“You walk through the passageway and see something shiny on the ground. You stoop low and pick it up. It’s a shiny coin, but it’s not like the silver or gold in your pocket…” and then you pull out a real coin and hand it to your players. They of course are astounded at your acumen as a Dungeon Master and you decide there and then to bring more D&D props to the table.
That’s just one simple example of how D&D props can enhance your gameplay and bring your story to life. In this article, we’re going to talk about what DND props are, why to use them, how to obtain them or create them, and most importantly, which ones you should bring to your table.
With this information, you’ll have the power to be able to craft worlds and shape destinies! Well, not really. You’ll just know how to make your players have more fun which is just as good. So let’s get into it.
DND props are physical objects used to exemplify objects found within the game. Dungeons and Dragons props are anything that helps to augment the immersion. In practical terms, a prop helps support something or prop it up, like a beam or pole connected to a wall. In D&D terms, you can conceivably think of props as things that help prop up the suspension of disbelief and the fantastical nature of it all.
Most of the time, props will be physical items that help your players buy into the notion of a fantasy world. As you’ll see later in this article, a case can be made for less than physical items, but generally, and for the biggest impact, physical items are preferred.
As a dungeon master, just preparing sessions can be tedious, time-consuming, and difficult. We have to carve hours out of our precious time just to make it happen. If we don’t, then the game doesn’t happen. That said, if we just put in a little extra effort, we can turn a simple game with friends into an immersive experience. We can make real memories even though what we are doing is play-pretend. You use props to bring the game to life, to immerse your players, and make them feel things they’ve never felt before. It’s for the “Wow!” moments or the shock and awe that comes across your player’s faces when they see you pull out something that they’ve only fantasized about. That’s why you use props.
There’s another, more practical reason to use props, and that is that they help anchor everyone to the same point. When describing a magical weapon, if you can actually pull out the weapon and show them what it looks like, then everyone has the same basic understanding of what everyone is experiencing. An argument could be made for not anchoring everyone together and letting everyone have their own experiences, but I like being able to bring everyone on the same journey.
So really when it comes down to it, there are only two ways to obtain D&D props.
You can make them or you can buy them. Let’s talk about the advantages and disadvantages of both really quickly.
Customization: One of the biggest advantages of making your own props is the ability to customize to be exactly what you want it to be. Even with buying props, you can still customize it, but again it will come down to paying someone to do it or you doing it yourself. When you make it customized you can choose in the very moment of the prop’s creation how it will look, rather than having to go back and forth with the maker.
Cheaper: I would say the biggest advantage of making your own Dungeons and Dragons props is that it could be a lot cheaper. There are ways to do things in DIY fashion and many hacks you can employ to save money and possibly time.
Pride: Generally, when you make props, you will feel a lot more proud of them when you present them to your players. You’ll smile and know that you created something truly amazing.
Learning Curve: As with any skill, making props requires a period of learning and skill development. If you are at the very beginning of this process, you will likely churn out some props that are less than perfect. If you are ok showing a half-baked thing, then that’s fine, but if you are a perfectionist, then this will likely be very difficult for you. You’ll probably have to spend hours and hours watching YouTube videos to hone your craft.
Overhead Costs: While the actual materials might be cheaper, it’s very possible that the machines and tools to make your props won’t be cheaper (especially if you only do one of the multiple types of props). For example, while a spool of FDM 3d printing Filament is around $20 to $30, the actual 3d Printer can start at $150 and get much more expensive from there.
Time Cost: For most props, there will be an extended amount of time to make them. Even if you 3D Print something, it will still take at least a day (depending on the size of what you print). If you don’t have the patience for it, you might find that you just want to buy something.
You Don’t Have to Do It: The biggest advantage of just buying D&D props is that you don’t have to make them. I mean that you have no responsibility other than ordering it. That means after you press “Order” you can just sit back and relax.
Quicker: Often, buying props can be quicker if you find something that you want that’s already made and that you don’t need any customizations. Etsy is a great place to find one of these. There are thousands of props already made that you can order and have delivered within a week or two.
More Expensive: 9 times out of 10, buying a D&D prop will be more expensive than just making it. That’s because whoever you’re buying it from is trying to make a profit so there will be the baked-in costs of materials, time, and then their profit. When you make a prop yourself, you just worry about the materials.
