A Keeper's guide to papers
A ticket gets the investigators aboard. Their papers decide whether they get off. Everything below is how the period worked, which is why it plays well.
Bearer makes an investigator's papers for Call of Cthulhu and any 1920s or 1930s tabletop campaign: the passport a consul would have filled in, with the visas and frontier stamps a campaign leaves in it, and the permits, certificates and tickets of the period, to print or to share.
The consulate is a scene
A journey across five countries is five errands before the train leaves, in a fixed order: the destination's consul first, then every country on the way, each one leafing through the visas before his. A consul asks where, why and for how long. He keeps the passport overnight. He is the first person to learn where the investigators are going.
The refused visa
A refusal leaves no mark in the booklet and closes a whole route. There is another way round, slower, through other consulates; or there is a forger. In Bearer, tick "the consul refuses": the visa prints nothing and the journey's stamps are left out.
The breaking of a journey
A transit visa covered a journey without voluntary interruption. The investigators who leave the express at Sofia to follow a lead have, on paper, entered Bulgaria without a visa.
The expired passport
Two years in 1920, five by the end of the decade. A long campaign meets a renewal, and a renewal is granted by the consul of one's own country, who may have questions of his own. Bearer prints an expired passport all the same and says so beside the list.
The full booklet
Twenty-eight pages of visas. A globe-trotting investigator fills them, and a full passport is replaced by a fresh one: a new number, and every hard-won visa left in the old booklet.
What a passport says about its bearer
Profession, domicile, place of birth, special peculiarities: a frontier officer reads all of it. So does whoever searches the hotel room. The stamps are an itinerary anyone can follow backwards.
Sources
- League of Nations, Advisory and Technical Committee for Communications and Transit, Resolution adopted by the Conference on Passports, Customs Formalities and Through Tickets in Paris on October 21st, 1920 (Passport Conference, Preparatory Documents II), C.641.M.230.1925.VIII (read directly)
- League of Nations, Passport Conference held at Geneva from May 12th to 18th, 1926: Final Act, C.320.M.119.1926.VIII, Official Journal, August 1926, pp. 1088-1097 (read directly)
Open the passport office · MGS Toolbox