Moe Lane's Blog, page 874

07/17/2020 Snippet, TIPPED ON A STIFF.

Didn’t work on it yesterday, working on it again now.

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It hurts, that’s what it feels like. Getting a knife stuck in you hurts. I’ve had it happen before, and it never gets any more fun. All of that stuff about ‘a cold spike of fire went through me’ or ‘a wave of pain ripped through my side?’ That’s how people who don’t get stabbed talk about it. When it happens to you, there’s only two things you think about. One is, Dammit, that hurt.

The second thing is I’m gonna get that cabron who just stabbed me. That’s the problem with using knives, you see. It takes longer to kill a guy with one than the Lore would have you think. And for damned sure I wasn’t gonna just let him wind up and have another go at it.
I think he wasn’t expecting that, or that I can move my battered hide pretty quick when I got the right motivation. He really didn’t expect me to make a game try at breaking his knife arm with both arms and a knee; and wasn’t that just more pain as the hole in my gut got bigger? But even if I didn’t break the arm, I made him let go of the knife.

Which was still in my side. I might have pulled it out and freaked him out even more — I got a glance at him through slightly dizzied eyes; he had the look of somebody whose day had just gotten weird — but I’m not a dumbass. The knife was fine where it was, plugging the hole. Mostly plugging the hole. That was going to be a problem.

Quote of the Day, Because I’m Trying To Sell Books On That Hellsite edition.

You’re hardly surprised, surely. Anyway: Tycho, from Penny Arcade:

Maybe there’s some range of infragood i’m not currently aware of; maybe Good as a descriptor is richer and fuller than I previously knew. Maybe there are some kinds of good that are bad! No doubt I’ll be able to find the answers to these and other pressing questions on Twitter, a place which asks the question, “What if there were a place for people who thought a junior high cafeteria wasn’t brutal and Darwinian enough?”

What he’s referring to is the word that the Twitter Bitcoin fraud thing was due to a compromised insider, rather than an actual hack. Some people call that… ‘good.’ But it’s not, really. It really and truly is not.

Moe Lane

FERMI RESOLUTION RPG flavor-text up on Patreon.

Link here. It’s behind the Patreon paywall because THE FERMI RESOLUTION is what I’m working on this month. And deary, deary me but this thing is going to need playtesting next month. I’ll be making the call for volunteers for that, don’t you worry.

The new THE NEW MUTANTS trailer.

More of a teaser, really, but it’s got some new footage.

THE NEW MUTANTS is still scheduled to come out August 8th, but I’ll believe it when I see it. If ever there was a movie that was cursed, this is it…

The GREEN KNIGHT… RPG?

Dunno if this is a gimmick or a go-ahead.

The difference being, a gimmick is where A24 goes I dunno, what do nerds like? Table-top games? Fine, throw one together; and a go-ahead is Psst! Make sure you earmark ten grand in the budget for a TTRPG. If anybody asks, we’ll say it’s for marketing. I could see it going either way. Also, I like the 1980s aesthetic. Guess that’s something that’s here now.

You can buy the GREEN KNIGHT TTRPG here. At thirty five bucks it’s exorbitant, but not at [INSERT GRATUITOUS SLAM OF SPECIFIC GAMING COMPANY HERE] levels. You can’t really expect Hollywood to know the markets, hey?

Moe Lane

PS: Post about the movie spawning this game here.

Adventure Seed: Can’t Take Me Home.

Blame this.

Cant-Take-Me-Home-Google-DocsDownload

Can’t Take Me Home

It all started… where did it all start, really? The ancient cult of Cybele is as good a place as any, probably. She was an odd goddess: wild, yet linked to cities; a Magna Mater with an unfortunate tradition of priestly castration tacked on; simultaneously an insider and outsider in whatever pantheon she found herself in. Which, as everyone knows, gave the goddess tremendous arcane power. Magic is fueled by contradictions, and the Greco-Roman pantheon is a positive whirl of cheerful contradictions. 

Which is why Classical imagery was so popular among the Masonic occultists who set up the United States; oh, certainly, the austere republicanism and service-minded mindset was appealing, on a purely exoteric level. But when it came to the hidden esoteric infrastructure there’s simply nothing with the same theurgic resilience as the Roman gods. They’re extremely easy to customize, after all; plus, its theurgical rituals don’t interfere much with those of the Judeo-Christian religion, which is a definite plus. The Abrahamic faith-network is notoriously touchy about integrating with other theurgic traditions.  

But that’s not the point of this discussion. This is actually all about how the Secret Masters had to use the Cybele cult to patch the problem of West Virginia. 

It was a unique problem, really: most states progressed along the path of colony/territory, then achieved statehood after a reasonably straightforward process. West Virginia, on the other hand, did not; it ripped itself out of an existing state (albeit one currently in an illegal rebellion), and its actions were later retroactively ratified by the ruling civil authority. At the time, nobody thought anything much of it — including the civic mages handling America’s occult infrastructure. It was in reaction to an illegal rebellion, after all; plus, West Virginia kept its original True Name in its title, which seemed to keep things from going too odd. The relevant authorities kept an eye on things, and when nothing happened they gradually relaxed.

Fast forward a hundred years. It was now the 1970s, which was of course the most dangerous decade of the occult Cold War between the USA and the USSR. Esoteric patches that seemed reasonably sturdy in a time where the United States was seen as a mere picturesque entertainment on the world stage were much less so in a world where it was facing down a collection of bloodthirsty death cults. Further reinforcement was necessary.

So the Secret Masters at the time went looking through the archives, and decided that the Cybele cult was suitably under-used enough for their purposes. After all, it venerated a mountain goddess who had populist appeal and enough internal contradictions to mystically patch a state that had been born from a literal war with itself. All they needed to do was come up with a suitable exoteric focus for the patch.

It being the 1970s, they went with a folk song. An obscure traveling hymn from the original cult was acquired and suitably adapted by a team of DC-based occult operatives with talent in both music and theurgic retrofitting; the result, of course, was “Country Roads.” Forget the official history of the song, of course: crafting it took six months of steady, sometimes dangerous work by the two arcane songwriters who took lead on the project. It was and is a masterpiece of its kind, and it worked perfectly. The population of West Virginia readily accepted it — and with it, the increased occult linkages with the rest of the United States’ magical defense grid.

And, for the record: it was not intended for John Denver to take mystical possession of that song. It was not. Ethically speaking, that song was just too heavy a burden for an untrained or unprotected person to bear. The plan was to have Johnny Cash shoulder it, because he was a long-term veteran of the occult Cold War and had enough of a connection to the Abrahamic faith-network to shrug off Cybele’s influence; but Denver was in the wrong place at the wrong time and managed to get himself entangled with the song anyway. 

The Secret Masters then spent the next twenty years trying to keep the poor bastard alive. And frankly, Denver should have been dead in ten. It’s really impressive, particularly since Denver had all the inherent esoteric potential of your average piece of beige fabric. But the esoteric forces of the universe caught up with him eventually: and now, here we are.

And where are we? Well, when somebody dies like John Denver did, they can leave relics behind. Sometimes those relics can act as foci for unquiet spirits. And Denver’s spirit is somewhat unquiet, these days: he’s occultly linked to a state that he never really lived in, and the link is via an ancient cult that perhaps was just the slightest bit bloodier than harried 20th century civic adepts might have realized. He’s currently haunting Clopper Road, in Maryland (that’s where the song is technically located; yet another contradiction), and it’s not precisely a country road anymore, either. And no, that’s not helping.  Denver can’t get back to West Virginia, in his current state — and, even if he gets there, doing so won’t let him Move On. Pretty soon, he’s going to become dangerous. Let’s not let that happen, all right?

Try to exorcise him as peacefully as you possibly can; he served his country well, and too much damage to his spirit will set up resonances that we do not want. But he’s got to be exorcised. And whatever you do: don’t engage the ghost of John Denver unless he’s in direct sunlight. The last team reported that that’s the only really safe time to approach him.

Obviously.

‘Dancing With Myself.’

Dancing With Myself, Billy Idol

The first reports of FROZEN DREAMS Kickstarter books in the wild!

I sent the first (and absolutely largest*) wave of signed FROZEN DREAMS books out a couple of days ago, and I’m naturally terrified that they’ve all been promptly offered up on whatever dark god renegade USPS cultists worship. But so far they seem to be showing up OK:

Thank you, @Ogiel23! pic.twitter.com/YvrmQCv22g

— More Evil Bill Lumbergh (@Jeff_Weimer) July 16, 2020

Got my copy today! Looking forward to cracking it open and enjoying it with a good beer

More details on that massive Blue-check Twitter hack.

Note that I am not putting a link to this Vice article in Twitter itself, as the company is being pretty damned prickly about how allegedly the bitcoin hack happened because of somebody on the inside participating. Which just adds a certain something to this entire Carnival of Bad Decision-Making, doesn’t it?

I don’t blame Twitter for pulling the plug on the blue-checks, mind you*. The kill switch is there for a reason. But, for everybody else (and for the love of God):

Don’t work with hackers to give them access to user accounts.Don’t trust those hackers to keep their mouths shut.Don’t commit this level of fraud. Actually, don’t commit fraud, period; but really don’t commit it at this level. People are gonna go to jail over this. The real jail.Yeah, they will go to jail over this, because thanks to a certain prolific Tweeter the NSA will have an excuse to look into it. Don’t make the NSA notice you. Don’t don’t don’tity don’t don’t.And if you do do this, don’t talk about it to the press. What possible benefit would that be?

Here endeth the lesson.

Moe Lane

*I do blame them for letting this happen, of course. Or at least I expect them to fire whoever hired the alleged inside crook.

Hi, folks. I needed a mental health day.

The Civ III is just an excuse, not the cause. The cause is that I’ve been pushing the Kickstarter, and right now I don’t actually have anything to do regarding it. Everything’s done or waiting for other people to do, and I’m out of oomph. So I’m going to go back to rotting my brain on video games and going to bed early.

Oh, and laughing at blue-checks on Twitter. They all mass-hit by a bitcoin scam identity theft, so Twitter’s shut down all the verified accounts for the moment. That sh*t’s getting hysterical.