[Any edition] Do you use/make props for your games? If so, what have you done?

[celestialkin]

I just got done making the following item for my campaign, for a PC who has a Deck of Many things in such a chest which was a family heirloom/relic he rediscovered.

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Got the box at Michaels, and stained it last night. An hour ago I glued in the fabric, and I just now placed my Deck of Many Things from Green Ronin in it.

And when my current games don't have a Deck of Many Things I can use it as a nice decoration which I can put stuff in. For future groups I can even use it for other "ancient" and "mysterious" treasures like potions and scroll.s



And below is one I did two weeks ago, which will probably be used this Saturday. It is a parchment to a PC from my setting's multiverse-wide council of all dragons, whom the PC is actually managing to tick-off...

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This Saturday I plan to be at my local Walmarts at teh crack of dawn to scavenge any Halloween stuff that will be on sale. Yesterday I saw some very nice amulets, some nifty weapons (daggers, hand axes, pitchforks, and some flintlock pistols), and even a wizard's mask I might like.

I also plan to drop by my local dollar stores. Odds are all the stuff other stores couldn't sell might end up there.



As a player, I have currently been using a futuristic "light/energy sword" I found at my nearest dollar store for my gray Roswell-like alien in a BESM game. It's his medical "probe". Lets say the other players don' like getting medical treatment unless truly necessary.

[TheThan]

Nothing so elaborate but I’m thinking of introducing a “OOC teddy bear”. If you want to speak out of character, pick up the teddy bear.

[afroakuma]

Have done with a small ocean of small change, and I had previously made a program that simulated the Deck of Many Things. Should chase that one down...

[newbDM]

Nothing so elaborate but I’m thinking of introducing a “OOC teddy bear”. If you want to speak out of character, pick up the teddy bear.

Dude, that is an awesome idea!

May I please steal?

[Thane of Fife]

I had a villain who used a magical golden Mardi Gras -style mask to conceal his identity. The mask was also an item one of the players needed for some quest. So, for the final battle against 'Le Masque,' as they called him, I bought a golden Mardi Gras -style mask and wore it. I think that made the fight way more awesome for them.

Similarly, in a PbP game I'm dm-ing on another forum, I change my avatar to depict whoever the PCs are talking to at the moment. They seem to enjoy it.

[Swordguy]

For the Halloween Call of Cthulhu Adventure I'm running this year, made a complete Mythos Tome.

Went to Barnes&Nobles, picked up a leather journal with unlined paper. Went to Lorem Ipsum and generated a WHOLE LOT of fake latin. I then hand-copied (with a quill pan, natch) it all into the book. Illustrations were also hand-coped out of actual occult books - notably the Keys of Solomon and the Malleus Maleficarum. A few chapters out of these occult tomes were put through English>Latin generators and written into the book. Sections of the book - especially those titled to deal with spells or Mythos creatures - were written in a shakier hand that scrawled across, up, or down the page, overwritting itself and wearing through the paper, writing the same word over and over, and so on.

Finally, I ripped out some random pages, torched the last several to the spine (just after the title page of the spell that basically summons Nyarlathotep and asks him a favor), gave myself a really bad paper cut by accident and used the opportunity to cover several pages in bloodsplatters, burnt the edges of the whole thing, and scuffed the living hell out of the covers.

My players found it at the end of last session (and freaked right the hell out when I said - you find this...and freaked out again once they started reading it. Evidently, two of my players know a little Latin, and opened up to the sections cribbed from the real-life occult texts). We wrap up on Sunday, so I'll try to have some pics here Monday night.

[adanedhel9]

I have plans to do a journal of a major historical character from my campaign. The journal will be in really bad shape (it's about 1000 years old), but it'll be intact enough to give the players clues to various historical secrets - secrets that will shape the second third of the campaign.

I'd love to go Swordguy's route with the bound book, but calling my handwriting chicken scratchings is an insult to chickens. I'm going to have to print the pages make them legible, and then I'm not sure how I'm going to bind them. Any suggestions?

[Totally Guy]

I've made a few things out of card and others out of felt.

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For extra bragging rights the finger puppets were a surprise prop for my first ever session as DM and was a guess at what the players would choose.

The players chose:
Tiefling Warlock
Eladrin Warlord
Dragonborn Paladin (Gold coloured)
and an Elf Ranger

So I guessed pretty damn close for 3/4 of the party... I was sure Goblin Wizard would come up but my Jedi mind tricks weren't working on that player.
So when I pulled out puppets of character's the'd just started playing that very day they were shocked!

[KevLar]

@ Swordguy: that sounds like an awful lot of work, which is why I'd never do such a thing. The most I've ever done is cryptic messages or maps on parchments with burned edges and the like. But I would immensely appreciate such a prop if someone else brought it.

