Ephemera is transitory written and printed matter not intended to be retained or preserved. The word derives from the Greek, meaning things lasting no more than a day.
Now hopefully our AW ephemera will last more than a day or so! As I've been reading threads on NPCs, R-Maps, tools, visual aids and the like I've been particularly interested in how ephemera (rather than tactical floor plans and dolls) can tap into our Apocalypta.
As the first session looms on the horizon like black oily smoke in the fringes, I've had a few pre-game conversations with my group of wanna-be misfits and established some shared thoughts on our 'Big Picture' apocalypta with them. We are going with Sydney and its surrounds (Australia) as our setting to begin with. We've left the AW theme nebulous as suggested - to be brought out in play. The Players are aware of Playbooks, and we've talked a little about the archetypes and who they represent in broad brush stokes. We've watched a few films, discussed a few favourite books / graphic novels and all in all are psyched to 'bring it'!
After coalecsing all of the excellent advice dropped in my laptop over the past few days, what I want to bring (other than the rules, question prompts, session sheets, some dice and a whiteboard) is this:
1) A rather large tourist map of Sydney & Suburbs with all the 'sights' highlighted with large icon boxes. It includes public tranport networks, roads, parks, and infrastructure, cool. Its already been splashed with expresso and stirfry (by accident!) and will take pride of place in the centre of the table, or pinned on my rather large corkboard.
The map is gonna be defaced. As we explore and involve ourselves with the landscape: labels added by hand or old-skool labeller, holds marked, roads destroyed, future badness indicated. Pictures can be scribbled onto it, images stuck on, push pins and threads detailing gang territory added or removed.
2) All the pictures of folks from the images thread, plus hundreds of random 'portrait' photos from the interweb, all reduced to passport size and printed en masse onto recycled paper from work (often with fax notes or misprint half pages or whatever). I only use the draft B&W ink setting and the lowest DPI available. This has resulted in a rather scruffy collection of NPC pictures, all suitable for cutting out and colouring in (or defacing) as the NPCs get named and added to threats.
They can be stuck on R-maps, posted on the Sydney map with push pins near their 'last known' location or scrubbed out with red texta when they bite radioactive dust. They can be added to player journals and detailed with colour and verve, or remain a transient name and a face to be re-incorporated into later threats or simply become bruised by repeated crosshairs. The net result (I'm hoping) will be a sordid CSI style 'investigation' of our cast and crew, our situation and territory.
But I want more now. My brain has been grasping at all sorts of possibilities. From snippets of plagurised prose from the Visions thread written onto scraps of cardboard boxes with charcoal to collecting an old canvas satchel filled with palm sized 'junk' from our local jumble store. The idea being to bring out these 'unknown' artefacts onto the table to spark future badness,provacative questions, barf forth apocalypta or provide tangible objects to NPCs or the setting.
I've already dismembered and stuck John Harper's MC cheat sheet all over the margins of the map, collected a disjointed collection of unique d6's (none of them are the same size, shape, colour or print) and bought a 'wind-up' lamp to light the playspace, that someone is going to have to spend 60 seconds out of every hour winding lest we fall into darkness and despair.
So I'm a voyeur. What other ephemera have you AW folks brought to your games in order to engender a curiosity, a fevour for musing I wonder.... about the Apocalypse or the Maelstrom? For genuinely finding out in play, not deciding in advance. Its almost as if they are stakes of ephemera, that you are committing to the game's fiction, driven by the player's characters to find out what these little atefacts mean at the table, which questions do they answer or snowball?
And finally, how to you collect and display said ephemera? Player Journals? Noticeboards? Wikis?, Maps? Scrapbooks? Storyboards? Please share, so we can all collect bits and bobs that we like to our own games.