Coh

Coh (the Info-Mac archive shortname for the Complete Handbook of Outcastia) is a late-1990s shareware data expansion for Data Dimensions' AD&D Character System on Macintosh, bundling new races, classes, skills, spells, and a fresh campaign land for both dungeon masters and players to drop into existing AD&D 2nd Edition games.

Setting and story

Outcastia is a homebrew classical-fantasy campaign setting created by Nitehawk Jarrett (catalogued at RPGGeek as setting #7721). The handbook frames the supplement as an officially sanctioned third-party expansion for the AD&D Character System, intended to give Mac-based gaming groups a ready-made world to roam alongside the standard rules.

Gameplay and content

Rather than a standalone game, Coh ships as a content pack: tables of new player races, character classes, skills, and spells, plus geography and lore for the Outcastia setting. The data files plug directly into Data Dimensions' AD&D Character System, which itself was a Mac-native digital character-sheet and rules toolkit popular among 1990s tabletop groups who wanted to track stats on the family Mac instead of paper.

Engine and technical notes

The package is distributed as a single BinHex 4.0 archive (coh.hqx, roughly 4 MB) under info-mac/game/adv on the Info-Mac mirror. It is a content add-on, not an executable, so it depends on a working installation of the AD&D Character System host application to be useful.

Development and release

The handbook was self-distributed by an author who used the Geocities homepage ~hawksnest1 as a contact point, with the tagline "Strive to be different..." The release positioned itself as an official supplement to the AD&D Character System by Data Dimensions software. No commercial publication record exists; it is pure bedroom-shareware tabletop supplement work, archived through Info-Mac and otherwise undocumented in MobyGames or Wikipedia.