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Kol Korran
2015-09-01, 08:07 AM
Long ago I read Saph's campaign log, which ended with the party buying her a mug, with 2 quotes of the campaign. At the end of the first campaign I ran, I had the idea of asking a commission of a group portrait, perhaps with some NPCs along. At the current campaign, which is our longest and most invested, I am again having thoughts of making something (Outside the campaign log) to keep as a memento afterwards. This time I'm no longer a student, and earn considerably more, so more options may be available. I'm currently thinking of the following:

1) A painting, showing the PCs, Main NPCs, main antagonists (Slain), and possibly major places or themes in the background, possibly with a motto/ recurrent saying. This will probably be quite a complex work, and may require some funds for the commission. A visual reminder.

2) I've used a lot of soundtracks in the campaign, and in the log I've recorded these, in a sort of a play list. Thoughts of maybe making a list/ CD or such, with short titles such as "Battle at X", "NPC Y's theme music", "Arriving at Z" and so on. An audio reminder.

3) Perhaps a T-shirt or such, with either a much lower grade painting of the major PCs, or maybe just major sayings and jokes.

Probably not all at once (I'm not a Rothchild), but perhaps some... Still a long way to go. I'll probably ask the group, but some earn considerably less, or they might care less, and won't join. I don't want the issue to split the group, so I'm considering this to be more something I'll do, but I'll sniff to see what enthusiasm they may have for the idea. I'm the most involved of them anyway...

That said, I'd love to hear some of your ideas, or things you've actually accomplished and made- what sort of souvenirs/ mementos/ reminders of successful campaigns have you made? Good stories, bad stories, all are welcomed! :smallsmile:

Edit: List of cool ideas to do as souvenirs
1) Painting/drawing: Can be a The PCs, NPCs, antagonists, specific scenes, specific themes. Possible sources for artists:
- Deviantart (http://www.deviantart.com/browse/all/)
- GiTP's own "arts and crafts" forum (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?27-Arts-and-Crafts)
- Kickstarter's "Art for 1$" fund raisers.

2) CD with sound track of the campaign: Can be from specific scenes, battles, PC's themes, NPC themes.

3) Printed main phrases: Such as A main PC/ antagonist's catchphrase, or a one liner that really stuck with the team. Possible formats: short book/ T-shirt/ Mug/ Buttons (Sort of election buttons)

4) Trophies/ Commemorative plates and such: Can mimic specific treasures, or just as a "You did it!" kind of trophy. Possible sources:
- Memorial polymerclay pirate coins! (http://www.polymerclayweb.com/tutorials/other/piratecoin.aspx)

5) Miniatures: For PCs and/ or enemies/ major NPCs. Alternatively dolls/ action figures. One professional source:
- Heroforge (https://www.heroforge.com/). (Looks quite cool!)

6) Crown Royal Bag: The one true dice bag. Can be found many places, just google for it...

7) Miscellaneous crafting gifts: Just check the following ideas:
- Mgic Folding Photo cube (http://www.instructables.com/id/Crazy-Foto-Cube/)
- Musical Bracelet/ (http://www.instructables.com/id/Musical-Bracelet/)

Nerd-o-rama
2015-09-01, 08:28 AM
My favorite campaign souvenir so far is a character sheet from Call of Cthulhu with SURVIVED TO RETIREMENT scrawled across the front of it. But that's me.

Ninja_Prawn
2015-09-01, 08:35 AM
If you've got a few hundred pounds/dollars/shekels to spend, you could get some real silverware for them. "Congratulations, you beat the big bad! Have a trophy!"

If you want to be more thematic, you could remake items from the final treasure hoard.

If you've got the skills, you could make dolls/sculptures/action figures of the PCs. Maybe you could get them 3D-printed? I've been planning to make amigurumi of the PCs in my current campaign, if it lasts long enough...

goto124
2015-09-01, 10:00 AM
I was about to ask, IC or OOC souvenirs?

Kol Korran
2015-09-01, 10:49 AM
My favorite campaign souvenir so far is a character sheet from Call of Cthulhu with SURVIVED TO RETIREMENT scrawled across the front of it. But that's me.
Heck, I never played the game, but from what I've heard of it, that sounds quite awesome! :smallbiggrin:


If you've got a few hundred pounds/dollars/shekels to spend, you could get some real silverware for them. "Congratulations, you beat the big bad! Have a trophy!"
Silverware? :smallconfused: Why that in particular? I'm a bit confused.


If you want to be more thematic, you could remake items from the final treasure hoard. Hmmmm... this is intriguing. unfrotunately in my campaign the players show more attachment to things that are hard to replicate- swords, armor, that stuff...


