The Dragon’s Breath #1

5 Feb. 2003

Counter Culture I:
The Evolution of the FDP Counter Pack

By James Bell

Since our debut release in November 2000, Fiery Dragon has become known primarily for three things: one, our dashing good looks and unbelievable charm; two, our imaginative adventures; and three, counters. Putting the first two subjects aside for a moment (though I’m usually far too willing to discuss my looks and charm), I’d like to take a moment here and talk about FDP counters.

When preparing NeMoren’s Vault, we all felt fairly confident that we had a decent little introductory adventure on our hands. It provided a nice method of getting a diverse party together, some interesting dungeon adventuring, and a slightly mysterious plot that could be unraveled over the course of a few game sessions. All this was great, but we wanted more. We wanted everyone who bought it to get something useful out of the product, even if they didn’t like dungeon adventures or canned story lines. So, added into our very first release were two things that we, as players, always appreciated during our games: handouts and counters. 

Back in the days that make up our fond RPG recollections, we played in several different campaigns, not the least of which was a superhero game that began with Villains & Vigilantes. One of the great things about this game was that most of the adventures came with full-colour counters of the key heroes and villains found within. Of course, when we switched systems to Champions or Golden Heroes, we still wanted to use these colourful and helpful counters in our games. Having friends who are artists sure made this easy.

We used miniatures for our D&D games, but only had versions of our main PCs. For enemies and monsters, we used the usual: dice, candy, pennies. Or, we took our hero counters, flipped ’em upside-down, and wrote “orc” across the back. When we started Fiery Dragon, we wanted to make these handy tabletop accessories available, but also to update them to a more useful form (imagine if we just wrote “hobgoblin” across a blank square — though that would save on art costs!!). Thus, NeMoren’s Vault included full-color cardstock counters for every creature found inside the dungeon, as well as some generic adventurer characters to be used by PCs who weren’t lucky enough to have their images captured in lead.

With attacks of opportunity, range increments, spell radii, and other grid-based features, the counters have certainly helped us figure out combat rulings in our games, and based on our e-mail and sales, in other peoples’ games as well. The counters also served to get us noticed by others, including Steve Wieck from Sword & Sorcery. Steve was familiar with counters (having written some adventures for V&V), and soon we found ourselves signed to a one-year distribution deal with Sword & Sorcery. 

One of our first projects, now that we had big dollars backing us, was Counter Collection I: The Usual Suspects. This project was our attempt to provide full-colour cardstock counters for all of the “regulars” in the D&D world. It contained great quantities of orcs, goblins, kobolds, and all of the familiar fantasy monsters. We also recruited Claudio Pozas, the Brazilian artist whose website had been hosted by Eric Noah’s 3rd Edition News. Claudio’s style was elegant and effective, able to convey character and detail without crowding the image or making it difficult to reproduce. In other words, Claudio’s art was perfect for one-inch reproduction!

Counter Collection I has gone on to become our best-selling product, with sales continuing well into its 16th month of availability. We followed up with Counter Collection II, which featured a more diverse collection of images, punctuated by an amazing array of character concepts. By the time Counter Collection II came out, however, the d20 market was changing. Lots of new companies were on board and releasing great products; there were no guaranteed numbers, and everyone was getting a smaller slice of the pie. The Counter Collections, while great sellers (the second has since sold out!), were amazingly expensive to produce. Counter Collection I, for example, cost more to print than I brought home from my day job for all of 2002!

In July of 2002, our year-long contract with Sword & Sorcery ended. We had released 8 great products through them, including adventures by Mike Mearls, Kevin Kulp, and Monte Cook. The market had changed dramatically in the previous year, however, and we decided to set out once again as independent voyagers riding the d20 wave. To re-establish Fiery Dragon, we looked for products that had done well for us and had become identified with FDP as an entity. We had received accolades for our Counter Collections (CC II was up against Dungeon Magazine for a Best Accessory ENnie Award last year) and had become known as “The Counter Guys” (no offense to the fine people at Dragonscale Counters, whom we often refer to as “The Other Counter Guys”), so we decided to produce some new and interesting counters for the RPG market. 

Yet before we could release any counter products, we had to figure out how to manufacture them and make them affordable, all without breaking the bank . . . .

Next Week: In The Dragon’s Breath #2, James returns with the second part of “Counter Culture,” in which he details the steps involved in creating and manufacturing the Counter Packs — from cool d20 partnerships and Claudio’s tiny drawings, to hours of collation and locating the cheapest shrinkwrapper in town!

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