Newspaper Articles

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The newspaper system is a unique feature of the Amalthea server that aims to make the setting feel immersive and add some emphasis to the “living” part of a living world.
In universe, several news publications can be found in the city of Tisoria, employing reporters who are frequently adventurers themselves. While they tend to focus on events relevant to the city and surroundings, some of these news companies employ journalists worldwide to record important events far away, allowing citizens to stay informed of worldwide events.
The following newspapers can be found in Tisoria:

• The Tisorian Gazette is a highly reputable daily newspaper published by the Tisorian Gazette Company. It is the most widely read newspaper in the city of Tisoria, holding its journalists to a high standard of quality and accountability. This includes its adventuring journalists, who are discouraged from providing biased accounts of their own deeds. However, this also means the Tisorian Gazette is obsessively neutral in its reporting, refusing to ever come off as taking a side.


• The Ember Chronicles is published by the Ember Trading Company and focuses on matters of mercantile, financial, and technological interest. Consequently, it is highly critical of any opinion that goes against the Ember Trading Company's ethos of profit and progress.


• The Voice of the Martyr is a religious newspaper published by devout Sybilites not officially affiliated with the Church. The paper's views tend towards the fundamentalist, often to an insane degree, and does not directly reflect the official positions taken by the members of the Syblite Clergy, no matter what the paper might claim.


• Labor Daily is a radical labor-centric newspaper affiliated with the Docker's Guild. As its name suggests, it is most concerned with issues of labor rights, with a penchant for rabble-rousing and impassioned opinion pieces against Tisoria's status quo. The paper is also filled with crude caricatures satirizing the city's rich and powerful.


• The Tiered City Times is a sensationalist tabloid largely regarded as disreputable. Anything from conspiracist rants and racist screeds, to inane gossip about anyone of remotely any fame, can be found between its pages. "ARE SCOURGE CORRUPTED GOBLINS INFILTRATING OUR SEWERS!? Plus Velthirian Princess bares all on page 12!"

Regardless of the company, news reporters in Tisoria make use of the following item:

Camera Price 300 gp Slot none; Weight 3 lbs. Description: This handheld device can capture still photographs. Images captured by a camera can be developed whenever the character takes 8 hours to rest. A camera can hold up to 200 photographs.

From an OOC perspective, the newspaper system keeps players and characters informed of quests, storylines, and server events that may not be immediately relevant to them. It also prevents metagaming by providing a diegetic means for characters to learn about these events, even if they happened far away. In most living worlds, if a party has been deployed to the other side of the continent to combat a great threat, other characters are unlikely to be aware of what happened unless personally told by the involved characters. In Amalthea, all of Tisoria will be informed of such heroic deeds, because a journalist of the Tisorian Gazette (or another publisher) is most definitely reporting from that location. A player character can even be a journalist.
The Newspaper system is used in the Amalthea server in the following ways.

Quest Completion Template

When a quest is completed in Amalthea, an IC newspaper headline should ideally be provided in the News Articles channel. The GM or one player involved is encouraged to write an article. Doing so results in a free Hero Point for any one of the GM’s characters, or for the involved player character. More than one person participating in a quest can submit articles, but in this case, the articles must be submitted for different publishers.
You are by no means required to write the actual newspaper article; although you won’t earn the hero point this way.
When writing a newspaper article, make sure to think about what the public should know; an assassination, for instance, can be covered up as a suicide if players made the effort to do so. This should be reflected in the article.
When posting a newspaper article, use the following format:

Newspaper Company Name NEWSPAPER HEADLINE IN ALL CAPS By NPC Author (or Journalist PC) Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Some quests may not logically be reported, such as completely secret missions, or a battle inside the mind. In these cases, quest rewards can be given in the quest recruitment forum post with all involved player characters tagged, and the template need not be followed.

Server Events

A newspaper article should be posted whenever a GM wants to start a server-wide event that would involve a large number of players. Such events could be criminal or monster activity that results in random encounters for players who volunteer for them, a special occasion that provides open downtime quests for all such as a city election, or seasonal events that get players into some real-world holiday spirit, such as Halloween hauntings or Christmas gift-giving. It could also just be a temporary roleplay scenario that’s open to all players, such as a circus or traveling merchant caravan coming through town.
Details for how to run such events will be discussed on a case-by-case basis, but once decided, any and all such events should be announced in the papers. As with quest completion, an OOC summary description is enough, but writing a full article will earn you a free Hero Point.

Player Submitted Articles

Players are always free to submit articles for review, which can cover any kind of topic normally covered in a newspaper: news that don’t involve any PCs, feature articles on any topic you can think of, editorials, opinion pieces, or reviews of an IC work you just made up. Such news articles can be a good way to spin off into downtime quests or sessioned adventures if they generate enough interest. As usual, if an article is accepted and published, you earn a Hero Point for any one of your characters.