Using In-Game Props in your D&D Game...
This is probably the easiest and cheapest D&D Prop you can make yourself!
All you need is some glass jars or test tubes and vials, which you can get all from your local craft store, and fill them with different soft drinks and different coloured sodas to represent various D&D potions:
A Cherry Red Potion for a Healing Potion is the first thing that springs into my mind: And it’s an actual healing potion you can drink!
Now if you’re not into that thing, you can always take a look at “Healing Potion Kits”, which are essentially fancy glass vials filled with colourful resins with a number of dice equal to the rarity of the potion.
Either way, it’s relatively cheap to make, and pretty cheap to buy pre-made.
I have my own Healing Potion Set: Four little glass jars with a red resin inside and d4′s for each rarity of healing potion, and it only cost me about ~$26 USD, and that’s including all the Shipping and Handling stuff.
Whenever the Party finds or buys Healing Potions, I hand one of these bad boys to that Player, and they just keep it with their Character until they use it, roll the dice, and hand it back when they’re done…
Bonus: And because I like to brag sometimes, I like to use the skills of my many friends to build some awesome D&D Props.
And with one Friend being a Graphic Designer and another being trained to use a bunch of Glass Engraving Gear, I can proudly say I have a bottle of actual “Dragon’s Breath” Brand Whiskey (a Famous Brand in my D&D World), with a Custom Designed Logo that’s been engraved onto the fanciest whiskey bottle I could find…
Did I need this? Probably not… Is it cool? Heck yeah!
Now, obviously you probably don’t want to give your Players actual knives and daggers, so take a look at LARP Weapons!
You can get Daggers, Swords, Axes, Wands, Staffs and more, with most of them being a little expensive, but often times worth it…
I bought an “Assassin’s Sword” as a Prop for my game, since the Player’s are currently on the hunt for a forgotten forge from ages past, and are trying to forge a Silver Sword in a desperate attempt to stop a War with the Githyanki of the Astral Sea.
To buy this Prop ‘Silver Sword’, and the stuff I need to maintain it (just to make sure the sword doesn’t break), it cost about ~$100 USD, which ain’t cheap, but since it’s a Prop sword, it’s gonna get a lot of use…
But if you’re a DM on a Budget, you can buy some very fancy wooden wands and daggers from places like Dog Might Games, who do Custom Wooden Weapons like Daggers, Wands and even Big Ass Hammers from prices of $39 USD upwards.
And as someone who owns two Custom Wooden Wands, it’s fantastic!
I have a Flame Birch Imperial Wand to represent a “Wand of Fireballs”, and an Ebony Necromancer’s Wand to represent a “Wand of Fear”.
Both are really well done, and the faces you get when you hand your Wizard or Sorcerer an actual Wand of Fireballs… priceless…
Maps are a good thing to hand your Players, because they read “Big Bad Forest up North” and think “We should go there sometime…”
Now, you can draw a map yourself with various pieces of software, or you could even Commission an Artist to draw one for you, with the Prices being anywhere from $40 to well over $200+.
Now, obviously that depends on the detail of the map, and the map’s size, but if you just so happen to know a bunch of Artists and Cartographers, you could easily get a map done for pretty cheap…
I luckily have a bunch of Artists for friends, so I just send them my VERY rough details of a Map, and they draw it out, and with one of my friends being an actual geography student, she really does know where rivers, mountains and forests should be, resulting in a beautifully accurate map of the local area for the Players to explore…
And yes, I pay everyone for their time and their art, because you should, that’s what decent people do…
Similar to maps, but a bit more exclusive. If you have an artsy friends, or you’re artsy yourself, it’s pretty easy to create an old western style wanted poster for one of your Player’s Characters, or even the whole darn Party!
Luckily none of my Players have been that naughty lately, but I was in a Game recently were our Party had just escaped from an assassination attempt on the Queen’s life and had to leave town, only to sneak through the City Gates a couple of sessions later to find our faces plastered over every wall…
That was when the DM handed us her Custom-Made Wanted Posters, with each Players face right above the words ‘WANTED’.
Spell Scrolls, Scrolls of Protection, whatever you want to call them; you can find a bunch of spell scrolls online from some absolutely fantastic artists…
My personal favourite at the moment are the Scrolls from Arcane Scrollworks and SkeletonKeyGames, who produce some absolutely freakin’ fantastic looking spell scrolls for prices as little as $11.99 USD.
They do scrolls for the Arcane, Divine, Natural and you can get entire bundles of scrolls for less than $60 USD, which is great for a DM, or a Wizard wanting to expand their Spellbook…
Actually, speaking of Spellbooks…
You can get some beautifully made, leather-bound spellbook-looking notepads and journals for your Wizard Player, or even for yourself.
It can make a great Journal to take notes on the session’s events, or as an actual prop with real runes, glyphs and arcane symbols drawn inside for the Wizard Player to decode with their 20 Intelligence…
Copper, Silver, Electrum, Gold, Platinum: There’s a lot of different Coins in D&D, and handing your Players a couple of real coppers definitely increases the immersion, and makes shopping for potions and magic items a little more tolerable…
You can buy a whole bunch of them online, I got 50 Coins (10 of each type) for less than $20 USD, and there are companies out there that specifically make coins for D&D, from elven coins to dwarvish coins, to freshly minted coins for adventures like Waterdeep: Dragon Heist…
Ever wanted to make the Rogue Player feel extra special? Or maybe the Wizard Player finally got the chance to cast Detect Magic on that magic scroll they found earlier.
Well Invisible Ink Pens and UV Lights can make the experience all the more badass.
Say you draw an arcane symbol on a piece of paper and hand it to the Wizard Player, when they cast Identify or Detect Magic on it, just hand them a UV Light and watch their faces light up (get it?) when they uncover the hidden writings beneath…
Or maybe you want the Rogue to decipher a hidden message, or maybe a secret riddle is hidden on the Dungeon Wall and can only be found by casting See Invisibility or Detect Magic…
Invisible Ink is is one of those things that I could find 10,000 uses for if given the time…
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