Bob Defendi's Blog

Players, well-fed on crime dramas and mystery novels, will most likely gravitate to the crime scenes, intending to pick them apart for forensic evidence. They are destined for something of a shock. Crime scene investigation is pretty much unheard of in the Mortal Realm. The people here find murder so unsavory, and these murders so frightening, that they clean the crime scenes as soon as possible to erase all memory of the deed.

And they’re probably justified. First, the Mortal Realm has yet to develop anything like Sherlock Holmes or forensic science, and so a preserved crime scene has little purpose other than the macabre. Also, leaving a series of tainted homes around a city is just begging for an Ulcer to form. When the party asks to see the crime scene, local officials are likely to fall all over themselves, assuring the PCs that no evidence of the crimes still exists. Their city is clean.

Assuming the party demands to walk through the crime scenes (and the investigation is still ongoing), the characters will likely come on each with an escort from the city guard or one of the guild patrols, depending on who saw the place when it was fresh. Likely, they will see the second crime scene first, because the Captain of the Guard investigated it himself. That will give the guard the time to gather the relevant watch volunteers to take them to the other scenes.

I’ve been working on the Kickstarter for our second product, The Festering Earth. We have a stretch goal for a full-on maps glow up, but I don’t want to count on that. I’m therefore working on a light refresh of the maps using more modern map assets. Let’s look at some examples.

Back in 2006, Campaign Cartographer was just coming out with its first bitmap symbol sets, just as I was producing these projects. In fact, I was ahead of their releases. For instance, the full version of City Designer 3 wasn’t out when I made our sourcebook on the city of Felric’s Redoubt. Because of this, the big city map was made with vector graphic symbols, whereas the maps I did for our fourth and fifth products had bitmap symbols.

My first example today is a border fort in Heaven called Stands in Faith. Back in 2006, I had two main symbol types besides the base symbols in the core Campaign Cartographer product. I used more photo-realistic symbols for present-day maps, but for the teasers, which depict heaven 10,000 years ago, I used a less-realistic, more abstract style.

In these versions for 2025, I’ve been primarily using the more modern Mike Schley art style. Mike Schley and Profantasy produced two versions of his style for us to use: a colored set for maps like you’d see in many of the 5e products and an “Inks” style for more black and white maps. I didn’t want to forgo color maps for the majority of our battles and locations, so I chose the “Inks” style for heaven maps and the colored style for the current-day maps. This leads to a sort of reverse Wizard of Oz effect, where everything in Heaven is black and white, and the current-day maps have a more modern RPG look.

As an example, here is the map of Stands in Faith from 2006:

2025 Version:

Later in the adventure, we have the more traditional color maps. This map is very technically a spoiler, but without a name or context, you can’t derive any real story information from it (I’ve scraped the title from the map to sand off the serial numbers.

Here’s the 2006 version:

Here’s the new version for 2025:

We’re about halfway through the Kickstarter campaign for The Festering Earth. You can back it now!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robertjdefendi/echoes-of-heaven-returns-in-the-festering-earth?ref=acsdar

Hello, all!

I’d like to put out a quick new roundup from GenCon and the internet. Many people save their big announcements for this time of year. Even when they aren’t making the announcement at GenCon, they make their big announcements right around the same time. If you have a lot of news, people are more likely to stop by your booth to talk.

This isn’t a comprehensive news roundup, but these are the announcements that are most near and dear to my heart.

Brennan Lee Mulligan Returns to Critical Roll (Or Matt Mercer Quits!!!!!)

If you’ve been to YouTube, you’ve probably seen the clickbait headlines. “Matt Mercer is DONE.” “No More! --Matt Mercer...”

And the like.

But the real headline here isn’t just provocatively saying that Matt Mercer finally gets to play in a full campaign on CR (Forever DM no more...). The real headline is that my favorite DM, Brennan Lee Mulligan, is taking time away from his passion of making custom shoes for American Girl Dolls, and has agreed to run Season 4 of Critical Role.

Here’s coverage of the news by Bob the World Builder.

I, for one, am delighted. The original Crown of Candy on Dimension 20 is the single greatest actual play campaign ever run. I loved Brennan’s short Exandria stuff.

I look forward to him running a CR campaign where destroying a city isn’t a requirement.

This time, he gets to do it for fun.

