Players love getting handed real-life, physical artifacts that tie their characters into the ongoing adventure. There are oodles of props, maps, handouts, images, and so on that can be tossed over the GM screen into the middle of the gaming table. Not everyone has time, energy, or skill* to get super in-depth with this kind of effort, and I get that. However, if you have even an inkling of desire to get into this aspect of creating an adventure, here’s what you can do for your gaming group.

Note on skills: I am not an artist at all. I can do decent maps, but not super fancy ones. I do not have the skills developed with practice to do any kind of character sketch or pretty map. However, there are resources out there that can help you out in this area. Keep reading for those resources.

Props

 There are a variety of props you can bring to the table. 

Props for your game can range from swatches of cloth, to hats, to pins, baubles, jewelry, metal coins, and other key items that players might come across. I highly recommend that you only acquire or create props for key elements. Don’t hand them a literal pile of copper pieces on the table after they kill a dozen rats. That’s just going to annoy everyone as the mess of coins gets cleared from the table in order to allow the game to continue.

Instead, if they find a brooch of a noblewoman with a family crest on it, that might be a good time to provide a brooch with some paint on it. Alternatively, you can provide them with a hand-drawn image on a piece of paper and point at it while saying, “You find this brooch in the alley.”

This sounds like it can get very expensive (it can) or become very time consuming (it can) or both (yes). Because of this, I’ve not done physical props in a long time. When I used to do it, I’d scour thrift and second-hand stores for things. Sometimes, just wandering the jumbled goods found in those types of stores, I’d come up with a great hook or NPC or aspect to a character that I didn’t know I’d find.

Maps

 Don’t use hex/graph paper for handouts. 

Maps are easier because they can go on a sheet of paper. The trick here is to use blank paper, not graph paper or hex paper. You can even find “aged paper” that looks yellow-brown and maybe has a faded stain pattern on it. Personally, I like to use thicker (50-60 pounds) paper over the thinner photocopy paper (20-22 pounds) because it takes up the liquids that I use in my aging process better, holds up longer, and allows for a good feel at the table. It’s heftier in a way that can be felt, which tricks the players into thinking the sheet of paper they hold before them is somehow more important.

For aging paper, I use tea and/or coffee to lightly stain the paper. This is an art and does take some practice, so you’re not dissolving the paper in the liquid. This is especially true in the day of recycled paper that doesn’t seem to hold up as well under exposure to moisture. After I get my paper properly aged, I draw what I need to on the paper. I usually use charcoal sticks of different sharpness to give it a truly “authentic” look.

Once I get the map prepared, I will (on rare occasions) bake the paper for a dozen minutes or so at a very low temperature in the oven. We’re talking around 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and I never walk away. I don’t want to char what I’ve just created. I keep a close eye on it while it’s toasting on the baking sheet.

There are some additional treatments you can add to the paper as well. Like holes burned in the paper, singed edges, torn off sections that are “missing,” and tearing the map into different bits. The different bits of missing sections can be scattered about different locations within your adventure.

Handouts

 Make each handout fit on a single sheet. 

Handouts will be things like messages, missives, writs of permission, payment promises, grants of title, grants of land, and so on. I have horrific handwriting (my mom always said I should have been a doctor because of my handwriting), so I do not write these out by hand. Instead, I use a word processor and some fonts with “archaic” appearances to generate the handouts. This is my go to. However, if you are a calligraphy expert, then you can be proud of the work you do with your own creations!

Encoded Messages

 Don’t layer encodings. That’s just mean. 

If you want to present a riddle to your players, you can even encode the messages using a very basic cipher system such as a Caesar cipher, an alphabet substitution cipher, or some similar encoding method. Don’t get super fancy here because the point of the handout is to show someone is trying to keep something secret and to allow the PCs to figure out what’s what with the message. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about or how to implement these ciphers, head over to Cryptii and use the online tool to encode your messages. In the middle column of settings, you can click the orange text representing the type of cipher, and then choose something under the “Ciphers” header.

Images

 Stock images to the rescue! 

Images go a long way toward immersing your players in the world. Really, these break down into people, monsters, and locations. Unless you’re planning on publishing the adventure, you can use stock art, free art, and such to print out and hand out at the table. I could list various sites that have stock art, but a good search on the World Wide Web for “stock art” or “stock images” and then using those sites’ internal search engines will do you better than following my lead. There are just so many different sites out there these days. There is also the Google Image search feature out there as well, and I use that quite often.

I’ll print out the images on my color printer using standard copy paper. I don’t try to feed the heavier paper through my printer because it’s not really designed to handle the thicker art paper I mentioned earlier.

Let The Players Handle The Goods

Once you have everything put together and hand things out to the players, I’d recommend letting them handle and tinker with all the things you’ve handed to them. If a handout or prop becomes a distraction from the game, then you can gentle ask the distracted player to refocus, but allowing them to handle the props increases their immersion in the game.

I would recommend collecting everything you’ve handed out at the end of each session and keeping those items separate from props that you’ve yet to hand out. This way, when the next session rolls around, you can place the found objects back on the table as reminders to the players on where they were and what they’d accomplished thus far.