1) Nope
2) One map I created was a treasure map created by an adventuring party from a few generations back. The "X" on the map would actually lead to a series of death-traps with no treasure. But, if you found the large matching coin from elsewhere in the adventure, and placed it just so on top of the map, it lined up and covered the "bad X" and pointed out where the real treasure was buried. In actual play, the players loved it. They said it felt like they had just taken part in a scene from the Goonies...
Other than that, I once put together a little tome of spells from a small leather-bound journal I picked up. I filled in a bunch of spells, maps, drawings, etc. and then stuck the whole thing in the freezer. On game night, when the mage finally got the book, I brought it out for him, and it was ice-cold to the touch, and had fog pouring off of it.
For my modern campaign, I put together a copy of a web page that contained a news article that a particular character would want to read. And I coded in some javascript messageboxes that slowly popped up onto his screen over the space of a few minutes, as he was reading, that gave off the appearance that someone was trying to contact him through his computer and sending him these messages.
Oh yeah, and I once put together a six-second animation of a giant ball of fire streaking down a very long hallway towards the players, as seen from their point of view. When they got to that hall, I told them, "You see this...". The ball of flame was about halfway to them before they realized what it was and announced (very quickly and very loudly) that they were all diving for cover.
Another good one, not very creative on the arts and crafts side but definitely fun from a RBDM standpoint, was the scroll submitted into evidence at a PC's trial for treason. When another PC was called to the stand to testify, the lawyer pulled out this "surprise evidence" and handed it to the PC on the stand, saying, "would you read the marked passage in the third paragraph for the court please?" The player on the stand was caught completely by surprise and was very suspicious, and slowly unrolled the scroll expecting to see some kind of forged evidence. He was even more surprised to read "The scroll you are holding is covered in contact poison..." as he realized that the lawyer was, in fact, the assassin that the group had been avoiding for the past few months.
On another occasion, the party was in an ancient elven dungeon. The ancient elves has split into three different cultures over the years, with three different languages, all derived from ancient elven. So, each of the three elves in the party could read a little bit of ancient elven, and if they worked together, they could figure out the signs in the dungeon, particularly the ones that warned about traps. I put together signs for a lot of the doors in the dungeon with different symbols and runes. Then I put together a customized "Runes You Recognize" list for each player. So when they would come to a door, they would each consult their list and say "I recognize the first rune on this sign, it means fire" or something like that, and they would figure out what each sign meant. Of course, there was the one chaotic player that decided to ignore his list and just make up funny meanings for the runes that he saw, while insisting the whole time that he was just reading from his list, and of course, the other two believed him.
