Back in 2020/2021, I was looking at a few options for solo tabletop role playing games (TTRPGs). At first I pulled the popular (and mammoth) finds like Gloomhaven, but I was looking for other lighter-weight options to do some stealth gaming while traveling. I first came upon Ironsworn, a viking-themed TTRPG developed by Shawn Tomkin, based on the “Powered By the Apocalypse” system and focused on solo play. One thing that was particularly attractive was that it was free to download the core rules – being pretty new to pen-and-paper games, I didn’t want a huge investment that might not hold my interest. I played a bit but while I had a character I was into, I had a hard time logging my game and when I dropped it for a month I had a hard time making sense when I picked it back up.
Fast forward a few months to October 2021, and magically Shawn Tomkin has begun a Kickstarter for a new formulation of Ironsworn, the space-themed Starforged. I followed this one closely, reading all the updates and pouring over the drafts he released while developing the play guides. I started playing on an early version, trying to be more organized than I had been with my prior game, taking a vast amount of notes and recording most everything I did. A little overboard, and the primary issue was it required a laptop and a fair amount of table space to play.
Since then I’ve purchased a Ratta Supernote A5X, a writing tablet that uses an E-ink display like a Kindle reader. I bought it primarily to keep me organized at work (which has been great), but it seemed like a perfect tool for TTRPGs like Starforged. However, I wasn’t finding much out there. The overlap of “People who play Starforged” with “People who have ridiculous writing tablets” seems to be fairly small.
Fortunately, Starforged comes with printable templates to get you started; unfortunately (though somewhat obviously), they’re created for regular 8.5″x11″ paper. With the default character sheet as a reference and using some of the knowledge of Scribd that I picked up from earlier efforts, I was able to create a template with the proper aspect ratio (1404 x 1872 pixels). Since I was doing it anyway, I added a few features not in the original sheet, and modified a bit to better suit the easy erasing/rewriting of the tablet.
- Health, Spirit, Supply, and Momentum are single blocks rather than long strips. The strips were there to let you use paperclips to mark your status, but we’re not doing that here.
- Added in an “Assets” block.
- Dedicated area to track your Starship, including status, modules, etc.
- Dedicated area to track other Assets
- Hex for integrity of the asset, as well as a small hex for a “battered” status or similar.
- The boxes to the right of each asset are for marking which benefits you’ve earned; every card seems to start with the first one so I’ve pre-populated it.
Next, I wanted to be able take a lot of notes on the progress in game. Might be a little excessive — I’m not sure retaining individual rolls is going to do much for anyone — but that’s how I did it. There was no reference I was able to find for this sort of thing so it’s entirely from scratch.
I hope someone out there finds these useful. If you use them and have any comments/suggestions, please feel free to reach out! I may make additional templates, but for now I’ve been using shrunk-down versions of the templates that came with the game.
