DIY Corner: Condition Markers ( A Tabletop Tokens Add-On)

This isn't a full-on DIY Corner, but rather a Supplemental add-on to the post I previously made about making your own tokens for your tabletop tactical play. This method is cheap (relatively) and lets you customize your tokens to match your campaign style, your personal aesthetics, and your part preferences. Also, they cost out to about 27 cents a token. Pretty cheap.

I'm using them and the players are loving them. But I have three spell casters in my group and they are constantly casting hold spells, chromatic orbs, and all of that jive. For large battles and small, you need some condition markers.

Whilst tooling around on the Interwebs recently, I stumbled across a site that was selling pendant supplies (the cabochons and epoxy stickers I use for the tokens being, in the parlance of our times, otherwise known as "pendant supplies"). As I was glancing down the page, I noticed the glass cabochon embedded in a colorful ring, you know, to make a pendant.

It was these. They are bottle caps, painted a solid color and flattened into a crimp so that they can be used for crafting. Or in my case, poisoning player characters.

There are basically two kinds of conditions you need to keep track of; that master list that is printed in every DM screen and on every cheat sheet that exists for D&D these days. And then there's the special effects that get applied to characters like Rage and Hunter's Mark. I haven't added them all up but it's roughly twenty or so, depending on what you need help keeping track of.


These things are easy to get in bags of 100--more than you'll ever need, but if you want a wide variety of colors, you may need to truck over to eBay, where several sellers have multitudes of colors for not a lot of money.

All you have to do is mark them with a Sharpie (and use a fine tip, here, because the regular Sharpies are a little too fat to use on such a small space). In fact, I dropped the past tense on a lot of my tokens and wrote "Poison" instead of "Poisoned." You might think two letters doesn't make a difference, but trust me, unless you have tiny handwriting, it does. And I don't need to tell you to use a light colored Sharpie on the dark caps, do I? Please tell me not to worry.

Once marked, a handy cheat sheet (color coded) clips to your screen and you are all set.

To use, let's go to the tactical simulation. Oh, no! Looks like Padraic the Cleric of Knowledge and his trusted man-at-arms are engaged in combat with a Deep One and a Cultist. Jinkies!

Padraic is quick to cast a curse on the cultist in order to help out his buddy. So the cultist gets the metallic orange condition marker, and it's just that easy.

But the Deep One bites Padraic, and now he's poisoned, so he gets the bilious green condition marker and all of his rolls are at disadvantage now! And he keeps that ring until he can clear the condition. Thankfully, a quick prayer to Minerva and he's back in business.

And what about those pesky large (and larger) tokens we've heard so much about? Here's our hapless duo all entangled with a skeleton horde. That's gonna leave a mark!

Good thing Padraic brought his holy symbol on this little jaunt. A quick turn undead attempt and the skeletons back off and start running for the exit. Take that, boneheads! Just put the condition on top of the token and it's the same thing. You can even stack these condition markers up.

Note that if I wanted to, I could totally make a condition marker for Turned Undead. If I wanted to. I do not. But if I did, I could. I'm not even joking about this. I just pick a colored bottle cap, grab a Sharpie, and blammo. Please and thank you. Done and done. But I do not want to do that.

I made five of each condition just to keep everything nice and even. On the off-chance that you care, I will list what colors I used for each condition. You do you, though; pick colors that make sense in your brain.




Blessed--Metallic Gold
Blinded--Black
Charmed--Pink
Cursed--Metallic Orange
Deafened--White
Frightened--Yellow
Grappled--Light Blue
Hunter's Mark--Dark Green
Incapacitated--Dark Blue
Invisible--Metallic Silver
Paralyzed--Maroon
Petrified --Gray
Poisoned--Light Green
Rage--Red
Restrained--Orange
Stunned--Purple

There's plenty of other one-off conditions and lots more colors. I only did what I needed, and I'm going to wait until I need another condition before committing a color.

I really like the home-made feel to this solution. I remember when we had to make our own character sheets. We made our own dungeons. We scrounged everything we were using to play the game. I love all of the accessories that are available for D&D these days, but sometimes, it's better to DIY.