Friday, July 5, 2013

Griim Cole, character sheet extraordinaire

Friends, this is Griim Cole.  I do not know him as anything more than a character sheet but, man, what a character sheet.  A single index card folded into four quadrants, the paper is as soft as well worked leather.  As you can see card is fiendishly worked over, the creator went through an art supply store worth of different pens and pencils in his ongoing working and reworking of the sheet.  

Wow.  

Griim was the single donation to PlaGMaDA from Adam Blechman, who wrote:

" Griim lived and fought during lunch breaks, after school and weekends 
while I attended Forest Hill Collegiate Institute in Toronto Canada 
in the early 1980s."  

There is so much time and play in this sheet.  Griim aged a year over play, from 19 to 20.  His stats went up and down and the modifiers painfully changed each time.  He lost equipment which he'd written down in pen, never a good thing to have happen.  And rations, those probably shouldn't be in pen either - though I know I spent a young life buying iron rations and then never looking at them again.

Griim is wonderful.  He's atypical, too.  


Normally a traditional D&D sheet this worked over would be on a printed standard form, a photocopy of a TSR sheet for instance.  To see this much love and investment in a character written on an index card is unusual.  

Also take a look at the stat listings, I can't ever remember seeing someone abbreviate the stats to a single letter when possible.  It makes so much sense, why did I never do this?

I can't actually figure out what level Griim is, either.  But we know he's patriotic.




And I love game math.  Love it.  I want to do a compilation of just gamer math.  More than math, though, the back of the sheet offers other mysteries.  What's that "Ultima 5 cleric" box in the bottom right?  What does "no food or handle" mean?  Why does Griim have so many metallic eggs written down?

This is a fantastic, wonderful character sheet with the sort of love and dedication that marks it out as a real work of art.