If you've got the skills, you could make dolls/sculptures/action figures of the PCs. Maybe you could get them 3D-printed? I've been planning to make amigurumi of the PCs in my current campaign, if it lasts long enough... This is a cool idea! Do you know of anyone who's done it? I don't have the skill, but perhaps I could find someone who does. Never thought of 3D printers, I barely know the use of them...


I was about to ask, IC or OOC souvenirs? OOC- things to give to the players, as something to remember the campaign by, after it ended. You know, something to look/ listen/ feel and remember those fond times... :smallamused:

Ninja_Prawn
2015-09-01, 11:11 AM
Silverware? :smallconfused: Why that in particular? I'm a bit confused.

This is a cool idea! Do you know of anyone who's done it? I don't have the skill, but perhaps I could find someone who does. Never thought of 3D printers, I barely know the use of them...

Edit: I didn't realise that was British slang. I meant 'silverware' as in 'sporting trophies'. Sorry.

I don't personally know anyone who takes dollmaking commissions, but you could probably find someone on etsy or the like. I'd offer to do it myself, but I'm snowed under at the moment.

3D printing is also alien to me, but I know you can design things digitally and have them printed to order. Such as here (http://www.shapeways.com/how-shapeways-works?li=nav).

Edit 2: I just found this (https://www.heroforge.com/). Looks pretty cool! You'd have to paint them yourself though.

ParsimonyJones
2015-09-01, 02:10 PM
This has given me a pretty good idea to do something similar! If you know anyone who has a button-making machine, they should be able to stamp out a few with the kind of quotes or symbols you had in mind.

The Fury
2015-09-01, 02:44 PM
Though it was a several years after the fact, Beermug Paladin and I were both in a really bad campaign which, long story short, ended with their character attacking someone with a beer mug as a final insult to the DM. After all this time both of us still laugh about it and last I heard that DM still holds a grudge. More recently I found a German beer stein in Goodwill and gave it to Beermug Paladin, calling it a "Holy Avenger."


Edit: I didn't realise that was British slang. I meant 'silverware' as in 'sporting trophies'. Sorry.


No, no. I actually really like that idea-- "Hey, buddy! you survived the campaign! Have a salad fork!"

Ninja_Prawn
2015-09-01, 02:49 PM
No, no. I actually really like that idea-- "Hey, buddy! you survived the campaign! Have a salad fork!"

As long as you have wooden spoons on standby in case they lose the final battle, I approve. :smallbiggrin:

Kol Korran
2015-09-01, 11:12 PM
Edit: I didn't realise that was British slang. I meant 'silverware' as in 'sporting trophies'. Sorry.

Edit 2: I just found this (https://www.heroforge.com/). Looks pretty cool! You'd have to paint them yourself though.
This is quite cool! I liked it! I'm going to suggest this to the players. I think some will like it! Thanks! :smallamused: And yeah, I got confused by that translation of Silverwear... :smalltongue: "Here, have a spoon!"


This has given me a pretty good idea to do something similar! If you know anyone who has a button-making machine, they should be able to stamp out a few with the kind of quotes or symbols you had in mind.
This is a fine idea! Could be quite fun! :smallsmile:

Fri
2015-09-02, 02:41 AM
The classic one is a group picture. You can easily put that on commemorative plates or mugs or tshirt or whatever. You can easily find someone cheap to do the picture in deviantart or something, then you can print the pic on a mug or such.

The Fury
2015-09-02, 08:26 PM
As long as you have wooden spoons on standby in case they lose the final battle, I approve. :smallbiggrin:

This could have symbolic meaning actually-- the fork can be for eating your just dessert. If you defeated in the final battle you're not given dessert and darkness has prevailed, yet hope is not lost. You have a wooden spoon, and with that wooden spoon you can make your own dessert and bring hope into the world once more! Will that hope take the form of chocolate pudding? An apple pie? A tray of brownies? A-- maybe I shouldn't make these posts when I'm hungry.

JAL_1138
2015-09-02, 09:01 PM
Perhaps a Crown Royal bag (the one true dice bag) for each player (often available by simply asking the staff at a bar for their extras). If you want to get fancy, Crown will let you order them with custom embroidery (names, monograms, short messages, etc.).

Kol Korran
2015-09-03, 01:06 AM
The classic one is a group picture. You can easily put that on commemorative plates or mugs or tshirt or whatever. You can easily find someone cheap to do the picture in deviantart or something, then you can print the pic on a mug or such.

