Judge's Toolbox

 I saw a video a while back of this person's GM's toolkit. It was a super lightweight kit they brought with them when running games to make their life easier. Most of my stuff is still in storage so I had to find pictures of them from a while back but I figured I could post the pictures of what I use, talk about it, share links to what I can, and hopefully give you some ideas for your own table.

    I wanna start this off by saying that my setup is super low budget. I don't like to use a lot of minis or map pieces. I find that, with the way I run, mostly improv and in the moment decisions, the use of a lot of map pieces and stuff doesn't really work for me. I come from an era of using rocks and pennies and whatever we could find as minis so keeping things low budget has always felt good and a little nostalgic. The idea behind this is that I could carry this with me easily and run a game almost anywhere with my backpack of books I used. 

With as many of these entries as possible I'm including links to show their price. I strongly encourage you to check your local equivalent of  a hobby or craft store before purchasing from amazon or any online retailer. If you go to a local craft store you're going to be able to hold it and look at it and really decide if this is what you want. They also sell them in much more manageable amounts, you don't need one pound of glass beads when a small bag is more than you'll ever need. 

 

Lets start off with the top of the toolbox, meeples. You can get these on amazon pretty cheap on amazon in a huge number. You can get them in wood, or plastic or even transparent plastics now it seems. I liked wood, just felt better in my fingers. coming in so many colors makes it easy to distinguish what they are supposed to be. It's easy to take a note card and place it on the table with meeples on it with "= orc" to make a key if players are having a hard time tracking it. This is such a low budget way to have a lot of minis out on the field for normal sized or smaller foes.

The first tray on the top. I went ahead a numbered this one to help with explaining everything. Tray 1 is easy, its just a few dice. I count at least 3 d20 in there which makes me think I probably put at least 3 sets of the standard dice in there in case anyone forgot theirs, or someone drops one off the table into the shadow realm

Tray 2: Glass beads that are flat on one side. They are really helpful for a lot of things. marking spots on a map, sometimes I use them to track enemies, sometimes they are just used to mark light sources or things that I'm encouraging the players to interact with that aren't monsters or NPCs. They are also super cheap. I think mine came from some random planter I walked past in the trash but they can be purchased in absurd amounts cheaply too.

Tray 3: Super simple, wooden disks from the craft store with a number on one side and a skull on the other. you could use them for death saving throws or something else but I used them as enemy tokens. It helps for people to be able to say "oh I'm gonna go to attack number 1" and track them, then flip them over when the players kill them to track the bodies. I remember looking online and finding they were much cheaper to purchase in a hobby store, almost half the price I found online. Here are some of them for you to look at online and get an idea of how much they are.

Tray 4a: A two parter because I couldn't comfortably keep the other part of them in that tray. These are just little card holders that have a cardboard piece that slots in. for a while there I used them for the PCs. the players could draw their character, write their name, doodle a little symbol for their character, anything really on the card part and then it was easy to tell who was who and who was were. I offered to print off art and glue them to the cards for players but that never really happened. 

Tray 5: A collection of pawns in different colors. sometimes they were used for PCs sometimes they were for hirelings or NPCs who came along with the party. These came before the cards in tray 4 and were mostly phased out aside from NPCs after a while. I originally got them for a board game I was making but ultimately never used them for that because I found out I could build my prototype in tabletop simulator.

Tray 6: Similar to tray 3. I had larger ones for larger foes. The neat part is these are usually measure in the half inch so they always lined up with the grid. I had some long ones for mounts along with the ones shown there.

Tray 7: The all important spare pens and pencils. I always assumed everyone would show up with none and expected them to go missing so for pens I raided a supply closet for these stylus pens from work and got mechanical pencils. Buried under there are long erasers in those plastic sleeves that you click out like a pen, I love them and it saved a lot of mechanical pencils from never being able to refill.

 

Tray 4B: Talked about above as the other half of the top tray.

Tray 8: There are more wooden disks that fill out the slot of "large" size monsters and enemies, along with some peel and stick glass tiles that have numbers on them. I never really used those for much. One time in 5e I used them to track exhaustion, another time I used them to track traps on the floor the players had found, once I used them as a stand in for monsters. I'm not sure I would seek these out when I rebuild this box.

Tray 9: A bunch of dry erase markers in different colors. I don't typically use minis or scenery pieces and I draw out my maps so having a bunch of colors was usually pretty helpful to get hazards and details across. not the same tray but next to 9 is wet erase that filled out the same function. It was usually an either/or situation but there was one single time that I pre-drew the tiles and had some of them in the wet erase so I could wipe away the dry erase parts and make the map "crumble" away. This tray also includes a sand timer of 1 minute which is often used to put the pressure on players in tense moments. When I take it out, it usually doesn't even mean anything, it's just there to cause panic.

