Worldbuilding Newsletter The Essential Scroll
ID: 007446
When you need the news, check the Essential Scroll. Providing the truth to readers since 1490.
Are you looking for a way to engage your players without a huge time investment? Email them the Essential Scroll, and world build between gaming sessions.
World-Building Newsletter
The Essential Scroll is an in-world newspaper pdf intended to be emailed to your players between sessions. It speaks to conflicts in far off places, whimsical day-in-the-life articles, and in-world self-help content.
There are three versions we have nicknamed sword and sorcery, urban fantasy, and science fiction. The newspaper articles are the same between versions, but the content is written to fit the genre you are playing in.
The newspapers were created with Ironsworn, Starforged, or The Untrodden Ways in mind, but you could use the Essential Scroll for any gaming system or role-playing campaign that matches one of the three themes.
Versions of the Essential Scroll
The Essential Scroll comes in three versions.
- Sword and Sorcery: ancient settings with wizards, barbarians, vikings, or knights.
- Urban Fantasy: modern settings with cryptids, urban legends, and faery monsters living in today’s society
- Science Fiction: future-based themes with space ships, laser guns, and robots.
Use it as a passive world-building technique. The content in the newsletter is generic allowing the newsletter to fit into many different fandoms.
Three Weeks Worth of Issues
There are three issues of the Essential Scroll available for each setting. Email your players every week or space out the sending based on your planned campaign duration.
How to Use This Fantasy Newspaper Kit
GM-Lead Game
- Buy the Essential Scroll from your DriveThruRPG
- Each week between sessions, send your players a copy of the Essential Scroll
- At the start of the next session, engage your players with questions about the Essential Scroll’s content. Let them weave the story elements into your campaign.
Solor or Co-op Gaming
- Buy the Essential Scroll from your favorite PDF provider
- Each week between sessions, read an issue of the Essential Scroll. How does your character react to the news?
- Start your next session with a Move based on the newsletter content.
Or, use the newsletters as Story Starters. Read the feature article, and use it as a starting point for this week’s session. Join the Essential Scroll’s writer on a journey.
Licensing and Revisions
Promotional artwork created with resources from Pexels.com and Morguefile.com including dogukankocan, helloaesthe, iryna-khamulyak, isabella-mendes, liza-summer, mikhail-nilov, and paduret.