The group picture was my original idea. I was going a bit further than that- including NPCs, antagonists, and maybe a quote or visual representation of a theme of the campaign. But... at the time of an older campaign I did check some commissions on Deviantart, and for the quality I wanted it was quite expensive... But yeah, for something more basic, and with fewer characters that might be quite affordable. Does any of you have any experience with such a group picture? Any particular artists you'd recommend? Any chance of seeing possible works?


Perhaps a Crown Royal bag (the one true dice bag) for each player (often available by simply asking the staff at a bar for their extras). If you want to get fancy, Crown will let you order them with custom embroidery (names, monograms, short messages, etc.).

Hmmm... googling "Crown Royal" seems to indicate it's quite a thing... mostly for alcoholic drinks it seems? (Pardon my ignorance), though they do also make dice bags... Interesting... :smallwink:

Fri
2015-09-03, 01:56 AM
The group picture was my original idea. I was going a bit further than that- including NPCs, antagonists, and maybe a quote or visual representation of a theme of the campaign. But... at the time of an older campaign I did check some commissions on Deviantart, and for the quality I wanted it was quite expensive... But yeah, for something more basic, and with fewer characters that might be quite affordable. Does any of you have any experience with such a group picture? Any particular artists you'd recommend? Any chance of seeing possible works?


Is this going to be a secret? Because back then me and my group just pooled some money to get a commission.

JAL_1138
2015-09-03, 04:07 AM
Hmmm... googling "Crown Royal" seems to indicate it's quite a thing... mostly for alcoholic drinks it seems? (Pardon my ignorance), though they do also make dice bags... Interesting... :smallwink:

Crown Royal is a major Canadian whiskey brand. They sell their bottles in distinctive felt drawstring bags (generally purple, though depending on the product some come in green or brown or other colors). Since every bottle comes in one, the bags get used for other purposes very often, as hey, free drawstring bag with the whiskey.

They're often used by non-RPG'ers as poker-chip bags (bars and casinos have no use for the bags and will often give them out freely or sell them for a buck or so). They also get used to hold numerous other doohickeys, doodads, thingamajiggers, whatchamacallits, spent shell casings for reloaders, screws/bolts, pocket change and other coins, golf tees, travel hygeine-kits (toothbrush, razor, etc), spare fishing-reels, binoculars to protect the lenses, Scrabble letters, etc., etc., so on and so forth.

In the earliest days of RPGs, when there wasn't much of an industry outside TSR itself, you couldn't go down to the game store and pick up a dice bag for $1-and-tax, and for that matter polyhedral dice were fairly hard to come by--they came in the box sets and virtually nowhere else. Holmes Basic edition actually sold faster than TSR could get dice from their supplier, and many boxes shipped with cardboard chits you'd pull from a cup or hat Bingo-or-Scrabble-style, with a mail-in IOU for dice for when TSR could get more.

Since actual purpose-made (or at least purpose-marketed) dice bags weren't being made, and the Crown Royal bag was so common to have laying around for unrelated reasons, it became the default dice-bag. It's still typically a better-made bag than the cheap velvet ones available in most game stores (and people still have them laying around already and don't have to spend any extra money), so they still get a lot of use for that purpose.

Curiously, despite the current availability of high-quality dice bags (custom chainmail/scale-armor, nicer velvet than the El Cheapo $1 bags at the game store, leather, suede, satin, canvas, crochet, knit, etc.) made and marketed as dice bags and often emblazoned with various geek graphics (the Elder Sign, webcomic characters, Tolkien-Elvish lettering, Nordic runes, Tolkien-Dwarven runes, Celtic knotwork, gaming logos, prints of space photos, blood spatters, dragons, skulls, Cthulhu, etc.), the old Crown bag is still something of a mark of "gamer cred."

And they just feel right--they're classics.

goto124
2015-09-03, 06:00 AM
This could have symbolic meaning actually-- the fork can be for eating your just dessert. If you defeated in the final battle you're not given dessert and darkness has prevailed, yet hope is not lost. You have a wooden spoon, and with that wooden spoon you can make your own dessert and bring hope into the world once more! Will that hope take the form of chocolate pudding? An apple pie? A tray of brownies? A-- maybe I shouldn't make these posts when I'm hungry.

End of campaign desserts! *drools*

Subaru Kujo
2015-09-03, 11:08 AM
Well, speaking as a player. I do love artwork of characters. That is how our Star Wars campaign started off. Our GM decided it'd be fun to collect physical descriptions of each character before things started, and then showed up with stuff when we started the game.

