Rather than invest a lot of money in minis I’ve come up with a cheap way to create my own POGs, which are small little disks you can use for tabletop games. To make them I use , a standard ink jet printer with 67lb paper and a 1 inch hole punch.
First you’ll need to find some suitable images. I usually use Google image search, although Deviantart has a lot of good drawings.
Open up your image in Gimp and the first thing you’ll want to do is change the print size to be 300. This will ensure that everything you do matches up properly for when you go to print things out.
After changing the print size, select the circle select tool, click on Fixed aspect ratio and change the size measurement to inches.
Use the select tool to create a 1 inch circle. Odds are the circle won’t match up with what you want your POG to look like.
In that case, you’ll need to resize the image. Go to Images->Scale Image and make the image larger or smaller as needed. In this case I’ll be making the image 50% smaller.
Once the image is scaled re-draw your select circle. Keep re-sizing the image until it fits the way you want it to in the 1 inch circle.
Once it fits properly, go to Image->Crop to Selection and then Select->Invert. Click on the eraser tool, choose a larger brush size and erase all the edged of your circle. Because of the inverted select tool you won’t be able to erase your POG, just the edged, so this is quick and easy to do.
This gives you one side of your finished POG. Go ahead and save this as a PNG file. I also like to do a reverse side of the POG and since I’m using Savage Worlds right now I have the flip side of the POG be for when the character is shaken. For this I go to the Text tool, choose Sans Bold, up the font size to 60 and choose either red or yellow for the font color. I then write SHAKEN into the tool and position it on the POG.
I then save that version of the POG as another PNG file.
After creating several POGs that I want to print out, I’ll create a new file using the US-Letter template.
Then I’ll open up all my POG images, the normal and shaken versions, and for each image I’ll do an Edit->Copy on it. After that, select the brush tool.
On the right hand side of Gimp you can select your brush. One of the brushes will be your copied POG.
Select it and stamp it out onto your US-Letter blank sheet. Do the same for all your other POGs and stamp them all out on your sheet.
Once your done with that you can print the entire sheet out to a PDF file. Choose File->Print, select to print to a file, PDF and give it a filename.
After that you can open up your saved PDF file and print it to your printer or send it off to Staples to be printed for you.
Once you’ve printed out the sheet you can punch them out and glue them onto 1 inch disks. You can buy 1 inch washers from Home Depot or your local arts and crafts store should have wooden disks. The craft store will also have other sized disks so you can make 1.5, 2 inch or even 3 inch POGs if you want to make larger monsters. Normal stick glue works fine and you can re-use the disks simply by soaking them in water which will remove the glue.
And the finished POGs:
