DM Toolkit: Counter Collections

WARNING: This post produced strong feelings of nostalgia in the author. It may ramble a bit.

I first discovered Fiery Dragon's Counter Collections at Gamescape while living in California. I bought Counter Collection I and used it for my first campaign using D&D 3.0. The campaign centered around the Second Age of Middle Earth, when men of Numenor sailed the shores of Middle Earth and Sauron was crafting the rings with the help of Celebrimbor. Around the same time I helped edit a website about Middle Earth d20, which sadly no longer exists.

Shortly thereafter I won more Fiery Dragon counters during a mini-adventure writing contest on EnWorld.org. The adventure, Crocodile Tears, was about a hobgoblin ranger and his crocodile animal companion who laired in the fallen temple of a lost hobgoblin empire and hunted the lizardfolk who'd toppled that empire. I continued using the counters in Japan, where I ran a 3.0/3.5 campaign based on a original Dragonlance modules (and a short foray into Monte Cook's Banewarrens).

The counters were a great resource for a recent graduate (inexpensive) who played games at a pizza parlor (portable) in a homebrewed campaign (diverse). Claudio Pozas is an exceptional artist, and moving these counters around the battlemat was the way I learned 3.0/3.5 tactics. If I needed counters these days, I'd go for the Counter Collection Digital v2.0 Gold, which gives you digital versions of thousands of counters (from which you can print just the ones you need).

That said, I switched to minis as soon as I returned to the States, and I don't see myself ever going back to counters. There's something very compelling about three-dimensional gaming, and as I mentioned in a previous post it's possible to get a lot of very nice prepainted D&D minis these days.

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