Moe Lane's Blog, page 48
June 19, 2025
05/19/2025 Snippet, IN THE HALLS OF THE LILY KING.
Still trying to get into the rhythm.
…
It was easy to cause a distraction in Holy Quebec. All you had to do was be loud in any other language besides French. The trick lay in being loud in the right way. Waylon had seen the inside of this city’s holding cells a time or too, and while they weren’t awful he was far too sober to overlook their drawbacks. So doing anything illegal was, as New Californians would put it, Right Out.
Luckily, the Lost Tourist wheeze was an old reliable.
“Please, Notre-Dame, see-voo play?” he asked the closest gendarme, mangling the French with malice aforethought. “La mee-zoom dew papa? On rude bee-ad? Is this the right way?” He wished he’d an actual map to wave around, but calling the Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Québec ‘the Pope’s house’ would probably be enough to roil the waters without boiling them.
And didn’t it, just? The gendarme gave him the sourest of looks, barking out “C’est une affaire de police. Je ne suis pas guide touristique. Allez-vous-en!” far too quickly for someone who didn’t speak Imperial French well to follow. Luckily, his muttered “Imbécile!” afterward was loud enough for Waylon to hear.
Tweet of the Day, Roll 3d10 For Crushing Damage edition.
This is fairly hardcore, especially since the DM in question undoubtedly heard this response at some point, and then began to smile evilly.
My favorite Gary Gygax thing happened while I was on a panel with him (obviously Gary was the big draw for the audience, so we let him do most of the talking). A querulous player asked how to interpret some arcane rule buried in the dungeon master's guide. Gary said curtly, "Ask… pic.twitter.com/6SIdP3134x
— Sandy Petersen(@SandyofCthulhu) June 19, 2025
Happy Juneteenth!
As is customary for this site, happy Juneteenth! It’s a clear, hot day: I may just grill those hamburgers instead of stove-cooking them, after all. And to Hell with all slavers.
June 18, 2025
‘I’ll Fly Away.’
I’ll Fly Away, Gillian Welch & Alison Krauss
#commissionearned
The Predictable But Maybe Okay Anyway OSIRIS trailer.
Yeah, it’s silly that aliens would come to Earth just to collect humans for their larders. Silly and stupid. On the other hand: lots of guns, and Linda Hamilton doing a weary Russian accent. On the gripping hand: my wife wants to know what they did with that poor Gorn’s eyes.
The Unnameable (Unfiltered)
I really need to get back to other things.
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The Unnameable (Unfiltered)
Who killed the Amalgamation? What killed the Amalgamation? That is the unanswered question. It may very well be an unanswerable question, for all that it is the most important one facing humanity. There are those who strenuously argue that the question should not be answered at all. What good could possibly come from solving the mystery? If an entire galactic civilization could not prevail against its murderer, what hope does humanity have?
That is a minority opinion, however. Most people take the position that it’s better to know the danger, if only because it could give humanity an idea of how to minimize the risks. They don’t obsess over the topic, though. Obsessing over it never ends well.
What Is Known
The scale was universal. Humanity has yet to find an occupied Amalgamation world that was not targeted. Even the smallest orbital platform or mining outpost was sought out.The attacks were simultaneous. Not quite perfectly: the central worlds were all struck at the same time, to the extent that this even means anything over interstellar distances, with outlying systems mopped up in an inexorable tide of xenocide. But the murder of the Amalgamation took no more than six standard Terran days.The destruction was thorough. No sapient life besides humanity survives in the former worlds of the Amalgamation. At least one ship survived by hiding in interstellar space, but it was long cold by the time humanity found it. Under the circumstances, finding more derelict ships would be distinctly low-probability events.The malice was overwhelming. Whatever killed the Amalgamation hated it. It particularly hated the Amalgamation’s culture and arts, taking special care to wreck and spoil whatever it could find of beauty, strength, and worth. This destruction was not perfect, but to this day there are huge gaps in humanity’s understanding of the aesthetics of galactic society.The xenocide was ritualized. As for the various species of the Amalgamation: most died on the first day of the attacks. The others were brought to various places in the Tomb Worlds (invariably one of local religious or cultural importance), and had things done to them. Several centuries have turned the evidence of those things into battered, scattered bones, to the secret relief of xeno-archeologists. It was already too easy to think too hard about what must have happened there.The oversight was deliberate. Whatever murdered the Amalgamation knew of humanity’s existence. The location of Earth was well-marked in the records, and the Amalgamation’s monitoring of humanity was both constant and comprehensive. Earth should have met the same fate as the rest of the Galaxy.And nobody knows why it did not.
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The SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE trailer.
Yes, let me address this now: SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE left me unimpressed. Jeremy Allen White is a good actor, but he doesn’t have Bruce’s musical stage presence – yes, yes, I know many of my readers don’t like Springsteen’s singing. The man can work a crowd, though. Concede that, at the very least.
Also: I like Nebraska a lot more, now that I’ve admitted it’s a folk album. But let’s not make it into the greatest work of Twentieth century music, okay? Even if it’s part of the biopic.
#commissionearned
A new installment of THE BOLD MARAUDER is finally up!
A couple of days late, because I went to go see my mom. June is being a generally insanely busy month for me anyway. So, check out THE BOLD MARAUDER on Patreon!
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June 17, 2025
A Slow Fall Into Madness, Part 6. (Unfiltered)
Maybe finished?
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War, Deferred
For a while, it looked like the news that the entirety of Galactic civilization had been destroyed would act as a catalyst for lasting peace. The 2050s in particular were one of the least conflict-driven decades in human history, as nations actively sought to avoid wars and even skirmishes. It was widely feared at that time that the day of humanity’s reckoning had not yet come, and that the only way Earth could hope to survive would be by cooperation and unity.
The problem was that this newfound desire for a united front was linked to a steady military buildup during the same time period. The average nation’s percentage of GDP dedicated to defense tripled between 2050 and 2076, with a large proportion of that dedicated to orbital kinetic energy weapon (KEW) defense. One of the first useful applications of Amalgamation technology was the introduction of reactionless drives. Terran scientists didn’t quite understand how they worked, but Terran engineers could build and repair them, which was the important thing. Every nation that could soon had a bristling array of KEWs in orbit, ready to attack any space armada that might come boiling out of charnel blackness of deep space.
(Truthfully, most people assumed that there was no way that humanity could survive the same kind of attacks that had murdered the Amalgamation. Even so, few were willing to go down quietly. Besides, there was always a chance, right?)
Unfortunately, by the early 2070s the early panic had begun to fade. The armadas had not shown up. Perhaps they would not, and that was a relief. But unity was still considered a desirable goal, in and of itself; and it was clear that the planet was still too disorganized, too fragmented. There needed to be a consolidation of resources, peoples, and polities. Peacefully, of course. As much as possible. Realistically possible.
And if not? Well. There were plenty of weapons.
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