Daggerheart

Daggerheart is everywhere right now. People love it. People are up in arms about its license. People are ecstatic. They are raging.

But mostly, they like the game itself.

I haven’t decided if my group will like it. It’s very narrative-driven, and I have a lot of roleplayers, but mechanics that require a lot of improv give them fatigue. We had this problem when we played FFG’s Star Wars. It can be hard to come up with an interesting narrative twist on most of the rolls you make in the game.

But we’ll see. I look forward to seeing Brennan run it in the AP. Maybe that will help me and my group decide. I know at least one DM who intends to ignore the narrative improv aspect of the dice system. That, too, might be a good solution.

Here’s Bob the World Builder (again) on his take on Daggerheart.

Cyberpunk Red

I am an OG Cyberpunk player, dating back to the 2013 days (that’s the year of the setting; it was released in the 80s, for those who don’t know). Tomorrow I get to play a netrunner again at a tabletop game for the first time in...40 years, maybe? Anyway, Cyberpunk Red has announced some upcoming books. A Single Player Mode book, allowing us to play CPR solo. A Night City sourcebook for 2045, and a 2077 campaign book for those who’d rather play in the era of the Project CD Red computer game.

All very exciting news! Here’s the announcement.

Enter the Big Dog

We had plenty of announcements from the D&D event at GenCon. The most reassuring statements have come from Dan Ayoub, the new head of the D&D franchise.

For more on this item, see the article on DNDBeyond.

The Head of the Franchise

Dan is still working to rebuild trust with the community after the OGL debacle, and he should. We, as a community, benefited from the fallout when WotC put the SRD into the Creative Commons, but there are still plenty of hard feelings. Dan is doing a great job of stopping the buck right where the buck is meant to stop. His theme is centered on building with the community, rather than for it.

Updates to the SRD

They announced that they will be updating the SRD on a rolling basis and adding monsters, options, and other content. This is excellent news. The last two SRDs were rarely updated (I can’t remember if the first one was ever updated. We can’t directly use the Artificer, and although they are not the most natural fit for Echoes, anyone who says gnomish Artificers don’t belong in the setting is a goddamn liar.

The new take on the SRD, along with its CC license, has been great. If you’re still using the OGL at this point, it’s just because you like a whole lot of legal text on the last page of your book. The Creative Commons provides a more reasonable framework. For instance, in our first Adventure Seed, A Knife in the Dark, there were several points where things could break into a chase. In the new 5e-specific version I just released, I’m able to footnote the chase rules from the DM’s Guide, instead of being oblique about them. Previously, we weren’t allowed to mention anything not in the SRD, even to indicate compatibility. That’s why Aasimar haven’t been mentioned in Echoes before now, even though they are quite the elephant in that room.

Maps for Everyone!

However, the best news is that they are making Maps free for all on September 16th. For those who don’t know, Maps is the 2D VTT for DNDBeyond (as opposed to their 3D VTT). Right now, if you own the DMG on DNDBeyond, you can’t use the included maps inside the Maps program unless you have a Master Tier subscription. As of September 16th, you’ll be able to use Maps with any book you’ve purchased digitally on DNDBeyond. I get to play (as opposed to DM) D&D again for the first time in a while when Heroes of the Borderlands comes out. Now I know that we can play it on Maps if the GM doesn’t want to run it on Foundry. (An inexplicable decision, of course, but more options are still more options.)

The Table

Wizards announced a new initiative called The Table. The Table will be an advisory group of people, like content creators or 3rd party publishers. The members of the table will rotate out over time. We don’t have a lot of details, but I believe they will use this to gauge community opinion, gather trusted insights from people on the ground, and the like. I know as a publisher, it’s very easy to get blinders. You are so caught up in your issues that you often miss what’s happening in the marketplace around you.

The Table would have told them the OGL fiasco was a bad idea. That came from Hasbro, so it might not help, but at least we would have had people in contact with them when they went radio silent on the matter for two weeks.

Spotlighting 3rd Party Content

You might have noticed more third-party content appearing on DNDBeyond. Part of that is the company being more open to bringing in 3rd parties who aren’t Darrington Press. But now they intend to branch out. For instance, Nerd Emersion, a YouTube content creator, has done several videos on Maps at this point. Recently, WotC reached out and asked if they could use clips from his videos in some of their promotional materials. Win/Win.

