Wonderful News!

Life can be weird for Demon City contributors, but The New Yorker has reported that Vanessa Veselka has The 2020 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction for her new book The Great Offshore Grounds.

Vanessa wrote about just a few of the weird corners of the real world she knows about for Demon City, including The Flower Sellers and the Industrial Core in the Sketches section.

Here's the bit she wrote about the FBI for us, all laid out, click to enlarge it:

FBI Files by Vanessa Veselka

Field Offices and Files

 

The FBI has field offices in many towns where someone can walk in and ask to speak directly to an agent and make a complaint. All agents of a certain rank are required to do one desk shift a month. It’s about as loved a shift as KP duty in the armed forces. Even though all reports are recorded, the agent at the desk has full power to decide if you’re basically a “5150” (slang for ‘crazy enough to commit’ that comes from a California code) and note that on your report.

Who has records of unsolved murders?

In the public imagination, there is a great and perfect database tracking all unsolved murders with DNA matches, MOs, and the signatures of killers. There is not.

The part of the FBI that deals with serial murders is Kidnapping and Missing Persons. Traditionally the department is also grouped with Bank Robbery, perhaps because of the potential for hostages and repeat behavior. The problem is that when a missing person report is filed in one state, while a photo may be circulated, details are often not. Moreover, most reports are teenage girls who ran away so unless the girl comes from a family with money, access to news media, lawyers or social power, little attention is paid. This means if someone is killed in one state, and the body dumped in another, it’s unlikely to appear on anyone’s radar if the family doesn’t have connections or the story doesn’t attract media.  

 ViCAP

The national homicide database (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program or ViCAP) is supposed to close this gap, but the database has always been a bit of a sham. Initially, the FBI asked local and state agencies to enter thirty years of unsolved homicide data. But entering the data is non-compulsory and the initiative came without extra funding for the hours needed or staff. As a result, many agencies never added their unsolved cases. There are other reasons data might not be entered.

1)    Detectives have to triage their cases and might be overwhelmed with current murders. They might want to see the data entered but can’t waste time on history right now.

2)    There are also turf wars between agencies. Local agencies might not want to share with state agencies and neither might want to deal with the FBI. They might fear that if their data goes in the FBI might get the criminal first and credit for the collar, which might affect promotion and career advancement opportunities.

3)    In urban centers, data might not get entered for political reasons. Police chiefs often don’t like the number of unsolved homicides a department may have made public.

4)    In rural areas or government-phobic backwaters, data might not get entered because of a general mistrust in any federal program.  As a result, the database has major holes, often in the places where most crime occurs. For many years the Texas numbers, for instance, did not include the Houston (as well as 28 other counties).

 The national DNA database, whose DNA gets entered and how, is also highly political.

In general…

City Police have jurisdiction over cities. Mayors usually appoint police commissioners so they are prone to behind-closed-door local politics (unions, special interests, favors etc).

Sheriffs have jurisdiction over and highway and rest areas. Sheriffs are often elected so prone to external political optics.

FBI has jurisdiction over everyone. Everyone hates the FBI.

Records

Most states have an established time limit for keeping files. Once that time passes, a file that wasn’t linked to a homicide can be destroyed. The problem is that many files remain in missing person limbo because the body was never linked. Theoretically these records are digitized and stored in some way but many never made it out of paper form. Between 5-7 years most records that don't result in connection are at risk of being destroyed. 

In other news, a new Cube World is out--that's #23--and LotFP default-setting adventure called Screaming Lake 

It's 10$ and has evil priests and living sound. Enjoy.

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The Cops Shot A Demon City Contributor In The Eye & I Just Got Out Of County

So first, journalist Linda Tirado, who wrote on the upcoming Demon City, got shot in the face in Minneapolis:

So starting now all proceeds from the next Cube World (Odd Jobs in Small Baronies) that just came out...

...will go to her because, really, when you can only see out of one eye every little bit helps...will go to her because, really, when you can only see out of one eye every little bit helps--and I feel fine leaving it to her discretion whether to in turn pass the money on to someone else.

