a tiny excerpt of a tabletop roleplaying game dungeon, consisting of 9 blocks, with walls and a stair in the back. In the middle there is an adventurer minifigure with a small torch token placed on the miniatures base. The token is a simple torch standing upright on a round base.

Darkness, light, and props

Most of the development for the game is triggered by things I discover in playtesting.

Last weekend, light became important. The heroes were navigating a forgotten mine, and had to rely on torches to see things. But not all of them were carrying something to illuminate the pitch-black corridors of the mine. So we improvised and placed bright yellow dice next to miniatures of those who carried a torch.

The next day, I did two things: 3D-printed and painted up some tokens to use instead of those dice, and wrote down formal rules for how light would work:

Any torch-equivalent light source will only make things in a 5×5 square centred on that torch readily visible. There is some dimly illuminated area in a 9×9 square, again centred on that torch (up two squares out from the sufficiently lit space) where one can see shapes and outlines, but no details.

From the “Light and vision” section of the rulebook

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