Which handout for which scene
A handout is a prop that does a job. Reading a scene out loud tells the players what a character saw; putting a piece of paper in their hands makes them the ones who saw it. These are the ten kinds this site makes, and the scene each one is for.
Things a character is sent
Message — A5, 148 × 210 mm
One page someone is handed: a letter, a warning, a confession, a transmission. The workhorse, and the one to reach for when you are not sure. A title, a body and a signature, in handwriting, typescript, a terminal, a modern email, a diary page or a page torn from a notebook — six looks, which is what makes the same structure serve a Victorian letter and a hacked console log.
Best when the sender matters. A letter carries a voice, so it is worth more than an in-character summary exactly when the players should be wondering who wrote it.
Telegram — 210 × 148 mm
Short, clipped, expensive by the word, and impossible to argue with. A telegram is the format for news that arrives too late and too briefly: a death, a summons, a single instruction. Its shortness is the whole effect — nobody explains themselves in a telegram, so the players have to.
Things a character reads
Newspaper — A4 or A3
A broadsheet front page, with stories you drag between columns. Use it when the world needs to be bigger than the scene: the players came for one story and the other four on the page tell them what else is happening in town. It is also the best way to plant a clue nobody is looking for yet, because a front page is something people skim rather than study.
Print it at A3 when you can. Players spread a newspaper out; they do not hold it.
Mythos Tome — two A5 pages
A book on a shelf, for the Call of Cthulhu family. The first page is what the investigators see and can read; the second is the Keeper's — what studying it costs in time and Sanity, and what it teaches. The two pages export separately, which is the point: hand over the first, keep the second.
Menu — A5
A tavern's board, a dining car's card, a ration list. Quietly one of the most useful props there is, because a menu is a list of prices, and a list of prices is a setting explaining itself without a single line of exposition. What is expensive, what is out of stock and what the locals eat says more than a paragraph of description.
Press Clipping — A6
One article, cut out. Where the newspaper shows what the whole town is reading, a clipping shows what one person thought worth keeping, and players ask who cut it out before they ask what it says. Several from different papers on the same story make a trail on their own.
Register — A4
A page that is mostly a table: a harbour book, a stores ledger, a sign-out log. Nobody writes a register to be read, which is why it is believed. Hide the clue in one row among a dozen ordinary ones and let the table find the line that does not fit.
Questionnaire — A4
An exam paper, a personnel form, a survey, filled in by somebody else. The questions belong to an institution and the answers to one person, and the players read the gap between them. Hand it over blank instead and let a player fill it in at the table: an admission form asks things a character would rather not say out loud.
Things a character is shown
Photograph — two A6 pages
Your own image as a print, with a caption on the front and a note on the back. A photograph is the one handout players look at longer than they read, so it rewards a detail placed where nobody looks first. Print the back as well: the handwriting there is usually the point.
Poster — A4
A wanted notice, a proclamation, a recruitment bill, a missing person. A poster is public, which makes it different from everything else here: it is not addressed to the players, they are just the ones standing in front of it. Good for putting a face on a threat, and better for the moment a player recognises the face.
Advertisement — A5
A leaflet that sells something: a tonic, a holiday, a retreat, a lecture. It is the one handout that wants to be believed, and it always names a price and an address, which makes it the easiest way to send the players somewhere. Put the clue in the small print.
Official Form — A4
A police report, a permit, a requisition, a case file. Bureaucracy is a genre of horror in its own right, and a form makes an institution real in a way a description cannot — boxes someone had to tick, a stamp someone had to get. Use it when the obstacle is not a monster but a process.
Things a character carries
Identity Card — 86 × 54 mm
An ID, a pass, a badge, a guild membership, the size of a bank card. Two uses: give one to each player at the start and the party is documented, which changes how they behave at checkpoints; or give one to the party and it belongs to a stranger, which is a mystery with a face on it.
Ticket — 150 × 62 mm
A train ticket, a boarding pass, a cloakroom stub, a receipt. The smallest prop and often the sharpest, because a ticket is evidence: it puts a named person in a named place on a named date, and it does it without anyone claiming anything. A stub in a dead man's coat is a scene.
Reference Card — 63 × 88 mm
Poker size, nine to an A4 sheet. A spell, a condition, an item, an NPC — any system. This is the one handout that is not fiction: it is a rules aid, and its job is to stop the table looking things up. Make a card for every status effect your system keeps forgetting and the game speeds up measurably.
Choosing one
The question is not "which handout would be nice here" but "what do I want the players to do with it". A newspaper gets skimmed and shared. A letter gets read aloud by whoever is holding it. A ticket gets examined. A card gets kept. Pick the object whose natural handling is the behaviour you want.
Whichever you pick, the look is a separate choice — the same telegram can be 1920s or Eastern Bloc. That is what styles and settings is about, and printing handouts covers getting it onto paper.