A lot of people have asked about me since they know I'm in downtown LA--and thank you for that--this map pretty much says it all:

But I got it all on tape so might as well use it.

Peaceful protest (this was friday before there was a curfew order):

Aaaand here come the cops:

Cops:

This guy was popping off at everyone.

Rubber bullet picked up on my street

I gave the video to the LA County public defender in case anyone gets charged with more than a "citation" or tries to get their mountain bike back and they say it was "seized as evidence".

Anyway blah see you soon.
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The Best Graph Paper Notebook For D&D

What is the best dungeon master's notebook? It came out a few years ago and it's this thing by a mile:

The Princeton Architectural Press Grids & Guides Notebook For Visual Thinkers...

You guys may have seen the converted cookbook I use for the Cube World atlas...

This is a much more day-to-day workhorse product.

So it's sturdy, well-stitched, it's A4 (or A5? whatever: the objectively best RPG book size as decided by LotFP at some point), it was even reviewed in New York Magazine :

In the past I’ve stocked up on whatever cheap-ish notebook hits these requirements:

1. Sturdy cover (won’t get dented in purse)

2. Opens flat

3. Good paper: ink won’t smear / bleed

4. Of a comfortable writing size

5. Decently attractive

These days, I no longer settle. There’s a better option out there. I’ve tasted the fine wine and I can’t go back. Luckily, the wine is priced at a reasonable $16. It is the Princeton Architectural Press Grids & Guides Notebook, and it is not like Other Notebooks.

What really sets it apart is the variety of different grids it provides, which Cube World readers might've seen...

Each spread has two different grids or guides left and right, eight in total, ideal for drawing a map on one side and putting notes on the other....

 The triangle one is perfect for making hexmaps...

The circle one is probable the most eccentric but it has its uses...

The ledger paper on the left has 38 numbered lines, which is perfect if you want to make a standard encounter roll table where there's a 2-in-6 (33.3%) chance of a random encounter. Just do 33 entries and then you've got  a few extra lines for things like "Torch goes out", "Thirsty, drink", "Hungry, eat some rations" etc. and the last line is "38.-100 No encounter".

The one on the right is a logarithmic scale grid, which is nice for diagrams or drawings where you need a sense of perspective...

...or depth, I used it in this Tracery map under the Lodestone Golem to show the steps down from the upper level to the lower ones:

 The left-hand "plaid" grid here is an architectural grid...

Which you can use if you like to include the thickness of the walls as part of your map, so like between Green 4 and Green 5 here you have a lil' gap and a guide to the width of a standard doorway:

The 6-panel grid on the other side is based on a grid for drawing storyboards, I used it to, for example, draw the map on the graph paper side and put in little sketches of the distinctive features on the panel side:

 You probably know what to do with this stuff here--dot grid left, standard graph paper right:

Interleaved between these they also throw in a few random reference pages, this one is languages: sign language, semaphore, etc:

I turned the reference page on geometric shapes into the 4-dimensional room map that you might've seen in the Red & Pleasant Miscellany.

There are a few different versions of this notebook and (I can't decide if this is good or bad) they each have a slightly different set of 8 grids:

That beige one is the "Grids & Guides Notebook for Ecological Thinkers" which, despite the beigeness and cringey title (you can totally see Elon Musk being at some TED talk and going "I've always been an ecological thinker") has a really useful grid for dungeons: large squares about the minimum size you can write in with a .005 pen and about exactly the minimum size for a plausible dungeon room, with a coordinate grid (A, B, C, 1, 2, 3...) already printed in...

Which is ideal for drawing an area map freehand (you can just use the coordinates to identify points of interest) or for making idea matrix charts where two pairs of ideas are knocked together to look at all the combinatoric options like these....

I used this grid for the Tiger King Dungeon...

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Anyway yeah that's the best notebook! Ummm...there's a new module up in the store all about flayers and negazohedrons and brain-eaters...

So if you want it, get it.

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You Are Here

When I was working on Violence In The Nympharium for LotFP the idea ended up being100 linked short adventures, so the first thing I did was go Ok we need lots of different kinds--the murder mystery one, the horror one, straight dungeoncrawl, interdimensional lunacy--everything I could think of.

