Playing aids for AD&D

I started this journey to actually play AD&D by the book a few months ago now, and I'm still not at the point where I'm prepared enough to run a campaign, as in DM it myself and play with a character.

I've found the extra playing aids put out by TSR to be almost essential when running the game. I cannot imagine the arduousness of having to play straight out of the book.  I will link the playing aids I found to be the most helpful, and where possible I will link official or open license versions that are as close to the TSR originals as possible.

First off is Mad Irishman's AD&D Player Character Record replicas: http://www.mad-irishman.net/pub_dnd_1e.html#1e_adnd2   I found these to be invaluable in recording my players' accumulated information, as the days when all a PC's information could fit on an index card a la OD&D are over.  AD&D has too many conditional adjustments and statistic modifiers to keep track of.

Unfortunately Mad Irishman's PDFs only reproduce the actual sheet, and not the instructions. There is a lot of useful information in the instructions that would help fill in these sheets, information that should be in the PHB but isn't, and the only way to get it is to track down a copy of the original product.

Secondly the adventure record sheet, linked on the same page, which reproduces a lot of the information on the character sheet, but has a useful section on tracking turns or days.

The next absolutely essential aid is the DM screen, reproduced on Dragonsfoot: https://www.dragonsfoot.org/cs/index.shtml#22 .  After reading through the DMG I came to the conclusion that there was no way I was going to remember all those rules and exceptional cases myself, and I was ruminating on creating a "cheat sheet" for reference, but then I found half the work was done for me with the DM screen. While it is little more than just a collection of tables, some of them apply directly to the Character sheets with information that's not obvious from the book.

And Finally, the Dungeon Masters Adventure Log, for which I could not find a free legal copy online. Not the log itself, but the instructions to the log is what's valuable, as it collects a bunch of adventuring rules that were scattered throughout the DMG in a concise and readable layout.


The most valuable aids for me are ones that provide quick references to the rules and charts from the DMG and PHB. Using these aids has taken a lot of strain of preparing and organizing a play session of off the DM and make it possible to play without constantly flipping through the source books. These aids also provide an organized and structured way of describing the events and results of a session without defaulting to haphazard and unreliable loose paper notes.  Surprisingly, some of the information recorded on these sheets is not mentioned in the core books themselves, meaning there are some essential rules missing from the books.  I found that these aids greatly enhanced my experience in AD&D and I consider them to be as essential to game play as the source books.