Mock-Artistry

Sometimes you spend your design-time dreaming up marvelous settings, compelling characters, wide open vistas of mapping, devious traps and abstruse puzzles.

At other times you spend it farting around on MS Word trying to create a personalized Character Sheet.

Click to enlarge

Here is the latest iteration of something that took entirely too much time. 

I am by no stretch what would pass as an artist or designer, yet, like the aftermath of an IKEA furniture debacle, I find myself strangely pleased with the result.

I’ve seen and used many sorts of sheet over the years, knowing they can range from the overstuffed 4-page affair to the most elementary notepad scribbles. I find the modern ones unbearably neat and efficient, rather unlike this ransom-note collage.

Given that I want a campaign with character, it follows that the sheet a player is to be best acquainted with should provide a window projecting into just such a world, tangibly evoking something of its aesthetic qualities.

My own headspace, as regards the visual, is very much brimming with images that conjure two names: Steven Jackson and Ian Livingstone. To them, my heartfelt thanks for they are originally responsible for setting me down this path. I don’t know if they did any of the illustration work, but I’ll be sure to check it out in the near future.

It so happening that “Fighting Fantasy” is for me one of the definitive visual aesthetic influences when I think of D&D, I hope with this sheet, and others that should follow, to transmit to players these jolts of nostalgia that are for me an important part of the RPG experience.

It is a fifth edition character sheet, so not exactly system-agnostic, but I at least feel confident saying something can be whipped-up for pretty much any version of the game.

Critique is most welcome, both functionally and aesthetically speaking.