Wolds & Wednesdays: SIG & Eiríndal
SIG: Special Investigations Group came out this week, and I’ll be honest with you. It may be one of my favorite Worlds of Pulp books yet. That surprised me a little at first. Then I thought about it for a minute, and it stopped surprising me at all.
I’ve loved police dramas for as long as I can remember. Crime capers, noir procedurals, late-night beat stories, foot chases through rain-slick alleys, top cops, back-alley rumbles, and hard-luck detectives working the mean streets. If it has a badge, a bad neighborhood, and a case nobody else wants to touch, I’m in. So it was only a matter of time before I sat down and wrote the kind of story that thrilled me as a kid.
No surprises here. Three generations of police came before me. It was hardwired into me.
I’ve come to believe those stories hit so hard because, at their best, a police drama is about one stubborn hero standing against a machine. That hero faces a city that doesn’t want saving, a system that would rather look away, and a situation that gets worse the longer you stare at it. That struggle is the beating heart of SIG.
The book is set in Puerto Solara, a fictional city tucked along the South Florida coast between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. The sheriff there has received a special mandate to build his own team. So, he reaches out to the cops and agents this city chewed up and spit out, the ones who were framed or buried because they crossed the wrong people. His pitch is simple. They’ve already ruined your careers, so what else can they take? The real question is whether you’ll stand up or let the city fall because you took a black eye.
If I’d had a larger page count, I would have packed in more story hooks. I hated leaving them on the cutting-room floor. So here’s my plan. I’m going to write a short collection called the Puerto Solara Story Hooks and Street Beats and post it right here on the website, free. Because Worlds of Pulp is modular, there’s really no end to where you can take SIG. Drop it into a modern horror campaign, a pulp adventure, or a straight crime game, and it’ll fit.
Now for what’s coming next, and I’m excited about this one.
The next Worlds of Pulp book is The Shattered Crown, a fantasy setting built around a power vacuum. Human and non-human peoples are all scrambling to claim their place in a world that just lost its center. You’ll meet the Naga, the Fomorian, the Rakshasa, the Tengu, the Minotaur, and a few others I’m keeping quiet about for now. Even the humans are their own breed, unique to this setting.
The Shattered Crown isn’t meant to be a whole world. It’s a continent you can bolt onto the fantasy city you already love, adding new peoples, new politics, and new trouble without tearing down what you’ve built.
If you haven’t picked up SIG yet, now’s the time. Then keep an eye on this space for The Shattered Crown. To whet your appetite, I’ve included a first look at the cover below:
