I’ve been procastinating-slash-working on a project, on and off, for a bit more than a year. I think it’s finally ready for a first minimally-viable public release.

It’s called paperpawner, and it’s a tool for creating paper miniatures for tabletop RPGs.

Diagram showing high-level paperpawner workflow

Are you a RPG fan and want to make your own paper minis? Try it at https://ivan.sanchezortega.es/paperpawner

Are you also a programmer? The (GPL’ed) source code & issue tracker are at https://gitlab.com/IvanSanchez/paperminis

Everything started something like 10 years ago when I picked up Pathfinder after totally ignoring D&D 4thed after not playing D&D 3.5thed so much. IIRC the main driver behind me getting into Pathfinder is Vehrka, so you can blame him and his gaming group Barrilungos.

Now, Barrilungos has a healthy supply of 28mm-scale metal miniatures for wargaming and tabletop RPGing, and their games are fun as heck. But me, being the cheapstake that I am, rather turned to the 5-bucks-per-100-monsters paper miniatures.

…but there’s an availability problem with published paper miniatures: even though they are cheap and plentiful and quick to make, sometimes you want a specific creature or person that is not there. For that reason, I created what was the precursor of paperpawner back in… 2012?, a horrible mess of hacky PHP code.

It wasn’t usable but it was useful, and it helped me run lots of Pathfinder Society games in Madrid… with the specific miniatures for each scenario.

Years later, I joined the Hexagon Spillklubb including one of their klubbsagas. Playing GURPS is cool, but the… paper triangle… things… representing monsters and stuff was… a bit underwhelming (on the other hand, the modular hexagonal tiles for the megadungeon were awesome).

Now, armed with cool tools like Svelte and PDFJS, and a bit of help from Per Kristian “PK” from Hexagon, I’ve re-created that hacky tool as something that runs only in the web browser (no webserver handling any images means less hassle for me, as I won’t be holding or hosting any images ever).

It… works. It’s not perfect, and kinda covers a bit more ground that it should (cataloguing all images, which isn’t really needed), and kinda lacks a few features (hexagonal/octogonal bases, setting stuff to zero, editing a creature’s positioning, 40mm pawn scaling, etc). But it works, it’s usable and it’s useful as it is today.