This is something I’m sharing from my own campaign. We have a lot of Supporting Characters and NPCs aboard our ship, and we found that the easiest way to track them is to use a spreadsheet on GoogleDocs. I can download it as a PDF or print directly from GoogleDocs, as shown below.
The great thing about keeping their stats on GoogleDocs is that you can now use the data to quickly generate printable Crew Cards.
Take a look at the examples (using some stats for NPCs here at Continuing Mission), then I will describe how to create a copy for yourself, and how to generate the cards.
EDIT 2: Oops, I had Kargan’s Traits and Medals wrong, but it’s fixed now.
Examples
Crew Cards (White background) example (PDF)
A number of dots along the side are automatically generated and equal to Stress, in case you want to use a paper clip to track Stress.
Crew Cards (black background) example (PDF)
How To Use The Crew Roster
Caveat: this is still experimental, so I hope everything works. Let us know if you encounter problems.
- First create a copy on GoogleDocs by clicking this link: REPLICATE
- You will see three tabs: Roster, WhiteBkgdCards, and BlackBkgdCards.
- Replace the data in the Crew Roster with your own crew’s stats. You may wish to adjust font size for cells with a lot of information.
- Set the print settings or PDF download settings to Fit To Width, and choose a margin size that works for you. I recommend Narrow.
How To Use The Crew Cards
- Choose the tab for Cards based on the background you want.
- On the right side, there is a 2×2 grid. Enter the row number of the character as it appears on the Crew Roster.
- Set the margins as shown below, and print or download the page, then cut into cards.
Here are the recommended settings for margins in GoogleDocs.
How to Modify
I intentionally left out Weapon damage on the Cards as it’s not needed at our table (and easy to figure out). However, you can likely sneak them into Traits and Medals if needed.
You might also want to change font size of certain cells if you have a lot of text to fit in.
With some knowledge of Google Sheets, you can also add things such as Stardate, Episode, or version number to the cards. We track our versions through a Season/Episode index.
Oh, to get the images right, do 100×100 pixel photos and put them somewhere online, like your own WordPress site. The Google Sheets formula to use is =image(“theURLofImage”,3)