Seals, bindings and objects

By the time anyone reads a word, the object has already spoken — its weight, its edges, whether it was sealed, what it came in. This page is about that half of a handout: the wax, the thread, the cloth, the envelope and the box.

Craft and forms

A scroll with a wax seal

Roll the sheet around a pencil so it holds a curl, tie it with a ribbon or a leather thong, and close the ribbon with a blob of sealing wax. Modern flexible wax from a glue gun is far better than the brittle traditional sticks, because it survives a pocket and a car journey; traditional wax looks better and shatters if you look at it wrong. Either way, seal onto the ribbon and not onto the paper, so the document can be opened without destroying the seal you spent five minutes on.

Let the players choose the wax colour for their own house or faction and the prop becomes theirs: every letter they send afterwards is sealed in that colour, and the first letter that arrives sealed in it but not sent by them is a scene you did not have to write.

A stamped seal

A brass seal stamp with a crest turns a blob of wax into an official seal. Chill the stamp in cold water first or it lifts the wax back off with it. One stamp per faction, used across a campaign, teaches the table to read a sender at a glance — which means you can then send something sealed with the wrong crest and watch them notice before you say anything.

Mini scrolls

A strip of paper the size of a bookmark, rolled and tied with thread, is the cheapest prop in this guide and the one you can make twenty of in an evening. They are for the things that come in quantity: a spell scroll, a bounty note, a message carried by a bird, one for every player at the start of a session. Small enough to be handed under the table to one person without the others seeing.

A hand-sewn journal

Fold four or five sheets together into a signature, pierce three holes along the fold with an awl, and sew through them with waxed thread — in at the middle, out at one end, back through the middle, out at the other. That is a pamphlet stitch, it takes ten minutes, and it produces a real book: something with a spine that opens flat and sounds right when it is closed.

Age the pages before you sew, not after, and write on them before that. A journal is the one handout players will sit and read for ten minutes on their own, so it earns more content than anything else here: a few dated entries, a gap, a page torn out, a final entry in a different hand.

A leather cover

A rectangle of thin leather folded round the signatures, sewn through the same holes, is the difference between a booklet and a grimoire. Craft leather takes dye, paint and a hot tool, so a sigil can be burned or stamped into the front; a scrap from an old belt or bag works as well and costs nothing.

Objects instead of paper

An object as the evidence

A coin, a key, a dried herb, a bone, a cloakroom token. It carries no text and asks a question anyway: what is it for, whose was it, why was it in the pocket of a man who had nothing else. Put it in a small bag or a box so that handing it over is an event, and resist labelling it — the moment you attach a note explaining the object, the object stops working.

A negative or a slide

Print a photograph as a negative onto transparency film and the players have to hold it up to a window or a lamp to see anything. It is period-perfect for anything from 1900 to 1995, it explains why the image is unclear, and it justifies a scene in a darkroom — which is a good scene, because a darkroom is a small red room where only two of the party can stand at once.

Packaging and context

The prop box

A wooden or card box holding four or five small things — a vial of powder, a folded letter, a newspaper cutting, a photograph, a key — is the strongest single handout you can make, because opening it is one moment that the whole table leans into. Fill it with things that disagree with each other: the photograph should not match the letter, and the key should fit nothing you have described yet.

A sealed vial or pouch

A small bottle of powder, seeds, ash or sand, closed with wax, is a ritual component the players can hold.

A newspaper cutting

One column, torn out rather than cut, aged separately from everything else. A cutting is better than a whole newspaper when the fiction is that somebody kept it — the act of keeping is the information, and a single column in a wallet says more about its owner than a full front page says about the world.

An old photograph

Print in black and white on matte paper, trim the corners slightly, and write a date and two first names on the back in pencil. The writing on the back does more than the image does: it names people the players have not met and dates an event nobody mentioned. Put one more person in the frame than the caption accounts for and the table will find them without help.

An envelope with a condition on it

Write on the front: to be opened only if I do not return. Seal it, hand it over, and say nothing else. The envelope does more unopened than most handouts do opened, because it sits on the table between the players as a decision they can take at any time — and the moment somebody opens it early is a character moment you did not have to prompt.

A folder for each player

Give every player a document folder at the start of a campaign and hand out everything three-hole-punched. They file it themselves, they bring it to every session, and by session six they are the ones who can find the name of the shipping clerk from the second scene.

A redacted document

Black bars over names, dates and one verb. Redaction is the rare technique that adds information by removing it — the shape of what is missing tells the players how long the name was and who was afraid of it. Black out less than you want to: a page that is mostly bars is a page nobody can read, and the pleasure is in reconstructing, not in guessing.