Blackwater Creek

Two more handouts left, but one was a bit more work than the other: Henry Roades’ Field Notes.

According to Blasphemous Tomes, a site run by the author of Blackwater Creek and his friends, “Scott was a little lazy when creating handouts for “Blackwater Creek”. Handout #5 — Henry Roades’ Field Notes — are presented in the scenario as a summary. This conveys the necessary information, but not a lot of atmosphere.”

I would tend to agree. The book gives some basic information, but is not detailed by any means. Luckily, some brilliant soul named Josh Becka mentioned on Reddit that he created a replacement handout, and Blasphemous Tomes linked to it. The content of the handout is absolutely spot on – fantastic work!

To create the field notes “journal” prop itself, I grabbed a “swirl border lined stationery” image that I found on Pinterest, and copied that into Microsoft Publisher. Then, I used variations of the PhontPhreak’s Font of All Madness for the font in the journal – starting with relatively normal, and making the font increasingly worse and deteriorating by the end of the journal, to denote his descent into madness.

Instead of doing a full blown journal, I decided to create a quarter page fold “booklet” journal. The result is 2 pages, printed front and back, stacked on each other, then folded into quarters, with an outside “cover” of dark brown cardstock paper. Then, I sliced the two top “seams” of the booklet to create one booklet, with each page double sided. I finished the booklet journal by splashing red and black paint on it, using a lighter to burn some spots off some of the pages, dripping water on the cover and rubbing some spots of the paper off so it looked more thin and worn, and basically doing anything I could to make it look beat-up without damaging the integrity of the handout contents:

Blackwater Creek Handout #5 – Roades Field Journal Download

If you print out the handout (linked above), print it out double-sided. Then, stack them so that they look like this:

Then, fold in half, and then in half again to form a booklet. Slice the top edges open to make a book.

And last, but not least, Handout #6 – the Summary of Confessions of Ezekiel Cade. Scott Dorward and his friends have created audio handouts, including one for Handout #6 (basically, a very good audio recording of someone reading the handout with thematic background music). If the investigators ended up talking to Baxter and getting the information, we could play the audio recording for them as an “audio handout”. Otherwise, if the investigators decided to do some library research, I decided to create a handout for them from the Miskatonic University’s Orne Library:

Blackwater Creek Handout #6 – Summary of Confessions of Ezekiel Cade Download

As always, I try to include a version of the handout with a white background (no background), so you can print it out yourself on your own aged paper, or if you already have aged paper to use as a background, so you don’t have to waste/use as much brown/yellow ink. Otherwise, I also try to include a version with a textured/aged background too, because not everyone has the time, money, or inclination to acquire aged background/vintage-looking paper.

Here’s the link to my Dropbox where you can download all the files for this scenario!

We had a bit of a change-up this week. The Keeper’s best friend from college came to stay with us for a week, and he volunteered to be the Keeper for this scenario so George could be a player (for once!)

As always, I volunteered to make the handouts/props, which wasn’t too bad because most of the props for this scenario were paper props.

The first “unofficial” prop I created was an introduction letter from Professor McTavish (who is concerned about his friend Henry Roades) to Walt Gerig, the graduate student who came back from the expedition and then had to quit school to take care of his “mother”. I used Biloxi Script and letterhead from the HPLHS to create the letter:

I figured the graduate student would be more likely to talk to the investigators if he had a letter of introduction from someone he trusted.

Introduction Letter to Walt Gerig Download

For the next few handouts, I made some very deliberate choices for fonts used for this scenario for Henry Roades’ handwriting, and used PhontPhreak’s Font of all Madness which I found on the Cthulhu Reborn blog site. The font analysis and font variants for someone devolving into madness are AMAZING and I fully plan to make use of them in the future.

Handout #1 has just the regular PP Handwriting Upright. He’s (relatively) sane and he’s trying to convince his friend that everything is fine. Handout #2 (the draft letter) was more frantic, he pressed harder on the sheet, crossed out lines – so I chose the PP HandwritingSlantHeavyMunge. I used HPLHS Miskatonic University letterhead, typed out the handouts as normal, and crumpled up Handout#2 to make it look like a draft.

Handout #1 – Letter from Henry Roades Download

Handout #2 – Incomplete Letter from Professor Roades Download

The next two handouts were pages from various books. I just typed them out using Chenier and Bookman Old Style font, respectively, and added ‘vintage paper backgrounds:

I didn’t notice until much later that I had forgotten to change the “page number” of the books and they were both 159. I went back and changed the files so they have different page numbers now. I also am bad at tearing a page naturally so it looks like it’s been ripped out of a book, so I turned to a Youtube tutorial on how to do it. Evidently that ripped edge is called a “deckled edge”. I actually don’t own a wooden ruler like that (who does, these days?!), but….I DO have a paint stick in my garage!

20 minutes and a razor blade later, I had my very own deckling stick:

Handout #3 – Chapman Book Download

Handout #4 – Stansfield Book Download

The next few handouts took a little bit more time to create, so for now, I decided to create whiskey labels!

My inspiration for these whiskey labels came from searching for vintage whiskey labels on Pinterest and Google. I did a little bit of photo editing in Microsoft Paint, and printed the labels out onto Avery label stickers. Originally, Brent (the guest Keeper) and I were going to break out Jameson whiskey and invite the gaming group to take some shots, but after a drinking game gone awry on Thursday night (whereupon we were all very hungover and in NO mood to drink on Saturday night), and concerns about people driving, we decided to see what everyone was going to be drinking during the game (we usually set out some snacks and drinks/soda/beer). Then, once they got to Blackwater Creek and started chatting up the locals, Brent casually walked over and slapped a sticker label onto whatever they were drinking. Thereafter, every time someone took a sip of their drink…”Roll Constitution!”