Props driven investigations for Imperium Maledictum #City26

Two sessions in to the IM City26 game I have been having a go at conveying the atmosphere with physical printout for some of the things they find during their investigation - partly to reflect the grinding bureaucracy of the Warhammer 40k Imperium but also to convey some of the voices of the factions through vox-log transcripts.

Engagement seems ok, getting everyone to read a handout is a bit of a time sink but when there is a handful of them in play that people can rotate between them it seems to work. At player request I have set up a thread on our gaming society forum with all those uploaded, we will see if that gets much interaction.

Formats for a future yet to come

I combed through official sourcebooks to get a standard handout format - starting with the old Rogue Trader '87 and working up through Dark Heresy and Imperium Maledictum. There is happily a lot of content out there on 40k lore which puts lots of the icons and images easily to hand.

One of my favourite things I learned doing this was how the date format worked - the first digit is a check-sum type confidence interval depending on how close the connection is to Terra. Up to 5, it is a continuous chain, 6-8 are increasing levels of 'we can tie it back to a date we think we know when it happened' by margins of less than a year, less than ten years and more than ten years. Lastly we have 9 which is 'a xenos wrote this, do not trust it' which is entirely apt for the setting.

I worked some things up in Word with basic fonts, used the formats I pieced together - headers of subject, date, classification, who transcribed it, ancillary references at the bottom. For drafting Imperial documentation one does well to channel the stereotypical secret policeman - the content is one thing but precision about who, where, when is critical so whoever is responsible can be found and blamed afterwards.

To reflect the vast timescales for the setting I aged up some of the documents to reflect how noone had looked at the issue for ages - this involved printing it off then scrubbing the inside of the heating furnace with it, with particular attention to the edges which worked well.

Progress logs at table

Since vox-transcripts are so prevalent in the setting I am also trialing a new means of session logging - I throw down a voice recorder at the end of the session and get the players to record their report to their Patron. This is then transcribed and I clean it up and give it an appropriate header to become another handout. I would not be entirely regretful for this campaign to flare-out and another party to have to try and pick things up from these ... terse... activity logs.

So far it is working, the table has logs to work from at the start of each session, let us see how it evolves over the half dozen sessions we have left. That sentiment broadly stands for the props in general - good so far, not sure about the overall effort-reward ratio, will hold off

Overall #City26 progress tracker stats:
Progress: 44/52 wards completed
Completion vs target: 85% vs 73% target
Population covered: 87%