slightly less than 1″ square. I also cut out 1″ pieces of the flexible magnetic strip. I cut the sticks into 4″ long pieces. Using an x-acto knife I cut a small hole in one corner of the foam core and glued a stick into it. Once those were all dry I peeled and stuck the magnet bits to the bottom. I have magnetic receptive game mats.
Using photoshop I made some number flags and some condition flags. The numbered flags were glued directly to the sticks. THe condition flags were glued to small pieces of drinking straws.
Now during play I can park a NPC on top of one of the flag bases and can easily see what number it is for the purposes of record tracking and announcing. Â In addition as an NPC gets a condition I can drop a reminder on it. By dropping them upside I can designate they go away at the end of the turn (turned over) or if they’re right side up they’re a Save Ends. I made the status flags pretty generic without numbers because frankly having a marker for every freakin’ option is just too much. +X ongoing, -X to AC (F/R/W), Save Ends, End of Next Turn, etc and so on. The status markers are just visual reminders when a creature has something odd about it.
If you’re mini’s also have magnets on the bottom of them then they all stick together quite well and you can use the status stand to move them around pretty easily. Otherwise you just have to be careful when you pick them up to avoid the mini from falling off.
Anyway for $10 or so I made 25 of these with a ton of material left over.
3 comments
Anonymous
December 31, 2009 at 11:16 am (UTC -5)
Would you be willing to share the Photoshop file for the flags you created?
Dennis
December 31, 2009 at 2:14 pm (UTC -5)
Yes. I’ll put them up for download sometime today or tomorrow.
Dennis
December 31, 2009 at 8:31 pm (UTC -5)
Ugh, looks like I may have deleted them or didn’t save them which is odd because I know I exported them as PDF’s. Ben over at bensrpgpile has some which as it turns out is where I got the idea from watching a few minutes of their play videos. They obviously took a little extra time than I did. I churned my 25 out in about the same minutes and cut it all out by hand. http://bensrpgpile.com/?page_id=11