Moe Lane's Blog, page 488
September 29, 2022
Tweet of the Day, Never Ascribe To Sabotage What Can Be Explained By Russian Incompetence edition.
I’m not an engineer. But I was able to follow along, and I gotta say: it sounds plausible as Hell that the Russians simply explosively fornicated the canine when it came to trying to get the Nordstream pipelines back up and running. Admittedly, that may just be my old Cold War reflexes talking – but we had those reflexive reactions for a reason.
I'm going to regret this, but what the hell:https://t.co/RirQ6xUQwU
— Ian McMurtrie (@ian_mcmurtrie) September 29, 2022
Via @KarlKGallagher.
The THE SECRET WORLD RPG Kickstarter Launch Video.
The Secret World RPG Kickstarter starts next week. Hopefully it’ll fund without any trouble, but obviously Star Anvil isn’t taking any chances. Here’s the launch video: it’s gonna be a great setting, I think. It certainly is for the MMO.
09/29/2022 Snippet, BUZZ ON THE STREETS.
Finishing this up! …One hopes. Finally figured out how to end it.
Patreon!Speaking of leeches, I ran into one on my way to breakfast with Lucas. We were gonna go over the scene fresh, once we had had some sleep; he didn’t think the statues were gonna get wrecked or sent far foreign, and neither did I. All the best buyers would be right here in town, and they’d all cut off their own right hands before they’d damage the hairs that weren’t there on the statues’ heads. So we’d have some time to figure out who took what; we already knew why and when — and I knew how, even if Lucas didn’t want to admit it. I also wanted to make sure Lucas understood that going on a bloody rampage wasn’t the best option, here. Adventurers usually get that friendly territories need a soft touch, but they also don’t like getting their stuff stolen…
It was at that point I got slugged in the stomach. It was a good, professional job, too: just the right angle and oomph to bounce me off a wall and knock over a trash can. Oh, and it hurt like a sonuvabitch. It always does.
As I tried to stagger myself to something like a fighting stance — I get hit a lot in this business, but I’m not gonna stand there and just take it — I heard somebody say, “Hit him again! Hit him again!” He had the kind of voice that’s trying to sneer, but can’t get more than a note above ‘whine.’
“That’s not how it works, sir,” rumbled another voice. One I thought I recognized. “If I hit him again, I’m just beating him up.”
“That’s what I’m paying you for!”
“No, sir. You’re paying me to help you send the Shamus a message. There are rules, sir.”
“Better listen to him, bub,” I wheezed out as I blinked away the tears. “It’s all in the contact he had you sign. That you, Luiz?”
Tweet of the Day, RIP Coolio edition.
There’s some wisdom in here.
i got to interview coolio one time and you bet i asked him if he was over his beef with weird al. pic.twitter.com/bVPZ15Qtpg
— Dan Ozzi (@danozzi) September 29, 2022
Via @HungarianFalcon.
September 28, 2022
Now is a great time to sign up for my Patreon!
Only a dollar a month, and I have monthly and weekly content! Some of that monthly content is coming up! Currently one short story a month, gaming material also monthly, and weekly microfiction! Sign up today!
Patreon!The ‘They missed a trick’ HOT TAKE: THE DEPP/HEARD TRIAL trailer.
I didn’t watch the trial itself, so I have no urge to see HOT TAKE: THE DEPP/HEARD TRIAL. But the problem with this movie isn’t that it’s exploitative. It’s that it’s not exploitative enough. What they should have done in this movie is gotten Johnny Depp and Amber Heard to play themselves.
…Yes, I’m making light of the entire tawdry affair. Then again, so is this movie.
09/28/2022 Snippet, BUZZ ON THE STREETS.
Crime Scene!
Patreon!It was unsurprisingly easier to trace the path of a wildly careening coach full of groaning mooks through the streets than it had been to track one single Adventurer on his way to breakfast. Most people hadn’t seen the coach themselves, but that was what gossip was for. A couple of times, I didn’t have to ask before somebody volunteered what they had heard from somebody else who had heard from a guy who’d been there. Mostly it boiled down to, “headed towards the southern docks.
After that, it was simply a matter of using my keen detective senses to find the remains of the coach, jammed into an alleyway. I was helped in that by the crowd surrounding the wreckage. Most of ‘em were trying to dismantle it, either for salvage or just to get the damned thing out of the way, but there were also people just there for the street theater. There usually are.
“Good morning, Shamus,” one of them said as I sidled up. She was an older lady, primly sitting on an barrel while she peeled an orange. “This your fault?”
“Nope,” I said automatically, and then snorted as I realized that it really wasn’t. “I came in late, Senora. What happened in Act One?”
“Oh, it was quite a scene,” she replied. “The coach came barreling through here about an hour ago, with maddened horses up front, fisticuffs on top, and some poor man hanging on for dear life on a rope behind. It must have bounced off of every cabbage cart in the street before the horses tried to go through that alleyway.” She sighed. “They almost managed to get the coach to fit. Orange slice?”
In the e-Mail: Casting the Runes [GUMSHOE]
The full title is Casting the Runes: Occult Investigation in the World of M. R. James; and the title really does say it all. “Casting the Runes is a roleplaying game based on the works of M.R. James, the father of the modern British ghost story, and uses the GUMSHOE system for investigative RPGs. The unique character of James’s stories, and his own personality, inspire the game.” It’s Edwardian-Era intangible horror, in other words. I picked it up because ghost stories sound like they’d work well in GUMSHOE’s system, and because they’re throwing in the PDF along with the print book for free. I’m down with that.
