I’m still continuing work on my Dark Sun conversion and by Shabby Land zine, but I like to take the occasional break to quickly create something small and simple.
I recently picked up Chaosium’s Cthulhu Dark Ages, the medieval sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu. It’s great book, but when I run Lovecraftian games, I prefer the lighter ruleset of the Cthulhu Hack, a RPG derived from the OSR game The Black Hack.
The nice thing about Black Hack games is that it’s pretty easy to whip up new archetypes and rules. I’ll probably throw together a few new medieval-themed Cthulhu Hack archetypes eventually, but for now, I’m just going to stick to the character sheet.
My plan was to take the old Cthulhu Hack character sheet I had previously created, and give it a medieval makeover. My plan is to make the sheet reminiscent of an illuminated manuscript. I’m using LibreOffice Draw to create it.
Making it look like an actual illuminated manuscript would be a little too busy and difficult to read, so I’m going to just add some touches to suggest it. I decided to give the Cthulhu Hack title has a colorful illuminated initial “C”. It’s an actual scan of a real medieval manuscript cleaned up in GIMP.
For the rest of the text I used the font Oakfield2019 by Charles Stross. I’m not sure I’ll be sticking with this font, but I’ll leave it for now. A lot of the manuscripts I saw had colored initial capitals, so I added them as well.
I renamed Flashlight/Smokes to Reason/Passion to better match the medieval setting. Mechanically, they work the same way. I considered replacing some of the other terms with more Dark Ages vocabulary, but decided to keep it simple for clarity’s sake.
Here’s what I have so far. I still have a few little tweaks, mostly involving the title, but I should have it ready this week. I’m also not sure about the text separators. I’m still looking for something that looks a little more medieval.
Polyhedral Nonsense 