Coins of the Realms: A Game Supplement of Fantasy Coins
Publisher: Fat Goblin Games
Pages: 5
Size: 3.76 MB
Cost: $1.00
Release Date: 8/18/2011
Get it Here: RPGNow.com
As a GM, sometimes I like to use little props in my game to spice things up a bit. One prop I’m currently working on is creating coins for my campaign to give to the players. If your game world has many countries that each use their own coinage, you can have some fun with money changers, exchange rates, and even some collectors. A varied monetary system might even be a catalyst for adventure when those gold pieces your party just recovered might only be worth half as much as you think they are, unless you are willing to travel to the country of origin.
Fat Goblin Games’ Coins of the Realms offering is just one set of gold coins in denominations of 1, 5, 10, and 100. A single printing of the PDF gives you 28 coins of each denomination. Each coin type is 1″ in diameter, and when assembled, has a stamped picture on the obverse and the denomination amount on the reverse. The graphics look like they were taken from ancient coins and look like they’ve been in circulation for some time. The PDF file is full color and does not print up very well in black & white. I had hoped to be able to print it out onto appropriately colored cardstock to get copper, silver, and gold coins.
I printed out a couple test pages and quickly discovered that using this PDF was going to be a bit more work than I wanted. Each denomination of coin has its own page in the PDF. This makes printing a bit easy to figure out because if you want 100 1 GP coins you just have to print off the 2nd sheet of the PDF 4 times and you’ll have 112 coins. The flip side is that you’ll have to cut out each coin and glue the obverse and reverse halves together. The coins on each page are off-center, horizontally and vertically, so there is no way to configure a duplex print that would work out to get the coins aligned on both sides of the paper.
Having to print off these coins and gluing the halves together would make for a thicker end product, especially if using cardstock. If you have a bunch of wooden miniature bases you could use colored paper and end up with a nice thick coin. For me though, I want game aids that offer me some advantage in using them. Having to print this PDF in color, punch out or cut each coin twice and then glue them together is too much work.
It would not have taken Fat Goblin Games much effort to center the coins and exchange the sides for duplex printing. If they wanted to provide additional optimized pages for black & white printing this one PDF could have made all the coinage for a country instead of just one type of coin. If they did this, then I might have been interested in buying coins for different nations and adding a useful prop to my role-playing game.
At $1.00 I could see this being a useful prop for many GMs, just not this GM.
Leave a Reply