Moe Lane's Blog, page 856
October 6, 2020
In Nomine Revisited: Rikbah, Mercurian of Lightning.
Some of the most fun things I ever did on the old In Nomine email lists was to hurt people’s heads by taking details about the game world to their logical conclusions. I feel no shame in this. It was good for them!
Rikbah
Mercurian of Lightning
Corporeal Forces: 3 Strength: 4 Agility: 8
Ethereal Forces: 6 Intelligence: 12 Precision: 12
Celestial Forces: 5 Will: 10 Perception: 6
Vessel: male/3, +1 Charisma
Skills: Artistry/3 (Writing), Computer Programming/1, Chemistry/1, Emote/6, Fast-Talk/6, Knowledge (Archeology/1, Conspiracy Theory/3, Logic/3, New Age UFOlogy/3, Occultism/3, Pseudoscience/3), Language (Ancient Egyptian/1, French/1, Greek/1, Latin/1, Portuguese/1, Russian/1, Spanish/1), Lying/6, Savior-Faire/1
Songs: Healing (Corporeal/3), Motion (Celestial/3), Tongues (Ethereal/3)
Attunements: Mercurian of Lightning, Seraph of Light, Generator, Friend of the Illuminated
Rikbah is regrettably necessary.
The problem is this: basic Darwinistic evolutionary theory is both sound, and essentially correct. But in the In Nomine universe it isn’t strictly True, now is it? Maybe it would be True in a universe where the Creator was one of those Newtonian Clockmakers, with servants to match — but that’s not the In Nomine universe. The In Nomine universe is the one where supernatural creatures — including Jean, the Archangel of Lightning himself, although he rarely refers to himself that way — have been generally mucking about with Earth’s natural development since the start. Sure, Heaven has done nothing too outrageous, except for the Eden Experiment thing. And the Lilith thing. And the entire Grigori thing. The whole War, really. The Purity Crusade, too, when you think about it; can’t say that ethereals aren’t a natural development of having humans around.
OK, so it’s been outrageous.
Still, Darwinism works, even in that universe, as long as nobody looks too closely at it, which people have been doing lately. Link that up with both reliable record keeping techniques and universal literacy, and you get the potential for unfortunate revelations. Unfortunate revelations tend to get in the way of Lightning’s core mission of keeping humanity from doing anything really stupid with their tools; therefore, it behooves Jean to set up a countermeasure like Rikbah.
Like any good Jeanite tool (Jeanites do not consider the word ‘tool’ to be an insult), Rikbah serves several purposes at once. His major purpose is to come up with and popularize internally-consistent and imaginative, yet ultimately non-provable and highly improbable, explanations for anomalies in the historical, archeological, and scientific record. Needless to say, these explanations will be just as far from the actual truth as they are from the scientific paradigm favored by Lightning; there’d be precious little point, otherwise.
The idea is to leave orthodox thinkers with no viable alternative to the current scientific consensus, and guide unorthodox thinkers into channels that are unlikely to affect the War. Besides, there’s nothing like pseudoscience to attract a Vapulan, and every Servitor of Lightning knows this. Granted, all of this is harsh or even cynical in a certain light — but Jean’s organization is not known for sentimentality and is known for practicality, so that particular observation would not be deemed to be especially persuasive anyway.
Needless to say, Rikbah is both well-trained and well-motivated (he still has his job, after all). Perhaps a touch too well-motivated, really; his Choir keeps him from being actually harsh towards humanity, but Servitors of Lightning tend not to be that impressed with human intelligence, and this particular Mercurian is no exception. He sees nothing unusual or noteworthy about the fact that his job is essentially to get people to believe in lies; after all, most angels have more or less the same duty. He merely has the pleasure of having it all spelled out for him. Jean would no doubt relieve him of his present duties if this current low regard for humanity becomes more obvious (and thus, more of a warning sign), which probably means that Rikbah is safe from Falling any time soon — but he’s not as unlikely a prospect as some.
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 Interestingly Ambiguous ARCHENEMY trailer.
Couple of interesting trailers today, and I decided to go with ARCHENEMY, mostly because it wasn’t visibly shilling for the People’s Republic of China.
Interestingly, I dunno from this if the guy is crazy or not. Well, sure, he’s kind of crazy either way. I dunno if he’s delusional, though. Could be either, really.
10/06/20 Update, REVISIONARY: 27800/32000.
It’s coming along. ‘Polly Want’ is almost finished, although I need to change the ending. Ehh, sometimes you gotta. It works better this way.
Patreon!From “Polly Want”:
Blid hadn’t been sure whether Kuiz would even want to talk to him about [birds] again. The muck from the [parrot’s] disappearance was slopping over onto the planetary government by now, and Blid fancied he could detect a note or two of genuine worry in the news coverage. Not that there was anything to worry about, right? [Parrots] only ate seeds, after all. The government was real careful to keep mentioning that, too. Almost as if they were worried people might start wondering otherwise.
But Kuiz proved eager to meet — and it turned out he didn’t believe the [parrot] had been stolen, either. “There’s just too many moving parts needed to make that story work,” he explained to Blid. The two of them were in Kuiz’s apartment, which looked like it was normally sparse but was now virtually covered in printouts and books. And they were all about [birds], or at least Terra — at least, that’s what Blid guessed from the pictures and compact, somewhat brutal Terran script on the printouts. “It’s much easier to assume that the creature flew out a window.”
