Why it matters to you
Old-school gamers are embracing the latest technology for a fun new retro gaming experience.
Dungeons & Dragons has grown in popularity the last several years, with new digital toolkits that make a Dungeon Master’s job easier to handle. No dice to lose, no rulebooks to thumb through, no smudged graph paper to track your progress. But veteran D&D fan Ken Hinxman has taken dungeon mastering to the next level with a home-built high-tech Dungeons & Dragons custom table that includes a 4K display and touchscreen capability.
Hinxman, who’s known as Caethial on Tumbler and Twitter, built the table in a single day on New Year’s Eve 2016 with two of his friends. Hinxman modestly notes that “there really are no plans for the table, we had a general idea of how we wanted it to turn out, but we made most of the decisions on it on the day we built it.”
The table itself was built with lumber you can buy at any hardware store, along with some brackets and a few screws. According to Hinxman, the table itself cost about $120 to make. It’s furnished with a 40-inch Samsung smart TV and a Dell Precision 5720 4K touchscreen workstation. The touchscreen is a nice touch, but the setup also works well with a laptop keyboard and mouse, as you can see in one of the gallery images above. Building one of these babies in your own gaming den will run you about $2,500.
Caethial’s table set off a firestorm on Reddit when it was first posted, with more than 75,000 upvotes (and counting) at present. We’ve featured custom gaming tables before, but this was a completely homebrew venture and the finished product is remarkable to behold.
The software Hinxman uses to run his games is Fantasy Grounds, a virtual RPG tabletop system that’s officially licensed by Wizards of the Coast and available on Steam. Hinxman says that he prefers Fantasy Grounds over other systems such as Roll20, noting that he finds it far easier to use. Although generally used for online play, he says it works quite well for home games and allows a “fog of war” effect where the map is gradually revealed to the players as they explore it.
Check out the photo gallery for some great images from Hinxman’s Tumblr page to see more detail of the build itself, as well as exciting action shots of a game in full swing.