Not of This Earth

It's been a while since we've featured a full-blown prop set like this one from Creafae.  It not only features a nicely done Grey alien-style fetal specimen, but a slew of supporting documents and props. 

 That includes photographs, slides, and supplementary references for the included scientific report. 

The report itself is a wonderful piece of work describing the recovery of the specimen(s) and the resulting autopsy.  Some wonderful worldbuilding is on display here.  Click through on the link above to see the complete gallery.

 

Quick and Easy Prop Documents

Find yourself in need of a prop search warrant for a case you're investigating?  How about a paternity suit filing that potentially reveals a bloodline descended from the strange inhabitants of Innsmouth?  Then head over to legalfakes.com.  It's a gag website for fake legal papers, but the forms aren't half bad as prop documents for your tabletop games.  If you're looking for something a bit more realistic they're a perfect base for retouching.  Best of all, the site's paperwork is quick and free.

 

 

The Things Below

"The Things Below" is an interactive storytelling project from artist Fred Burdy.  In place of a traditional narrative it uses prop documents, photos, and ephemera to create an immersive tale of things perhaps better left unknown.  Click through to take a look at the full gallery.  It's an impressive piece of work.

 

The Miskatonic Papers

What really happened to the Miskatonic University Tunguska expedition?  We'll find out when Todd Thyberg releases "The Miskatonic Papers".  He's been posting a steady stream of prop documents and artifacts from the project.  I'm looking forward to the final product.

Papers, Please

This beautiful collection of props and documents comes to us from Dr. Christian Lehmann.  They're part of a LARP set in occupied France during WW II.

The Day They Nuked Buffalo

On September 27th, 1952 downtown Buffalo, New York was incinerated in a nuclear blast.

No, you haven't jumped over to an alternate timeline.  The bombing was part of a civil defense awareness exercise.  As part of the effort the Buffalo News printed a special post-apocalypse edition.   Conjecturally, the bomb wiped out most of their staff and they were forced to use a still intact printing press in the suburbs.  As far as I know this is the only prop newspaper ever officially sanctioned by the US government.

Ironically, much of the destruction described in the story would actually take place years later. All those factories and industrial facilities would indeed disappear, but it would be foreign competition and not a nuclear fireball that claimed them.

I stumbled across the Buffalo exercise while researching a similar effort held in Utica, NY, just down the road from where I live.  It was the largest civil defense exercise in US history, using thousands of volunteers from a wide radius around the city to simulate a full blown nuclear attack and its aftermath.


The area in the newsreel where white suited teams are checking for radioactive contamination was, until recently, one of the most contaminated industrial sites in the entire nation.  The soil was so saturated with coal gas waste that it would puddle up in your footprints if you walked across the grass. 

The Road to Madness

Det. Arthur Fitzgerald has learned first hand there are things in this world that don't fit in with our conventional view of reality. David Hemenway brings us some cool prop documents developed as background for his character in an upcoming "Call of Cthulhu" campaign.

A Plethora of Passports

As a followup to Tuesday's look at Belloq's passport I wanted to offer up the "Passport Stamps and Visas"group on Flickr.   It's a fantastic resource for anyone looking to create a prop passport.  You'll find hundreds of examples spanning the 20th and 21st centuries from countries around the globe, all sourced from collectors and travelers.   The large format pictures make it easy to recreate transit stamps, or even lift them right from the posted images.

As an aside, I've become increasingly leery of recreating accurate official paper.  For a film or television series having an accurate recreation of a period document may be important, but for live action games?  Not so much.  For personal use I think "believable" trumps "accurate".  You also avoid the sad reality that a lot of official paper doesn't look nearly as cool as it should.  Central Intelligence Agency, I'm looking at you. 

Belloq's Passport

Dr. René Belloq is a highlight of "Raiders of the Lost Ark". He's the kind of intelligent, ruthless, and charming villain that's all too rare in film. Toy and Prop Masters brings us this conjectural recreation of his German passport, complete with period stamps, transit notations, and a plethora of inserts based on the search for the "Well of Souls".