“But how would it have gotten out?” asked Blid. That was the only sticking point for him, or at least the only one he was ready to concede.
10/06/20 Snippet, PATCHWORK GOD.
Damage!
Patreon!I started to mumble curses as Jack started Part One of Plan Getting Himself Ripped Up — which was great news, because it meant my heart had restarted, my lungs had at least sealed off the perforated bits and begun re-inflating, and my nervous system was answering its calls again. But that also meant my pain sensors were about to go back online, so I started pulling myself to my feet. When the agony hit, I wanted to be in motion.
The Tome would have noticed that, especially when the agony did hit and I started screaming my throat raw, except for the way it was trying to fend off Jack with three tentacle-stumps. Which was harder on my partner than it sounds; those stumps were fairly dexterous and had fairly razor-sharp edges. Poor Jack’s skin was a nightmare of lacerations and visible bone by the time I half-leapt, half-staggered onto the ball of sullen malice that was the Tome’s final protection.
At first it didn’t hurt that much, which worried me. Was there permanent nerve damage? That would be inconvenient — but then, thankfully, the pain hit, and something inside me relaxed a little as I started shoving my hands through the ball. I was now back on familiar territory. Now it was just a question of who wanted to win more: me, or the Blasphemous Tome.
It’s me, I thought as my bleeding hands grabbed the Tome and twisted it free of its links to the outside world. It’s always going to be me.
October 5, 2020
Two weeks until the TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION, Vol 1 Kickstarter launches!
10/20/20. Sign up now for launch notifications!
Take a peek at this upcoming project on @Kickstarter! Then sign up for notifications to stay tuned. https://t.co/vfqM6myo7s
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) October 6, 2020
There also is, naturally, a mailing list. You can sign up for that, too.
10/05/20 Snippet, PATCHWORK GOD.
Bad physics! Bad! No biscuit!
Patreon!I did a little time dilation of my own as I scrambled around, under, and a couple of times over various pieces of suddenly-mobile office furniture. Partially because I needed to think as fast as I was moving, but mostly because I wanted the Blasphemous Tome focused absolutely on me. Sort of like screaming in somebody’s ear to distract them, only with more casual abuse of the local laws of physics. Which is why it was only a little time dilation; the last thing we needed right now was to make it easier for the Tome to escape. This amount of distraction was enough.
This particular Tome was a talker, and once it figured out that I wasn’t human (ugh) or from the Loyalists (double ugh) it started trying to convince me to just let it run away. As, to quote the humans, if; but I let it drone on and on about fellow travelers and following our nature and non serviam while I sidestepped corkscrewing computer monitors — which gave me an idea; I grabbed two by their power cords and started spinning them around like nunchuks. The cords would pop off in a second or two, sure… but at the speed I was moving at, that effectively meant ‘some time from now.’
10/25/2020 Update, REVISIONARY 27200/32000
We’re getting pretty close to a culmination, here. Although the fourth story in the chapbook needs quite a bit of expansion.
Patreon!More from “Polly Want”:
It was wrong to judge alien ecosystems by one’s own, Blid knew. But [birds] were simply horrible creatures. There was one video showing a large aquatic [bird] called a [heron] that was hunting smaller ones called [ducks]. The [heron] would stalk and capture a [duck], one by one, then half-strangle it using the two nightmare needles it called a ‘beak.’ Once the [duck] was sufficiently stunned — and usually half-drowned in the process — the heron would then somehow manage to swallow the [duck] whole and alive. And then the [heron] would go onto the next one, its prey still struggling under the skin and scales — no, [feathers].
Blid thought maybe that was it. The [birds] were all so patient, so methodical, it seemed like they weren’t really alive in the conventional sense. Shake-shake-shake, chomp, shake-shake-shake, chomp — over and over again, like a machine.
“Only they’re not machines,” he told Trindy over another lunch. “Machines don’t have those eyes.” Blid hunched down a little over his meal after that, as if talking about a [bird’s] eye might attract its gaze. Which was silly, of course. They were all on Terra! Except for the one in the Consulate, a treacherous voice in his head told him.
HARD CLEFT (Unofficial Legends of The Secret World #5) available for pre-order.
Just in time for Halloween (October 29). No word whether Blodwedd will have to retroactively rewrite all the bits with the weapons, going forward. (This is a Secret World Legends joke. A bad one, so don’t worry if it’s not funny).
HARD CLEFT – Book 5 of the Unofficial Legends of The Secret World is available for preorder on Amazon now! https://t.co/VUen80IplO pic.twitter.com/45eKMgqSPp
— Blodwedd Mallory (@BlodweddMallory) October 5, 2020
The oddly endearing FREE GUY trailer.
Then again, I roll Paragon lightside Queen of the Girl Scouts*. There are games where I’ve wanted to do this sort of thing on general principles.
Via @geeksaresexy.
Moe Lane
*I still remember the first time I heard that in Mass Effect 3. It made me grin and say aloud, “Aww, Jack. I missed you, too.” And I had. Jack was my FemShep’s id, saying a lot of the stuff I’d have had my character say if it wasn’t for the, you know, entire Queen of the Girl Scouts thing.
