What to do if boons and characters are stolen?

[Rycaut]

Literally stolen - I just had my backback which had all of my unused boons, GM chronicle sheets (including my tier 1 boon from this year's gencon) and three of my characters stolen and likely won't ever be recovered.

What can/should I do?

(I don't have copies of any of the characters or chronicle sheets for those characters which sucks because one of them was the one I wanted to run thru Waking Rune, the other is the one I have been playing most recently and the third is my only built low level character (needed to be rebuilt due to errata but I don't have the chronicles etc for him)

And the loss of the boons from years of GMing and playing hurts the most - all my races boons all my various seasons boons etc.

Really bad day

[pauljathome]

The obvious answer is "contact your local VC". Hopefully they'll be able to reconstruct much of what you've lost from the online records and (if they don't know personally) from talking to event/con organizers who will remember you gaining boons.

[Rycaut]

who do I talk to get my Tier 1 boon from GenCon back? The other boons would be nice to get back but far less critical - what I really am saddest about it losing three of my favorite characters - all of my notes, chronicles, years of play now gone in an instant.

Really crappy start to the day.

[ElyasRavenwood]

For your Tier 1 Boon, perhaps contacting Jon Compton may be the best thing to do. There may be a an online record of what you have GMed at Gen Con.

I am sorry for your loss.

[Kyshkumen]

I would talk to Pirate Rob as he is your local VC. I don't see him turning a deaf ear on what happened to your PFS records and he might be able to help work things out to get you a replacement for the GenCon boon. Sorry to hear that you had your stuff stolen and hopefully we can get those three characters back to playable soon. The one bit of good news is there should be an online record of all the games played.

[Pirate Rob]

Send me an email. We'll get you sorted out as best as possible.

[Rycaut]

The challenge for me is all my notes in the character sheets about items, feats, stats array etc and remembering which dm sheets were assigned to these characters. I'll try to rebuild them as best I can just hate losing all the history of fun games. Really a bummer. Guess I should start scanning my sheets but too late now. (And thanks Pirate Rob - I'll email you this evening when I have time)

[LazarX]

Rycaut wrote:

The challenge for me is all my notes in the character sheets about items, feats, stats array etc and remembering which dm sheets were assigned to these characters. I'll try to rebuild them as best I can just hate losing all the history of fun games. Really a bummer. Guess I should start scanning my sheets but too late now. (And thanks Pirate Rob - I'll email you this evening when I have time)

That info should be obtainable by looking at your session list in your account.

[Rycaut]

but I don't have copies of most of those scenarios - and I did apply some games that I had GMed to these characters (from a few years ago before GM games were tracked to a specific character ahead of time)

I'll send Pirate Rob what I can recover - trying to remember what boons I had applied to any of these characters.

Also two of them were no longer legal races (Tiefling and Aasimar) (the tiefling is such an older character of mine that I actually used a race boon to build him)

More painful is trying to remember all of the GM credit chronicle sheets I had as well as other sheets I had but hadn't applied (boons & adventure path games). Lots to remember and try to figure out how/if I can recover.

[UndeadMitch]

As long as the games were reported online it should make recovering from that much more manageable. Sorry to hear about your bad luck.

[Rycaut]

I think I'm going to try to get in the habit of taking a picture of my character sheet(s), chronicle and any boons I get for every character going forward. Digital storage is cheap and easy to backup.... trying to recreate three beloved characters is not fun in the least.

[Kyrie Ebonblade,]

Been there. Done that. I'm in the process of rebuilding my binder. Which was 23 characters big at the time.

It is epically not fun.

[Gary Bush]

You may want to look in the general area of where your backpack was taken. It seems likely to me that whoever took it is not PFS player and the papers are likely in a trashcan somewhere. If you are fast enough and get to the can before it is taken to the dump you might get lucky.

Good luck...

[Rycaut]

Gary Bush wrote:

You may want to look in the general area of where your backpack was taken. It seems likely to me that whoever took it is not PFS player and the papers are likely in a trashcan somewhere. If you are fast enough and get to the can before it is taken to the dump you might get lucky.

Good luck...

Unfortunately this was on Tuesday and I live on a busy street and it was early in the morning (and on a day when many of my neighbors had their trash cans out on the curb. I've posted to the neighborhood NextDoor group and may post some flyers offering a reward this weekend but I'm not very optimistic - most likely they didn't open up the bags until they were far away from my home (I'm guessing they were in a car because they stole a large shopping bag with my toddler's stuff for his new school (full pack of diapers, sheets, changes of clothes etc), his lunch bag and my backpack with my laptop, papers and more in it - so it is unlikely they were just walking down the street or on a bike with all of that stuff.

[Gary Bush]

Who knows.. with scumbags like that maybe if you went to Craigslist and posted a "finders fee" you might get someone to bite. and hey, if police happens to stop by and fines you laptop.. well..

Anyways, really stinks that this has happen to you.

[Rycaut]

indeed - I think I'm going to get in the habit of taking a smartphone photo every time I get a chronicle sheet in the future and of my character sheets after a game. Annoying but at least if this happened again in the future I would have a way to at least somewhat recover

[James Risner]

One hint I do, I build my characters as PDF when I find time. So I have a high quality PDF scan of every chronicle and I store on my iPad or iPhone. Then leave papers at home.

This works well for me, because I've never used an expendable thing on a chronicle sheet except build options (like race or expedition manager, etc). So I never need to check off something from a sheet ever, as I simply won't ever want to do so. I could see some GM's would rather you had the paper if you are using expendable boons.

[burkoJames]

WHen I got my characters stolen the local Bay Area VLs helped me out big time and printed out new chronicles. And will be helping me out more by signing them if I ever can bring myself to fill out the 100+ chronicle sheets based on my records.

[Rycaut]

I don't tend to run from electronic devices at the table - when I get to play I try to be disconnected (it is a rare event these days unfortunately). I also have a LOT of characters with boons and limited purchase items on chronicle sheets that I do need to track (or more accurately did need to track if I can't rebuild them). One of my characters I had a PDF of from building him in Hero Lab two games ago - so I should be able to mostly recover him as a character - but losing his chronicles means losing all my records of what he has/hasn't purchased - and the last time I played him I had gone through all of his chronicles and finally purchased all the special arrows he had access to (he's part Zen Archer so that's kinda important)

I do also tend to buy wands with limited charges when I have access to them (sometimes even by characters who aren't casters - they are often really helpful for parties I'm part of even if I can't use them directly).

[andreww]

James Risner wrote:

One hint I do, I build my characters as PDF when I find time. So I have a high quality PDF scan of every chronicle and I store on my iPad or iPhone. Then leave papers at home.

As I understand it we are required to have paper copies of chronicles as well as character sheets.

[JohnF]

I don't generally run from electronic devices, either - I much prefer hard copies. But I do maintain an electronic copy of my Inventory Tracking Sheet (including all gold earned and spent), as well as the paper copy in my character binder. I also don't throw out older hard copies of my character sheet - they all get tossed into a box.

My wife has taken the extra step of scanning all her chronicles and boons. I haven't got that far yet, but it's on my "To Do" list.