Return of Drow

Drow statblocks are returning to 2024 in the upcoming Forgotten Realms books. As a designer, I understand why they wouldn’t want stat blocks of PC species. As a DM who runs D&D...yay!

3 DLC, Astarion’s book of Hungers

Todd Kendrick, who was laid off from WotC recently, still gets to do YouTube interviews with the WotC staff. Again, yay. In a video he released this week, they spoke of the three DLC-style downloadable products for the new Forgotten Realms books. One of them is Astarion’s Book of Hungers, which illustrates why this new model benefits us as customers. That information would never make it into the main, published book. Imagine the reaction of most people to find a massive section on Vampires in the middle of the Forgotten Realms stuff. It would be disproportionate based on its actual relevance to the setting. People might be led to think that the Realms were primarily about vampires. Which they aren’t, of course.

But you put it in its own book and theme it around a popular Baldur’s Gate 3 character, and it comes off as what it is, an interesting set of side rules with a dash of fan service: something people might want, but nothing they need for the core Forgotten Realms experience.

Partnering with Paizo

The most significant development in the industry is the partnership between Wizards and Paizo. There is a deep rivalry between D&D players and Pathfinder players. Then, one day, we open D&D Beyond and find Abomination Vaults for sale at the top of the Marketplace. Not the Pathfinder version either, but a 5e version.

Honestly, I don’t feel like the rivalry existed between the design teams. When I backed the Kingmaker Kickstarter a few years back, I specifically bought the add-on that allowed you to play Kingmaker in 5e. I love that story, but I’d rather run it in D&D. It was clear that the Paizo people had no issue with people running their stories in 5e. But now we have proof that this sentiment runs both ways.

And that feeling of community. That feeling that this is all a collaborative effort, that’s what this whole hobby is all about. So give us your Table Advisory councils. Give us your collaborations between Critical Role and Dimension 20. Give us 3rd party spotlights. Most of all, give us collaborations between Wizards and the other large publishers out there. We don’t want division.

We want to play these games. Together.

I'm going to be playing catchup over the next couple blog posts. I blame the government.

Life the Universe and Everything was as good as ever from the point of view of the attendees. The only exception, of course, was their arbitrary rule that I can't do my Plot a Novel in an Hour presentation two years in a row. :) Always a crowd pleaser.

But seriously, I had many great compliments from the attendees. At least as many as normal, maybe more. We had a reunion of Writers of the Future Winners and felt like old times and I took a few of the people who were submitting out to dinner after so they could pick the brains of me and Brian Hailes. I made some connections, including a new gaming buddy who I won't name for their privacy until I have permission, but they are new to gaming and a gaming savant. All in all, a very successful symposium.

However, on the professional end, things were very different. Not necessarily different in a bad way.

You see several local people and guests were recently named in the #metoo movement. This colored every interaction we had. I want to stress that I don't think that any of this was bad (the coloring and the naming, not the acts that needed to be named...those were very bad). Most of the people I know who were named gave what seemed to be very heartfelt and well-thought-out apologies. (I'm probably not qualified to judge). At least one of them is a very different person now than the person who did those things. None of that, of course, is an excuse or gets them off the hook. With one exception, where the two accusations seem to have been revoked, these accusations are real. The damage done was real. Nothing that happens now can undo that.

But as someone who hasn't been named, I want to talk about apologies and the power of them. I spoke to one woman at the symposium who will remain nameless, who was the target of harassment by one of the people named. Nothing he does now can change that, but she told me that his apology meant a lot to her. She'd been dreading going to the symposium and seeing him this year, and his apology, well-worded and very sincere, had taken a great weight off her shoulders. I don't want to put words in her mouth, but I could tell that it had meant a great deal to her, where a less-than-genuine apology would probably have made matters worse (at least for the "insulting" values of worse).

I, of course, asked her if I'd ever done anything to make her uncomfortable or to hurt her. I knew what her answer would be before she said it because she and I had a fight some time ago, and I know that how she perceived the fight and how I perceived the fight were different. And that's no excuse. I made her feel gendered during the fight, and it mattered not one wit if I felt justified in the moment. There's no justification for that. Ever. The whole point of being a human being in a civilization is to try to see things from the point of view of the other human beings in the same civilization and to not shit on them. It's never okay to make them feel like you think of them as "lesser". It doesn't matter if you didn't think of them like that. It doesn't matter if you were really mad when you did it. It doesn't matter if it was an accident. None of that matters. You own your actions. Wait, that was too distanced. Let me rephrase. I own my actions. I made her feel like I thought she was lesser because of her gender. I made her feel patronized. If that sounds like weasel language, let me take another run at that. I patronized her. I did that. Nothing else matters.

