A while back, I shared some of the newsprint projects I’ve created for the Blades in the Dark game I play in. Since then, I’ve been saving up more, and I think it’s about time to share.
However, our GM, Jeremy Tolbert, suggested I write a little more about my process for this stuff, so I figured I’d dig into that.
Word of warning: if you’re making newspaper content from scratch, it’s going to take time. It turns out writing passable articles isn’t hard, but it is a time investment. The shortcut I use is to work with Chat-GPT, just the original free version. It does everything you need, especially if you prime it properly and keep a consistent chat thread going that is related only to Blades in the Dark stuff. As long as you’re not completely against messing around with text-generating AI, this is the way to go.
I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Here’s how I have gone about producing newspapers for our biweekly (as in twice a month) game.
Step 1: Make or get some templates. The first thing I did, early on, was build a few different newspaper templates. My templates files are in Affinity Publisher, and each newspaper generally includes one master page for the newspaper’s front page, and another master page for the interior. I actually purchased a (cheap) commercially-available newspaper template as part of a design bundle, but this isn’t necessary: you can learn the necessary skills for making a basic newspaper page in Affinity Publisher pretty quickly. (In fact, I found that I wasn’t really happy with the template I bought, and designed something new from the ground up that I like a lot better. It took me a few weeks to learn enough to do a passable job of that. I’m still learning Affinity Publisher, though, and I’m sure the eagle-eyed will notice little mistakes and flubs and missed opportunities in my layouts.)
Having a set of newspaper templates sitting around is handy, not only because it saves you building a newspaper from scratch, but also because it allows you to have both variation and consistency in the campaign log newspapers you create. I don’t think more than three or four is really necessary—you could get away with one, if you really wanted, but the variety of cycling through a few templates is nice. If you don’t have layout software, or can’t be bothered to learn how to use it, no worries: you can easily find free templates built for other software (like Powerpoint or MS Word), especially on Reddit boards.
Step 2: Take notes, and think from a POV outside that of the PCs. Next, during sessions I try to take notes about everything that happens, with a special emphasis on little things that could form the basis of news reports. This is especially important if you have a group that cleverly finds ways to reduce Heat after scores, because of course if they do enough of that, the newspapers won’t have their names or identities to report, or even the real crimes they committed. You can get around this by reporting the apparent crimes that were committed as part of the score.
(For example, in one session our characters stole a wine-delivery truck because it was the easiest way to get access to a nobleman’s wine cellar. The wine truck was a kind of automated contraption that had automatic access to the cellar, whereas the rest of the guy’s mansion was locked up tight. Our characters managed to steal a load of expensive, fancy Tycherosi wine, but they also reduced heat enough that (outside of criminal circles, and presumably some friends of the nobleman) nobody in the city knew about the theft. The wine truck, though, we regarded as collateral damage. But the wine truck’s owners wouldn’t see it that way: the truck had been hijacked, its (cheap, inexpensive) contents had gone missing, and the truck had been totaled in a fancy part of town. Therefore, the theft of the wine truck was a minor news report, as was a rise in criminal activity in that neighborhood.)
Looking for opportunities like this—for what your group sees as “side events” or “coincidences” to take on a different significance in the articles—not only helps you get past the way characters bleed heat, but also brings Duskvol alive: other characters in the world—especially those who never appear in the session—are affected by everything the PCs do and must interpret things without full knowledge of what really happened, and seeing this in print this drives that home.
Step 3: Get GM input. Right, so once the session is over, I usually check to see if the GM has sent me any requests for inclusion in the newspaper. (If you’re GMing the game, you won’t have to do that, but I’m a player.) This can be handy because sometimes the GM will want to have certain events highlighted in the paper, either to bring back issues from the session or to foreshadow things to come in a future session, or even just to highlight some of the less-apparent threads that have been woven into the loom in the past session or two.
Step 4: Go to Chat-GPT (or whatever text-creator AI you use). It’s around this point that I usually go to Chat-GPT and open up my persistent chat I’ve been using for months to generate news articles for my Doskvol newspapers. You probably don’t have one of these… yet. The thing is, when I started using it, it was after a fellow player in the same group discovered that Chat-GPT kinda-sorta seemed to know a bit about Duskwall. My guess is that this is partly because it was trained on the web, and the web has lots of Blades in the Dark play reports, and partly because RPGs tend to lean heavily on stereotypes that exist in other stuff Chat-GPT was trained on. However, Chat-GPT doesn’t know anything about your game group, so it’s a good idea to spend some time priming it. All that means is, typing up summaries of public-facing characters of the sort who would appear in newspaper pieces, events in Duskwall, and so on. You can also write about your own game, if you like. Chat-GPT will soak it up.
