Moe Lane's Blog, page 837
September 30, 2020
In Nomine Revisited: Fort Kanaloa
Fort Kanaloa
There is a section of Hades that was clearly designed and laid out to be a seaport, complete with an artificial harbor and coastal fortifications. There is, of course, no ocean in the celestial plane – at least, no ocean now – so the Port District instead looms over a barren plane of rock, stretching all the way to the metaphorical horizon. This being Hell, any useful equipment or materials were carted off long ago; but the buildings themselves remain. And of them, Fort Kanaloa is easily the most important.
It is not a particularly well-favored building, seeing as it was clearly designed to be the primary defense of the port in case of a seaborne invasion by Heaven*. The fort stretches for easily several miles, taking up the entirety of what was once a breakwater and is now a sheer cliff, and its dirty grey stone barely contrasts against Hades’ ever-present smog. There are no real windows, only narrow gaps in the walls where unknown weapons presumably were once kept.
Inside is an almost endless grid of rooms, stairways, internal fortifications, all lined in the same dirty grey stone that almost seems to suck up what light there is. All the senses, in fact, seem muted. Even smells attenuate quickly over distance, here.
As the above suggests, Fort Kanaloa is still in use. It is the place where the Game puts what prisoners they have that they might find a need for later. The system is very basic: a prisoner is brought to a cell, walled inside, and then abandoned. If the prisoner stays put, nothing further happens. If the prisoner decides to break out, then Fort Kanaloa’s special Rules come into play.
The first thing that the prisoner will discover is that there are no visible guards. No visible guards, no obvious security systems, no paperwork: being sent to the Fort is apparently the Asmodean equivalent of being tossed in storage, and forgotten. The prisoner will have the run of the place, subject of course to the opinions of the other inmates. Their interactions with the others will quickly lead to the second thing that gets discovered, often painfully: there are Three Rules.
No stripping of Forces. Fighting is permitted; ripping off pieces of souls is not. Do not leave. There really aren’t any doors, anyway – but there are places where an exit could be fashioned. Do not gather in groups of more than twenty. This is possibly the most viciously enforced Rule of them all.
The Three Rules are posted in every room of Fort Kanaloa, and failure to follow any of them even once results in what appears to be a savage beating the next time that a demon is alone. The demon will have no memory of the actual beating, but will feel the aftereffects for quite some time. A second failure? Nobody knows what happens to the now-missing demon, but it probably wasn’t nice.
However, aside from these Rules, nothing else seems to be forbidden. Song use – although there seems to be a potent metaphysical block on communication in or out of Fort Kanaloa – sedition, treason, thoughtcrime, punning: the Game doesn’t punish it, and there may even be some demons at Fort Kanaloa that might actually believe that they don’t write down infractions, either.
The inmates have, of course, banded together in a nigh-infinite number of gangs, organizations, and cliques: while death or maiming is actually quite rare at the Fort, mere violence is not, and having an extra pair of eyes can be helpful. Besides, there’s not much else to do except indulge in factionalism, as resources are rare (although the occasional storeroom of junk is still found, even today). Inmate groups usually either coalesce around those with powerful Band, Word, or skills / Songs / attunements: those with useful tricks can do reasonably well for themselves. It should also be noted that roughly 15% of the inmates at the Fort are actually damned souls: the Rules do not make any exceptions for them, which means, freakishly enough, that Fort Kanaloa is one of the few places in Hell where mortals and celestials can deal with each other on terms that are not entirely unequal.
So what’s going on?
It’s half efficiency and/or laziness, and half sociological experiment. The Game doesn’t really do much in the way of imprisonment – they certainly don’t care much about rehabilitation – so they tend to take a minimalist approach to the process. If they don’t leave, don’t destroy each other, and don’t violate an arbitrary directive chosen because three Rules has a better look to it than two Rules, who cares what they do? Let them commit treason all they like, inside: they’re the Game’s to do with any which way, and their bad example won’t affect anyone else. This last would not be enough to buy tolerance from Asmodeans, but there’s the “sociological experiment” to consider: the Game is quite keen to see what self-created Rules arise when external ones are lacking.
Besides, some of the tricks and makeshifts created by the inmates to make up for the lack of resources sometimes end up being of interest to those on the outside.
