Bags of Tricks

A one-day build for three items!

Three pouches on a white crocheted rug, labelled bag of tricks grey, rust, and tan.

Alright, alright alright alright alright alright, I've gotta make the Bags of Tricks. Y'see, I'd abandoned the idea of making these a long time ago, purely because a) I would want little toys of the animals inside the bag, which would be difficult to find (like a jackal? Where would I find a small jackal toy?). Secondly, you would be able to tell the difference between them by touch, which was definitely a no-no. And so that's where it sat. Kinda the same with the Bag of Beans, in that each bean would just be completely identical with a number written on it, which in retrospect is identical in style to a playing card, but that ended up being made at the same time as this, so we're kinda knocking them all out at once here! Also, it's why you see that bean-shaped label in there lol

At one point recently, I decided to look online if there were Bags of Tricks for sale online, y'know see how they did it kinda thing. And it turns out that tokens were used, of course! All the same size, just write the animal on there, bing bang boom done. So now it had to be made. So, like the Charm of Many Things, we used the plastic from some candy bins, in this case Quality Street and Celebrations candy bins, which gave us purple and red plastic, but wanting to differentiate the colours of them, I sanded the underside of one of the purple sets with 320 grit sandpaper to make it a different lighter purple, problem solved! This was to be a quick one-day build (YouTube SongaDay link), so we weren't going too fancy with it. I used my chainmailling ring for the circle size, giving us a 3/4" circle, and elongated that to make the bag tags.

It was pretty quick after that. A pair of scissors to cut all those out, some double-sided tape to stick paper to what was once the photo-covered side of the plastic (it doesn't show through thankfully), and then threw clear tape on top of that to protect the paper and ink. And then we SQUISHED IT DOWN for the night (so not technically a one-day build, but mostly, also we need to wait for the bags to dry).

And speaking of bags, I found these little jute bags at a store called Home Bargains, which conveniently gave us our tan bag right off the hop! We mixed up some acrylic paint with water (the same method that was used to colour the string in some of the D&D module bindings), and then let that dry.

I didn't feel the need to make an instruction page for this, since it's relatively self-explanatory, though the rules for the bags is here (text version) for reference. As an added note, thank you Texture Max for a whole pile of free seamless tile textures that make up the backgrounds for the draw stories below, and also 2-Minute Tabletop for the battlemaps!

And with that, we set our painted bags to bake in the sun for a while, crumbled them around in my hands to get rid of as much loose paint as possible, did that again inside out, soaked them in paintwater one more time and then repeated that process, which left us with fabric coloured all the way through, and as much loose dust as possible removed from the bags. And they came out pretty good! We have tokens for all of the animals, we have little draw stories for all of them below, and this project was a success :D

Made July 15, 2024 plus squishing/drying time




Did you want to draw from the:
The Gray Bag of Tricks,
the Rust Bag of Tricks, or
the Tan Bag of Tricks! 		A pile of plastic circles and several ovals cut out from red and purple plastic, with half of the purple ones being sanded to make for three different sets of identical quantities of pieces, all sitting on a white cutting board. Behind is a purple plastic bin with lots of scrap pieces of plastic, and the lid that has been used to make the pieces.The pieces all double-sided taped down to a white sheet of paper, so that we can write the animal on each of the pieces after cutting them out.

All of the pieces trimmed and labelled with all of the animals, and the oval pieces titled bag of tricks grey, rust, and tan, sitting on a wooden table.All of the pieces now upside down once again, stuck to a strip of packaging tape laying on the table to give a protective coat over the writing.

The pieces fully finished, laying on top of a rather thick book of calculus for engineers, that is about to be used to flatten down the pieces and fully adhere the paper to the tape.Three tan jute pouches, two of them now coloured grey and orangy rust, and hanging inside of plastic bottles with the tops cut off so that they can drip dry from the watered down paint mixture that they were submerged in to give them colour.

The three pouches, now coloured, dried, and filled with their tokens, and the label tags attached to the drawstrings, sitting on a white crocheted rug in the sun to display.