Tuesday 8 February 2011

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

5 comments:

  1. Very cool, especially the doodles and varying penmanship. Where did the original sheets come from?

    Also curious to know how... um, how Fnord gained so much weight.

    90lbs? Yikes!

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  2. I laid out the sheets myself, using a rotring technical pen and ruler. I don't recall for sure where the weight gain came about, but I have a vague memory that it was due to one of our DM's many sudden brainwaves and enthusiasms. I think he worked out a system based on height, strength and constitution... but I could be imagining the whole thing.

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  3. You sir, penned some great sheets. Thanks for sharing!

    Now about that "de-stunk skunk" and bite-mark on Fnord's arm...

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  4. What, everybody doesn't have a de-stunk skunk in their equipment list? Huh.

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  5. Love the doodles and the rest of the sheets too.

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