(Don’t forget to name that chat so you can find it again later on, and keep using it every time you generate more article content.)
Once you’ve primed Chat-GPT in that chat thread, you should be able to prompt it pretty easily. Here’s a few examples of prompts I’ve recently used for some articles in the past few months, after using this thing since February or so:
You can get a few things from the prompts, but not everything. My tips:
- Especially at first, specify a time period and other stylistic cues for the text. Do you want the paper to sound Victorian in tone? Chat-GPT can (passably) do that, but only if you ask.
- Think about the author/publisher, and let their politics and values creep into your prompts. You can see one example above where I pretty much ask Chat-GPT to attack unionists who are mounting a strike. This is not something I would do, but the newspaper it’s for is a conservative, pro-establishment rag (like many papers in Duskwall). In your prompt, take on the perspective of the newspaper’s editorial board—and yes, that means invent a political stance for each newspaper.
- Specify a wordcount. The more you work with this, the more you’ll get a sense for how many words you’ll need to fill a column. This is really helpful.
- Don’t expect perfection. I usually spend a couple of minutes on each article, just reading it over and making small changes. Sometimes I’ll write a witness quote, or other times I’ll have Chat-GPT write a comment by a local. I often rewrite the names that come up, for a slightly more Dickensian flavor.
- Write your own headlines. There’s a bit of an art to it, and Chat-GPT n managed to do it the way I would.
Follow those tips, and Chat-GPT should spit out mostly useable content. It’s not brilliant, but it reads sufficiently like an imaginary newspaper in an imaginary dystopia that any game group should be happy with it. With that amount of effort, you should be able to generate stuff like the following with about 30-40 minutes of work per session at most.
Step 5: Generate a mix of content. You don’t want everything to be focused on the actions and activities of the PCs, so consider what other current events might be going on in Duskwall. Political spats, naturalistic exhibitions, goat-cart races, workers’ strikes, crimes by other groups—not all of them rivals or allies of the PCs, most of them not even named—and more all can help make Duskwall spring to life on the page. I try to include at least one or two of these every time, sometimes more.
You can also generate ads. I love using ads for running jokes, for one thing: in one series, there were ads and articles touting the benefits of a new kind of flour made of dried and ground-up insects. (The first ad was launched just as a character developed a cheating ring at Duskwall University, and the articles suggested that the only viable explanation for the jump in student performance was the brain-boosting benefits of roach flour. A few sessions later, people were getting seriously ill from the stuff and merchants were trying to unload it for cheap.)
Still, ads have other uses too: they can illustrate things about Duskwall, like the poverty and desperation that is always just a few bad scores away for most characters. They’ve also sometimes been harbingers of major in-game events. (The ads for the House of Velvet-Upon-Satin in my most recent papers below are an example of that.)
Step 6: Prepare some art for inclusion. Honestly, most of the time I put into it now is appropriate illustrations and preparing them for use. My process for that is simple: I search for old engravings or illustrations usually Georgian, Victorian, or Edwardian era stuff. When I find something I like and which suits the paper, I open them in GIMP and convert them to PNG files in greyscale before saving them. I prefer this to AI generation of art, because I haven’t been able to get an AI to produce satisfactory line art of the kind I need. The old stuff is public domain, and a little inventive searching is usually enough to turn up something passable.
As for actually preparing the image: I might adjust the brightness and contrast a little, just to get rid of minor background greying, and then save the file again. I then change the image mode back to color so I can make the image transparent. (I do this by adding an alpha channel in Layers, and then use the Alpha to Color. This will usually produce a useable transparent image made up of black line-art, perfect for your newspaper.) Finally, I export it to PNG format, and then it’s ready to include in my newspaper,m so I drag it in, size it, and set the flow to what looks good for the situation. Recently, I’ve begun to caption these images, too.
That’s… pretty much it. I only produce a couple of pages at a time, and when they’re done I just export them as large PNGs and share them with my fellow players. Easy-peasy.
