Madam Mapleleaf
Madam Mapleleaf is a pen name featured in Steamy Ink Press, and she is shared amongst several authors. A contributor writes the column and publishes under her name, alongside every other contributor doing the same. No one in town can prove who wrote which one, so the plausible deniability is built into the fiction. It also means voice consistency is a big deal, in-world and out: every pen has to sound like the same Madam Mapleleaf, because the moment your item reads distinctly like you, the anonymity slips.
This doesn’t mean the individual Madam M’s don’t have distinct flavors, because they all do. The line is identifiability: a contributor can bring personality to the column, but not a personality the town could trace back to them. The editorial pass keeps verbiage and anonymity consistent so that nothing slips by on accident.
Her Voice
Society-column diction with teeth. She addresses her readers directly and fondly, maintains impeccable manners while saying appalling things, and treats gossip as a public service. Signature move: the innocent-misunderstanding disclaimer. “Should a detail or two be off, I’m sure your generous hearts will understand that you simply misunderstood the situation as you perceived it.” She is never wrong, you just misread her.
If you need a vibe reference, think Lady Whistledown of Bridgerton—elegant, omniscient, delighted by everyone’s poor decisions, and beloved because being featured stings and flatters at the same time. Gossip Girl works too, for the shared-anonymous-narrator energy and the sign-off culture. She’s those archetypes relocated to a frontier town where the scandals involve werewolf breakups and wraith lord memorabilia, which she covers with exactly the same energy as a duchess’s ruined engagement.
She will reduce a name to initials when it suits her and print it in full when that suits her better. She speculates freely, frames it as concern, asks questions she absolutely knows the answers to, and treats the courier system as her personal nervous system.
Feeding Her vs. Writing Her
Anyone can feed Madam Mapleleaf. Send your tea—an observation, a rumor, a paragraph about something you witnessed—and it may appear in her column, woven in alongside everyone else’s. This is the main way to contribute and it’s open to everyone. Tips run through the same consent process as everything else: the consent list is checked, and anything touching another PC’s secrets gets a conversation with that player before it prints.
Writing full columns as Mapleleaf is restricted to vetted writers for a few reasons:
- Out-of-game knowledge bleed is a real risk with this column specifically. Mapleleaf “just knows things,” which makes her the easiest place in the paper for something you learned as a player to end up in print as in-game fact.
- Shauna does not know everything that happens in-game, and does not know what’s a secret. Editing can’t catch a leak the editor can’t recognize as a leak.
- With a large pool of pens, it’s only a matter of time before something a player didn’t want outed such as a secret plot, a hidden identity, or a relationship not yet public ends up in the column because the writer didn’t know it was off-limits and the editor didn’t either. Keeping the pen with a small set of writers who coordinate closely is how the column stays fun instead of harmful.
If the paper thinks that you would be a good fit to write for Madam Mapleleaf, you will be contacted in (and out of) game. If you have interest in being one of those writers, talk to Shauna.