Blog Comments

nice!

Oh, those poor sods...

Cool for the edit.

Nice idea with the carnies.
Here's my poster - not colour

Spoiler:

, and edited to align with the timeline of 'The Horror at Martin's Beach', which acts as a backdrop.

A color version of the carnival poster I still had in my files:

Nice, thanks for the gameplay report, Freak show is one of my favorite scenario.
I am looking forward, one day, to run it from inside the carnival with performers from the carnival as player characters.

Hey - thanks.

InDesign is a tool I've been using increasingly for newspaper articles and the like. It makes the job of updating/re-purposing articles for new stories a lot easier. And it has some great tools generally.

I created a real physical journal ('The Journal of the Dark Brotherhood') for our first scenario - 'Edge of Darkness'. That was the most ostentatious prop so far (OTT tbh). I may post some pictures.

(I'm late to the party)

Atoms for Peace: Great treatment of clippings. It looks a lot more authentic than the tea / coffee bath stain trick.

Markhepworth: Photoshop is probably your last step for a lot of prop documents. I created the PDF that Atoms has worked with in Apple's Pages app for Mac OS X (It's a consumer grade, rather than professional, page layout tool. Think InDesign for novices and dabblers). The trick is to get some good basic fonts that fit the era, and find some reference documents to model your document on. The HPLHS have a wonderful collection of period fonts on their website and google image search (and the HPLHS again) have great reference material. Once I had that stuff it was a matter of making setting up styles in pages to match the reference material. The only trick (as it were) that I used was that i intentionally used anachronistic margins and line heights so that a) i didn't have to create as much filler around Max_Writer's original text and b) it was easier to read (important given the density of text!) for modern readers.

niiiice

Great work,its cool to see some more Dark Ages stuff on the Blogs as it seems to be an almost forgotten setting for Cthulhu.Looking forward to seeing how this pans out.

Hi MW, That was a really nice set of handouts. Much appreciated by all

Sweet! Those are the newspaper articles I wrote. Glad they're seeing use.

Wow, seeing the original files suddenly puts it all in perspective. I think "learn photoshop-fu" will have to go on my long-term to-do list. Thanks.

SPOILER ALERT: following some of the links above will give away aspects of this scenario

I use photoshop in my job nearly every day. I can't quickly tell you how to use it. But there are loads of tutorials available online.

And as far as these props go, it was a relatively simple matter of re-purposing material I already had. The newspaper articles started as already existing props available for this scenario that I found here on Yog-Sothoth. I added a paper texture I found, cut out one article, added a drop shadow and Yig's your uncle.

The photos started life as an aged photo I created of Walter Corbitt that I decided not to use. All the photo-grunge was ready - created using free Photoshop brushes I downloaded. And each of these images actually has the same grunge on it at varying levels of opacity. The image of the broken statue of Mary, and the eye symbol are actually elements of some superb floorplans that were created for The Haunting, that I used in play.

The portrait of William Merriweather with ghostly figure is a combination of William's character art with the background darkened and a very scaled up and faded figure that I found somewhere else. This one took the longest (not very).

I'd love to see someone post some hints and tips on making props of this sort of standard - photoshoppery is a dark art as far as I'm concerned. The most I've done so far is to re-do a few handouts in word.

Inspiring. I really have to start getting the campaign journal for my group assembled - photoshopped photos, fake newspapers, postcards - and, more importantly, post the pdfs to Yog for other people to use

I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. Most of these were quick n dirty photoshop jobs based on some of the great handout material that's already available for this scenario.

I agree--those are pretty awesome props! Makes me feel abashed with what I foist on my players

nicely done