Tray 10: Those wooden pieces I mentioned earlier that are used for mounts. they are a little long and take up just over two 1' squares. 

Tray 11: Even more little wooden disks with numbers on one side and "X" on the other to signal a body. these tiny ones are used for swarms, like my favorite little monsters, vegepygmy.

 

On the bottom of the box I really managed to cram a lot of stuff in there and this one has some things that are not pictured or are in later pictures. For example, not pictured is a standard deck of playing cards. I have never really had a use for them but I always imagined it could be useful some day or in the event most people don't show up at the last minute we could still play cards.

Number 1: This is a wooden salt cellar I found in a thrift store, I keep one complete set of DCC dice in it. It probably takes up too much space but I really like it.

Number 2: Note cards. Any table needs these. one side is blank, the other side had lines. Great for making quick notes for players to hang onto, place something down on a map. I'm confident no one reading this blog needs me to talk more about what I do with these, I'm not breaking any new ground.

Number 3: A dry eraser and yet more pens. Its been so long since I used these that I don't even remember what was special about these pens. the eraser was super helpful to have on hand because of how I did maps, which you'll see later.

Number 4: Sticky notes. Yet another staple at any table. as with note cards above, I'm not breaking any new ground here.

Number 5: These are stolen from Cranium. That is the player pawns and the die from cranium. not pictured, I 3d printed 3 more, one in silver, one in white, and one in black. These became my default PC pieces for a while. Someone drew little faces on them to show the direction they were facing. The die was just thrown in there, because why not? On occasion I would have a player who called bullshit on the dice that were rolled out in the open and be salty their character died. I would offer a chance to change their fate if they could call what color the die would land on before it was rolled. I encourage people to plunder old board games from thrift stores and the trash for pieces of their games. I'm still kicking myself for not taking the pieces of mysterium and throwing them in with this stuff.

Number 6: Have I mentioned that I used to run 5e? These decks are from a company called Nord Games. I got into 5e because friends wanted to get into the hobby and had discovered D&D, so I ran the system they had already read and asked about instead of DCC which I had been running for years at that point. The decks I owned were a happy middle ground between DCC and 5e for how criticals are handled. I wanted tables with fun options, The players wanted big numbers and were deeply opposed to critical tables because a certain famous GM didn't use them on his show. As for the treasure decks, I like treasure to be randomly generated unless you specifically are hunting down a named item and have gone on a quest for it. The last one there, the luck deck, if I still had this I would be using it in DCC. The luck deck was used to add something meaningful to rolling a 20 or a 1 outside of combat. On a 20 you would get a card you could play at any time that could alter your own die rolls or add some beneficial effect to the game. On a 1, I got a card that I could hang onto and hit you with later to penalize a roll or cause some doom. I will never forget a player evaluating how hard his save would be, realizing he had a slim margin of success and then shouting "you're going to the shadow realm!" when I slapped that card down in front of him. Bastard still made his save.

Not Pictured: Plastic poker chips. These got a lot of mileage as fleeting luck tokens, fellowship tokens, markers for resources players might forget to track, number of days traveling vs number of rations. Just a whole lot of use.

Not Pictured: Plastic bottle rings. When you drink a soda you get a ring of different colors depending on the brand and flavor. The colors could mean anything and I used them to indicate status, bleeding, on fire, stunned, paralyzed, poisoned, you name it. I kept them in so many colors, I had a little tray I kept in that bottom box.

Other things I liked to bring with me in my bag with my book and dice include the dry erase dungeon tiles and a binder that was my Judge's screen. Pictured below, on the left is the boxes of the dry erase tiles and on the right is the binder I used for my screen. I really liked that binder because it bent at that crease along it and could be used as it's own stand.

 

 The dungeon tiles were really nice because you could do chases, extend rooms as needed, spin them around while making rooms to mess with people's orientation as they tried to map. They were a lot more to carry than the classic roll up map, for sure, but I preferred these because it presented more chances to mess with players in a way that is less antagonistic and more funny. They can be found at Roll 4 Initiative where you can get them in hexes and even different patterns if you don't want white tiles.

The binder opened and folded in the back with a piece along the bottom to make it sit open. I had quick reference tables for both 5e and DCC in mine because I was switching off between running both of those at the time. It takes up more space than a normal judges screen but I could get so much more information this way, including full critical tables and fumble tables. Its hard to tell in this picture but it's standing on it's own there super nice to have on hand. 

 

 

 I hope this maybe gave you some ideas for stuff to use at your own table for low budget fun.
 

 If you're thinking of building your own Judge's toolbox like this I cannot stress enough that no single tray should ever cost you more than $5, these things can be done super cheap and still be super effective.

 If nothing else this is something I've wanted to talk about for a while now but was pretty sure I would never find these pictures again. If you made it this far, thanks for reading!