The first edition of
Dungeons & Dragons did not ship with any sort of character sheet. The
Men & Magic booklet did provide "a sample record of a character" (pg.10) which comprised only the example character's name ("Xylarthen"), his class, his six abilities, and his gold and experience totals: it omits even fundamentals like level and hit points. Nowhere in the original game did there appear a pre-printed, fill-in-the-blank form for recording the vital statistics of characters. The fan community immediately grasped the usefulness of keeping one such form per character, especially in a campaign with many players. It is therefore not surprising that the first fanzine dedicated to a
Dungeons & Dragons campaign included just such a character sheet: the one we see above, from the
Haven Herald #1 of Stephen Tihor's Endore campaign in New York, dated May 3, 1975.
