Digital handouts

A handout does not have to be paper to be an object. On a virtual table it is a file somebody opens; in a pocket it is a voicemail that arrives on a Tuesday. The rules are the same as for paper — it should exist for a reason of its own, and it is usually better delivered to one player than to all of them.

On a virtual tabletop

Handouts shared in the tool

Every virtual tabletop can push an image or a document to the party or to one player, and the one-player version is the feature worth using. A document that only one character can read reproduces the thing a physical handout does naturally and a shared screen destroys: the holder decides what to tell the others.

Upload the same file you would have printed — aged, stained, scorched — rather than a clean export. The aging survives the screen perfectly well, and a party looking at a photographed letter treats it differently from a party looking at typed text in a chat window.

Layered PDFs

One file with the information on separate layers, turned on as the investigation earns them: the map, then the underground level, then the thing marked in red. It is the digital equivalent of handing over a map in pieces, and it has the advantage that the file the players keep is always the current one.

Fog of war

Uncovering terrain live is the one thing a virtual table does better than a physical one. Use it for the shape of the place rather than for its contents — the corridor that turns out to be longer than anyone expected does more work than a revealed monster — and remember that the covered area is itself a handout: the players read the shape of what they have not seen.

A shared notes document

A collaborative document the party keeps themselves is, in practice, the handout they reread most. Start it for them with three or four headings — people, places, questions — and then stay out of it.

A media kit

One folder of images for the campaign — locations, faces, objects — chosen to look as though they came from the same world. Consistency matters more than quality here: five pictures in one style beat twenty in five styles, because the party learns to read the style as the setting.

Audio and video

A recorded message

Thirty seconds of a voice does what a page of transcript cannot: it carries an accent, a hesitation, and the sound of a room. Record it on a phone, in one take, and keep the mistakes — a clean read sounds like an actor, a fumbled one sounds like a person leaving a message they did not want to leave.

Play it twice. The first listen is atmosphere and the second is information, and the party will ask for the second anyway — better to offer it than to have the scene stall on what somebody thought they heard.

Found footage

A twenty-second clip that stops mid-frame. It costs a phone, a dark corridor and a shaky hand, and the thing that makes it work is not what is on it but where it stops — the recording that ends before the door opens is a better handout than the one that shows what came through.

A voicemail between sessions

A message that arrives on a Wednesday, in character, to one player, is the only handout in this guide that happens while nobody is playing. It is extraordinarily effective and needs one agreement first: ask the table, before the campaign, whether messages out of session are welcome, and to whom. Some people want the game to stay at the table, and that is a preference to honour rather than a challenge.