Back in the time of the dinosaur, the way I learned to play D&D was primarily based in the “theater of the mind”-style of storytelling. Sure, I owned vinyl grid mats, and there were occasions where we’d break out a few minis, but this was fairly infrequent.
When I decided to come out of retirement as a DM back at the end of September, I considered that I was returning to the hobby with decades of professional design experience in my toolkit. Part of the allure of being a DM now is that I can screw around with creative writing, and making a web site, and printing out designed PDFs for players, and wearing down my Wacom tablet building custom art elements, etc.
Over the last few months, I’ve also quietly been working out ways to introduce customized “2.5D” battle maps into our games. I’ve tagged countless pins on Pinterest, bookmarked pages and saved videos to “watch later” on an array of painting techniques, downloaded folders of JPEG tearsheets, and otherwise scoured the Internet for inspiration and guidance.
Great minds think alike. This last weekend, my brother and niece surprised me with a birthday gift as I arrived at Zulu’s Board Game Cafe with a huge boxed gift—the Fantasy World Creator! (Again, THANK YOU!)
When I got home that night, I immediately started checking out all of the unboxing videos I could find. I’ll skip the part where I gush about how amazing I think this whole product looks and jump to how crushed I felt when I saw the Kickstarter was funded in pounds, not dollars, and online reviews referenced centimeters, not inches.
Shit.
So, yesterday I sucked it up and made the 45 minute drive back out to Zulu’s and returned the game, making an exchange for Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and a gift gift card. I’ve been wanting Xanathar’s Guide for months, so I felt really good about the trade.
I have no idea why I can’t just leave things alone; I couldn’t get that gorgeous boxed set out of my mind, and I couldn’t figure out why anyone would release a product like that scaled in centimeters as opposed to inches…and guess what…
Yep. Researching it even more today, I’m now seeing that the set is actually scaled in INCHES.
Seriously—check out Black Magic Craft’s unboxing video (below) and then take a wild guess of how I’m thinking about spending the next few hours of my life. When this is all said and done, I may have spent an additional 3+ hours driving back and forth to Zulu’s, simply because I’m afraid of the metric system.