Welcome To The Shipname!

Reading Steven Marsh's Daily Illuminator about making fake podcasts for game props got me thinking. I love using props. I'm the one who'll make fake newspaper articles or produce torn scraps of secret messages – you name it. I even cooked a meal for my gaming group once. But some of the best props are the simplest: maps.

Back in the 1980s, I was running a Traveller game, and I had a scenario set in a starship. I also had something very few people had at the time: a computer and a (9-pin, dot-matrix) printer, plus a graphics program that would be laughable today. I created a little pamphlet that was ostensibly from the management: "Welcome to the [Shipname]." It was about what you'd expect from a travel brochure: It was heavy on "you're going to have a great time on our starship," but it had, as real brochures for things like resorts often do, a map of the ship. That served a very important purpose in the game by giving the players a reference they could check without having to keep asking "Where is the passenger lounge? Is it forward or aft from our rooms?" It's something their characters would have had in-game that also helped with actual gameplay.

Nowadays, of course, one could create a very realistic brochure with a word processor and some clipart grabbed off the Net. And it's useful for the exact same reasons.

In my next post, I'll follow up with a few ideas!

-- Jean Mcguire