2011-03-15 Character Generation Shortcuts PDF
A few days ago I revisited my Character Generation Shortcuts and added backgrounds and starting equipment for demihumans. A reader wrote me an email to say that he liked it and used it when he played with his kids. Awesome!
This mail also pushed me to add another four demihuman backgrounds to bring the number up to eight and add a starting spell to all wizard and elf backgrounds. I updated the PDF file, too. Unfortunately I had to reduce the font size to 12.
In an effort to fight mediocrity (read the intro to Greg’s review of Lamentations of the Flame Princess), please let me know if I can improve spelling, grammar, layout, or the entries themselves if they didn’t work for you.
There still is no thief class.
In my games, magic users and elves have as many spells in their spell book as they can cast per day. Thus, they start the game with a single spell in their spell book.
I really should add a license to the file. For the moment, this notice will have to do: The two documents are made available to you under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 license. The font used for the titles is Behrensschrift, free for non-commercial use; the font used for the body is Garamond No 8, also free for non-commercial use.
Update: This also appeared in Fight On! #12. 
Tags: RPG
Old School
Labyrinth Lord
Convention
one-shot
Keep It Short 
2010-06-24 Character Generation Shortcuts PDF
Last year I presented a little table with character backgrounds for the players of a Labyrinth Lord one-shot.
I’ve been feeling inspired and worked on it some more. It is now available as a PDF.
Attention conservation notice:
- there’s nothing for demihumans (but see 2011-03-08 More Character Shortcuts)
- there is no thief class
Should I expand the tables on the last page or are they good enough?
I’ve called the entries “subclasses” – ie. bandit is a subclass of fighter, hermit is a subclass of cleric. Theoretically it would be possible to provide real class abilities for them all. I’m not sure this is required, however. Instead, I might eventually add one or two spells for each wizard and cleric to cut character generation time down even more.
Tags: RPG
Old School
Labyrinth Lord
Convention
One-shot
Keep It Short 
Comments on 2010-06-24 Character Generation Shortcuts PDF
I love it! Very colourful, and it’s not “balanced”.
I will use this as a starting point and expand on it for my own group.
– Tim 2010-06-25 04:34 UTC
Fantastic. Simple and evocative.
– Harald Wagener 2010-06-25 09:14 UTC
Thanks! 
As for “balance” – I guess if I wanted to be obsessive about it, I could check whether the average equipment cost was about the average starting gold you would get.
– AlexSchroeder 2010-06-25 12:28 UTC

Harald Wagener Access to the ODT file is forbidden
– Harald Wagener 2011-03-15 08:50 UTC
AlexSchroeder Permissions fixed. Thanks for the heads up.
– AlexSchroeder 2011-03-15 09:14 UTC
AlexSchroeder Sometimes I wonder whether I should be adding (descending) AC to the armor and damage dice to the weapons handed out. And stats for the animal companions and familiars.
– AlexSchroeder 2011-03-23 12:09 UTC
Adrian Descending AC? Seriously?
– Adrian 2011-03-23 13:40 UTC
AlexSchroeder It works for the kids!
– AlexSchroeder 2011-03-23 17:13 UTC
James Hutchings Thanks for this. I might see if my players are interested in changing to it from the standard rules.
– James Hutchings 2011-04-17 11:21 UTC
Add Comment