*Try not to think about that too much. As a mortal, you not only don’t have the right kind of brain to comprehend the nature of the celestial plane; you don’t even have the right kind of physics.
This material is not official and is not endorsed by Steve Jackson Games. In Nomine is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy .
The September Patreon stuff is up.
Although I reserve the right to swap out the RPG setting for something else next month. It’s a good idea, but it needs just a touch of something.
Impurities: A Cthulhu Mythos story about things I know nothing about, really! But since when has that ever stopped anybody!The Elmerite Order: a mystical bunch of your standard hidden magicians in an uncaring world, only they’re being more or less subsidized for it.
ENOUGH TALK*! Netflix to do Conan the Barbarian series.
Whee!
Netflix has put in development an epic live-action series based on Conan, the iconic sword-and-sorcery character created by writer Robert E. Howard…
…the project, from Fredrik Malmberg and Mark Wheeler’s Pathfinder Media, is the first in a deal between Netflix and Conan Properties International, owned by Malmberg’s Cabinet Entertainment. The pact gives Netflix the exclusive option to acquire rights to the Conan literary library and develop works across TV and film, both live-action and animated.
This is what is good in life.
Moe Lane
*An excellent scene from an underrated movie…
…and one that perhaps might be referenced in an upcoming anthology of mine. Sign up for Kickstarter launch notifications today!
Tweet of the Day, It’s Florida Men All The Way Down edition.
(H/T: Instapundit) I understand that the ‘Florida Man’ meme is unfair. The state does full-disclosure on crimes, so reporters know there’s a well of crazy stuff there to mine.
And yet.
So. Assuming that this story is correct, Florida highway interactions can start with bumping cars on the highway, speeding up, slowing down, brandishing a firearm, having someone respond by firing a gun through his own windshield, and then having the gunman call the cops himself to report in the incident as a warning to future highway wrongdoers. But that’s not what fascinates me.
This fascinates me.
After the gunplay, THE PASSENGER TOOK OFF HIS SEAT BELT. While the car was still merrily driving along.
:pause:
FLORIDA MAN!!!!!
September 29, 2020
REVISIONARY status, 09/29/2020: 24800/32000
Getting into POLLY WANT, honestly: some stories are hard to expand, but this one really needed to be properly fleshed out. I feel a lot better about this project than the other one, honestly. I should have expanded it a while back.
Patreon!The odd thing about horror, Blid Srohtop discovered, was how quickly you adjust to living with it all the time.
The first few weeks were the roughest; Blid knew he would have to hustle for more customers now that the contract with the Terran Consulate had gone down the sewers, but he had trouble focusing at odd moments during the day. It was always the same thing, too. He would be doing this or that, and suddenly a memory of that horrible [bird]’s head would leap right out of the primitive parts of his brain and terrify him.
It was odd, though. It should have been that terrible beak that unnerved him most, but it wasn’t. It was the eyes, and the way how the [bird] had kept turning its demonic head to watch him from one side, and then the other, with a frustration and suppressed rage that was clear to perceive, even with species and xenological barriers in the way. And the oddest part of all about that? Unlike everything else, that frustration did not seem particularly aimed at him.
The TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION Kickstarter goes live 10/20/2020.
It’s a short story anthology set in the Fermi Resolution world, spanning a millennium of war and conflict. TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION will feature a combination of Patreon and new stories, including a never-before-seen Tom Vargas novelette! I can’t wait for people to read it.
Click here to sign up. Feel free to pass the link to FROZEN DREAMS around, too. Every little bit helps.
The FIREFLY Honest Trailer.
Like me, Honest Trailers loves Firefly. Also like me, it admits that not having multiple seasons of it does nothing to diminish its nerd mystique. Bizarrely, the Netflix model of two-and-out might have threaded that particular needle…
Video of the Day: Orca vs. Otter (language warning)
Via Facebook. Hysterical, yet casually profane, in that particular Australian way. But if you have a cool boss, go ahead and play it for him or her. It’s very well done.
In the e-mail: A Deadly Education: A Novel (The Scholomance Book 1).
Oh, happy day. A Deadly Education is Naomi Novik’s latest, and I’ve already started it, and so far it’s excellent. The only thing keeping it from Book of the Week status is that it already had it, more or the week I heard about it. I regret nothing…