[Ashtar]

Made a aged scroll...

Laser printed with nice calligraphy font, coffee stained and put in the oven till the edges curled and burnt slightly. Then rolled up and put into a leather parchment roll. Nice effect, but a hell of a lot of work.

I also made some doctored photos showing architectural elements they encountered. Put some lion statues (snapped at the local justice hall) into a desert background (a picture I took on holiday)...

Edit: Oh yes, now I remember, I made several newspapers for one of my cyberpunk games. Complete with fake adds and stuff

[WalkingTarget]

[pure awesome]

Here I was going to talk about the matchbox I made to match a club somebody had been in and the assorted random documents for my CoC campaign, but that seems kind of pathetic now...

The props are part of the fun for CoC though.

[valadil]

Glug, I really like those finger puppets. How long do they take to build?

I mostly stick to paper props like notes, maps, and drawings. I don't burn edges but I do seal letters with wax. Explosive Runes is 10x as fun when players actually read it. I don't want my players getting suspicious though or else they'd never read anything, so I make sure to give them all paper items possible.

My favorite was a diagram. I had an Ogre in prison. His name was Tiny and he hated orcs. Tiny's eyesight wasn't so good and his memory was even worse. Everywhere he went he carried a chart written in red crayon. It read "Tiny," and had an immense stick figure self portrait, "Orc," with a large brutish stick figure, and "not Orc" with a regular stick figure. Tiny consulted his chart whenever he met new people to see if he hated them or not.

[Swordguy]

@ Swordguy: that sounds like an awful lot of work, which is why I'd never do such a thing. The most I've ever done is cryptic messages or maps on parchments with burned edges and the like. But I would immensely appreciate such a prop if someone else brought it.

It was an incredible amount of work.

Once of the "nice" parts about working in theatre is that you spend a lot more time unemployed than employed, so I had plenty of time to do it, though.

For a once a year game, though, it was worth it.

[Tadanori Oyama]

I don't use physical props that much, I put alot of effort into the creation of my battle environments.

I bought wood cut pieces from craft stores (circles, cubes, stars, fencing, cyliders, etc) and I use them with my Dungeon Tiles and a 3.5'x4' white board and magnets to craft an encounter in scale.

It typically takes me two or three hours to fully design my dungeon rooms for each session and then about five minutes to set up each one when the players get there. I like to make players think environmentally, so I add lots of things they can interact with. I also traps that alter the terrain.

My ultimate was a water trap with real water (plastic tray with the tiles set under it so they could be seen through the bottom. I measured the water out and applied it round by round as they tried to escape (while fighting the monsters that waited in the trap). It gave them something to really worry about and it modivated the crap out of the Halfling Rogue when she saw how fast the water was rising around her miniture.

Next time I'm thinking acid trap with Mountain Dew.

[Totally Guy]

Finger Puppets didn't take that long really. I'm using coloured felt and an iron on fabric adhesive. The only sewing I did was a couple of threads for the goblin's fez.

I've got a friend who's just recently bought some vacuum formed plastic terrain from here.

And I've made a few of the kits from here.

[TheThan]

Dude, that is an awesome idea!

May I please steal?

Sure i don't mind.

I need a plush Boba Fett for my starwars game though.

[LotharBot]

My wife usually makes the props in my games:

- she wrote up a Vorpal Sword quest (logs: 1 2) for a character who'd always wanted one, and drew up the sword, named Sventerant ("gnome slayer"), on parchment. Calligraphed a description of it: "But one task defines your mold: all my gold for all my gold." Burned the edges to make the parchment look aged. For over a year, the player has kept the parchment in his PHB and pulls it out every so often, saying "hey baby, wanna see my sword?"

- the same cardstock dungeon Glug posted above.

- a cardstock ship from the same company (World Works Games). It's sitting about 80% complete on our dining room table. The other players don't know about it yet, though we did capture a ship last session, and I suspect we'll keep it. Once we name it, my wife will bring it to the session with a custom nameplate and everything.

- way back in the day, my wife made a parchment map for a campaign where everyone else had dropped out (I kept playing the whole party because I liked the story.)

- quite a few custom-painted minis, including an axe-wielding minotaur female (since I'm playing one right now). The mini came from the game Descent: Journeys in the Dark.

I've also commissioned two full-party images from Djinn_In_Tonic:




(click for larger versions)

[LoopyZebra]

Awesome Bookmaking

Wow. That puts my books to shame. They're just construction paper with some printed pages in the middle, and maybe some artwork by hand or crumpling.

Really though, thats a cool prop.

[Voshkod]

For a modern Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green campaign, I had the players investigating the crash of an airliner. I had pre-recorded the contents of the cockpit voice recorder, with your truly playing the voices of the pilot, co-pilot, other pilots and control center. I spliced in some sounds from real voice recorders (the rather urgent sounding "pull up! pull up!" from the autopilot, that sort of thing).

