Maps, cards and table props
The props that stay on the table all evening rather than being read once: the map everyone leans over, the cards dealt out as an investigation goes, the coins that turn a price list into a transaction.
Maps
Drawing it in ink
A map drawn by hand with fineliners on heavy paper reads as a document made by somebody in the world, and the bigger it is the more seriously the table takes it: A3 is worth the trip to a copy shop. Draw the coast and the roads and let the labels be uneven — a hand-lettered name in the wrong size is what tells the players a person made this, and a perfectly set one tells them a printer did.
Leave things out on purpose. A map with a blank quarter, a road that stops, or a coastline that peters out where the surveyor turned back is a map with a question in it, and the party will go to the blank part first.
A relief map
Cut the contour lines out of foam board or corrugated card and stack them, and the hills become something the party can put a figure on top of.
A map as a jigsaw
Cut the finished map into irregular pieces and hand them over as they are found. The geography then arrives as a puzzle rather than as a fact, and the party argues about what the missing piece contains — which is usually a better scene than anything you could have drawn on it. Cut curves rather than straight lines, and never cut through the one landmark they need to orient themselves.
Cards, coins and tokens
Clue cards
One card per piece of evidence, dealt out as the party finds it. The reason this beats a list in somebody's notes is that cards can be moved: a table with eleven clue cards on it starts arranging them — by person, by place, by time — and the arrangement is the investigation happening in front of you, with everyone able to see what is known.
Keep each card to one fact and print a few blanks so the players can add their own. Poker size, nine to an A4 sheet, is the format to use, and a file the site exports is already at that size.
Custom coins
Metal blanks, foreign small change or printed card discs — it matters less what they are than that there are enough of them to count.
Faction tokens
A handful of tokens per faction, stacked on the table as an influence track everyone can see. Moving one across the table when a decision lands is a piece of theatre that costs nothing, and a visible track means the party argues about the consequences before they act rather than after.
A dossier on a person
A folder with a photograph, a form, two cuttings and a page of notes, about one NPC. It is the handout to make when a character matters, because it gives the party something to hold that represents a person — and adding a sheet to it between sessions is the cheapest way to show that the world kept moving while they slept.
Tarot or divination coins
A deck or a handful of coins the players consult themselves, with the reading left to them. The interesting part is that a random draw commits the table to something nobody chose, including you — so use it where you are willing to be surprised, and never as a way of delivering a decision you have already made.