White Box RPG: Character Sheet Sketches Part 1

A hobby project that I am working on is creating random character generators for a ‘White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventures’ fan site that I am designing.  White Box is an Old School Revival role-playing game designed by Charlie Mason, based on the first incarnation of the ‘World’s Most Well-Known Role-Playing Game’.  The first step in creating character generators is to design character sheets. 

I drew inspiration for designing the character sheet from James V. West’s White Box character sheet, which captures the Old School 1970s feel through hand drawn pencil and paper sketches.  Thus, I set out to design my own version of the White Box character sheet using pencil and paper sketches.

Below is my first sketch, where I created a draft of the hit points (the heart) and character portrait/sigil (the scroll) areas.

 

I wanted the armour class field to take the form of a shield; thus, the above sketch was created.

I liked how the heart-shaped hit point and shield designed armour class areas turned out.  So, for my next iteration of these sketches I decided to go with these designs, placing the armour class, hit points and saving throw areas side by side; connected by overlapping scrolls.  The sketch above will likely be the final version for these statistic boxes.

The sketch above is my first attempt at drawing the area for the character’s name, level and class.  For my next iterator, I decided to make the background scroll wider to accommodate more information (i.e. race, alignment and experience points).  Thus, I came up with the sketch below.

 

For the ‘to Hit’ area, I decided to go with a worn tavern floor look (i.e. the worn wood planks), with a spear separating the ‘to Hit’ values from the descending and ascending armour class values.

The above sketch is my second version of the character portrait/symbol area.  The scroll in this version is facing up (the scroll in the first version was facing down).

 

I create the following template in Photoshop as a rough layout for the character sheet.

I will be continuing the process of sketching elements for the White Box RPG character sheet for the next post in this series.