Styles and settings
A handout is read twice. The second time is the words; the first is the look, and it happens before anyone has read anything. A style is the answer to what the object was, who made it and how much they cared — which is why the same telegram in two styles is two different pieces of information.
Every template here separates the two. The structure is fixed — a telegram has a sender, a date and a body whatever it looks like — and the style is a choice you can change at any time without losing a word you have typed. Open a handout, pick a style from the toolbar, keep writing.
The eras
1920s
Letterpress and hot metal: a blackletter masthead, tight serif columns, rules between stories, drop caps. The default almost everywhere, and the right one for Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green backstory, Gaslight, pulp adventure and anything between the wars.
What it says: this was set by a professional on a machine that cost money. It reads as authoritative, which is exactly what makes a forged document in this style unsettling.
Eastern Bloc
Cheap paper, heavy sans headlines, stamps, a form that has been photocopied more times than anyone counted. Deliberately not a specific country — it is the visual grammar of a planned economy, which covers everything from a 1970s Warsaw Pact game to Delta Green's institutional paranoia to a dystopia you invented.
What it says: an institution produced this, the institution did not care, and somebody above you has already read it. It is the strongest style on the site for making players feel watched.
Modern
Clean sans, generous spacing, no ornament. Available on the newspaper and the message, where it turns a front page into something from this decade and a letter into an email or a printout.
What it says: this is now. Useful precisely because it is unremarkable — a modern handout does not announce itself as a prop, which makes contemporary horror land harder.
The genres
Fantasy
Roman capitals, aged paper, a hand-lettered feel. On the card, the menu and the poster — a spell card, a tavern board, a wanted notice.
What it says: this was made by hand, by someone who had to plan the layout before committing ink. Fantasy is the only style here where irregularity reads as authentic rather than as a mistake.
Cyberpunk
Monospace, hard edges, high contrast, the look of something a terminal printed. On the card, the form, the identity card and the ticket.
What it says: a system generated this about you. The identity card in cyberpunk is the clearest example — it is not a document you carry, it is a record you are in.
Wild West
Wood type, heavy condensed capitals, the poster nailed to a post. On the poster, where it belongs.
What it says: this was printed in a hurry, in a small town, by someone who wanted it read from across the street.
The message styles
The message carries five looks of its own, because the same page serves five different objects:
- Letter — a hand, ink, a signature. Personal, and the only one that carries a mood in the handwriting itself.
- Typewriter — struck keys and an uneven ribbon. Official, or obsessive, depending on what it says.
- Terminal — green on black, a prompt, a cursor. A transmission, a log, something intercepted.
- Modern — an email, a printout, a note left on a desk today.
- Diary — a private page, written for nobody, which is what makes reading it feel like trespass.
Picking one
Match the style to the object's maker, not to your campaign's genre. A fantasy campaign still has institutions, and an institution's notice looks institutional; a cyberpunk game still has people who write by hand, and what they write by hand is the thing worth reading. The mismatch is often the point — a 1920s form in a fantasy game is a world where the bureaucracy arrived, and that is a setting detail you got for free.
Consistency matters more than accuracy. Handouts from one source should share a style, so that when one does not, the players notice before you say anything.
Once you have picked, printing handouts covers getting it onto paper, and which handout for which scene covers choosing the object in the first place.