Lack of Options: Often, when you buy props, you have to choose from what’s out there. You could commission a maker to make something special and unique I suppose, but that would only add to your cost a lot. The cheapest options are using what is available out there and making it work somehow, but then again that limits you.
So really when it comes down to it, the questions you need to ask yourself are:
After asking those questions, you’ll be able to evaluate whether or not to buy a prop or just make it yourself.
But now you need to answer the question of what prop you need.
Lucky for you, that’s what the rest of the article is all about.
Before we begin, let me just say that I do not have any sort of affiliation with
Music is the most used prop, even though most people wouldn’t consider it a prop really. Since it helps immerse players, set the mood, and set everyone on the same anchor point (the same tone) I would contend that it is a prop, and one of the best ones too.
The best thing about using Music is that there are so many free options out there. You don’t even need to consider making your own D&D music (unless you want to) because you can use tools like Pandora, Spotify, or even YouTube. All of those have free options, and just as long as you can quickly turn down the volume when an ad shows up, you’re golden. Even the paid versions are not that expensive and there are hundreds if not thousands of playlists out there made specifically for D&D. If you aren’t using music in your games, I would highly encourage you to try it out.
The next prop considers another of the 5 senses; sight. We all need lighting in our games and there are many ways to create the perfect mood lighting. I would suggest that one simple, and cost-effective way is to buy simple white candles. Currently, on Amazon, you can get 6 for $28.98. There are even more accessories you can add to just the candles, such as sconces, candelabra, or even getting unique candles. You can also purchase electric candles that can change color to give you even more of an ambiance. Obviously, the cheapest choice would be to go to the Dollar Store and pick some up there, but you get what you pay for.
Our sense of smell is one of the senses most closely related to memory, so stimulating the olfactory nerves can be a great way to help your players immerse themselves. If you know what sort of environment your players will encounter you can light the candle before they arrive and then the scents will immerse them in the world you create.
Admittedly, it can be hard to calibrate the smells to the world if your players jump from location to location, but if you know for certain that they are going to be in a dungeon, there’s nothing stopping you from making your house smell like a dungeon. Again, this one might be for the most advanced D&D, but if you can do it well, it will make a world of difference for your players.
In every D&D campaign, characters will at some point obtain Health Potions. Well, there are props out there that exemplify health potions and give some great utility. These props are basically bottles with all the dice inside that are needed for a health potion. For some you just uncork the bottle and pour out the dice, taking the healing the dice indicate. Others don’t have you uncork the bottle. Either way, they are really cool to use and fun to hand to your player when they acquire a healing potion. In fact, one of our founders, Nick Scryer, makes these in his own prop-making business. If you want, give him a holler and he’d be happy to sell you one.
D&D sessions often take a very long time. For me, they average somewhere over 3 hours. I don’t know about you, but 3 hours is enough time for me to get hungry. Adding in themed food is a great way to immerse your players. This one is similar to the Candles in that if your characters aren’t in a place where they can get cooked food (like a tavern) it won’t much make sense. On the other hand, you can plan a very special banquet in-game and then provide the food out of the game and make the whole thing a lot more theatrical. It’s one thing to describe the food. It’s another to present the food and let their taste buds do the rest.
If you want a simpler example, you could prepare some sort of field ration like beef jerky, or traveler’s bread and give that to your players when they take long rests or something like that. An even simpler option is to provide drinks that are catered to their character. I’m sure we can all think of fun drinks to make (whether you drink Alcohol or not, like me). Having some bubbly root beer on hand can be a great touch when your players enter a tavern and ask for an ale.
Speaking of ale, having mugs specific to your characters is a great way to give each player a sort of uniqueness but also allow them to get into character. It’s hard not to feel like a Viking when you are drinking out of a Viking mug. It’s a simple touch but it can make all the difference. The best part is that there are many ways to obtain mugs like this. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, you can make the mug. You might buy a block of clay or sign up for some sort of pottery class, or you would make it out of wood. 3D Printing is also an option, though I would caution you to make sure you know that the material you print the mug out of is food-safe because not all 3D printing materials are.
If you want to buy the mug, you can start by looking at local thrift stores to see if you can find a good deal. After that, going to a convention is usually a safe bet, for example here in Utah, at FanX, I know there is a boot that sells mugs made from animal horns. Finally, you can check the internet like Amazon or other stores like that.
If you want to get really crazy, you can buy a mug and then customize it. You might buy a generic mug and then use some clay to create Viking designs on the outside and then paint it. You really can’t go wrong.
