When I played the Peru Prologue with my family, we used some character sheets I had already developed for OTF. They worked great, but I’ve had a few ideas since then – some purely thematic and some more practical.

One idea was to make a fake passport for each PC – themed based on their nationality – and that when unfolded that passport would be the character sheet. That turned out to be fairly easy to accomplish, and I was pleased with the results.

My kids and I recently played Betrayal Legacy, and I noticed a couple of things. We have no problem writing stuff down at the end of scenarios or sessions, but we don’t like to spend time writing stuff down in the middle of a session – preferring to use cards or counters to quickly note changes to characters. In vanilla Fate, the main stuff that gets written on the character sheet during play are Stress and Consequences. In my implementation, other lasting aspects like Drives might also change frequently. That’s not a lot, but since some of those can get added, erased, or changed quite a bit during play, I figure it would be a good idea to at least look at alternatives.

Recently I came across the Kickstarter for Tainted Grail and found their character boards really cool. Then I started thinking about how I might be able to use something similar to reduce the written record keeping on the character sheet. What I’ve come up with is a board that the character sheet gets inserted into (or under).

The character’s skills, aspects, ties to other characters, sanity, refresh, and stress boxes all show through the board. This allows the player to see everything they need to during play and even make changes to things that might only change once or twice per session, like sanity or ties. The player can place cubes into slots over stress boxes to mark them, and place cards displaying current consequences in different slots based on the value of the consequence. There’s a place for fate points, and the board indicates where to place cards for stunts and drives to the side of the board.