RPG Record Sheets

I've made a lot of character sheets over the years, dating back to my college days. By some bizarre miracle, most of them have survived (unlike my hard drives). Most of the sheets are for RuneQuest, but there are some for other systems, too; I'll dig more up and post them before too much longer, I hope. Some readers have sent in some cool sheets, too, which I'll put up as soon as I can. Oh, you'll also find some useful charts and tables sheets below. Many of the sheets are in Adobe Acrobat format; the Acrobat reader is free, and can be downloaded from www.adobe.com. The thumbnails are linked to the best version of the sheet; alternate formats are listed beneath the thumbnails.

More Character Sheets

Sheet Errata and Descriptions

I originally designed most of these sheets about 13 years ago, in college; it was necessary, since A) we went through a lot of character sheets in those days, and B) none of the gamers I knew really liked the standard Avalon Hill RQIII sheet. Plus, the idea of paying AH for sheets seemed really, really lame after Chaosium's enlightened position on copying character sheets for RQII. The Help sheet evolved over time (mostly during slow times in the computer lab) and has been improved by years of work, and the input of a lot of gamers.

Most of the sheets are designed to be two-sided; they consist of two pages, with the intention that the page be run on manual feed through the printer a second time to print the second page on the back (although if you have a printer that will print two-sided, mazeltov).

You're welcome to download, use, and modify these sheets to your heart's content, of course. If you come up with a neat improvement, I'd love to see it. And if you find the sheets useful, please point your friends towards this site!

Note: Some of the non-Adobe sheets almost certainly will require a little tweaking to fit exactly on two pages. The formatting and use of space is very precise, and even moving from one printer to another will throw it off. Still, it shouldn't be hard to fix the spacing. The most common problem is that one or more lines will become too narrow (which looks bad, but can be corrected), or too wide, in which case it will wrap to the next line and make the sheet too long. Each file should only be two pages long, not three.

The RQIII Character Sheets

The best RuneQuest character sheet I ever saw was in the old RQ2 RuneMasters book. Linear tracking was used for total hit points and hit locations; it impressed the hell out of me. For one thing, it meant that it would take much longer to wear through the sheet with my eraser, since I wouldn't be rubbing at the same spot all the time. I'm sure I'm not the only gamer who wears holes in character sheets!

When RQ3 came out I designed a character sheet with the linear tracking system. Here are five versions of it: one of them ought to work for you.

1. RuneQuest III character sheet. The Acrobat version should be viewable and printable on almost any system.

2. RQ3 character sheet, Acrobat form. It looks just like the normal RQ3 linear-tracking sheet, but unlike the version that can only be read, this one can also be filled in online by anyone with the Acrobat 4.0 reader. It calculates category bonuses, hit points, and some other variables automatically from entered characteristic data. There are two minor issues, both easily handled:

A. Automatic calculation of fumble percentages for weapon skills. No matter how I jerk around the Javascript, something always goes wrong. I probably need to set up some "If...Then" commands, but I don't know how yet. If anyone's good at this sort of thing and would like to see the work in progress, email me. In the meantime, these are manual fields (i.e. you need to fill in the data "by hand" online).

B. The sheet automatically calculates the number of minutes it takes to regenerate a single magic point, based on your Current POW. Unfortunately it gets cranky, and demands that you enter the Current POW. I'd suggest making that the first entry.

I'm going to keep tinkering with it, and any advice will be much appreciated...

3. The new MS-Word 97 version (revised 03/05/2012) corrects a number of shortcomings in other versions. It uses the entire page, using a .5" margin rather than a full inch. The extra space has been used to add blank skill categories and enlarge the font in some areas.

4. The HTML version displays well and prints out on my own system. I hope that it does on yours, too. This is not an auto-download, but rather a normal HTML page.

5. The ASCII sheet will probably look better after a little touching up with your favorite word processor. On the plus side, it should print on just about anything.