So I did one about moving through a maze (like a literal maze this time) and trying hard to get a treasure without seeing a basilisk. The size scale is drastically reduced, gaps in the maze are sometimes 1' wide or less, some are just big enough to look through.

The default rules of D&D aren't meant to deal with this--you can move 30-60' in a six-second and I've built this adventure where a player needs to make tactically important left-right decisions every four or five feet.

This is where its nice to be able to draw it all out in the middle of thinking up the adventure rather than write the whole module and then hand it off to some other person to illustrate--the more of the problem I can draw, the less I have to write. By drawing the labyrinth up front I can go "Ok, let's say the basilisk hears you, how long does it take to get to you? Do we need rules for how it moves? Can it climb walls? What if the players climb the walls?" etc.

In another adventure for Nympharium the treasure was in a trap--technically in a trap which was itself in a trap which is itself in a trap, etc.

When you normally draw a dungeon, you put a little square with a "T" and then write "Pit trap" and move on with your life. By drawing the whole trap and the entire mechanism, Grimtooth-style, I managed to make this one into an adventure that'd keep a party busy for forty minutes or more.

Once I'd done a few of these, I realized this kind of stuff is so relaxing when I DM with it--like when you have one of those stress-DMing situations where you've spent weeks trying to set up a day and everyone is finally available and then the day comes and your head is in five different places and you're like oh fuck game in an hour but I haven't done laundry but if I pull out one of these "activity book" -style adventures--oh man everything is right there. No abstraction, no trying to keep track of people, it's has an 8-bit video game clarity that I can just cruise on. It's easy to stretch parts out, go into descriptions, take your time because you have all the problems the players are about to face very clearly laid out.

Obviously this approach doesn't work with everything--Castle Terravante from the first Cube World is a social adventure about a weird love triangle and drawing the castle itself and drawing little weirdoes with rapiers in it with arrows pointing at each other doesn't get you very far, you still are stuck having to invent situations and act NPCs and the majority of the adventure is going to have to be improvised around their personalities. You are less CPU and closer to just being another player (one devoted to making life...challenging..for the other four).

But when you can do it, it's nice. And it's fun to try to figure out new things to draw and what possibilities that opens up. Like I have this one notebook which is printed with a page of angles, they're presented in degrees but also as fractions over pi, so if the halfling economy is based on pi, and halfling houses are always round then...

Anyway, the new one I just put up in the store last night is a pack with three of these: The Labyrinth of the Basilisk, The Deep Trap, and The Old Empire--a like 50-room dungeon all drawn in cutaway view.

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Christmas Present

Christmas present:
Before Ragnarok happened, James' idea for the April Fools' release (or was it the Free RPG Day release?) was a book on Bards, made by me
I agreed to do it on one condition (well two conditions, the first was lots of money) --we'd do it in the exact format of the '80s Dragon Magazines, including comics, letters, and lots of real black and white ads from real OSR companies.

It was all edited and in layout...

...as you can see on the bottom-right, Rainville had even finished the cover.

Although the idea was originally a joke, so was Red & Pleasant Land (working title "Eat Me")--I was determined everything I wrote in there be not only playable but something I was actually planning to use.

It had a traveling troubadour class, a set of scheming entertainer NPCs, a Vornheim-style entertainer generator, an interconnected sandbox built around the circuit of taverns and festivals that an itinerant musician, juggler, etc would follow, a bunch of descriptions of plays that PCs might pull off the shelves of a random library that looked pointless at first but had hidden clues and adventure hooks worked into them, a few musical magic items including gongs and a more detailed version of Heward's Mystical Organ, an adventure that started with a poem the players had to examine for clues, another adventure featuring "The Malignant Hymnal of Occychorcys" and a guide to making music puzzles. 

Fall Book Update

Ok, it's looking more like I can do it in 144 pages, which should make it a little cheaper for y'all.

Anyway still Fall 2019, and still stay tuned.

Coming Fall 2019

click to enlarge

Hardcover, 320 pages, full color. Stay tuned.