I apologized to her there in the green room. But just in case I didn't do it well enough, I'm apologizing again. There was no excuse. That was entirely my fault. I should never have done that. It's my responsibility to be a better person than that. You have made me a better person by calling me out on it. So I am sorry. And I am grateful. I don't deserve the grace you showed me, after the fact. I am sorry. Thank you for being the person that you are.

LTUE was a time of self-reflection for all of us. My personality has a splash radius. I'm aware of that. I am fortunate that this is the only incident I've been accused of. I'm sure I've hurt others. If any of you read this, I apologize to you as well. I'm sure you have treated me far better than I deserve.

But we aren't good people, if we are actually good people, by getting things right the first time. If I somehow achieve the goal of being a good person, it's because I screw up and try again. And because others are gracious enough to give me a second chance.

But of course, most of the attendees probably saw none of that. To them, it was just a great symposium. I might not always be sure I'm the person I want to be, but I can be sure that we're all professional when we need to be. All of this?

That's what the green room is for.

This week I'll be participating in Life, the Universe, and Everything. This is an academic symposium and possibly my favorite "con." Maybe because I give myself permission not to try to sell or conduct business there, but just to meet people, network, and make friends. I know those things blur together, but here, they blur together in the green room or at dinner and lunch enjoying myself, and not behind a table. That said, my books will still be for sale at Howard and Sandra Tayler's table, and I should be at the mass signing Friday night.

Here's my schedule:

Thursday

10am, Cedar (Provo Marriott): How to Run a Useful Playtest (Moderating)
11am, Cascade C (UVCC): So You Want a Revolution?
1pm, Amphitheater (Provo Marriott): Building a Multidisciplinary Career: Writing, Gaming, Film, Art, and More
3pm, Zion (Provo Marriott): Making Money
4pm, Arches (Provo Marriott): Crime Writing

Friday

10am, Cascade B (UVCC): Writing Groups 101
12pm, Cascade B (UVCC): Writing Science Fiction Tropes

Saturday

12pm, Cascade B (UVCC): Pratchett vs Anthony: Humor in SF/F

The full version of the LTUE schedule is available either as an interactive page, or as a giant PDF grid.

After I've played a big game like Divinity Original Sin 2, much less two big games like it in a row (I hit the end of the first game over the holidays), I tend to have built up quite the to-do list. If I've been playing normal length games, I might just need a day or two to catch up (barring a major novel edit), or I might be able to catch up on my to-do list an hour a night before I start playing something, at the beginning of the game before I get really hooked. Not so with a truly huge game. Much less, as I said, two.

I've been working for over a week now on various odds and ends, trying to put them to bed before I take some evenings off again. I promised Amber Argyle I'd do another map for her, for her next book. That will be done with just another hour or two of work (the longest parts of those maps are the customer symbols that always come up, and I've finished all of them now). I'm also nearly done itemizing my deductions for my taxes. I assume I still need to do that after the new tax laws. We'll see what the tax guy says after he's had time to look at the numbers. I MIGHT finish both of those Wednesday night. If not, Saturday for sure (I have plans Thursday and Friday).

Also, I went through every digital map I own and reorganized them so I could find them when running a game. That's not really writing related, but it's been bugging me and it gave me something to do when my brain burned out on work that didn't involve me starting a new game. That last is the real risk...that I'll get burned out and need to start something non-work to recharge. That project got me through all these big, tedious tasks like taxes. (The map making isn't tedious, I love it, but I can only work on custom symbols for so long before I flame out.)

So. Things are good. I've queued up a ten-hour game (The Last Guardian), for my next play. That should get me to LTUE and maybe through it. With luck, I'll finish it just as I get notes back on DbC3 just as I finish that. I don't know what's queued up after it. Something long, probably. A gift from Howard Tayler.

