So as I had mentioned in the Bag of Tricks page, I had originally passed on making this item because I guess the idea of having a pile of identical beans with numbers on them didn't appeal to me at the time, it wasn't a deck of cards after all, but with the Teeth of Dahlver-Nar being made, we had to scoop up this item as well. And so... pinto beans!
Pinto beans (or navy beans, or whichever beans I find first that are white), they're white, you can write on them, and then you can hit them with a layer of topcoat to a) protect the ink, and b) keep the bean from becoming damp and molding. I'd almost debated whether to buy plastic beans, or use pebbles, but neither of those appealed to me, not good-looking enough, or take too long and/or too expensive to ship in or find enough identical. So yah, let's just use beans! This is set to be a two-day build (one day for the bag label, I already had a worn-looking appropriate bag as-is), after printing the instructions (text version). Now, although most of the beans are separated into spans of ten numbers, number 1 and 100 are individual to themselves, so we of course must make all 100 beans. Which is fine if not preferred, it will fill out the bag more, and of course in the random bean puller below, many of them will have identical descriptions for those spans of ten things, but that's all fine and good because that's how the item works lol
And rather unexpectedly but obvious, kidney beans ended up being the answer! I eventually reasoned that trying to write on the smooth shell of a bean with a pen would be nigh-impossible, and I already had a bag of kidney beans for meals kicking around, and like... kidney beans are the most bean looking beans you can get, so it was just about perfect. I wrote all of the numbers on all of the beans in paint (taking 6 hours!!!), let them dry overnight (also because it was like 2am when I finished that), and then topcoated the number side in the morning, giving them a nice shiny appearance. And since I need to rest these on a surface to dry, I'll need to wait for the day before doing side 2 to be safe, and then back and forth until we have two coats on each side. But... the hardest part of the process is done! As well, I printed off the instructions in little tiny text as per usual and added that as an additional tag to the bag (and on the back of the bag of beans tag, I printed the first half of the rules before the random number part), and now we know what they all do!
And it turns out the topcoating process was both easier and harder, depending on your perspective lol. While I didn't need to keep the steady hand as with writing all of the numbers, I did need to find a way to hold the bean between two fingers, slurp some topcoat onto it, and then find a way to place that onto the paper towel without making a complete mess of everything. And with enough practice, I was able to get them down fairly reliably without many of them flipping over and landing sticky-side-down (pick that up quickly and slurp another coat on, that smooths it all out again), and used that little piece of plastic to push the beans around after getting them unstuck from my fingers and onto the table. And it took several days of fiddly pushing and prodding and painting, but we managed it, both sides of the beans have two coats of topcoat, and the item was complete :D
Made July 23, 2024
Edit: Also, there was minor numerical changes to the 2024 rules for this (though it's virtually identical), so the instruction tag and files above were updated to reflect as such.
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- Also with a 60 second wait option because it takes one minute for the effect to take place
