Bury your character in an RPG Coffin?

Well, not exactly bury, but the RPG Coffin from Cheese Weasel Logistics is an interesting way to carry your character sheet, miniatures and dice around.

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The RPG Coffin is an adaptation of Cheese Weasel's Card Coffin, which is a tin box about four by five by three inches deep with a special insert for holding your card games and accessories. In this incarnation, the plastic insert is replaced by a foam insert that will hold two miniatures, and some fun stuff... a character record booklet, a multi-purpose adventure note pad, a little calendar for tracking what days you'll be playing, and an official Cheeze Weasel Logistics pencil with eraser. There's also an adhesive-backed sheet of felt which you can put in the bottom or lid to roll dice in.

Unfortunately, the box is just barely too small to hold 3x5" index cards. It'd be great if I could just throw a few of those in there (seeing as how much I [[http://raven.phoenyx.net/mutterings/20041125.html|like them]]), but they don't quite fit.

While the boxes come in only two pre-printed styles, they also have magnets with various pictures on them that fit the top of plain black tins. And thin sheet magnets that will work in inkjet printers are not terribly expensive... buy a package and print your own custom labels, perhaps with your character portrait. (This is what I'm planning to do. Alternately, you could put local restaurant magnets on it. I seem to have no shortage of those.) Whether you go for a pre-printed tin or the plain black one, watch out... the coating scratches very easily. Mine is already showing wear just sitting on my desk and being taken out of the house only once.

I think the neatest part of the RPG Coffin is the miniature storage area. For those who play with minis, it's always a little awkward finding a safe place to store that one mini you need to bring to the game every week.

There are currently only two character record booklets available, D&D 3.5 and XCrawl, neither of which I'm interested in. I got the D&D booklet with mine. My primary purpose in buying the whole kit was to figure out if I could develop a useful Fudge-related booklet for it. I'm still working on that.

The big question I have is, will people use a character sheet that comes in a 3.25x4.5" booklet form? I think it'd be easier with rules-light forms of Fudge, where there's less technical game information, whereas the D&D booklet spreads important combat info across many pages. I think trying to play D&D with this character booklet would drive most players nuts.

One could just fold up a standard character sheet to fit, but that makes for a wrinkly, unattractive sheet. And you'll run into the same problem with any handouts from the GM, etc. Not to mention that your rulebooks won't fit in there. :) (Though I could probably write all of my freeform Fudge "rules" on a booklet that would fit.) If the character sheet doesn't work out, the RPG Coffin is a pretty box for a couple miniatures, dice and any tokens or small gizmos you might want to carry to the game. Especially handy if you use tokens to represent "hero points" and want to keep them between sessions.

Or if you play [[http://www.septemberquestion.org/lumpley/dogs.html|Dogs in the Vineyard]], your character will easily fit in a little booklet, and you can use all the rest of the space for all the dice you need to play the game.