LTUE, Life, the Universe, and Everything, a local academic symposium for genre writers, is right around the corner. I've started getting requests for advice from first-time panelists and moderators. I've written a few posts on this subject in the past, so I decided for this week, I'd pull them together into one place. I've discovered, in doing this, that putting together a "clip show" version of a blog post isn't actually less work than just writing a new post. Go figure.

But, I had to do this anyway, and I didn't want to do both. :)

So. Without further ado.

I wrote this post back in 2015. It's a list of advice on panels, both as a panelist and a moderator. In this post, I concentrate on the panel experience itself.

https://www.robertjdefendi.com/main/2015/10/10/your-fiftieth-convention-part-1-panels

In this post, I discuss conventions in general and my overall convention philosophy. All the advice in here won't be right for everyone, but it's all right for me and I'm sure you'll find a lot of stuff that will work for you. There's advice on panels in here as well, but there's also advice on how to act in the halls, how to act in the restaurants, and how to conduct yourself in general. Remember, if you have any kind of name for yourself: this might be your hundredth interaction of the day, but this may be the only interaction the person you're interacting with has with you in their entire life:

https://www.robertjdefendi.com/main/2016/2/14/things-i-do-to-make-conventions-better-for-everyone-else

This last post might not be for the faint of heart. If you're prone to anxiety and about to attend your first convention as a professional, might want to hold off on reading this one until after:

https://www.robertjdefendi.com/main/2016/7/31/biography-of-a-disasterous-panel

That's the most important advice I've given on conventions, I think. The big thing is to remember that this is your job. Give it your all. And take enough time off after to recover. I find my sleep after a convention is just as important as how I conduct myself at the convention itself.

This has been a nice, quiet week. Work has been a bit rough, but otherwise, things have been peaceful. Even Writers' Group canceled for a Writing Excuses recording day. So mostly I played Divinity Original Sin 2.

The most eventful thing that happened was my first email interview for a local newspaper. They sent 8 questions, pretty standard stuff. I asked for a target word count. They gave it to me. And then I started crafting my answers. I think I prefer this form of an interview to an in-person one in many ways. While you can't develop any kind of chemistry with the interviewer, and that's a big loss, you can really craft your responses. I worked on one or two of the lines for ten minutes. I'm still not completely happy with them.

But I can't deny that my answers are more polished than they'd be in an in-person interview. And post-edited as well. They don't have any of that fumbling toward an answer that human speech has in the wild, where you start talking without knowing where you're going to end up. Now, part of being a funny guy is having faith that you can start a joke without knowing the punchline and not fall flat on your face. Most of the time. But having a little time for rewrites is much better.

So while it might be ideal to get to charm the interviewer in person, getting to really craft your answers is a big benefit as well. Essentially, it allows you to all but write the article about yourself. They can change and frame what I gave them after the fact, of course, but what they have right now is about 95 percent me, and only 5 percent the interviewer, and that gave me a lot of control over how I come across.

Usually when hear myself in an interview after the fact, I cringe. That won't be the case this time. So that's a big plus. Anyway, I found it a novel experience.

That's it for this week. Soon, as in the next month or so, I should be getting edits on the next DbC novel. Until then, I'll probably take it easy. If I start a big push before then, I run the risk of burning out or getting sick. So I think I'll conserve my strength for the moment. I drive myself into the ground often enough.

I'm back from vacation. Sort of. I mean, for one, I'm writing this, technically, while still on vacation. Also, I'd bet good money that when you read this, I'm not really back from vacation. I might be working. I might work super diligently. In my heart, however, I'll still be on vacation, and I will be for days. It's hard to come back from a week plus with nothing to do but binge TV, movies, stand-up comedy, and video games. It's broken my work ethic. And my sleep schedule. It's been murder on the diet, but that has more to do with Christmas being an eating holiday and my book release party producing an excess of stress eating and leftover cookies.

So let's talk about book releases. My first book release party was excellent by any first-book standard. I sold about twenty copies. I tell everyone that 20-25 people came, but that's a huge underestimation because not everyone who came bought a book. For instance, a lot of families came and bought one book among them, and several people had already bought electronic copies and just showed up to fly the colors. So the real numbers were likely in the ballpark of forty. We took over Hastur Games that night, spilling into other sections of the store, forming into sub-clicks, etc.

My second book release was not that successful.

