Last year I made some hanging tags for the GM to use during gaming to keep track of player stats and whose turn it was. Since then we’ve added some long-term NPCs to the party, so I needed to make more, and I thought I’d document the process… (except I missed photographing one whole step. Oops!
First, the GM printed off the templates for me. He uses photo paper because he likes the crispness, but it’s not needed.
I cut then two pieces apart so I can adhere tape to the top of them…
And it never goes perfectly and I end up wit wrinkles. The problem is that if you set the paper down and try to tape over it, static pulls the paper up to the tape and it’s never adhered properly. Ditto trying to lay the paper onto the tape, though I’ve had some luck weighting down the tape and placing the paper on it, though it can still go wrong. Maybe some temporary adhesive to stick the paper to the table would work? Or just live with sometimes having wrinkles…
Then I use a mat cutter because I use mat board, you could probably just use chip board from food packaging (for that matter you could just paint/draw on the mat board to skip having to glue…). I cut the pieces to the sizes I need, one smaller and one larger per tag.
Now glue the ‘laminated’ tags to the mat board…
And the part I didn’t photograph… cut ribbons, attach ribbon end beading things (they have a name, I’m sure!) to one end, fray-check the other, and add some beads! Then glue your mat board/laminate pieces to the ribbon (I used the grid lines to on my cutting mat and and old one to try to space it, but if you wanted to be exact you could use spacers).
Let that glue dry and you’re ready to game!
(Front of blank “enemy” tags)
(Backs of the NPC tags and “enemy” tags)
Congratulations! Your RPG Hanging Initiative Tags are a Featured Project this week!