I recently signed-up to try out a Play-by-Post excursion into Rappan Athuk using the Labyrinth Lord rules over at the Unseen Servant Forums. Each of us in the group used the Unseen Servant Die Roller tools to build our characters. This is my first experience playing a game via a forum, so it should be interesting. I know it's not quite as cool as playing via G+ Hangouts, or using Skype, or Roll20 or any of that sort of 21st Century technology, but it is fairly asynchronous and fits into my schedule a whole lot easier. And that makes it a lot cooler to me right now. I have a ton of deadlines and commitments, and setting aside the same time on the same bat-night just hasn't been workable, so this way of doing things is something of a godsend for someone like myself. In fact, you might consider this sort of a Transition for me, as I've never done this sort of gaming before. I think it will be a lot of fun. The people I've interacted with at Unseen Servant have been really nice, very helpful and very welcoming to someone completely new to this sort of thing.
The Unseen Servant site offers some very powerful online tools for setting up all sorts of special die rolls, including special macros just for your character, or based upon the specific requirements of a particular campaign. Our group's DM posted a special 'Campaign ID' to the Character Generation thread. Using that code allows each of our character sheets to be directly tied into that specific game. Unseen Servant also makes it really easy to show your rolls by way of a link, to cut down on cheating or fudging. It also will show how many times you re-rolled, and I think it will show if you swapped stats around, which is kind of useful, if you care about that sort of thing, which quite a few osr grog-types do care about.
I rolled four or five times for my character's attributes. I wanted to see how this gizmo worked. I also was hoping for a spell-caster. I kept all the attributes in order, as rolled. The first few couple of sets of attributes were definitely fighters. Then a '16' popped up in INT, and I took a closer look. 13 in WIS and CHAR. 12 CON. 11 in STR and DEX. Not too shabby. Not your Conan or Gandalf type, but decent. I've rolled far worse over the years. This character felt like it might be a good character to try out. The stats I rolled, in order, left me with a character that would make either a good Magic-User or an Elf, so I opted to make them an Elf. I flipped a coin, it's a boy. Made up a name: Ushnab. Then I started filling in the blanks, using the online die roller to calculate Starting Gold (3d8x10=150gp), and consulting the Labyrinth Lord booklet for prices, damage inflicted by the weapons, etc. We were each given 8,500 XP which made Ushnab a 3rd Level Elf, since we're using Race-as-Class.
I bought a few things, starting with weapons first (Short Bow, Scimitar and Dagger. Later, I added a Mace, for those times when blunt force trauma is indicated). Old School rules: If you have weapons, you can get the rest of the gear. Thankfully, Ushnab had a decent bit of gold to work with, so I bought Scale Mail, and a bunch of supplies right off of the list in the book. Even had a few GP left-over. But I wasn't done just yet.
Our DM thoughtfully provided some Extra Equipment to each of us based on our picking a number off of a blank table for each class-type on another thread. I picked number '4' under Elf. Thus Ushnab received a set of +2 Chain Mail, a Potion of Healing, and some bonus gold (400gp), plus his spell-book and starting spells. With the additional funds, I bought a few extra items, and I'm considering picking up a guard dog. But I want to see how much a few
All in all, the Character Building tools over at Unseen Servant are a breeze to use and building Ushnab's sheet took only a few minutes after only a cursory consultation with the online User's Guide. Once I had the online character sheet all filled-in and ready to go, I was able to copy-and-paste a link into the forum that provided a copy of the character to the appropriate thread. This copy of Ushnab's Character Sheet will automatically update every time I adjust things on the original, which is very handy. There are multiple options for various formats, allowing you to copy-and-paste a snippet of code over to a forum or bulletin board, etc. and have your character sheet display there, which is what The Unseen Servant was intended to do, and it does a great job. However, there didn't seem to be a good (i.e. obvious) way to extract a version of the character sheet to re-post it to our blog, so I had to copy-and-paste chunks over by hand. It would be even more handy if the characters generated within Unseen Servant were printable or exportable, and maybe there's a simple trick for doing this in javascript, but I don't know it. So this will have to do for now. That's a minor quibble, and frankly it isn't what they're set up to do, so it's definitely an unreasonable expectation. But hey, we're used to that sort of thing...ahem.
We still have a few things to sort out, like the background-fluff and the description, but they're not so important and I'll update the entries as we go along. Our DM has given me permission to post play reports from our sessions, so I'll be summarizing our group's expedition into the depths of Rappan Athuk as we go along.
So, without further ado, here's Ushnab Belagarg...
Personal Attributes
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