The Press of Waterdeep by Troy Taylor is a role playing game supplement published by Wizards of the Coast through the Dungeon Masters Guild Community Content Programme.
The supplement is available from DMs Guild for $0.99 but was purchased at a reduced price during a sale. It consists of two parts; a PDF and a Word document. The PDF has 27 pages, one page being the front cover, one the front matter and two pages are ads.
Newspapers, broadsheets and scandal rags is in character discussion on some of the various papers that can be found in Waterdeep. Five papers are detailed, giving an overview as to the sort of things they print.
Using the newspapers in your game is about the later handouts and on using them in the game. They can be used as flavour or as potential adventure hooks. How reporters and owners can be useful is also covered.
Next is a d20 4 column table that can be used to randomly roll reporters; nickname, race, publication and beat and contacts.
A map of Waterdeep shows where the five newspapers are located and there is a map of a newspaper office.
The rest of the supplement consists of single-page handouts that are designed to look like the papers. There are thirteen in total; all but one of the papers has multiple editions.
The accompanying Word document is a sample layout of one of the papers, allowing a DM to create more.
The Press of Waterdeep in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and has enough content that they would have been useful. Navigation could be better. The text, for the content not the sample papers, follows a two-column colour format and appeared to be free of errors. The layout of the different papers varies. There are a number of colour illustrations, all public domain. Presentation is decent.
The supplement is theoretically intended for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, but lacks any game stats so can be used with pretty much any system.
This is a nice little supplement. The background on the different papers provides interesting information on each, then there are the actual handouts themselves. These can be printed out and given to players. Each has different stories, in some cases several, written as if they were newspaper articles and columns, and quite a bit of effort has gone into them. The Press of Waterdeep is a reasonably priced supplement containing quite a lot of material for handouts and ideas and it can be found by clicking here.
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