When they finally found the CVR and hooked it up, I played the tape for them. Got a round of applause for my efforts.

I probably still have the script around here somewhere.

Props, when used sparingly, can be very impressive.

[Mr Pants]

my group uses OoC hats that you wear when you talk OoC. Some of them aren't even hats though, mine is a 1 pound box of beads. One of my GMs also awards bonus xp for coming in costume, having a prop, or talking in an accent.

[RandomLogic]

I suppose miniatures count. I paint them primarily for D&D. I'm still working on making a game board, tileset type thing.

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Some are better than others. And I still have a laundry list more of em to do!

[Swordguy]

Oh heck, if minis count then I've got some pics that I don't have to wait till Monday to post...

LARGE IMAGES
My character from my previous L5R campaign

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Stuff from my Classic BattleTech campaign

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Silly Crap that I just felt like building

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[adanedhel9]

Pardon my near-threadnomancy, but I want to show off my just-finished project.

This is the battered journal of a major historical character; the players will be using it as a guide to uncover secrets both past and present.

The cover:



Inside, including some "art" (Google image search + paint.net)



Showing one of the washed-out pages (lorem ipsum text printed really lightly):



The end result wasn't nearly as awesome as my imagination (I was thinking along the lines of the Doctor's journal from Human Nature), but I still think it turned out pretty well. I'd have loved to have done it in handwriting, but sometimes even I can't read my own handwriting. And there's no way I could've drawn anything remotely as nicely as I could create on the computer.

[Brauron]

I've used props extensively in CofC games I've run. Any letters the PCs get, I hand to the appropriate player, journal entries, etc. I've never done anything as elaborate as a full book, though I'd like to at some point.

For a convention game I ran last year set in Roman britain, I actually sculpted a statuette of Tsathoggua that the PCs had to retrieve from a fellow legionary and return to the degenerate serpent folk that were preying on the legion during the night. Sadly it broke not long thereafter...the looks on players' faces when I pulled it out and said, "Barbatus gives you this." was amazing!

[Hal]

For non-standard magic items or items of import, I put all stats on one side of an index card, and a picture of the item on the other side. Typically, I just GIS for whatever the closest approximation of the item would be. My players seem to like it.

The other thing I do is if they have an important map, I'll try to age it. After printing it out, I soak it in leftover coffee, let it dry out, then crumple it up a lot. Gives it a great "aged" look.

[newbDM]

Pardon my near-threadnomancy, but I want to show off my just-finished project.

This is the battered journal of a major historical character; the players will be using it as a guide to uncover secrets both past and present.

The cover:

<snip>

Wow, that is awesome!

I love your ideas. The paint program to make images look like sketches, and the text trick.

The text trick would have saved me so much effort! How did you get it to print lightly?

I've used props extensively in CofC games I've run. Any letters the PCs get, I hand to the appropriate player, journal entries, etc. I've never done anything as elaborate as a full book, though I'd like to at some point.

For a convention game I ran last year set in Roman britain, I actually sculpted a statuette of Tsathoggua that the PCs had to retrieve from a fellow legionary and return to the degenerate serpent folk that were preying on the legion during the night. Sadly it broke not long thereafter...the looks on players' faces when I pulled it out and said, "Barbatus gives you this." was amazing!

Have a picture of it?

And who broke it? That must have sucked.

[Brauron]

Have a picture of it?

And who broke it? That must have sucked.

Sadly, I don't have a picture, and I'm the one who dropped it -- fumbled it while packing it away after session and it crashed to the floor. It was a beautiful little horror -- lumpy, toadlike (though on close inspection it had six limbs) with a grimacing little face.

[adanedhel9]

Wow, that is awesome!

I love your ideas. The paint program to make images look like sketches, and the text trick.

Thanks. I'm hoping to get the same reaction next Saturday when it comes into play.

The text trick would have saved me so much effort! How did you get it to print lightly?

I just set the text color in my word processor. I started with the lightest grey available in the default set, decided that wasn't light enough, and then set it lighter (220/256 luminosity). Fresh off the printer, it was legible with study. After going through the cola and oven treatment, only little bits of it are legible, but there's enough color and form to clearly indicate that it's text.

[Ridureyu]

Remember those giant foam-rubber Hulk Hands which had little speakers in them? I don't have those. I do, though, have the Fantastic Four Thing Hands.

They have myriad uses.

[Ionizer]

You guys all rule. The best I've done is light a map on fire in my oven while trying to age it.

I do use stuff for combat environments, though. Mostly folded paper for objects and stuff. For really big rocks, I use one of those Paper Fortune Teller things:

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I suck...