Vintage Family Trees

One of the quirks of Lovecraft's work is how often genealogy comes up. Stories like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "The Dunwich Horror" feature the frequently repeated theme of bloodlines tainted by Mythos influence, and "The Thing at the Doorstep" is a particularly icky take. That's why I was happy to discover some excellent vintage family tree certificates at the "Oh So Nifty Vintage Graphics" crafting site. This one is available over here...

...or try this calligraphic example. 

They're an ideal way to introduce clues involving family relationships into a tabletop or live action game.

Well 'Versed

Mike J. was kind enough to share some of his own Firefly/Serenity documents in the comments to Thursday's post.  He's produced alternate currency, bureaucratic paperwork, tax stamps, and some excellent industrial signage.  The rest of his blog is pretty cool as well.  It focuses on more obscure prop items, including some well done Mythos items.

Paperwork from the 'Verse

"Firefly" is long gone, but it's fans continue to keep the show alive.  Yellowjacket brings us an impressive collection of paper props from the 'Verse, including ship's papers, transit labels, industrial signage, and currency.  His discussion thread includes links to everything in high-resolution PDF format.

Papers Please

Josua-Mozes brings us this bureaucratic prop tableau.  The faux passport is a great piece of work.

The Retro ARG

This is a bit ranty.

I'm putting together another installment of the Holiday Gift Guide that focuses on prop-heavy books, like the Dennis Wheatley mysteries I've raved about before.  One of the attractions of those dossier-style projects is that they tell a story using a novel mechanism of documents and physical objects.  Spotting the clues and putting them together is fun, but there's a real narrative being built up as the backstory is slowly revealed.  One with engaging characters, interesting twists, and a logical chain of events.

That's something almost totally missing from today's Alternate Reality Games, the spiritual and technological successors to Wheatley's work.  And that's a damn shame. There was a time, not too long ago, when ARGs were filled with possibilities.  They were the perfect venue for bringing interesting stories to life in a multi-media format, a technological embodiment of the epistolary style writers had been using for centuries.

There were hints of what were possible on display during The Beast, the epic tie-in with Kubrick's/Spielberg's "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence", and it's stylistic followup "I Love Bees".   Both games had a massive community of followers dedicated to steadily decoding the bits and bobs of the overall story.  It was a revolutionary approach, but with the benefit of hindsight it's easy to see that the seeds of mediocrity were already being sown.  How?  The increasing reliance on the decoding element of gameplay over the narrative strength of the story.

Today, over a decade later, I can't think of a single ARG that isn't primarily an exercise in cryptography.  Instead of building a strong story game creators are concentrating on ever more obscure encoding schemes.  It's almost risen to the point of self parody.  Discover a website address in viral video.  Visit the website.  Get asked for a password.  Sign up for an email.  Get an email that links to a distorted image.  Try different stenographic techniques to decode the image.  Break the code on the picture to get a phrase, which turns out to be a key for a code imbedded in another email, which gives you access to another webpage that needs a hashtag you can only get by running an audio clip through a spectrum analyzer.  And then, finally, you get access to...a list of corporate officers.

Sweet.  Fancy.  Moses.  What a god awful waste of time.  The player has to jump through multiple hoops and the story has only advanced incrementally, if it all.  It's just like the horrific "grind" that used to characterize online fantasy games.  Bring me ten ghoul ears.  Ding!  Fetch 16 rabbit skins.  Ding!  Lather, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum.

The problem, I think, is the idea that interactivity equals immersiveness.  Designers seem to think that the mere act of tackling ever more elaborate and bizarre encoding schemes means the players are "involved" in the game.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  They're just grinding away, the same way they did when they were a 4th level Wizard hunting spiders in EverQuest.  It's rote busywork carried out solely as a required exercise to get to "the good stuff".  You know, the actual content.  The Story.

Except, sadly, there usually isn't a story.  That's because creating an engaging narrative is a lot harder than running an encryption program.  Developing characters, establishing locations, and nurturing a plot takes time, effort, and skill.  There are vanishingly few people, much less game designers, who can do it well.  Hence the reliance on Ye Old Cryptography Program, because you can pad out even the most inane and amateurish story to epic size by laying on an endless series of passwords, codes, and pointless, illogical puzzles.

