Anyone have any suggestions for making Victorian-style newspapers for handouts?

Anyone have any suggestions for making Victorian-style newspapers for handouts?

Anyone have any suggestions for making Victorian-style newspapers for handouts? I was inspired by a rewatch of Sherlock Holmes and by the end pages of old Shadowrun modules where they have news articles that reflect what the players did in game.

Fonts? Layouts? Form Fillable type things?

20 thoughts on “Anyone have any suggestions for making Victorian-style newspapers for handouts?”

  2. Coincidentally, I printed out some old-looking paper for my son to make treasure maps. If you search for “old paper texture” you should find some nice backgrounds to start with.

  5. How computer savvy are you?

    When I was running a Gotham City game, I used Latex to make a front-page newspaper.

    It was difficult to get it working, both to build the template and also to learn how to write using the latex commands and then convert that to pdf – but the output was really nice. And once I’d got it figured out, it was easy from that point forwards.

    (Plus, Latex is good to know if you do scientific publishing)

    The nice thing about using latex is that the template could then handle the page formatting, do newspaper columns, and all that.

    Otherwise, you can probably find a Word template, or something for Google Docs or similar.

    My biggest problem was “filling the pages” – I knew that the players had, say, blown up a power plant – but I had to write a news article about it.

    What I did was I’d google for real news about something similar – so a real news about an explosion at a power plant, then I’d paste that in, and go through changing the location names, adding in some NPC names instead of real people, and changing the quotes to be relevant.

    Then, to fill the rest of the page, I’d just have a look at the Weekly World News website for some fun story. That filled space, gave a few images to make my paper look pretty – but it was also a great way to drop hints and look for clues. e.g. in the game there was going to be a theft of “something” from the Museum. The PCs were trying to cover the whole museum, and when the thieves ended up stealing a fossilized dinosaur egg they said “Oh, of course!” because a few sessions before, the “filler” article was about a fossil dinosaur egg that started to make noise when it was left near a radiator, and the museum suspected it was going to hatch. It was one of those “why didn’t we figure this out earlier” moments that the players enjoyed.

  6. I found this as part of my downloads from an old Bundle of Holding.

    http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/110812/Mutable-Deceptions-Vol-1-Jazz-Age-Newspapers?hot60=1&src=hgrs

    It’s technicall 1920s era newspapers, but given that Doskvol is a blend of a few time periods, it’s a good start.

    Ideally, I’d like to do a page that covers any heat they rack up, hints on upcoming jobs, and information on what the other factions are getting onto in the city.

  8. Would anyone be interested in working with me on a webpage that auto-generates a fake Doskval newspaper, full of articles?

    I can do the code – where I’d need help would be with the randomly-generated stories.

  10. Naaa, I’d rather do mad-libs style fill-in-the-blanks while rolling on random tables.

    So we’d have some drop-down options like….

    Type: Burglary

    Against: Dimmer Sisters

    Allies: Cabbies

    Target: Magic item

    Complication: Busy gala

    And then we’d generate an article based on that. So the code would look under “burglary” and “busy gala” for a template, and find one that works.

    “The city is abuzz with news of the gala, being held by the Dimmer Sisters this coming Tuesday! A fancy affair, the most important and influential members of Doskval shall be attending!

    John Wainwright, a Cabby and close friend of the Sisters, mentions that this gala will be the only chance for guests to view the Wand of Isis, a curious and valuable item of interest to many scholars, whispers, and Spirit Wardens.”

    So essentially that template is just:

    “The city is abuzz with news of the gala, being held by AGAINST this coming Tuesday! A fancy affair, the most important and influential members of Doskval shall be attending!

    RANDOM NAME, a ALLIES and close friend of AGAINST, mentions that this gala will be the only chance for guests to view RANDOM TARGET DESCRIPTION, a curious and valuable item of interest to RANDOM GROUP INTERESTED IN TARGET TYPE.”

    … but, as you can see, I suck at writing news articles. So I’d need help writing the articles, and figuring out what the random tables should be.

  11. Found a free newspaper web template, and threw it up somewhere. Something like this:

    https://blades.000webhostapp.com/

    The first column is my example of an artifact theft.

    I’ve put in random names, and the various factions & descriptions from the pdf.

    Even though it’s the same article four times, hopefully it illustrates what I mean about generating a random article about a score for the PCs to do, with random factions etc.

    We could put in some “smarts” so that allied groups tend to be allied in the stories (with the chance of a non-allied group being mentioned – sometimes there may be cross-faction alliances. “Oh, there’s a cabby who’s friends with them? We’re friends with cabbies – that’s our way in!”)

    If this is useful, we could possibly even go further, and have a page that we can fill in before it generates the articles, where we can say which factions are at war, who likes the PCs, etc. so that the articles can mention events happening in player’s individual games.

    If nobody is interested in building this, that’s cool – but I probably won’t build it by myself.

  12. I was tempted to work up a bunch of newspaper front pages to generate story ideas, but I don’t have the time to actually write the content. I’ll happily do the design if there is enough material to do a few cover stories at least. I used to actually do newspaper setting once nostalgia

Comments are closed.