I did one of these! not a consistent every session thing but they made a big ruckus in town fighting the Mafia who happen to have an influence over the paper
They’re called “broadsheets.”
I’m running a PF2 campaign where the party are outlaws running around Alkenstar, robbing banks and seeking vengeance.
Every day begins with some newspaper headlines. One will be about them if they did something substantial or noticeable, but I have a ton of fluff ready to insert. Some is story related foreshadowing, some is just stuff like “Prices of apples are up 2% after news of heavy rain in Geb’s south has washed away too many skeleton fruit pickers”
Hmm.
The problem comes in when the necromancers promise skeletons for manual labor stuff to make society better, then they take public funding and ultimately the skeletons start making soulless derivative art and writing plays/stories that barely (or don’t) make sense.
We are working on making it better, we just need to use up more and more mana to train the skeletons
The problem is getting an army of undead. If a level 20 wizard uses all their spell slots on reasserting Animate Dead every day, that’s 128 skeletons. They’d presumably be untrained laborers making 2 sp a day, so it’s 25.6 gp a day. You’d be the world’s poorest level 20 wizard.
If you want a proper army, your options are having a whole bunch of necromancers, a Lich using its Lair Actions to regenerate spell slots, the Wand of Orcus, or using Finger of Death to murder people for years. And that last one only gets you zombies.
Edit: It’s 142 skeletons if you’re a necromancer wizard thanks to Undead Thrall giving you an extra pile of bones.
All you really need is some boy skeletons, some girl skeletons, a lot of alcohol and some sexy music
Without going into homebrew or Wish territory (as the former is table-dependent and the latter is DM-dependent), Finger of Death creates an undead that is permanently under your command.
Being a 6th level spell, a 20th level caster can cast it six times per day (by spending all their higher level slots casting that spell exclusively), which means that, provided you have a steady supply of humanoids to cast the spell on, you could have six undeads per day, or 180 per month. In a year, that’s 2190 undeads, which is itself a small army. Give it some time, and you’d have a small country following your commands.
At that point there are only two problems: time itself (which can be solved with features that increase your lifespan, such as Boon of Immortality), and other people trying to stop you (which can be solved by using your spell slots to make them regret their decision).
Then again, why bother being a powerful wizard if you still need to work raising undead on weekends and bank holidays?
I did list that, but doing the math is helpful. This is less useful for labor, but you could use executions or assisted suicide. If aging in their universe is anything like ours, I imagine there’d be no shortage of good people who’d rather go to heaven and donate their money to charity than spend it supporting themselves as they slowly and painfully die, but even in 3.5 where there were downsides to old age, the worst it got was +3 wisdom and -6 strength. Commoner was a class, so they’d roll ability scores and someone could have a Strength of 4, but they could also level up and improve their ability scores.
The other problem is that they’re making zombies, not skeletons, and there’s no rule that zombies decay into skeletons or anything like that. Though I suppose if we’re playing RAW, there’s no rule that zombies decay at all or are unsanitary.
Hmm, if you store the zombies in differen environs maybe they will “poke-evolve” into new forms? A zombie in ordinary conditions turn into a skeleton and if its stored in salt or a smoke hut it becomes a mummy (smoke house can also add extra abilites, add liquid smoke for STR bonus, juniper for that wild +DEX or sandalwood for a bit of CHA). Store it as a medical school teaching aid and it will develop an INT score, and if its an exhibition in the museum or library it can be WIS
Only if you send them to work somewhere else and have them give you their pay.
If you are their “employer” you can make much more than 2sp per day from them.
A good capitalist can make 10x or even 100x of what they pay their employees off their work.
You have to be a really good capitalist. If anyone could do that, they’d bid up the price of employees until the companies can barely turn a profit. And at that point, the skeletons barely help.
Also, they work 24/7. Even if they worked for someone else, they’d do at least double or triple shifts, depending if they’re 12h or 8h, netting far more than 2sp.
Do they? In 3.5, undead didn’t need to sleep, but 5e doesn’t seem to have rules for that.
Even if you’re making 85.2 gp a day, that’s a pittance for a level 20 wizard.
Cast wish
Wish for army of undead
Done
oof ouch what did you do to my bones
A quick greater restoration should fix that
OOF OUCH NOT THOSE BONES
This is functionally what Fellmarrow is doing in Narrative Declaration’s Kingmaker 2e actual play.
army of skeletons to conquer the world: capitalism style
I did this for my Waterdeep: Dragonheist campaign. The paper was yellow journalism through and through: they misspelled PC names, misattributed actions, and obviously supported one of the factions. It was a lot of fun. I fully recommend it.
definitely pitching this to my DM for the upcoming Eberron campaign; we’ve been watching Legend of Korra for vibes and inspiration, and the recaps in that show were perfectly fit for the setting
The biggest thing preventing me from doing something like this is that I like having my players do a recap of the previous session, as a way to help me know what caught their attention the most/what mattered to them.
I guess you could still do this, especially if you really lean into the idea that the reporter is presenting an extremely biased/limited recap.
You could be like the reporter in Harry Potter, Rita Skeeter, who interviews people, and is also an eyewitness report, but writes biased and salacious versions of everything.
Have your group recall everything as usual but you are now the reporter taking notes. After the recap put out a slanted newspaper about it.
I ran one where the players were doing the tabloidery. It was great. I can’t take credit for the basic idea; it was one of the sorta-prefab campaigns in the system we were playing.
I’ve never even played DND but this sounds lit.
I ran a years long Shadowrun campaign and in between sessions, I’d post news stories, forum conversations and other little scenes the players would have access to that showed how the greater world was taking in their actions. I’d use it to slip in foreshadowing or clues on perhaps people they should hit up for information, stuff like that. Highly recommend this not only as something fun for the players, but also good creative writing exercises to take on different modes of writing.
Transcription
Post by yeens-human:
I’m begging you
Put a reporter and early version of a newspaper in your dnd campaign
At the end of every mission/ordeal have the reporter interview the players as to what happened
After session on the campaign discord type up a hilariously uncharitable summary of the events that took place and start making falsehoods. And most importantly: spell a party member’s name wrong
“Local sea elf beats vandal and promises to kill again”
“Star cross lovers, gangsters come to tragic end at the hands of murderous vigilantes”
(For the original image author, of course)
Yeah, I have to fight the temptation not to fix typos sometimes!
It’s harder when it references Shakespearean phrases, this being one of the most famous terms from his works.
This is how you put your Blades in the Dark crew at war with the Ink Rakes.
Huh…if I was running a DnD campaign again I would actually totally do this; ironically my players aren’t…heroic/humble? If the townsfolk began reacting negatively to the characters, the players would just stop fighting the bad guys. Spider-man would continue helping people if they hated him as much as JJ hates him because he can’t help but be heroic, my players would not. I’d have to confine the effects of the newspaper to just the newspaper itself.
its almost as if those that control the message control society
Awesome idea! I’m gonna do this the next time I run a campaign!
A tabloid that just exaggerates everything