There are a few likely contributing factors. First of all, it wasn't my first book release. A whole bunch of people are willing to miss your second event that would never miss your first. It's your first. They have to support you. Your second? Well, they were there for your first and they fully intend to be there for your third, right? Second, it landed right before Christmas, when people didn't have a great deal of disposable income left and holiday plans. I know it was the day after payday and I was already living on credit cards for that check. (Of course, a good portion of that had to do with the book release party.) Third and finally, the weather turned bad that night, and the moment I saw the streets and the snow, I knew there wouldn't be a turnout.

In fact, you could honestly call the turn out a disaster. The only people actually there on time for the event itself were the people who had to be there and the families who had ridden with the people who had to be there, plus my fellow podcaster JC Carter, who had lent us a piece of sound equipment. There were few enough people that Taylor Stapleton, the comic, tried to beg off going on, until I pointed out that every person there had told me that not one of them was there for my book. All the family members (and JC) had told me they'd only come to see Taylor's comedy. True story.

So she performed, and the one table of gamers in the store loved her. And the audience loved her. And we picked up a loyal friend or two by the time we really got started (I delayed a half hour). And the store owner didn't know that those seven or so people had to be there, so he thought it merely a really weak turn out. He didn't know how bad it actually was.

The irony, of course, is that eventually, people did make it, but because of the snow, almost all of them turned up after the main portion of the event was over, when I was just sitting around signing the very occasional book. I'd decided to stay for at least an hour and a half, and in that time I sold four copies.

Taylor said something to me after to make me feel better, and I said, "It's not like I haven't done worse events than this." She smiled and agreed. As a comic, I'm sure she has had worse experiences as well. The crowd we had was great. Just small, and that made it daunting to start. But I've done that book signing where no one comes. Almost every author has, at some point. And I'm sure every stand up has performed to a nearly empty room. Or worse, a dinner theater.

I've done panels with one attendee. I've done signings where every passerby refused to make eye contact. You think, when you start, that the loneliest part of writing is when you're at home with the blank page. Or maybe stuck on a terrible edit. It isn't. Its when you're sitting at that table, and no one has come. It can be worse when you're at that table in a full store and still no one comes.

But this is what we sign up for. A lot of people think they'll be a writer because it's perfect for introverts. That isn't true. The hard part, the most important part, requires you to hang, bleeding, in the open, in public. Smiling. Pretending that everything is all right.

And for me, it was. But I've done this before. Your first time, it won't be. Your first time, it will likely feel like your world has ended.

And maybe it has.

But we build worlds for a living, right? We do that every day. Maybe 500 words at a time. Maybe a thousand. It's the job. We do it daily. Weekly. We do it when we don't feel like it. We do it when we hate life. We do it and we do it and we do it some more.

So when your world comes to an end. You rebuild it. And you go on. Because it will happen again. I promise you. And it will keep happening. You'll keep needing to rebuild. This isn't easy. We don't do it because it's easy.

We do it because we have to.

I wrote that last post, had about one night of two hours of recreation, and then did the math and realized that I didn't get any more time off until my vacation starts at the end of next week. Unless I finish early (fingers crossed.) I can only count on getting about five days of productive work in during a given week, and I wanted to be finished next Wednesday night, if possible. See, I've been fighting off a cold and I learned when I did that draft of DbC 4 and then went straight into a convention that if I do that, I'll get pneumonia, so I'm relatively certain that if I do my normal 5 hour nights during this book, my immune system will lose the fight and I'll get sick right away. So I figured I need to add at least one extra day into that schedule.

So, at the end of the first week, I'm pretty close to halfway done. By the time you read this, I should be halfway done. Its going pretty well.

Meanwhile, Audible rejected DbC 2 again, for technical reasons. At least one of those reasons was super valid and would have been very embarrassing if it had made it through (it was shrapnel left over from a change they made us make the first time around). We've made those changes and I've done a full audit of the files. I think I've found all the little glitches. We're reuploading them for approval.

Meanwhile I'm trying not to fall behind on DbC 6, which is where all that loss of sleep usually goes. So far, that's worked out because I've had a couple events cancel, but we'll see if that holds up.

That's all for this week. Even with the enforced extra sleep, I'm very, very tired. Hopefully I'll stop being sick soon.

But the work doesn't stop just because I feel like crap.