Every D&D game played has used monetary currency in the game so that characters can buy things and acquire new items. How awesome would it be to have an actual physical representation of those coins? The board game Oathsworn has small metal coins and recreating something like this wouldn’t be too hard.
The only drawback with this type of prop is that often D&D players can be somewhat miserly with their coin acquisition. One of my players for example has acquired over 9000 gold pieces with his character. So for that reason, I’d say you should come up with some denominations that are worth more than the platinum, but if you can swing it, you can get each player a small velvet bag to hold their gold coins in.
The coins don’t have to be metal, though that is a nice touch. Plastic ones are just fine and, if you have access to a 3D printer, much more attainable.
If you don’t want to go the money route, you can still use coins for theatrical flair. For example, the Lord’s Alliance in Faerun often uses badges or tokens to identify its members. It would not be too far-fetched to have members of that organization carry some sort of identifying coin.
The nice thing about prop coins is that they are generally small so they don’t take up too much storage space which can be a big determining factor when it comes to having props or not.
D&D is a game of adventuring which means that having a spatial awareness of surrounding areas is crucial. This means that having a map will be very important to your players. Making your own map can be time-consuming but it can also be worth the effort when you show it to your players and they just go nuts for it.
There are all sorts of YouTube videos on how to make a good-looking map and if you have access to it, Photoshop can even be a great help. Other services like Incarnate can help in the process of actually designing the landscape. When it comes to putting the map to paper, I would rely on YouTube videos or just rely on another creator to make the map for me.
Keys are another easy prop to incorporate into your game because they are generally so small. Just like coins, you can 3D print them. Maybe an easier way to obtain them would be to find thrift stores or antique shops and look for large old keys. From there, you can adorn the keys in special ways like maybe painting them or varnishing them. From that point, I would describe the door in the game to match the keys that you’ve obtained in real life.
Making your own keys here might be a little harder than other props. People are generally accustomed to having keys at least have a little weight to them. Making the keys out of insulation foam might not be a great idea then. 3D printing would probably be the most attainable method unless you have a forge nearby that would allow you to go throw the process of pouring your own metal key.
Finding an ancient journal containing writing that is crucial to the party’s adventures can be such a great way to introduce a new aspect of the campaign or flavor things just that much more. With a journal prop, you can make or buy with fairly low difficulty.
If you do intend to make your own prop journal, make sure that the handwriting is how you want it to show up. As someone with very bad handwriting, I can tell you that bad handwriting ruins immersion. If you don’t have great handwriting, find someone who does and ask them to pen it for you.
Now, journals can be hefty books, and you might be asking whether or not you have to fill up all of the pages. The answer is that it depends. There are a few tricks that you can use to make the process easier so you don’t actually have to fill all of the pages with words.
As always, you could just buy one, or commission one, and then you don’t need to worry about the finer details of whether or not all the pages are filled. The creator does. You just sit back and wait.
Often in D&D, characters can find puzzle boxes that hide small items that are important to the quest or campaign. Presenting your players with a similar puzzle box can be a fun way to immerse them in the game and give them sort of a real-world problem. If you choose to do a puzzle box D&D prop, you gotta choose 1 of 2 methods first.
As far as making your puzzle box prop there are numerous 3d files that you can get though they don’t actually work as a real puzzle. There are many options that you can by ranging everywhere from $14 to $195 and probably even more expensive. In this instance though, I would probably opt for purchasing a puzzle box just because then you can have an actual puzzle that your players can fiddle about with.
While many props have had actual utility or have had some sort of representative association with something in-game, creating wall-mounted head props is a different story altogether. With this prop, you are more or less creating your Dungeons and Dragons space. Let me explain what this prop is.
In real life, whenever you hunt an animal of some renown, it’s often a custom to taxidermy the head and mount it on your wall as a sort of trophy. Despite what you believe about this custom, it happens. Well there’s nothing stopping you from doing the same thing with a fantasy creature from D&D. Obviously you can’t kill that actual creature because it’s not real, but you can make or commission a replica of the creature to mount on your wall. That’s what I’m talking about.
I myself have begun a couple projects along this vein. I printed a Black Dragon head for my brother’s birthday, but when it came down to painting, my skills have proven to be slightly less than perfect. I also started a Silver Dragon head for myself. The Black Dragon head is actually for sale, but the Silver Dragon head will adorn the walls of my house (once I get enough 3d Printing Filament to finish it).
