My must-have tabletop tchotchke is the miniature PHB I made myself
Why I make Personal Player's Handbooks, and you should, too.
Once upon a time, I was prepping for a night of adventure as leader of an infamous mercenary group in the world of Dragon Age and confronted a hard fact: I just didn't have the space to keep the Dragon Age RPG sourcebook on hand.
My desk already pulls double duty as a workstation and a PC gaming hub, leaving no good space for a hardcover rulebook. Digital solutions aren't up to snuff: Searching a 400-page PDF for the precise definition of Stunned is nobody's idea of efficiency or fun. When playing through Roll20, my large monitor is still stuffed with a digital map and video chat windows, and when playing on a table — look, I live in Manhattan. Nobody in my tax bracket has space for a full dining table. Laptops and iPads take up precious snacks and dice real estate, not to mention the proximity threat of beverages just dying to be spilled.
Even the market of small-batch tabletop RPG aids fails me here. Green Ronin's Dragon Age RPG is way too niche a system for such attention. I needed something more than a Dwarven Rogue cheat sheet, but far less than a weighty tome. Something I could easily reference without group play grinding to a halt.
They say if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. And that's why I hand-made my own Personal Player's Handbook, a craft project/game-playing exercise that's given me both more room for play on my desktop and more room for fun in my play.
Is this just a gaming journal?
Not exactly. There are lots of notebook-based TTRPG aids out there, from a zillion Etsy sellers to the venerable Field Notes company, but these pre-printed objects aim to replace the usual stacks of paper: The character sheet, a spell list, inventory, and campaign notes.
The biggest hurdle I found was that these pre-printed journals are invariably system specific, usually aimed at the audience of 5th edition D&D and, rarely, a handful of its most popular competitors. There was nobody out there hazarding a print run for the player base of Green Ronin's licensed Dragon Age RPG system from 2010.
