I like handouts.
I like them a lot.
If you’ve seen the Alexandrian remixes for Eternal Lies or Dragon Heist, then this won’t come as a surprise to you. Those campaigns are fairly representative of what my games look like: There will be dozens or even hundreds of handouts. Photographs, letters, lore books, artifacts — anything I can get into the players hands enhances the experience and becomes a tangible touchstone for what’s happening in the game.
In running a single adventure — like Left Hand of Mythos — keeping track of the props is pretty straightforward. Over the course of a campaign, though? Things can get more complicated.
It’s not at all unusual for my players to pull a sheet of paper out of their notes and say something like, “Hey, this letter from Lady Scarlet to Thornai that we got thirty-seven sessions ago — can we pull that from the evidence bag and dust it for fingerprints?”
Now, somewhere in my notes is likely the information I need to answer that question (i.e., who handed this letter before the PCs snagged it). But where, exactly, is it?
Well, almost certainly keyed to whatever location they found the letter in.
… and where is that?
Damned if I know. It was, after all, thirty-seven sessions ago.
What I’ve learned to do is put tracker IDs on my paper handouts. That way I know where to look up my notes about them later on.
I use alphanumeric codes for my scenario notes. For example, scenarios in my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign include:
- BW03B Alchestrin’s Tomb
- BW06 Chapel of St. Thessina
- CC07 Porphyry House of Horrors
- NOD2 The Secret Meeting
And my current Night’s Black Agents campaign has scenarios like:
- CS03 Paymaster
- CS06 Dragovir Monastery
- PP01 Arkady Shevlenko
- SJ02 Serbian Mafia
These are just generally useful for keeping stuff organized, but are particularly useful for tracking props. In pencil, I lightly write the alphanumeric code somewhere on the prop. No matter how much later the prop surfaces, I can just reference the code and know exactly what notes I need to reference.
If you don’t want to use scenario codes, another option might be maintaining a master handouts index, listing every prop you’ve prepped and the adventure it comes from. The tip here isn’t the specific method of the tracking; the tip is that having some way of knowing the provenance of your props becomes important as you begin running rich, complicated, long-lasting campaigns.
For those who run games on something like FoundryVTT, when you use the Journal tab you can optionally put those handouts in a directory. Instead of keying the notes themselves, you can key the directories and then if the players want to ask questions about a “journal” (which I use as a catch all for everything, ranging from visions to autopsies, or anything that I don’t want to describe) you can go back to your notes for that directory.
You can also mark your players as “Observers” of those journals, so they can see the clues they found but not the ones you never gave them.
I use a nearly identical system to track unidentified treasure and other found objects. I add the room number (if any) to the code, and track it all in a single spreadsheet.
Interesting. I feel like I’d automatically end up noticing gaps in the numbering, if I were to receive props ABC1, ABC2, ABC3 and ABC6, for example. I’m tempted to adapt this system such that each prop gets assigned a number which gets written onto the prop at the moment it is handed out, and in the GM notes, that number gets appended to the master list of props, where GM reference numbers are mapped to player-facing prop numbers.
Ie, the players find the prop ABC3, then ABC5, then XYZ2. The GM writes 1, 2, and 3 on them, respectively, then, in the master prop list, writes 1 – ABC3; 2 – ABC5; 3 – XYZ2.
This means the players can never know the any information about the number of props they may have missed, and in my opinion, may help to sell the illusion that the world is bigger than it is.
@Aphadion: That’s why I don’t number the props.