Today’s D&D Spotlight Interview (April 17, 2009) focuses on Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeon Tiles line. If you like the “making of” featurettes on your favorite DVDs, you may enjoy the interview as a whole. I don’t have anything to do with the Dungeon Tiles design team, but I thought I’d arrogate to myself the privilege of answering one of the questions that the interviewer put to the designers.

Wizards: Any advice for folks looking for good ways to store, organize and otherwise sort their collection of tiles? How do you, for example, use them in your games?

Peter: I store mine flat in drawers, organized by floor type.

Andy: I use inexpensive silverware trays (the kind that go into a drawer and hold your forks and spoons). I put the tiles in edge-down, so that I can flip through them quickly to find the ones I want.

Logan: I have a terrible system of organizing them. My little tiles are all just in a plastic grocery bag. I know Mike Mearls stores his in their original frames and keeps them on a bookshelf. I’ve thought about getting some slim cases and making foam outlines to store them, but that might be more trouble than it’s worth. I know plenty of people use little resealable bags.

Personally, I use an organizer case manufactured by the Stanley tool company. Well, actually, I use about six of them: two for dungeons, two for caverns, and one each for wilderness and village scenes. The yellow bins sit snugly inside the organizer, but they’re not attached to anything, so you can easily remove them to make room for the larger tiles. I also use one of these to organize the tiles and miniatures I need for each adventuring session, and another to organize the miniatures and tokens that I hand out to the players for each session. If you’d like to see some photographs of my storage solution in action, just follow the “continue reading” link below.

My Stanely organizers stack very nicely on my closet shelf:

Removing some of the inner bins accommodates larger tiles:

And small tiles can be grouped by size for easy retrieval:

When I prepare to use Dungeon Tiles in an actual game session, I either prebuild the scene by taping the tiles to a large piece of foam board or by grouping individual encounter areas’ tiles into separate zipper-lock baggies. Then I carry just the tiles I need in yet another Stanely organizer, along with my dice and the monster/NPC miniatures I’ll need for that night.

I’m straying a bit from the topic now, but I do use another Stanley organizer to carry little “kits” for each player. The “kit” includes a miniature (currently, I supply most of the miniatures for our group) and a set of Litko Aerosystems condition tokens, along with a bloodied token and custom tokens for action points and magic item daily uses.

At the beginning of a session, I just hand each player his PC’s box, and we’re good to go.