We started off as a simple pen and paper table. A few journals and pens were the only real set pieces of our story. We had bought the “Mines of Phandelver” module but it didn’t include any maps. My husband (Dungeon Master of our table) had to cover the text while showing us the pictures in the guide while he ran us through our very first Dungeons and Dragons experience.
After a few weeks we decided to add more to the table and we decided to buy some terrain maps. We also found a cute circular paper token generator that we could print out easily. We made tokens of all the player characters and made so many different people, monsters, villains, heroes, beasts, and animals.
The terrain maps were dry-erasable plastic and each side was a separate terrain. We had a stone, grass, parchment, and white. They were great for a while but we kept having to re-draw maps and fix smudges. It became super difficult to keep having to do so much repeating work.
We moved on to grid paper soon. My husband found a great large pad of grid paper that was broken down into 1in. by 1in. squares with even smaller squares inside that made adding details easier. I ended making quite a few paper maps with houses, ruins, clearings, camps, and sooooo many roads! I tried to color in as many as I could but sometimes I didn’t have a lot of time.
I loved the paper map times. They were cute and playing in them during sessions was fun. It was great but then we ran into the opposite problem. My husband had to keep asking me to make maps and then he had to start helping me make them because we were going EVERYWHERE! I was pretty busy while also having to work full time but it was worth it for D&D.
Look for Part 2 soon…
The Adventure Begins: Stories from the Wife of a Dungeon Master 