Extry! Extry! Newsies & Bootblacks Primer is out. Read all ’bout it
You know that many retailers offer a free introductory booklet of some new game. That is called a primer and that is exactly what I am offering you today. Newsies & Bootblacks: First Game is 15000 words, 62 pages long, and features basic and simplified rules, and introduction to the setting, a character sheet and a sample adventure, complete with pre-generated characters: Forsaken. In Forsaken, the players play the children of well-to-do family who, after school, find themselves forgotten by friends, family and every other living soul. The characters will have to brave the streets of New...
Read MoreCharacter Sheet 2nd Prototype
Well, here it is, not yet the final thing, but pretty close. As you can see under these lines, I have chosen an informal, hand drawn frame. I wanted something simple that could be have made by a dedicated newsboy of the early XX century. As for the software used, I emplyed Scribus, which is the best free desktop publishing software around for this kind of non standard documents. For ordinary books, I still favor LyX, though. You’ll notice we begin with the character’s name in a box, then his age and pace — that’s a game stats that tells how fast your character is...
Read MoreCharacter Sheet Prototype
Here it is, the 0.1 Newsies & Bootblacks Character Sheet prototype. It is very, very plain, focusing on content, leaving the niceties to further development. As it is, however, it’s perfectly usable, covering all the stats you need to play a game. There is one issue with this character sheet: rules changes. Just a minor edit on the rules to be precise. You see, when I wrote the rules I envisioned three “skill boxes” on the character sheet: “Good at”, “Bad at” and “OK that”. Yet, when I actually came to design the sheet, I noticed...
Read MoreAlternatives to character sheets
If you are like me at all, you spent your teen years loving your character… sheets. You could get to great pains at customizing the look and feel of your sheet, to make information more accessible or to use art in order to beautify it. And then, by the end of the second or third game-session it could have turned into a shabby shadow of its formal self: wrinkled, erased and… oh the horror. Plus, character sheets are a pain to work with if you are playing around a small table or with no table at all. So from the earliest times of role-playing two alternatives emerged: the index...
Read More