What weird props do you use?

[sniffles]

Last time some players got blinded, I went into my office/RPG hellhole and brought out the 30th Anniversary bags from GC04, and put them over the player's heads. Instant "Bag of Blindness".

That's just evil!

We had a game in which a 'silence' spell had been cast on a coin and then tossed into the room the PCs were in. The GM asked us not to talk as long as our PCs were within the spell's area. We communicated with him by holding up cards describing our actions. I spent much of the evening with a sticky note on my forehead showing my AC.

 

[Hjorimir]

Last time some players got blinded, I went into my office/RPG hellhole and brought out the 30th Anniversary bags from GC04, and put them over the player's heads. Instant "Bag of Blindness".

Funny. What I do isn't really a prop; I just have them turn around so that their back is to the table.

 

[Chaldfont]

One of my players invents all sorts of props to "hex" my die rolls. His favored medium is 3x5 cards (which we use fall kinds of things like keeping track of bonuses, magic items, secret notes, etc). He makes little tents of them and draws pictures of me rolling 1s. One time, he punched a d20-sized hole in one and jammed a d20 into it, with 1 facing out.

 

[DarkRufus]

Use pegs from... peg games as character. Sometimes use a cat as a particularly large monster. Pencils are used to represent walls alot.

 

[StupidSmurf]

I was at a local con recently (www.ogc-con.com) and I ran some Call of Cthulhu adventures (the classic system, not that d20 garbage). The adventure started with a professor at Miskatonic University giving a lecture on pre-Christian cults. During his lecture, he's supposed to go insane, rip out his eyes, throw them at the attendees, and jump out a window, killing himself.

Here's what I did....

My wife is an expert in making molds and castings, and she made me a very realistic set of eyeballs, even down to my eye color. She also made some latex "flesh strips", blood-red of course. I also had a tube of fake blood.

I put the eyeballs, the flesh, and the fake blood in a fanny pack, and kept it at the small of my back, with my t-shirt over it so as to cover it up.

When I role-played the professor, I put my hands behind my back, making it a natural action characteristic of some lecturing blowhard. As I droned on, I reached into the pack, got my hands nice and red, and palmed the eyeballs, one in each hand.

At the right moment, I began screaming, put my hands up to my face, made a fake ripping motion, and hurled the eyeballs onto the gaming table in front of the surprised players.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), there was no nearby window for me to leap out of. The unforseen benefit was that my hands were stained with blood for the rest of the session, a fact that some players found "unnerving" but in a good way!

Definitely my favorite prop!

Second favorite prop: My Midnight Syndicate CD that has a D&D soundtrack. Some of the music is absolutely perfect for mood setting.

 

[Desdichado]

The best prop I ever heard of was from a Chaosium ran game at GenCon. Apparently they had constructed this book that literally looked like it had been made from human skin and stank like something that had been dead for three weeks.

I didn't see it, but Quickbeam tells me it cost the players SAN, to say nothing of the characters.