Here's what I got for it (and yes, I realize this will place me if anyone from that campaign posts here):


http://i.imgur.com/NB2DDbe.jpg


That said, it might get expensive for you if you have a lot of players/plan on doing a lot of campaigns. So moderation, I guess is key.

Red Rubber Band
2015-09-07, 01:30 AM
Do you like being crafty? If you get numerous, smaller pieces done instead of one, big one you could do something like this (http://www.instructables.com/id/Crazy-Foto-Cube/?ALLSTEPS). Or a musical bracelet (http://www.instructables.com/id/Musical-Bracelet/) for those who have a favourite music piece (or fight scene related to that music piece) and like the random bits of jewellery/adornments. The second does require a musical thingymajig to play it though.

If you'd prefer someone else did all the work you could try find an "Art for $1" type project on Kickstarter. Be careful with the project you pick, though, as there have been reports of projects popping up just for the money; I've never run across one, but have heard of it happening. I have backed two projects like this in the past with successful results both times - the pieces drawn were amazing.

There's an arts/crafts section on these boards. You could hit someone up who may be able to do "mates rates" for you :smalltongue:

Edit: You may be able to persuade/coerce/blackmail/pay someone to turn your journals into a short story... that would be pretty cool.

Thrawn4
2015-09-09, 05:33 AM
I have always been looking for a way to produce some custom memorial coins. Maybe a symbol of the campaign on one side and the names of the characters on the other side. Never found an affordable way though...

Berenger
2015-09-10, 02:42 PM
I have always been looking for a way to produce some custom memorial coins. Maybe a symbol of the campaign on one side and the names of the characters on the other side. Never found an affordable way though...

I don't know what is "affordable" in this context, but:

http://www.polymerclayweb.com/tutorials/other/piratecoin.aspx

Kol Korran
2015-09-11, 02:07 AM
I'm away on vacation, and this is the first time I've got the chance to write and respond, you got some very very intriguing ideas here!


Is this going to be a secret? Because back then me and my group just pooled some money to get a commission. The last time I suggested this to the group in a former campaign, this fell due to some players not wanting to chip in. Why?
- Some players are less invested in the game than others, or the DM.
- Some players earn less money than others. We are all grown up, and some have family, kids, mortgage... there may be other preferences than spending on gaming, especially something which may cost a pretty penny.

So, this ended with some players bot wishing to chip in. The rest decided to not buy the memento anyway, since that might put the non paying players on the spot.

But now I earn a fair deal more money, and thought to circumvent this by making a surprise indeed, so not to put any players on the spot.



Crown Royal is a major Canadian whiskey brand...

And they just feel right--they're classics.

Hmmm... never saw those in Israel. The culture here is mostly very light on alcohol. Still, something to look at. Not exactly as an end of campaign memento (I'd like something a bit more personal), but nonetheless, something that might be really cool to have!


Do you like being crafty? If you get numerous, smaller pieces done instead of one, big one you could do something like this (http://www.instructables.com/id/Crazy-Foto-Cube/?ALLSTEPS). Or a musical bracelet (http://www.instructables.com/id/Musical-Bracelet/) for those who have a favourite music piece (or fight scene related to that music piece) and like the random bits of jewellery/adornments. The second does require a musical thingymajig to play it though.
The cube idea and the musical bracelt are quite cool! I liked those! Perhaps make a cube with the different characters and NPCs? "Hey, I rolled a Julian" :smalltongue:


If you'd prefer someone else did all the work you could try find an "Art for $1" type project on Kickstarter. Be careful with the project you pick, though, as there have been reports of projects popping up just for the money; I've never run across one, but have heard of it happening. I have backed two projects like this in the past with successful results both times - the pieces drawn were amazing.
I'll look into those when I get back home after the trip. Sounds cool!


There's an arts/crafts section on these boards. You could hit someone up who may be able to do "mates rates" for you :smalltongue:
I'll look here as well!


Edit: You may be able to persuade/coerce/blackmail/pay someone to turn your journals into a short story... that would be pretty cool.
That sounds awesome, maybe some key pieces, key scenes and such? a Short book of the major pieces of the campaign? Sounds intriguing... Thanks! :smallamused:


I don't know what is "affordable" in this context, but:

http://www.polymerclayweb.com/tutorials/other/piratecoin.aspx

These look fabulous! I think those might work quite well! I'll look into that as well.
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Later on, when I have the time, I'm going to compile a list of your suggestions into the OP, to keep the list more easily available. Thank you all! :smallbiggrin:

Kol Korran
2015-09-12, 11:35 PM
I made the list, have a look at the first post. I hope I haven't forgotten anything! Tell me if I have made any mistakes/ omitted anything. :smallwink: