Moe Lane's Blog, page 873
July 19, 2020
The HARD KILL ‘Direct-to-Video special’ trailer.
So… is the entire movie set in that vacant factory?
No, wait, sorry: they went to a bar, too. And somebody’s house. So there’s that.
Yes, yes, I’m being unfair. Nobody gets to film anything anywhere anymore unless they can scrub it down, first: it’s a minor miracle that they got enough footage to film HARD KILL at all. But even for a video-release special there’s not much in the way of varied locations there.
Moe Lane
PS: Nah, I don’t know why Bruce Willis is in this movie, either. Boredom? The money’s good? He owed somebody a favor? Your guess is as good as mine.
07/19/2020 Snippet, TIPPED ON A STIFF.
We continue on with the new short story involving Tom Vargas. If you do like this, and you haven’t read FROZEN DREAMS (which stars Tom!) yet… feel free to pick up the book.
Patreon!I woke up, which is always nice to have happen after a fight. And I itched like a bastardo, too. Come to think of it, that was probably what woke me up.
When I opened my eyes, I was lying on a table at Rick’s. From the clock on the wall, maybe ten, fifteen minutes had passed. That kind of pissed me off; just once I’d like to wake up after being knocked out to find out it’s two weeks later and the guy who put me under had already been caught by hard-working Cin City street cops. But no, I was going to have to run this guy down myself. As usual.
I swung to a sitting position, and winced. Maybe I won’t run, I thought. Hobbling seemed more my speed right now. I looked down at my side, and winced again. It looked like I’d need to buy my next Shamus suit a few months early. On the other hand, I had gotten better than the usual rough bandaging. And I felt… better than I should have. “Must have been a flesh wound,” I muttered.
“Only if you count a kidney as ‘flesh,’” came a voice behind me. I gingerly turned my head to see… Sofia, was it?… gamely smiling at me. She was wiping her hands dry with a napkin as the hubbub of a police investigation went around us. We were in a bubble of nobody bothering us, though, which confused me until I remembered her last names. ‘Huston Redgrave’ was about as noble as it gets before the King starts keeping a spare eye on you.
I tried a chuckle. Didn’t hurt too bad. “Didn’t you hear? Shamuses don’t have organs. We’re like potatoes, inside.”
“You mean, all eyes and starch?” Sofia was quick with the comebacks, which was nice.
Patreon Microfiction: ‘Bites to be Them.’
Free will is so useful, wouldn’t you say? And humans can pretty much get used to anything, or anybody. Well, anybody who isn’t actually trying to eat their brains.
Patreon!July 18, 2020
‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken?’
Stuck in my head all night.
Please let me know if you don’t get your copy of FROZEN DREAMS.
According to Backerkit it looks like almost everybody who filled out their survey* has had their copy of FROZEN DREAMS ship, so if you don’t get yours let me know and I’ll start nagging on my side. I sent all of these via Media Mail, so hopefully I can track down what went wrong. Again, ‘hopefully’: this is learning-by-doing for me.
Gearing up now to do the RPG worldbook stuff exclusively. Oddly, I thought this would be the easy part. I wrote it already, right? Silly me…
Moe Lane
*FILL OUT YOUR SURVEY. CHECK YOUR EMAIL SPAM FOLDER.
From the FERMI RESOLUTION RPG Worldbook: Technology Hand-waving Made Simple.
Getting some good feedback from people.
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Technology Hand-waving Made Simple
At some point, a player might ask about the state of the roads, or point out that ruins tend not to stay intact for thousand years with only a little dust to show for it, or bring up something that the GM had not even considered (one example that came up in playtesting involved the vast arrays of fiber cables buried all over the country). Below are a few ways to handle such pesky incongruities.
The Collaborative Hand-wave. This is the favored solution, obviously: get the player to tell you why things are anomalous. In fact, bring the entire party into it, and reward their creativity with a mild but not adventure-sabotaging benefit. This reinforces player engagement and immersion, which is rarely bad. Use the other two options below for when nobody can come up with a good in-game reason on their own.
The Pre-Discovery Hand-wave. The Discovery’s ‘official’ date of 2103 AD is not accidental: it allows for eight decades’ worth (at the time of this writing) of future technological and societal change. Many things that were ubiquitous in 1940 are utterly absent in 2020; it is reasonable to assume that the same will be true when comparing 2020 to 2100. Any number of missing resources can be explained that way. Likewise, a pre-Discovery artifact could be made of durasteel or transparent aluminum or some other buzzword.
The First Age Hand-wave. It is canonical in this setting that most of the 22nd Century’s energy sources were magically wrecked in the first days of the Discovery, typically by mages literally gone mad with sudden power. It is entirely reasonable that there might have been magic users out there who hated, say, the Interstate Highway system badly enough to curse it so thoroughly that it, and their brains, exploded. That same First Age magic might have been used to preserve, too. Government and corporate groups would have been trying to research the new physics until civilization fell, and possibly afterward; exploring the aftermath of one of their experiments could reveal anything.
When all else fails: just run with it. If the players want to take over the Midwest themselves by turning every overpass into an Adventurer’s Guild stronghold, well, maybe the Universal Dominion should have done that first. Or maybe they tried, and the reason why they didn’t is now the adventure.
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Book of the Week: Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue.
Gabe of Penny Arcade summed up Ryan Holiday’s Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue as ‘what happens when bad meets evil.’ I was struck enough by that comparison to pick up the book — which, indeed, is about what’s in the title — and it is not dull reading. It’s also not completely comfortable reading, either. Back in the day, I never did anything remotely as awful as the stuff Gawker did, every day. But I watched them do it, didn’t I? And I never lost a night’s sleep over the things that they did.
So, points for Thiel, there.
July 17, 2020
THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER likely delayed, dagnabbit.
Disappointing, but not unexpected: “Marvel’s The Falcon and The Winter Soldier was supposed to be released this August, which is next month. Disney never announced a release date change, but it doesn’t look like the highly anticipated show is coming in August.” I like Marvel superhero movies and TV series, you see. I was looking forward to this and THE NEW MUTANTS and BLACK WIDOW; but things have all gotten goofy because of this stupid pandemic.
Somebody remind me again why we decided as a society that we didn’t need drive-in theaters anymore? — Because right now that doesn’t sound like it was a smart decision, over the long term. It’s really easy to social distance without masks when you’re in your car.
Moe Lane
PS: Yeah, drive-ins wouldn’t have helped directly, in this case. I still wish we had them around in useful numbers, though. And with infrastructure.
In the mail: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.
I grabbed Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era because I’ve never actually read it, hey? I usually read American Civil War books that concentrate on one thing or another, like a campaign or a general. Overviews are comparatively rare, for me.
And it’s such a big, fat book too! I can spend more than a day reading it, for a change.
