Deadline: A Clockwork Press Pregame
Part I of V
Welcome to Tabletop Journal Thursdays! A place to explore solo tabletop RPGs—not just the mechanics, but the stories they inspire and the worlds they build.
Each month, I’ll highlight a different game, journal through it, and reflect on the experience.
This month, we’re getting the presses rolling with Deadline: A Clockwork Press, a solo and group TTRPG from Fleur and Chelsea Sciortino, published by The Wanderer’s Tome. You can find it on DriveThruRPG for about $10. Deadline casts players as journalists in a strange, industrial-fantastical city, writing headlines as events unfold and tensions rise.
Over two phases—Establishment and Chronicling—you create a city, give it a name, populate it with districts and conflicts, then chart its evolution through newspaper broadsheets. Think Blades in the Dark meets The Front Page, with just enough Lovecraft and bureaucracy to make you feel like you’re playing an editorial assistant in Arkham’s dying pressroom.
My playthrough took me to Cesium, a temporal mining colony built atop the ruins of a city destroyed in a war across time. It’s a place where time is refined like ore, propaganda is piped in with the oxygen, and the dead occasionally return in perfect working order. Below, I reflect on what surprised me about the process, how the game’s constraints shaped the outcome, and whether this kind of solo map-and-madness generator helped me build a city more sophisticated and alive than I’d expected.
1. What was your experience of actually playing Deadline—how did the game’s structure, prompts, and mechanics guide your storytelling?
This game was a surprise, in the best way. I haven’t played many world-generation solo TTRPGs. The only close comparison in my experience is How to Host a Dungeon, which takes a very different approach to building a setting through procedural prompts. Deadline does something clever: early on, the tables give you very simple answers—“your city is a canal city,” “your city is communist.” Taken one at a time, these feel a bit dry or generic. But as they begin to stack, they build momentum. Soon you’re assembling something that has genuine complexity and potential.
Where Deadline succeeds is in getting you past that paralyzing blank space where the map is supposed to go. It gets the wheels turning. That early friction gives way to something far richer than the sum of its dice rolls—a city alive with headline-worthy conflict.
2. Many of Cesium’s tensions come from distinctions: Lifers vs. short-timers, suits vs. no suits, truth vs. propaganda. Did these emerge from the play prompts themselves, or were you deliberately pushing the game toward a kind of class critique or theological satire?
A good deal of it was discovered rather than planned. One of the biggest surprises, process-wise, was how much of it came through reduction. When you're given a prompt—say, for arcane influence—it’s incredibly broad. You can interpret it as anything from wizards to Lovecraftian horrors to X-Men-style mutations. But I found myself quickly narrowing the field, just mentally crossing off ideas that didn’t feel right. Not in a formal sense, just quick “no, not that” reactions. I didn’t want superheroes, didn’t want ghost stories.
Given that I’d already established Cesium as a harsh and dangerous place where residents needed to wear protective suits just to survive, the idea of people who didn’t need suits—and who also could never leave—felt strong. That gave me a natural source of division: “Lifers” vs. everyone else. The city’s canals were an early prompt I liked for similar reasons—literal divisions, fault lines—but ironically, that thread dropped away in the actual writing. Which was a surprise in itself.
Prompts like “communist government” nudged me toward certain critiques or exclusions. There’s a space on the City Record for religion, for example, but I left it blank—partly because the communist societies I’ve read about don’t typically have a state religion, and partly because the drama I was interested in came from interdependence. Everyone in Cesium relies on each other for survival. That makes it particularly volatile when someone has an edge—like a “Gifted” person editing a muckraking newspaper. He’s a minority, but with powers and a platform. That’s fertile ground.
In short, the rules gave me raw material, but the real value of a game like Deadline is in what it demands of your instincts as a writer or GM—what you recognize as likely to cook, and what’s going to fall flat.
3. What did you not expect? Either in tone, system, or outcome.
One of the more unusual challenges was the brevity of the game’s core output: the headlines. A headline, maybe with a subhead—that’s it. You're meant to take these nuanced events and present them as compact, stylized declarations. And because my goal here was to generate content for my Substack, I found myself chafing a little at the space constraints. Not because they’re unreasonable, but because—well, this whole conversation is proof that brevity isn’t my natural state.
That said, headline-writing is clearly a skill. And like many skills, it looks easy until you try it. So I may supplement the published broadsheets with additional context and writing—some connective tissue, maybe even “articles” disguised as letters or editorials.
What I’m still uncertain about is how legible these broadsheets will be to someone who didn’t play through the game. That’s always the question with solo journaling games: is this interesting to anyone but me? I suspect the answer here is “maybe not”—and that’s okay. The game doesn’t require your city to be simple or accessible. But when you're building something meant to also be read, there's a case to be made for clarity over complexity.
I probably shouldn’t have based the city on a war fought generations ago using time-compressing bombs. But I did. So I accept full responsibility for choosing a premise that may be a bit too high-concept for the headline format to fully accommodate.
The first document you create is a city record where a recorder responses and try to sort things out. The large space where I've included the districts is more traditionally used to draw a map But I didn't feel a map was going to be particularly useful to me and so I put something like a setting bible in that space. I wrote much more than is present here and I asked ChatGPT to edit it down for me.
Wrap-Up
Whether or not Cesium makes for easy reading is, frankly, not the game’s concern—and that’s part of what makes Deadline so effective. It doesn't ask you to polish. It asks you to respond, interpret, extrapolate. This clearly could be a whole level about how we get our news the limitations of headlines and shock and in this instance I've gleefully undertaken the role of editor much more concerned but provocation than information. The results are messy, strange, and far more complex than I’d expected.
If you’re a solo TTRPG player, a worldbuilder in need of inspiration, or just someone with a taste for municipal horror and old-school muckraking, this one’s worth your time. Deadline is structured enough to get you moving and flexible enough to surprise you.
The full broadsheets from my playthrough will appear here over the coming weeks, published just as they were written during the game. Until then, grab a copy of Deadline here, dust off your editor’s cap, and see what kind of headlines your city makes—before someone else writes them for you.
Thank you for Reading!