6. The latest edition is in the additional sheets section: a version of the standard character sheet adjusted for standard RQ III sorcerers. It comes in Word, Open Office (ODT) and Acrobat (PDF) versions.

The RQIII Charts & Tables Sheet

This sheet contains tables—a lot of tables. They include all weapon and armor information most commonly needed during play, Spirit, Divine, and Sorcery spell lists, skill category bonus tables, skill critical/special/fumble percentages, the fumble tables, and a lot more.  A few optional rules from various campaigns I've been in have also been included, specifically alternate Crush/Impale/Slash effects, alternate skill category bonus tables, damage bonuses, etc. In most cases these have been clearly marked "Alternative". Of course, if your rules are different you're welcome to hack, slash, and re-write the tables as you like.

There have been a number of different versions of this sheet. One eliminated Sorcery spells, and instead included a complete Opposed Resolution table. Others were formatted for PC-Write 2.5 (ah, the old days), or for the Windows Write utility. If you're really desperate or curious to see some of these, drop me a line and I'll try and dig them up for you.

As always, if you come up with a neat alteration to the sheet I would love to see it.

The RQII Charts & Tables Sheets

I picked this up somewhere in IRC; it's a scan of the key pages from the wonderful RQ2 rulebook. I suppose I may eventually have to remove it, since it's not mine, but until I hear otherwise I'm keeping it up. You can't be much more out of print than RQ2, after all. Warning: this document is eight pages long, and is over two and a half megabytes!

RQIII NPC Sheets

I've been promising to put up some NPC record sheets for years now (years! time flies...). Here's the first one, at last. It's ultra-condensed and can be used for up to nine NPCs. As always suggestions are welcome. WHOOPS! For some reason these files were deleted from the site somewhere along the way. Many thanks to the reader who caught that mistake! They're fixed now.

Lasse Hjelmervik Rasmussen & John Aadnoey RQ3 Sheets

I received these by email a while ago (I just looked at the date, and it was more than a YEAR!) and inevitably they got lost in the shuffle. Recently I dug them out from my email pile (you would not believe how much back email I have, and I remove spam religiously, I can assure you), and looked them over. They're certainly the longest character sheets I've seen in a long time, if ever, and are nicely designed. But they didn't break right on my system. I soon figured out that this was because they were formatted for the standard European paper size, A4 (210x297mm), which is narrower and taller than the US letter size—yet another result of US refusal to convert to metric. The topic of A4 vs. US letter was already on my mind, since in recent correspondence with a RQ website publisher from the UK we had been discussing problems with print-ready documents. Since I spent seven or eight years in hell supervising a copy center at a large law firm (so actually yes, in hell), I'm pretty knowledgeble about paper. In fact, I was one of the few people in Boston at the time to order A4 by the case, and for at least a while it had to be specially cut down from larger (I presume US legal-size) sheets.

Anyway, converting the Word documents I'd received to PDF files in A4 size was no problem. It seems only fair to provide them in that format, since the authors created them that way. However, the RQ audience seems to be split (in what proportions, I couldn't say) between Europe, the rest of the world, and the US. Rather than eliminate any large section of the potential user base, I converted a copy of the Word document to US letter size. Some tweaking was required; I had to expand the upper and lower margins considerably. But once it was in good order I output it to PDF in letter size, with the result you see here.

Isn't it amazing how I can just go on and on about such picayune details?

Incidentally, I also received Ogre character sheets along the same design. If there's any interest, I can convert and put them up as well; it's a bit of work, but it won't kill me. Drop me a line if you're interested.

Toby Partidge's RQ Sheets

RQIII character sheets, for standard characters, sorcerers, and animals. Toby uses a clean and classic design which I find quite pleasing. These Word documents are in A4 format, but I hope to make US letter-size versions before long. This is more difficult then the other sheets, since these were designed using text boxes. But I'll figure it out.

[email protected] Copyright 1996 by Peter Maranci. Revised: May 29, 2016. v.2.8