Crime & Sports • Daily
Fully titled Waterdeep Watchman: The Illustrated Police and Sporting Newspaper, the lively—if not outright scandalous—Watchman has the highest circulation of the city. Though few in the North and Sea Wards ever claims to “read such rubbish,” copies appear there just as regularly as they do elsewhere.
It was the first to use illustrations, a move that expanded its popularity, and provides sensationalized coverage of the city’s crime news, all the better if the story is bawdy, grotesque or involves sex. It also covers such sports that appeal to its core readers in the Dock and Trade Wards. Fisticuffs and horse racing, mostly, but, the Watchman will report on anything that can be wagered upon.
Many members of the City Watch serve as sources to the paper under assumed names, protecting them from reprisals by watch captains who want to clamp down on the release of any information during an active investigation. Readers eagerly look forward to seeing what mischief “Officer Hidgenscore” has gotten himself into.
Its owner, and publisher Bovvington Garnet also uses
fictional names for sources to irk his most hard-bitten opponents in
the Watch. Readers have come to believe that the fictional “Watch Capt.
Nichelle Dewdrop” is an amalgam of two bitter foes of the paper. It
might serve to taunt Watch Capt. Marzen Dewzberry, a halfling with
a reputation for verbally abusing female subordinates who once
threatened Garnet in a tavern over a story. It might also serve as a
reference to Sargent Nikky Silverslip, a human officer with a penchant
for shaking down businesses on her beat for protection, a ploy that fell
flat when she attempted her scam on Garnet the day he opened the
Watchman.