There are a few places out there that you can purchase heads like these, though, to be fair, they are quite expensive. You could try and make one yourself. I would say that papier mache is the cheapest way to go, or I suppose you could buy a lot of insulation foam and carve out the head you want, but obviously that requires a tremendous amount of skill or patience. Since this sort of Dungeons and Dragons prop is not essential or even useful to gameplay, I’d put this fairly low in priority on your list of props to acquire.
In this digital age, we can’t talk about D&D props without talking about the future evolution of those props. With movies like Ready Player One giving people ideas on where the future can take us, AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) will become more prominent and practical for things like D&D.
Even as you read this, Wizards of the Coast is working hard on OneD&D and it’s accompanying VTT (Virtual Tabletop). This VTT features a 3D version of what the DM is describing. It’s only a short jump from their to a group of people using VR goggles to play D&D with a virtual tabletop map in front of them.
If you have programming skills, you might be able to program various objects and then import those to a virtual reality program. How awesome would it be to done Goggles that let you see you fellow players as they are in the real world, but then if that player chooses, they can pull out a battle axe demonstrative of the axe their character wields.
This may be more Sci-Fi than fact at this point, but I can honestly see us moving swiftly toward this kind of future.
Speaking of the axe that your character wields, how awesome would it be to see a lifesize version of that same weapon? Well, there are many ways to make or acquire D&D weapons, and they don’t have to be as heavy as the real deal either. You can make an ultra-great sword out of light foam that looks authentic but weighs much less.
As you can probably tell, I am much more biased towards 3D printing, but you can make DIY weapons fairly easily and on a budget. The lower the budget, the less your weapon will look like the real thing but that’s a line you’ll have to walk.
You can of course commission a smith near you to actually create those weapons, or you can go to a knife shop in a mall (they are fairly common) to buy yourself a reasonable real-life replica. My brother-in-law, for example, has a couple katanas that couldn’t slice anything.
I find that the big issue with using weapon props is their size and storage. Having them at the table can be inconvenient, especially if your table is small and the room is “cozy”. You might decide to hang them on the wall similar to the Wall-Mounted Heads, mentioned above, or only bring them out on special occasions. Maybe you can hang them on the back of the chairs you use when you play.
Another, possibly simpler, idea is to just create a smaller version of the weapon. You don’t need to scale them down to tooth-pick sizes, but making a 3 foot long sword to something that reaches no more than 9 inches still allows you to wield it at the table, show the weapon in detail and let everyone bring their weapon to the table.
D&D is filled with magical items. The Dungeon Master’s Guide has maybe its largest section devoted to magical items. Most of these can be converted into real life D&D props. Obviously, because there are so many, it would take way to long to classify them into a specific category. You can conceivably think of rings, amulets, pendants, tokens, statues, circlets, bracers and more that could be adapted into real life props. Obviously, 3D printing is an option, but there’s nothing wrong with using normal looking objects as stand-ins.
In fact, a case could be made for “fun” D&D props using candy instead of more traditional materials. How fun would it be to present a player with a Ring Pop when they find a ring of spell storing, or a candy necklace when they find a magic pendant. These types of props would be fun and cheap.
All of this is to say that you don’t need to go overboard in obtaining D&D props.
You just need to be creative.
Obviously, we can’t talk about props for D&D without talking about minis. For those who aren’t initiated, minis are just miniature figures that represent the creatures in D&D. They can range in many sizes and they can have a varying degrees of detail. Their main use is during combat encounters in conjunction with some sort of map or grid.
The reason many people opt to use minis is because in combat, time and space matter and can be the difference between the death of the enemy or the death of your character. So because it matters so much, it is easier to bring a representation of the combat into the real world so that it anchors everyone to the same base of understanding. One person can’t complain about relative distance because they can see how far they are from their target.
Having minis isn’t necessary, but it can make a big difference in turning your game from something fun into something unforgettable. You can create or buy your minis.
In the end, you need to remember that nothing we mentioned is strictly imperative to have. It’s all nice to have and would theoretically make things more fun. As you consider whether or not to obtain props, you need to also think about whether you’ll make them or buy them (or rent them). All those considerations will help you make the best choice when it comes to your gameplay and your players. With this article, you’ll be able to pick the best props and have fun doing it.
In the comments below, tell us what prop you went after first!
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