Of course, if you want, you can get more fancy with templates, but this is game-log stuff, so for me I’m happy to just get it done while the session is fresh in my mind—usually within a day or two, if not right away. If I decide I want a new template, that’s something I do the week or two between sessions, when I have some free time to play with Affinity Publisher.
I’m pretty happy with my results, given the time I’ve put in. As I say, there are little gaffes and errors here and there, but this stuff is just for fun, so I am not treating it like it’s as serious as something actually being prepared for publication. Still, I’m pretty happy with how most of them have turned out.
If I really had my way, I’d probably output blank templates and then have Chat-GPT integrated into the template, so that I could directly generate properly formatted text. (I’d also want some way of adding images and placing them inline with the text.) However, I’m not a coder so that’s far beyond what I could do, and all told, manually assembling this stuff isn’t much work once you’re used to the process.
Incidentally, along the way, I’ve also generated things other than newspapers articles, as you can see in the gallery above (and in my previous post on the topic). Past readings into the birth of the “mob” (in the older sense of the word—the enraged populace of a city on the streets) in 17th–18th century London left me with a lot of ideas about how character assassination could work in Duskwall.1 All of these are methods that were relatively popular ways to ruin someone you hated in London during the 17th and 18th century, and for all I know most such practices continued on into the 19th century to some degree too (and, if you count tabloids, the 20th and 21st, really).
Formatting these things is simpler, and I’ve done them essentially from scratch. It’s not hard if you have the absolute basics of layout—and that’s all I really have. If you’re feeling daunted, you shoudl take heart: I pretty much used this project of Duskwall newspapers as a way of teaching myself how to work in Affinity, and of course I feel like I still have a lot to learn. You don’t need to have mastered it, and you definitely don’t need to shell out for Adobe Indesign. (If you are considering using Affinity for a similar project, pick it up when it’s on sale—that’s been pretty frequent over the years, so I’m sure you’ll get a chance.) Here are some examples:
- Libelous posters pasted by the hundreds onto the walls of main thoroughfares during the wee hours of the night, especially designed to direct official and public attention in the wrong direction after scores that attract a particularly high degree of heat.
- Paid composition of song-sheets defaming or praising individuals or groups within the city, which were then printed and sold in markets and spread through the popular consciousness that way.
- Parcel bombs that, instead of exploding to harm people, explode with a loud band and send hundreds of copies of a libelous or political pamphlet showing down upon an area. (Like the parcel bomb released in protest of the legalization of gin in, if I remember right, 1720 London.)
- Highly politicized stage plays loosely based on reality, but twisted to flatter, expose, attack, exonerate, villify, or praise people or groups within the city. I’m thinking of how John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera mocked upper-class London and especially the “thief-taker” Jonathan Wilde. There’s no more Duskwall-ish play than The Beggar’s Opera, I tell you:
The Beggar’s Opera not only partly-inspired my recently-retired character (Mother Windlash—also known as Carveline Windlash, the horrible bride on the wedding invitation in the set above),2 but also inspired my backup character, a playwright who has been writing a satirical play about the group.3 (An excerpt was included in my earlier post, Duskwall in Newsprint. Since I’m playing him with Tonamel’s Artist Playbook, there are actually meaningful mechanics tired to that play, too: the completed “magnum opus” is supposed to “change Duskwall forever.” How? I’m not sure yet, but I have a few ideas…
While a lot of people rightfully think of Duskwall as a pseudo-Victorian/dieselpunk setting, I think of the criminal side of things as being more like 18th century London, when crooks, highwaymen, and housebreakers were rampant and widely celebrated by the populace. That continues into Victorian times—Oliver Twist attests to that—and there are things, such as the London police, which came later, but my impression is that the London heyday of criminals-as-audacious-folk-heroes was in the early-to-mid-18th century, far more than in the 19th. This was also the heyday of conspicuous consumption and a lot of other things that remind me of Duskwall, and I’m happy to mix that in with all the more 19th and 20th century stuff, for a wonderful, grotty melange of oily, spark-burned nastiness.↩
Mother Windlash was half Mrs. Peachum from The Beggar’s Opera, and half inspired by the historical figure Mother Needham.↩
This character, Walter Halibutt, is basically the John Gay of his world, except he’s tall and skinny and looks a bit like Jeremy Irons, and is the sole survivor of an acting company filled with con men and cutpurses. The group died during a score, which was kind of our characters’ fault, so they took him in, and decided they could be the collective muse he’d been looking for to spur on his writing career.↩