D&D5e character: Aedan Comarren

 

Character sheet PDF is at http://mojobob.com/roleplay/dnd5e/Fitz_5e_Character_Sheet_Mk1_A4.pdf

Annette ran a campaign for a while, which I hope we'll get back to some time, in which the party was made up of a family of quadtuplets, born of chiefly parents in mysteriously magical circumstances. By the agency of a dastardly wizard (who came to a bad end eventually) the four Comarren children were whisked away to the ends of the earth, and we had to (a) escape his magical bonds, (b) cut out his gizzards, and (c) find our way back home, all of which we managed to do.

When the campaign went into hiatus, we were off looking for our mother who had been abducted by some sort of toad-demon thing.

The four kids, in order of age, are Aedan (me), Conoran (Steve), Uther (Andrew), and Ethel (Clare).

My character, Aedan, is a stunningly beautiful youth who has been cosseted and indulged all his life, and is therefore blithely and innocently self-entitled. Plus, being the eldest (if only by a matter of minutes) is the primary heir to the chieftainship, and naturally expects all his siblings to look after him and defer to his wishes. To his credit, he's generous and loyal, and treats his eminence purely as a fact of nature, and not in any way a matter of personal virtue. It's just the way things are.

His character class is Barbarian, but he's by no means a bulging-thewed Conanesque brawler. In fact his strength is no better than average. However, his dexterity is exceptional, as is his constitution, and most importantly, his charisma. 

He's fun to play.

I created a miniature for Aedan in HeroForge, and at this moment of writing, it's on my printer, hopefully taking physical form.

Finding a non-musclebound male model barbarian figure ready-made turned out to be impossible, so HeroForge was my best option. It's a bit expensive, but hey-ho. The STL cost about the same, or a little bit more, than a metal figure from Reaper or the like, and of course I have to print it myself.

And this is it, printed and painted. I forgot that I'm terrible at painting naked flesh. Plus, I notice that he's got green paint on his hand, which is a nuisance.

Spell Book

Here's a little thing I whipped up — it's a 4-page A5 booklet-fold spell book, with spaces to record spell level, name, casting time and components.

Click here to grab the PDF.

5e Character Sheet Update

I've uploaded updated versions of my 5e chracter sheet designs, now including a space for Death Saves. That's a bit of the sheet that's sure to get plenty of use.

Mark I: A4 double-sided

Mark II: A5 booklet fold

NOTE: if you stick a piece of that invisible mending tape (the stuff with the matte finish) over areas like this, you can keep pencilling and erasing it until the cows come home and you won't wear a hole in your character sheet.

D&D5e Character Sheet

I put together this character sheet for D&D5e for a couple of reasons. It includes an arrangement of characteristics and their related skills and saves that I like, and it's rather less rigidly laid out and sterile than some. It could be more compact, but I wanted to leave plenty of room so that you don't have to cramp up your writing hand fitting in teensy-tiny pencil scrawls.

I've printed it with both pages on the same sheet too, and everything is still easily legible. That has the added advantage of giving you a whole extra side of the page to use as a jotter.

The link points to a PDF file, approximately 160 KB in size.

Later...

This version is laid out with both of the above pages on the same side of an A4 sheet, to be printed double-sided and folded down to an A5 tent-fold. The inner pages are lined and framed, but otherwise blank — write whatever you want in there.

This one is also about 160 KB.

New Old Character Sheet Design

I just found an old AD&D character sheet that I designed years and years ago. It was intended to be printed double-sided, laid out on A3 to be folded down to 4 A4 pages, the theory being that it would act not only as a character sheet, but also as a folder to hold all of the gajillions of scraps of paper players seem to inevitably end up with. It was designed when we were playing an AD&D 1e/2e hybrid, so it's not quite either 1e nor 2e.

It was originally drawn out in technical pen and photocopied, but I just spent a couple of hours converting it to a vector format in CorelDraw so that the resulting PDF file-size isn't too huge. If you use Acrobat's "booklet printing" feature, it will print in the intended foldable format, or you can just print it as separate pages. I've tried printing it on A4 paper (and thus ending up with an A5 booklet), and though small, it's still quite usable.

You can download it here if you want to take a closer look. It's about 163 KB.

Edit: This links to a more readable A5 version if you want to print it as an A5 booklet. All of the text has been reformatted to Helvetica — much easier to see.

Spell Book record sheet

I have created an A5 PDF for tracking the contents of a character's (or NPC's) spellbooks.

