Love is in the air this month, and if you’re looking to spend alone time with a loved one, we have a delectable choice of date night activities for you, with the release of the second GUMSHOE One-2-One game Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops, and the massive Cthulhu Confidential nine-adventure collection, Even Death Can Die. Or if you’d prefer to be let alone, Garbo-style, hide behind the 4-panel Director’s Screen and Resource Guide for Night’s Black Agents.
New Releases
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- Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops – Pre-order the new GUMSHOE One-2-One game with a Night’s Black Agents flavour, and get the pre-layout PDF now
- Even Death Can Die – Pre-order this adventure collection for Cthulhu Confidential and get the pre-edit draft PDF now
- Night’s Black Agents Director’s Screen and Resource Guide – Pre-order the full-colour, 4-panel Director’s Screen for Night’s Black Agents, and get the PDF now
- The Book of Ages PDF – A 13th Age collection of now-gone icons, fantastic treasures, brooding monsters, perilous dungeons, and ancient secrets from the previous twelve Ages
- Loot Harder PDF – Hundreds of new magic items for your 13th Age game
- Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos – Pre-order this monstrous compendium of Lovecraft’s most celebrated and cryptic creatures for Trail of Cthulhu, and get the PDF now
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Articles
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- View from the Pelgrane’s Nest – Cat Tobin with what’s new in the Nest
- See P. XX: Converting QuickShock Foes to Baseline GUMSHOE – Robin D. Laws on translating Foe stats from The Yellow King RPG‘s QuickShock to standard GUMSHOE
- Why GUMSHOE for Swords & Sorcery? – Kevin Kulp on why GUMSHOE makes sense for Swords of the Serpentine
- The Phone – Robin D. Laws with an adventure for The Yellow King RPG’s This is Normal Now setting
- Plain People of Gaming: Random Encounters of the Quade Kind – Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan’s hack for choosing random mutant powers for random mutant passers-by in Mutant City Blues
- What Kind of Hero Are You? Kevin Kulp on how Sentinel, Sorcerer, Thief, and Warrior, the four loose classes, define your character in Swords of the Serpentine
- Getaway! – Adam Gauntlett on making your Night’s Black Agents chase scenes more thrilling
- GMs wanted for Gen Con and Origins – It’s that time of year again! Here are all the instructions on how to join our GM team for 2019.
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13th Age
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- 13th Sage: Escalate the Drama! – Rob Heinsoo on some dramatic uses for the escalation die in 13th Age
- You can listen to the latest episodes of the Iconic podcast here:
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See Page XX Poll
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Umm… I don’t know how to handle your survey. There are multiple answers on the list that /are/ essential, but nearly all of them depend on the game you’re playing: Crunchy dungeon crawl? Name, Equipment, abilities and Xp, not much else. Politics heavy urban fantasy? personality and backstory. Gumshoe one-2-one? Contacts and a place to write down clues that I’ve gathered.
For me, backstory space on a character sheet is always essential, irrespective of what game I’m playing, so I’m interested to see what others think is necessary.
I also don’t know how to handle your survey. It only seems to accept one response. Is that a glitch? If not, it seems you’re asking what’s the one element that that’s essential, regardless of system? So, character name, I guess? There are several of the elements you’ve listed that I would regard as essential, regardless of system: character name, a list of abilities the character has, space for your relationships, space for tracking XP and spends.
I agree with Frank Gundderson, others could be essential, depending on the system.
Backstory, BTW, is the one thing I don’t think I’d ever consider essential, unless the system specifically required it.
The one response accepting was a glitch! You should be able to select multiple answers now.
Heh. I usually have more backstory than will conveniently fit on a character sheet, so I tend to keep it in a separate document.
Haha, same!
I don’t generally keep story-related material on a sheet. My backstory typically evolves during play and is tied into the actual story, so I keep it as an evolving document.
A character may start with as little story as “a Hal-elf monk who hates water as much as water hates him, who studied under the Three, the Crusader, and the Priestess” and then later end up with notes as to exactly how he became a devotee of St. Spindly, the Spider-god of the Drow and the degree to which his attribute of Legendary Carousing is related to this incident.
For me, a character sheet is for me to reference to remind me of the things I am likely to forget. Like exactly what numeric values of attributes are (I cannot right now recall that number for St.Spindly devotion), or things he typically carries, spells typically memorized, money owned or owed.
Story and relationships i generally remember well, so I don’t have that need to refer to it on a sheet. Having them written down is mostly for when i look back a decade later …
In an ideal world, the sheet has all the information that the player will need to play the character in a one shot in a convention. That includes rule summaries.
That’s why i like Pbta playbooks.
The character’s story can go on a separate page in my mind. I’d think of the sheet’s front page as real estate in UX terms. What info do i need as a player to play the game without any downtime (if possible) or the minimum amount of downtime.
So a good character sheet will be a good sheet for the respective game. Relationships are important in some games (13th age, dramasystem, Swords of the Sentinel) less so in others.