| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
As far as I'm aware, I have purchased every Pawn Box that has been released yet, as well as several adventure path pawn sets. In some cases, I even got duplicate boxes as well.
But now I have thousands and thousands of Pawns. Finding the right ones when prepping for an adventure (or for my characters) takes more time than setting up the adventure or making the character does!
Does anyone have any advice on how to organize these things so that I can not only find what I need when I need it, but more ably carry the pawns with me when out adventuring into town?
Any sorting tools or containers or tips and tricks to offer up? If possible, provide pics! :)
As for me, right now, I use the boxes they came in for the most part, though they rarely stay in the original box.
Massive wheeled chest - Holds all of my small and medium monsters
Bestiary I Box - Holds all of my large monsters
Bestiary II Box - Holds all of my bases and huge monsters
NPC Codex Box - Holds all of my generic NPCs (such as "pirate" or "scoundrel")
Inner Sea NPC Box - Holds all campaign specific pieces (such as "Red Mantis Assassin" or "Gray Maiden"), including iconic and named characters
Monster Codex Box - Contains all playable monster races (goblins, drow, fetchlings, etc.)
Except for the first box, which is just a huge mess pile of pawns, I try to keep them standing up in alphabetical order. Space is tight though in several boxes, and I can't even flip through them easily anymore without them springing out of the box from the tension sometimes. :(
I generally keep Adventure Path sets wrapped up until needed for the adventure path, after which time they get sorted into the above.
I only own four pawn sets and I'm not sure how well my system will scale. Having said that, I keep all of the pawns in the original "pages" and keep those in full-page sleeves. These are numbered and kept in binders.
The key to making this useful, is that I've built an index that is printed and kept in one of the binders. I'll post pics when I get home.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Promised pictures:
Overview
Close-up showing the backing sheets* I recently added. These should make it easier to find the right slot when putting pawns away.
I cut-up the sleeve that the smaller sets come in and use them as covers for the binder. I still need to make copies of the box for that one.
This approach will probably have scaling issues, but I really like the index pages I made. However, I need to update them. They currently use the official names** for each pawn. It's nice to have an index of named NPCs, but I use most of them as generic examples of their race more often than not. I need to go through and create a generic entry for the named pawns and add it to the main index.
* Color-copies of the whole page printed on simple paper. I thought about gluing these to the empty cardboard "page" but decided against it.
** With names normalized. e.g. All giants named as "Giant, Hill" and all dragons as "Dragon, Young Blue". Different boxes use slightly different conventions in a few places. If anyone wants to use mine as a template, feel free.
OMG. That is fantastic! Looks like a lot of hard work to set up though, but man, it must make things easier down the road.
Wish I hadn't thrown out all of my punch out cards now. :(
Yeah, same problem here. I only discovered the sleeving solution a few months ago, but way too late for the Bestiary I, II and NPC Codex box.
I'm dreading the thought, but might actually re-buy some of those to
- a) have more of some pawns and
- b) be able to sleeve at least the new one's "correctly".
|
I thought about gluing these to the empty cardboard "page" but decided against it.
May I ask you why you decided against it?
I am currently thinking about using card stock backing glued to the original sheets. I do think I am going to steal your printed backing though....
I was thinking of just leaving them in the original boxes however, for compactness.
I did buy a set of each color and size of the new colored bases, anyone else feel like they got FAR too many of the black bases now?
|
Still looking for a way to store them myself, but I've done a bit of work creating an excel sheet to search for tokens. It needs a lot of refinement (read: it's a bit of a mess), but it does the job, giving the name, set, number and size of a pawn.
I've put it in dropbox HERE, let me know what you think! (You'll need to download it as it uses macros, sorry)
I thought about gluing these to the empty cardboard "page" but decided against it.May I ask you why you decided against it?
The original reason was that I was sure there would be leakage of the glue and it would forever plague me.
When actually inserting the backings last night, I realized it would be nearly impossible to get the an individual pawn out if I had glued on card-stock backings as I had originally been thinking.
I have some plastic storage casesthat I used to store them. Each case has little plastic dividers in it already. I have my pawns seperated by monster type/NPC Class, with my large amd huge pawns in sandwich baggies aosmo by type in the top of the cases. Its not the most efficent or easy to access system but it sure as hell beats digging through a messy pawn box.
I believe my girlfriend bought me the cases from a Michael's if anyone is curious.
I have some plastic storage casesthat I used to store them. Each case has little plastic dividers in it already. I have my pawns seperated by monster type/NPC Class, with my large amd huge pawns in sandwich baggies aosmo by type in the top of the cases. Its not the most efficent or easy to access system but it sure as hell beats digging through a messy pawn box.
I believe my girlfriend bought me the cases from a Michael's if anyone is curious.
got a pic or product number?
@Ginoa: I know what I'll be doing if I ever get the free time.