In my campaign, a standard spellbook is 100 pages, and each spell requires one page per spell-level* to inscribe. Therefore, the number of spells that can be written into a spellbook depends on the levels of the spells involved.

This file includes an array of check-boxes on the front page to indicate how many pages have been filled, and rows for the spell names, spell levels (and thus pages filled by them), casting/preparation time, and material components.

Using this form, it's a simple matter to keep track of which spell is in which book, how many books the character (or NPC) needs, and... and...

And probably some other stuff.

It should be handy for the DM too, for generating spellbooks-as-loot. The sheet can just be handed to the player when they manage to get past all the traps guarding the book. Or, if they don't... then not.

The PDF can be downloaded here. It's about 289KB.

---

* Note: I've converted all the spells into 20 spell levels, so for normal campaigns that would be more like two pages per spell level.

Simple character sheet

I was looking at one of my recent character sheet designs today, and it struck me that, though efficient, it was rather sterile.

So I whipped up this little one, which will fit on an A5 card. Alternately, you could print it at the head of an A4 (or letter) sheet and have a whole lot of extra space to make other notes on.

This one is not sterile. This one is... woogly.

You can grab the PDF here — it's only about 37 K.

AD&D Character Sheet Design

In Palmerston North, when I first started roleplaying (when I was supposed to be doing university study), we didn't have access to much in the way of official material. There was one bookshop who, for a short while, stocked a few AD&D manuals and some of those terrible TSR dice that crumbled like hard cheese, but that was about it. The first I heard of the famous "goldenrod" character sheets was just in the last few years, thanks to the internet.

What that meant was that if we wanted character sheets, we had to make our own — the sheets archived in my last post are examples of some that I designed with rotring and ruler, and photocopied at vast expense at university (if I recall correctly, it cost about 20 cents per copy — that's about a buck and a half in modern money).

The last sheet that I laid out manually (that is, by actually drawing lines and writing captions with a pen) was this one, copied at my work on to a bunch of surplus green card that somebody had bought a whole ream of and only used about five sheets. Just as an aside, I found the card excellent for character sheets; being so much sturdier than paper, it will take a lot more erasing and similar abuse, and it has enough body of its own that you're much less likely to accidentally punch through it with a pen or pencil when resting it against something yielding, like carpet or thigh.

This particular sheet is for another very old (somewhat munchkinish) character, Smirnoff the Fighter, who was immensly strong, extremely stupid, and hideously ugly. I haven't played him as a character for years, though I still employ him very occasionally as an NPC. You will observe that this design includes a bunch of stuff for Unearthed Arcana  classes like the Cavalier and the Thief-Acrobat. By the time this particular sheet was made, we were using a bastardized AD&D1e/UA/2e melange.

When I got my first computer in 1990, along with a copy of CorelDraw 3, I designed this one, based largely on the green sheets above. The computer makes it very easy to keep your lines straight, your spacing even and your text legible, but in the end it's all a bit sterile. Functional though.

Note: you can grab a PDF of this sheet here; it's about 25 KB, so not a large download. Ironically, I designed the sheet just in time to stop playing AD&D — that's about when we changed everything over to the Hero System 4th Ed.

Ancient History

WARNING! This is unlikely to be of any interest to anybody but me.

My second-oldest, and most-played, AD&D character was (and is) Fnord the Fighter. He's still going, though I play him very infrequently these days, and he's been through several incarnations as we've changed rule sets: AD&D 1e and 2e, Champions, a sort of Ultra-Runequest-like thing our DM was briefly enthused with until we rebelled at its extraordinary and pointless fiddlyness, Hero System (4th and 5th ed), D&D3e... I think that's all.

I still have a bunch of old character sheets for him, though the earliest I can find has him at 6th level. He came into an existing party being DMed by my old friend Mike Bolton, and I think — though I don't remember for sure — that he was created at level 3 (or maybe 5?). He's now at level 13, after 30 years of existence.

Looking at these battered, much-scribbled-upon character sheets brings home to me one of the differences between 1981 (when these sheets hail from) and now; we didn't have access to computers or printers then, and photocopying was both troublesome and expensive, so character sheets lasted a long time, until they were too battered or doodle-covered to be useable. These days it's an easy matter to print out a new sheet as soon as an old one gets a bit smudged.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is really just to get those old character sheets out into the dataverse, more or less as an off-site backup.

L6-7 Obverse

L6-7 Reverse

L7-8 Obverse

L7-8 Reverse

L8 Obverse

L8 Reverse

L9 Obverse

L9 reverse