We Interview TinkerHouse Games: the minds behind The Vault of Mini Things.

Whether you are a skilled dungeon master, player, or simply RPG curious there is without a doubt a plethora of available RPG books, kits, and materials available to experience any world one could imagine. What all of these lack however is a serious storage system and access to everything anyone would need to run campaign after campaign, story after story. The solution is an all in one offering known as The Vault of Mini Things – An RPG Encounter Toolkit. Recently Gaming Trend got to sit down with two of the members of TinkerHouse Games, Chris Marshall and Mike Hayes.

In talking with the two of them I got a little peek behind the curtains and what brought about the Vault of Mini Things.

Starting out Chris, gave us a rundown of where the vault came from and why there is a desire and perhaps even need for it.

Chris Marshall – “The idea was there was a situation where people who have been playing RPGs for a long time have bins of miniatures that any time you are playing someone has to go through the bin to get characters or enemies for a campaign. This presented a bulky storage situation that is not ideal when playing an RPG. The flipside is while there are 2D standees, there has not really been a good storage solution for those as well. We (TinkerHouse Games) said let’s do a 2D standee that is easy and quick to get to the table, and is part of a bigger set of items that could be one big dungeon master toolkit in a board game size box.”

This insight came to fruition in the backerkit campaign that TinkerHouse has run showcasing everything anyone would ever need to get into any sort of RPG.

Rob Berg – why they did you choose to go with the printing option they chose for the standees as opposed to using acrylic which seems to be showing up here and there these days and they responded

Chris – “We looked at acrylic and we could do it no problem, the issues with acrylic however is the type of art you can do on transparent acrylic is not as vibrant as we want. Printing on cardstock there is far more you can do as opposed to acrylic.”

Mike Hayes – “With acrylic there is more plastic, that will ultimately find its way into landfills”

Having agreed with Mike we moved onto their next point which was what they envision the vault as in the long run and why the success is there from their backerkit campaign.

Chris – “Backerkit was much easier to use for this project than other crowdfunding platforms for a few different reasons, one main one was it was easier to collaborate as a TinkerHouse Games running the campaign. It also made communicating with the community easier.”

They also envision The Vault of Mini Things as a long term project they would like to grow with expansions coming in the future.

Speaking to them about the last couple of details that went into this project Chris showed off the dice tray from Green Fox Woodworking that they collaborated with to provide an exceptional quality dice tray for the vault and how a simple little detail such as a small ramp can make a dice tray easier to use and dice easier to grab when constantly trying to roll them.

Mike – “The vault is all of your tools, and removes the obstacle of uncertainty and whether or not someone is equipped to provide a good experience or not”

Lastly I asked about late pledges and any pre ordering they might do in the future chris responded with,

Chris – “We want to allow people to late pledge and add on as long as possible. We’ll halt pledges and preorders when manufacturing so we know how much to have printed to have on hand. This will switch from the backerkit page eventually to our own shop preorder.”

With that in mind we left off on one simple idea

The Vault Provides.

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