Rethinking my Character Sheets

So, my main computer's hard drive just stopped working.  After just getting gimp/inkscape/files set up to make more silhouettes-- after months of struggling to get data off of my last computer's dead hard drives.  In defiance of the fates that are hounding me I want to post a bit about character sheets.

Index cards or notebook paper are fine if you have a few experienced players.  If you're going to have new players, character sheets need a bit more to them to help players understand and navigate all their character's info.  You can see one solution I came up with here.  And, one I was very proud of, a character sheet that folded up to hold handouts here.

But, if you have different players rotating in and out and/or a lot of player deaths, you can end up with a lot of these.  And if you're a traveling DM like me, they can get lost in the shuffle.  Also, the player handouts I give like maps and such, are often too big to fit in that neat little character sheet 2.0 I designed.  So, last time I met with my group I mentioned I was thinking of going to full-sized character sheets so I wouldn't lose them.  And one of my players mentioned "yeah, and clipboards we can all write on." 

That gave me the idea to glue a character sheet onto a manilla envelope and slide something stiff inside that.

The idea being that these would be big enough to not lose, capable of storing whatever players want inside, and stiff enough to function as a clipboard they can write on when we play.

I had two stiff plastic three ring binders that I actually hate as three ring binders.  I chopped them up with a paper cutter and they were perfect as stiffeners for my envelopes.

I need to print character sheets and glue them on the front (and backside on the back) now.  I downloaded a few but they all have clutter I don't use in my game (like lots of space for the old saving throw categories or to-hit rolls because they use descending AC).  I can make my own, but that will take a bit of work (like finding my icon/symbol files from my old computer's data recovery).  But I thought the idea might work well for you if you have a similar play environment (no game table, dim lighting, and adult beverages in abundance).  Let me know if it works well for you.

Public Domain Weapon Images 3

Small guns!  I'm pretty much psuedo-medieval adventure gaming all the time.  I feel like I could play D&D for a lifetime and not exhaust the possibilities, and yet, I still am really interested in other genres.  Gritty westerns is something I get interested in cyclically, re-watching Deadwood, or Unforgiven, or Tombstone.  Anyway, the other day I thought pictures of guns might be cool to write all the stats on and give to players in a Boot Hill type game.  Then I got really excited and went to Internet Archive to see what I could dig up.  It was a let down, because I couldn't find a lot.  I found more pictures of Webleys than anything else.  It's weird because you know old guns is something people are fanatical about, but I guess the right books haven't been scanned yet.  Anyway, here are a few small guns to start off with:

Colt's three derringers from oldest to newest , (oldest up top):

The first was available starting 1870.  I think they all used .41 rimfire rounds.

A Remington Vest-Pocket pistol. Available Starting 1865:

And a Sharp's Triumph (that's what the book from 1894 calls it, anyway) or what I think I've heard as a Sharp's pepper box.  First available 1859:

That last one is the only one that isn't single-shot.

 More revolvers to come in the future. These pictures are all in the public domain. You can do anything you want with them. I'll add them to the zip file of all the weapon images eventually.

Public Domain Weapon Images 2

Here are some more public domain weapon images.  Clubs and small blades today.

A couple Fijian clubs:

Friendly Islands club:

Mandinka dagger:

Turkish khandjar:

Burmese:

Gurkha kukri:

Japanese:

West African:

Arabic:

Indian:

Public Domain Weapon Images

These are just some images of weapons I've collected over the ~5 years.  They're all in the public domain, you can use them as you wish.

ps: I recently took down my "West Coast Blogs" page.  It had a lot of link rot and I would rather use the space to have a page dedicated to public domain art like this post, to make it easier to find.  I'm working towards that.

A Bigger Pile of Gear

In a recent post I suggested letting a group of starting players pick their gear from a pool of cards.   The miserly way I tailored the gear available made the whole experience pretty hardscrabble.  Since then, I had the idea of flipping that on it's head and making the players wealthy, petty gentry.

They have as much stuff as their porters can carry.  You would need to decide how many porters, beaters, link boys, personal assistants, personal guards and pack animals allowed to the group as a whole.  And I think you would have to shift the whole delve from one of trying to find some valuables to a kind of difficult, big game hunt.  So, for example, the party is trying to kill a cave bear, or leucrotta or something.

In this kind of scenario resource management would still be an issue-- nets might get torn, lots of food consumed by the hirelings, etc-- but it would be less about survival and more about problem solving.  Should you dig some pit traps?  Drive the beast into spikes or nets?

You would probably need to have lots of gear cards on hand, because money is not an issue; if the party wants 200' of rope then they can give that to their porters.  I would also want to make cards for outrageously expensive stuff that you wouldn't consider normal dungeon gear, like fireworks, cages, and jugs of tranquilizer.

And what to do after the hunt?  This could just be a fun one-off, or you can start tallying the hireling costs-- maybe the family has finally tired of the extravagance of this bunch of layabouts-- so players will have to sell off remaining equipment and decide whether to keep any hirelings and how many.

Here is a draft sheet of how you might handle beaters:

I figure they will be average strength and be focused of flushing and driving game, but can still carry a few things.

Here is a sheet for porters:

They're strong, or know how to balance loads well, and they all carry clubs for their own defense.  The check boxes can be used to show hit points.  Yep, this is basically treating them as beasts of burden (see here and here), but you are wealthy and and consider that their lot in life.

Of course you don't need cards to do this, you could have lists of gear printed out, index cards for each hireling, and have players write down what they want to take, but the cards would make the process more visible for everyone sitting at a table and also quicker, being able to shift gear from place to place without having to erase.