In 1990-91 Rifts was only the main book + the Sourcebook + Vampire Kingdoms, at least for a time. We were having a lot of fun with it but even then I was trying to find a way to manage the numbers in combat and help players keep track of their vehicle stats. Now I didn't have a PC but I did have my aging Commodore 64 and an alternate operating system that had gotten popular a few years before - GEOS.
GEOS turned the C64 into a very Mac-like device (well, 1980's Mac) with WYSIWYG word processing and some paint type programs that were pretty cool for the time. Availability met opportunity and I started making reference sheets:
There's a lot of stuff to keep track of but I managed to fit it all on to one sheet. Ranges, sizes, damage capacities, weapon details - whew! This was for one of my player groups.
This one was mainly for me. Sheet protectors and overhead markers made them reusable.
Another one for one of my players occasionally used for opposition as well. I was clearly having fun with different font styles and sizes.
The skelebot sheet got used a lot as I thought they made great opponents plus I had visions of the future war scenes in Terminator 2 which was a big deal at the time. Admittedly at 5 attacks per round they could get pretty nasty but I only had to have one mostly-dead party to figure that out. Not running a full squad of 8 made a big difference.
With the sheet protector approach these sheets were still clean and used through most of the 90's.Heck, they're still clean now! They're just printed on that really thin fan-fold paper we used to use back then so they've yellowed and faded a bit. I've cleaned them up just a little in the scans here, but not too much. The C64 itself was lost in a fire a few years later but the sheets live on!
Anyway, this is what cutting-edge game aids looked like about 1991!
2 comments:
Wow, I know of GEOS but I have never encountered someone who used it!
I remember a friend printing off a player's guide to his AD&D campaign on sheets of that two-tone dot matrix paper. It wasn't the easiest to read!
GEOS was cool, especially after years of the cyan-on-blue regular C64 OS.
The whole process with printing back then was a pain - ribbons? Tearing your perforated paper oh-so-carefully? Yeah, we have it much better now.
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