His Majesty the Worm is a new-school game with old-school sensibilities: the classic megadungeon experience given fresh life through a focus on the mundanities and small moments of daily life inside the dungeon. This post is part of a series of deep dives into the mechanics of the game.

The Adventurer Sheet

Here are two mild takes:

1. I think you can figure out what an RPG is about by looking at the page count dedicated to discussions of that subject.

2. I think you can figure out what players do by looking at the character sheet.

Here is the adventurer sheet* from His Majesty the Worm.

The front of the booklet is who your adventurer is at a glance. Their name, kith & kin, their motifs, attributes, their relationships with other characters.

The back of the booklet is a rules reference for players. The book is a shared resource. Pull as much commonly-referenced information out of it so people don’t need to hog it.

The inside of the booklet (page 2) is where the stuff you track is kept. On the left page, you track your talents, conditions, and animal companions. Talents can be wounded, so they’re included near the status tracker. On the right page you track your equipment, separated between what you’re carrying, your pack and your belt. (It’s easier to grab things from your belt than your pack!)

Read on to learn more about the design decisions involved here.

• I think “adventurer” is the more natural-language sounding word for a player’s character (as opposed to the insurance-salesman-sounding acronym “PC”).

Credit

First, let me call out the people who actually designed the sheet. One of my players, M. Finch, designed the initial version of the sheet in more-or-less its final form. One of the contributing artists, Michael Strange, gave this sheet a nice design. My graphic designer, Pete Borlace, iterated on and finalized the sheet.

Design Decisions

First, the adventurer sheet is designed to be printed double-sided and folded into a booklet. (I don’t know if this is the first game with a booklet-based character sheet, but I have not seen one in the past.) It is aesthetically and tactically pleasing (to me) to have a pretty little folded booklet in my hands. It’s appealing.

There’s a subtle visual language to the sheet. Circles tend to signify resources being taxed: damage taken, light flickering out, Resolve weakened. Squares tend to signify resources gained: Bonds charged, Arete triggered. Your light source is carried, as shown by the etched line connecting that section of the sheet to your hand slots.

If you have the Beast Master talent, an animal companion you have can be upgraded to a familiar and learn five commands instead of three. Notice how the 4th and 5th command slots are slightly rolled up to show that they’re non-standard.

You have four belt slots and twenty-one pack slots. This was done for a game design reason: it allows the GM to randomly target a piece of equipment. Either glance at the suit (1 of 4) in the minor arcana discard pile to target the belt or in the major arcana discard pile (1 of 21) to target something in the pack.

When I say that “His Majesty the Worm focuses on the human elements of dungeon exploration,” tracking what’s in your hands is sort of what I mean. It’s important to think about what’s in your hands. It changes as you adventure. If you’re carrying a shield and a mace and you say, “I want to cup the moth in my hands,” the GM can follow up to see how you’re trying to do that. Do you put your weapons down? These things feel important to think about.