One of my gaming buddies surprised our group by buying each of us one of the rather lovely Gametee gaming notebook folios/folders. “Ooooo…” thought I, “I gotta use me this. Four separate notebooks, that’s one for each campaign.” Thing is, the notebooks within use roughly A5 sized paper, so cramming a standard character sheet in there won’t quite work. Plus, it’d be great to be able to put the character sheet right in the middle of the notebook, using the same elastic string that holds the replacable notebooks in the folio. Which would therefore need a landscape-oriented character sheet with nothing down its middle.
You know what that means… completely non-obsessive and totally healthy character sheet design mania activated!
First up, for our Firefly game:
As the game uses the Cortex Plus system there isn’t too much that needs to be captured onto the character sheet. I followed the basic design of the official sheets, tweaking organization to be both clearer and avoid the centre of the sheet. Also took an opportunity to add a splash of colour and make the die types quicker to read. Since pretty much all game info could fit on one landscape page trimmed to fit, I could use the back of the sheet as a booklet for theme-inducing art and a character portrait.
I’m quite chuffed how this turned out and looking forward to using it in game tomorrow night!
With its fold-over design, I think it works equally nicely even outside of a/the notebook. Or just print the “inside” and it’s pretty much all there. I’ve made a blank version of the sheet in PDF format, an InDesign file with text boxes in appropriate places, plus font and die image information, all available in a zip for download. Enjoy! And keep flyin’…
Lynx Thoughts 
Love Firefly — my daughters were LARPers as teens, with a local game community (Los Angeles film industry folks, mostly) called Campaign. Cool stuff :)) Dawn
Nice! Amusingly my first Firefly game was also a LARP… I bet playing with a bunch of film industry folks must be highly engaged, seriously in character, and very amusing. :D
Fantastic! The costumes were AMAZING!!! The group originated in film school at Ithaca College in New York. Story was a couple of the guys took a sword fighting class and for practice created a magical kingdom/realm that grew into Campaign. Not any games nowadays, but my kids got in on amazing plots, and our house is full of gritty masks and artifacts :)) :)) Plus — my kids know how to: sew, camp, fight, plot, pretend, cook, cooperate, and run all over the forest in costume. Better deal than soccer :))
Haha, I bet the costumes were insanely good and the roleplay most intense! What a great time and great outcome… dance, play, cooperate, and oodles of stories to tell. :)
:)) :)) and life-long friends, too. You really learn about peoples “character” by their roleplaying characters, and how they handle in-game situations :)) :)) Take care!
You might be interested to know, a young (small) mother bear and two cubs have been haunting our neighborhood the past couple weeks, including sleeping up a tree in our back yard!!! I hear a horn honking below us right now . . . must be the bears are at a neighbors yard. Yikes!!!
The excitement of living on the outskirts of a forest!