Holiday Gift Guide: DND-Themed Gifts You Can Make Yourself

You can create gifts for all of the Dungeons & Dragons fans in your life with this handy guide!

The month of December brings a season of gift-giving! Picking out presents for others can be a ton of fun, especially for people who have similar interests to you. I myself love gift-giving, and by far  my favorite group to shop for is my Dungeons & Dragons group. Nearly every time I go to a convention, I come back with fun stickers, dice, or pins for each of my party members. But, especially this time of year, not everybody can go to conventions or plan out online shopping - plus, stuff you make yourself is more fun for you and more meaningful for them. So here are some ideas to kick off some DIY gift-giving for the Dungeons & Dragons aficionados in your life! 

Gift Your D&D-Themed Creations

You can make you own Dungeons & Dragons terrain as a gift for your Dungeon Master or players! Photo credit: Cory G. via roleplayingtips.com

Among bowls of snacks, bags of dice, and piles of paper, another set of tabletop staples are cool terrains (crafted versions of the fantasy landscape your party is exploring) and minis (miniature figures of the party members themselves). If you’re looking to make something for a Dungeon Master (DM), or if you’re a DM yourself looking to make gifts for your players, crafting your own terrain is a great way to use your crafting skills to geeky ends. Terrain can be made from craft-store materials and objects you can find at home, like styrofoam, cans, and popsicle sticks. Think about a specific scene you’d like to make (a lush forest, a pirate ship, or a scalding volcano), and consider what big (trees, masts, or a mountain) and little (mushroom circles, treasure chests, and puddles of lava) pieces might fit in that scene. There are plenty of helpful tutorials available from a whole community of people who have figured out the best way to make great-looking Dungeons & Dragons terrain, and you can learn from all of them!  

The Heroforge character creator

If your Dexterity score is low and you’re not much good with crafts, you can still create minis for your friends’ characters! I recommend using the free online tool Heroforge, which has an in-browser character creator that will look familiar to any video gamer. If you have a few dollars to buy the finished file from Heroforge, you can print out the figure at your local library or makerspace; otherwise, you can print screenshots on paper and make cardstock minis from your designs (or use the Heroforge image as a reference to draw the character with art supplies you already have).  If you’ve been playing together for a long time and know a lot about someone else’s character, you could put that knowledge to use and flex your writing skills by creating a poem or a story about their character and their adventures. 

These scented soaps could have marvelous dice hiding inside!

If you’re looking for a gift for someone not currently in a D&D campaign (or whose game you don’t know much about), you can still lend them your creativity! Dice are beloved by all D&D players; you can often find individual dice for a few cents at your local games store (or for free between your couch cushions)! These dice can then be fit inside empty Christmas ornaments with colorful paper or other additions, added to pour-and-cool crafts like a bar of soap or a candle, or even dabble in a bit of metalworking to make dice jewelry. 

Gift a Game-Playing Experience

Many games don’t require a Game Master and can be played with components you already have

Physical gifts are fun to open (and they get lots of ooh and ahhhs during holiday gift exchanges). But if you want to do something a little different, you can give someone a fun experience they’ll remember forever. In general, this can include things like movie tickets, concert passes, or customized coupon books, but you can customize a variety of awesome gaming experiences specific to the D&D fan in your life. There are plenty of neat games that can be played with you and a friend or two with no Game Master at all! Some of these games involve writing letters back-and-forth in character; some involve drawing or playing cards to see what happens, and some involve rolling dice in a choose-your-own-adventure style story. You can gift any of these games (many of which have digital versions the designers offer for free) and offer to play them with the giftee. 

What kind of adventures would you run for your friends in Dungeons & Dragons?

If you yourself have played Dungeons & Dragons or other tabletop roleplaying games, you can also offer to run a simple one-shot (a game limited to a single session) for a group of friends. Here at Young Dragonslayers™, we have tons of blog posts dedicated to folks learning how to be a Dungeon Master. When considering what kind of game you’d like to run, think about what kinds of stories your friends enjoy (epic heists, cozy explorations, or silly adventures), what character or other ideas you might be able to contribute, and what resources, like pre-written adventures or characters, you might be able to use. From there, you can piece together the ideas and resources you have and come up with a setting for your players to explore, a few challenges for them to run into, and characters for them to interact with. 

We hope you ejoyed this gift guide for crafty gamers…

But what if you want to give someone the gift of a D&D game without having to figure out all of these things? Well, you are in the right place! At Young Dragonslayers™, we have professional Dungeon Masters (I’m one of them!) who run online games for kids and teens from all across the world. The next quarter starts on January 8th, and enrollment is open for the next two weeks!

This is an especially meaningful gift for an aspiring D&D player struggling to find friends to play with them. We match young people with similar play styles into groups that are safe, friendly, and moderated; the tweens in my group went from not knowing each other to sharing video-game recommendations, memes, and some truly terrible dad jokes before the sessions each week. 

If you’re looking to gift a Young Dragonslayers™ D&D games (or any other experience), you can also have a pretty gift to unwrap during exchanges. You can use online graphic-design tools like Canva to create official-looking certificates you can print off, stick into a fancy envelope, and wrap with plenty of ribbon. Check out our version below for inspiration, and happy holidays!