I’m always in a rush before my in-person D&D games. Draw the maps on the whiteboard, refresh myself on the adventure, sharpen my pencils, pack the bag, set off on the bike. One of the most time-consuming bits has been finding miniatures or making standees for the players and enemies. All the worse because it involves casting strange incantations over the printer to get it to work.

Too often, I’ve resorted to using blank plastic standees that I can write on with a whiteboard marker - usually with the initials of the monster or bad guy. But the players just don’t gasp in the same way when you plonk down a white bit of plastic with an O on it. Much better to surprise them with something that looks the part.

That’s why I’ve made You’ve been Pawned - a simple tool that you can throw a bunch of images at and will reliably produce a page of standees to print. It should work in most Desktop browsers - if not let me know and I’ll try to fix. I find it really easy to get Bing Images (or other friendly AI) to make a few fun characters and to drop them into this tool. With a bit of help from the laminator and some scissors, I can make a whole session’s worth of characters in one go.

I use some of these whiteboard friendly blank game board markers from Amazon to hold up my standees. I think they work pretty well, and I particularly like that there are plenty of colours so I can throw a bunch of Orcs on the table and not get confused between them.

It’s also the first real bit of programming I’ve done for a while. Elm is my go-to language for making this kind of browser tool - something built primarily to work for me, but that other people might find useful. I find something playful about the language/architecture - it lets me get experimenting on the important bit of the problem right away, knowing that in the future I can lean on the type system to help me reorganise the code safely. And I find reactor-type code much easier to deal with than async/await code in javascript. In this case, the tricky bit for me was getting the CSS transforms for the offset and scaling of the images correct.

Let me know if you find You’ve been Pawned useful. If you have a particular feature you’d like that will make your life easier without making the tool too complex, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do.