Style and Tone

Scoop! is a fun, upbeat game which explores themes of journalism and presents players with difficult choices. The variety of departments within the newspaper and diversity of pursuits in the city of New Glabe mean that players have a lot of options for the tone of their game.

You might engage with the Editor's competition to find the best journalist, or choose for your character to pursue building positive relationships with their colleagues. You may focus entirely on the New Glabe Gazette, or spend every Turnsheet exploring the wider world. You might want to have a fun, silly time, or build a character who is going through difficult personal struggles (within the restrictions of our CAT policy, which is tighter than in many previous Society Games).

Whatever your desired experience, we aim to accommodate it within the world we've built around the New Glabe Gazette, so get creative! The main themes of Scoop! are detailed more below.

Information is an important theme of Scoop! How far would you go for a good story? What will you do with the knowledge you gather? How much evidence is enough for you to be confident enough to publish? Information is powerful, especially when your words are read by hundreds of thousands of people. How you use that power is up to you.

Scoop! is a game full of secrets. Some are personal and might seem trivially unimportant to other people; others have the potential to make or break careers. At times it may feel like everyone's hiding something (indeed, every player must share a secret about their character in the character creation form).

As journalists you strive to uncover the truth and share it with the world… Or do you? Sometimes the truth would hurt people more than a comfortable lie. Sometimes you might be pressured into hiding the truth. Sometimes it will be hard to tell if a source is being honest or not. How would you respond?

In Turnsheets, it may not initially be possible to tell if the information you have gathered is true. Would you still publish it and hope that you're correct? Or is it better to wait and be certain of the facts, but risk that someone else beats you to it and gets all the glory?

Unlike many Society Games, Scoop! is intended to have a realistic modern-day tone. This means that actions taken in character should be assumed to have similar consequences to if they were performed in real life. The GMs will let you know if your plans are likely to have drastic impacts that would make it difficult for your character to continue attending Uptimes.

Life at the New Glabe Gazette isn't all about work. We encourage player characters to build bonds with other characters, whether that be in the form of intense friendships, bitter rivalries or romantic relationships. Although some players will want to engage more heavily with the competitive nature of journalism, we also welcome players to explore personal plot and interactions with other PCs and NPCs. Everyone has an interesting story to tell, and we hope you will enjoy discovering each other's.