Moe Lane's Blog, page 78

One week to go on the Fermi Resolution Worldbook Backerkit!

…More or less. Backerkit has a semi-weird way of counting the days. But the Fermi Resolution Worldbook Backerkit ends on March 6th! So you’ve got a week or so to back my post-apocalyptic tabletop roleplaying game. The time of choosing is upon you…

02/27/2025 Snippet, JUDITH STORMCROW AND THE FLIM-FLAM MAN.

Almost there!

…

The Bone Marshes lived down to the name. They were marches; the vegetation was unpleasantly pale, while somehow both slimy and crunchy at the same time; and it stunk like a grave. Even the absolute lack of flying, biting insects wasn’t an entirely pleasant surprise. Judith kept wondering what was killing them, and unfortunately could think of a few plausible, and subtly dangerous, answers.

At least there weren’t any trees. Surprisingly good roads, too. Great Realm work, too. Gregor had known a little about that. “Back then this was called the Greenfen. It had lots of plants that the healers liked, so there was plenty of travelers, some towns, and a few temples. Silvergrove grew up around one of them.”

Barry’s arm was still in a sling, so Judith had the reins. “Is that what you want to dig up? Artifacts for healing? I can see there being money in that.”

“Yes. Some of the old surgical instruments go for a lot, especially if they were designed to work with magical healing. We don’t know how to make them anymore. Surgical instruments, dwarfglass alembics, other gear that can survive the elements. If we find any actual medical texts or spell-slabs we’d be all be set up for life, but since when do miracles happen anymore?”

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The DEATH OF A UNICORN trailer.

I’m not gonna lie: I don’t know whom I’m rooting for in DEATH OF A UNICORN. I know it’s supposed to be the evil corporate whoevers, but unicorns are bad. Like, really bad. Everything from Faerie is bad, which is why even the possibility that it is actually somehow real is enough of a justification to keep blanketing this planet with cold iron and electromagnetic radiation.

I dunno. Maybe everybody could die, except Jenny Ortega and Paul Rudd? That’d work for me.

‘Hold On (The Break).’

Hold On (The Break), Walk Off The Earth

#commissionearned

Quote of the Day, I Have No Response To That* edition.

GeekTyrant: “The Bear actress Ayo Edebiri has been hired to write the script and possibly star in the live-action Barney movie that is being made by Mattel and A24.”

Well, I do have one response: did any bits of Mattel and A24 ever come into direct contact with each other? Because I would have guessed that there would have been some kind of hypergolic** reaction if they had.

*Classical reference.
**Spelled it right on the first try!

#commissionearned

02/26/2025 Snippet, JUDITH STORMCROW AND THE FLIM-FLAM MAN.

Ambush!

…

The thing about magical ambushes is, they’re barely ambushes to start with. Spellcasting wasn’t subtle, and spellcasters weren’t modest. A mage goes up against a regular person, the mage probably wins. All they need is that chance to get that first spell off, and then it’s all over except the screaming and the burning flesh. Why waste time on doing a good job, if doing even a bad one will do?

There were flaws with that theory, but Judith never saw the point in talking about them. Training for them, yes. Talking, no.

So, when the first set of arcane bolts came howling out of one side of the overgrown road the Fancy Britches were traveling down, the guards on that side rushed the brush immediately. Arcane bolts were short-range, and mages couldn’t recast them right away. All you had to do was follow the path of shriveling and blackened vegetation back to its source, and see how the mages would handle that.

Judith didn’t waste time paying attention to that side; instead she looked to the other, one hand reaching for the protective charm she wore around her neck. It was almost too hot to touch, which wasn’t welcome news but at least it meant that it had worked to deflect away whatever arcane bolt had been thrown at her. When you weren’t a mage yourself, you never knew if you had a good charm until somebody threw a spell at you.

02/26/2025 Snippet, PICKMAN’S MODELS.

I’m doing a weekly ‘you have to sit and do work because a couple of other people are and we’re all expecting each other to do it’ session and it’s humiliating how well it works.

…

“Commander Marsh is in charge of the Americans here on the moon,” Reithner told him. “I am not even his direct subordinate. You should talk to him, not me.”

The cleaver-man scowled at Tobias. “He’s not one of us. Maybe you are, maybe you’re not. If you are, you can tell us how to talk to him, get what we want that way.”

He might have said more, but Tobias interrupted. “Let me start talking to you right now. There was a man captured with us. His name is Pickman. Where is he?”

Tobias did not like the cleaver-man’s grin. “You worried about him? You want him back? You going to ask nicely?”

“Absolutely,” Tobias replied, his voice flat. “Pretty please, with sugar on top.” He noted with bleak satisfaction that his captor reacted with the same desperate longing to the s-word as everybody else on the Moon did. “And while we’re talking about what I want: you leave her be, too. Harm the Lieutenant in any way, and you’ll get nothing you want.”

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It’s not that I don’t care that Kathleen Kennedy is leaving Lucasfilm…

…it’s that Kathleen Kennedy is the reason why I don’t care about Lucasfilm anymore. I mean, she won, didn’t she? She won, she’s going to cash out her chips, and somebody else gets to be the one who’ll have to throw the bodies in the incinerator.

All I have left is detached professional respect for someone who turned out to be a really skilled creative saboteur. At least, I assume that all of that was intentional. It’d approach cosmic levels of horror to instead contemplate the possibility that everything she did was an accident.

Tweet of the Day, Indexing Rules Exist For A REASON, WotC edition.

And this is why: so that you don’t scatter all of your monsters throughout the book. And before you ask, When would this matter? The answer is, it matters when you know you need a dragon, or a giant, or whatever for an encounter – but you don’t know which kind of monster would best suit it. It’s much easier to figure out when your dragons are all organized as Dragon (Green), Dragon (Red), Dragon (White) or whatever.

It's official. The new 2025 Monster Manual is literally organized worse than the 1977 original. In WOTC's version none of these dragons are under "D" for Dragon. They're scattered all throughout the book according to the initial of their respective color. That is beyond stupid. https://t.co/l8y0GKxrKD pic.twitter.com/GY949vXgoS

— Kevin Lamb (@KevinLamb74) February 26, 2025

You get the impression that WoTC kind of resents still having to sell actual books.

‘Wild Thing.’

Wild Thing, The Troggs

#commissionearned