I would love to see an ARG that totally rejects the current trend.  Something that returns to the epistolary roots of the genre and tells a story through documents, as Stoker did with "Dracula".  Even better, I'd like it to be grounded in reality and incorporate real historical documents.  If your medium is going to be the internet, use it.  All of those online historical newspaper archives, museum collections, and genealogy databases are an absolute goldmine of material just waiting to be used.

Here's a demonstration of what I think is possible, starting with an actual newspaper clipping. In Firefox you can right click and open the image in a new tab to make the whole easier to read. Just look at how many clues and potential plot hooks are in this single story. Then imagine using faux documents to amplify the story that already exists and take it in a direction the "official" version only hints at.

Vintage Radio Signals Report

This would be an ideal piece of evidence for any story involving an oceangoing vessel.   As messages were transmitted or received the radio operator would fill out the sheet and then place it in the master communications log.  Those little snippets of information can build up an entire narrative, as anyone who has browsed the transmissions from the night the Titanic sank can attest.

Just click on the picture below to get the JPG. You'll find a PDF with typewritten form fields and trimming guides over here. Ideally you would want to print it off using a colored vellum. Reports from a logbook would have two holes punched in the upper center area for the radio room binder.

London's Natural History Museum

Another map from the 1922 edition of "Muirhead's London and its Environs", this time of the Natural History Museum. Click through on the picture below for the high resolution JPG. The PDF version is available from Google Documents over here.

London Zoological Gardens

A map of the London Zoological Gardens from the 1922 edition of "Muirhead's London and its Environs". This is another of the journal stuffer documents I adore. Just click through on the picture below for the high resolution JPG. You can download a PDF version from Google Documents over here.

Size Matters

I've been puttering around with some PDF scans of vintage document and noticed something odd. The margins. All of the pages were surrounded by what looked to be a quarter inch of empty space, as though they were shrunk down after they were scanned.

It turns out I was misinterpreting what I was seeing. The documents weren't shrunk, but were universally smaller than the scanning platen sized for 8.5" by 11" "Letter" sized paper. That's because back in 1921 two different Federal committees came up with two different paper standards .

Not until World War I or shortly after was a standard paper size agreed to in the United States. Interestingly enough, within six months of each other, two different paper sizes were set as the standard; one for the government and one for the rest of us.

1. In 1921, the first director of the Bureau of the Budget established an interagency advisory group with the President's approval called the Permanent Conference on Printing which established the 8" x 10½" as the general U.S. government letterhead standard. This extended an earlier establishment made by the former President Hoover, the Secretary of Commerce at the time, who established the 8" x 10½" as the standard letterhead size for his department.

2. Now, during the same year, a Committee on the Simplification of Paper Sizes consisting of printing industry representatives was appointed to work with the Bureau of Standards as part of Hoover's program for the Elimination of Waste in Industry. This group came up with basic sizes for all types of printing and writing papers. The size for "letter" was a 17" x 22" sheet while the "legal" size was 17" x 28" sheet. The later known U.S. letter format was these sizes halved (8 ½" x 11" and 8 ½" by 14").

I vaguely recall coming across the idea of a minuscule size difference between "government" paper and regular paper before, but I wrote it off as an urban legend or waggish commentary on government efficiency. Personally, I'm not going to get too bent out of shape that my few reproductions of Federal paper are slightly oversized. It's a legitimate concern for anyone worried about the absolute authenticity of prop documents in the classic era. For casual game use the hassle of resizing document templates and hand trimming paper to size is too much effort for too little reward.

1927 New York City Pistol License

Today we have some reference photos of a classic era pistol license from New York City. At first I was a bit surprised that the card included both a pasted photo and a fingerprint, but by the late 20's the revolution in investigative policing was well under way.

Pinkerton Credentials

Julian DiMarco has updated his Pinkerton detective credentials from last year. He'll be making blank copies available on his website soon.