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A long time ago, no self respecting pen and paper player would ever adhere to preferring to play an RPG on the I-N-T-E-R-N-E-T. Sure, back in the day there were MUDs and the occasional text based RPG, but nothing could compare to listening to the great banter between PCs, seeing the poorly painted minis trudging around the graph paper you stole from school, and occasional glances of accomplishment you get from other players when your bard?s 24 charisma finally pays off.
But things have changed.
New programs such as RPTools, Klooge, ScreenMonkey, Battlegrounds and Fantasy Grounds have brought a new era into table top gaming, finally making play online table top games as close to the real thing as possible. Digital Adventures, LLC furthers the growth of this new branch of tabletop games with their online supplement, Online Gaming Tokens. Though this review only focuses on #8: Undead & Oozes, packs 1 through 8 were released at the same time and all incorporate the same features and style of artwork.
Online Gaming tokens Pack #8: Undead & Oozes features the fantasy imagery artwork of Claudia Pozes and Fiery Dragon Productions. If you have bought Fiery Dragon?s printed tokens or their digital collection, you will be familiar with the detail and flavor of each drawing. However, this is not just a reprint of their collection. A good deal of the artwork is either new or retouched and incorporates a great deal more personality into the images. The images are very high res. I ran an encounter using six different types of mummies, all of which looked fairly unique from the other. The artwork itself is scaled to fit on the typical 1 inch grids found in online gaming products such as Fantasygrounds and RP Tools. I opened up the product in three separate programs; none which required me to rescale the tokens to fit onto the scale. This was great as it makes it very easy to add things on the fly and not break from the RPG atmosphere by taking time to do scaling.
For the DM
I do not online game, but I do use tokens for my projector based games. Even on my crappy 600 buck projector, the lines separating the mummies wrappings and the cracks in the skeletons bones were vivid and really impressed my group.
The pack itself is surprisingly well organized. Undead and Oozes are separated into different folders. From there, they are further separated into alphabetical order by type. Even then they are separated by species. I expected their only to be one kind of vampire, one kind of skeleton, one kind of mummy ect., but each type of creatures has at least 2 or 3 different sub species associated with it. Very impressive to say the least. They could have easily repeated had multiples of the same images only resized to bump up the art count to 400, but each piece of artwork is unique. As a matter of fact, the one downside is that everything comes in just one size, the original size of the creature Most newer programs allow you to resize tokens in the game and some company?s, such as RPTools.net, have a token resizer. Still would have been nice to have had copies of the creatures in another size.
The Iron Word
On its own merits, Token Pack #8 is a fantastic program featuring a variety of undead from your typical 3.5 core variety to several I have only seen produced in the Libris Mortis. The artwork is 2-dimensional classic fantasy. Though it does lose some ground against the newer 3-dimensional artwork being produced for play online games, the traditional approach done in here holds up well.
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<b>LIKED</b>: - The artists of Fantasy grounds have been producing some of the best userart in the D and D world for years
- Its very easy to use and works in everything I've tried so far <br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: - As impressive as the artwork is, the 2-d images do not capture the true 3-d feel of minatures
- few tokens have multiple sizes <br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>
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