Like a lot of people my age, I sometimes have to get up in the middle of the night to answer nature’s call — and like a lot of people, I end up spending some time online before I can get back to sleep. Some call this doomscrolling. In my case, I was browsing Etsy for leather products that LARP and Renaissance Faire enthusiasts might buy — if I made one that was beautiful.
One design I’d been fussing over all week was a cylindrical scroll case, fastened with rivets. Getting the rivet spacing right meant a lot of fiddly math, and lining up two pieces of leather so their holes matched on the anvil was a real exercise in physical patience. I’d brought sketches to a Sunday-afternoon park session with a local LARP group, rolled up in a plain cardboard tube — I hadn’t built the leather version yet. One of my contacts there pointed out that some scroll carriers on the market are really just a rectangle of leather, with a string and a weight for closure, slightly larger than the page (or sometimes even a narrower wrap), acting as reinforcement. Way cooler-looking, and much easier to build.
Playing off “doomscrolling,” I landed on a name that sounds like it came right out of the Dungeon Master’s Guide: “the Scroll of Doom”. I already had a color treatment worked out for it — a deep violet purple, shading to near-black at the edges, an obvious fit for something associated with a certain dark sorceress. I’d named it Midnight Purple, and it was clearly the color for this piece.
A bout of insomnia turned into a genuinely productive design session. Keep an eye out — the Scroll of Doom is coming soon to a gaming table or outdoor LARP near you.
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