Moe Lane's Blog, page 899
July 11, 2020
07/11/2020 Report, FERMI RESOLUTION RPG Worldbook.
Had a sudden realization today: the worldbook is supposed to come with six beginning characters, and those characters are going to require a page each, because there’s art involved. And I am trying to keep the worldbook page count to 64. Which kind of means that it’s almost all done at this point, at least for the first draft. I’ll be hacking at it more tomorrow.
‘Was It Really You?’
I understand Tweets like this better now:
New performance by @KenStringfellow of @theposies: "Was It Really You?" by Mangled Grapes. It's a song I wrote around 1992, and I'm thrilled to see it performed by one of my favorite musicians of all time. https://t.co/s0OjVXXzGH
— Patterico (@Patterico) July 11, 2020
There is something thrilling about having something cool you made appear up there, in public and where you can — this is an important thing for me — get paid for it. Fame is good, kudos are wonderful, and even the oft-maligned ‘exposure’ has its tawdry charms; but there’s just something magical about that ka-ching!
Song’s good, too, if you’re into 90s music. Otherwise known as the music of my youth, God save the Republic…
July 10, 2020
07/10/2020 Report, FERMI RESOLUTION RPG worldbook: 32,263/38,400.
I was miscounting pages, so… 6K words to go, after all. The good news is, all the original stuff has had the expanded pass-through and everything else is fill-in-the-blanks. I should be able to hack it all together by Monday and get it out to the other folks having a look-see.
Not much else going on, really.
Patreon!Technical bleg: cheapest reliable postage label printer?
Is this expensive, for a postage label printer? Because $160 seems expensive. As in, actually out-of-budget expensive*. It’s going to be a lot cheaper for me to print out the postage labels on my own on regular paper and tape ’em to the envelope.
Thoughts?
Moe Lane
*All the money’s getting reinvested into future projects. Although a label-maker may end up being a business expense, at that.
MONEY PLANE!
It needed the exclamation point.
Via @bendreyfuss*, who isn’t wrong: MONEY PLANE! has all the hallmarks of being a Bad Movie For The Ages. I already know how it ends, too. Iit ends with the MONEY PLANE! crashing right into Kelsey Grammer, slowly enough for him to come up with one last zinger of a line but not slowly enough for him to, you know, run away.
But you cannot run from MONEY PLANE!, for MONEY PLANE! is as inexorable as the tides and twice as cruel. MONEY PLANE!’s bloodlust will not be denied. MONEY PLANE! is your fate; dark, and as patient as dust. MONEY PLANE! will live on when humanity is a forgotten memory on the winds of a boiling planet.
So, yeah, you might as well quip it out.
Moe Lane
*I like Ben. He’s all right.
From the FERMI RESOLUTION RPG Worldbook: bits from The War.
Just what it says on the label.
Patreon!Course of the War
The Universal Dominion started the War in a disadvantageous position. In 2790 the Dominion had moved east of the Mississippi in force for the first time in centuries; they sent an army to kill the Great Wyrm of Philadelphia and harvest her corpse, the Virginians mobilized forces to stop them, and on the very eve of battle… the Supreme Archmage, safely back in the Dominion, slipped on the soap in the shower and broke his neck. The Dominion might have still lost that battle; but the death of the Supreme Archmage without a successor guaranteed it. The Sephiroth sponsoring the Dominion army in the field found itself the immediate loser in the succession crisis and civil war that followed; that army was annihilated by the Virginians, and no attempt was made to avenge it. Dominion forces were too busy fighting each other.
The active fighting didn’t last long (there was a recognized successor by 2795, although some holdouts weren’t pacified until 2812), but it wrecked the Dominion army for two generations. The Dominion’s enemies took advantage: Deseret declared war in 2800, and shocked the continent by liberating Salt Lake City in 2803. Four years later, Deseret was joined by Dwarvenwood, the Second Republic, the Kentucky Free State, and Greater Hershey (but, oddly, not the Kingdom of Virginia).
The War has not been like the nation-destroying titanic conflicts of the fabled 20th Century. Though few contemporary scholars really recognize this, it’s been more like the slow decline of Byzantium: armies would be formed to conquer one place or another, there would be a campaign lasting a few years, and then eventually there’d be a truce or ceasefire (usually at the expense of the Dominion). Then the armies would regroup, and start again in a few years.
The Dominion did lose significant territory over this period; the conversion of the orcs in 2835 began the loss of their southern territories, and the Mississippi river campaigns of 2920-40 completed it. But after that period the War ratcheted itself down to a level where the Dominion was contained, more or less, and the other nations of North America could progress. It was at this time that the Alliance military became the autonomous entity that it is today. After a few decades, the War’s operational tempo slowed. The Dominion was in a disadvantageous position, but it was stable as long as nobody did anything stupid.
The Dominion did something stupid in 3045: the Archmage-general running the northern front ordered an ill-advised amphibious attack on the Second Republic and Greater Hershey. The entire northeast portion of the Dominion was stripped of troops and mages to invade via the Great Lakes; but, thanks to a combination of luck and prior warning, both nations had enough ships on hand to wreck the Dominion’s fleet. The collapse of the eastern front started a cascade of military disasters on the frontier: the Alliance has taken more territory in the last nine years than they have since the creation of the Imperium Orci.
And that is how things are today.
In the E-Mail: Storm Between the Stars.
I suspect that Storm Between the Stars will be hitting paperback soon, but if you don’t want to wait there’s always the Kindle version. It’s space opera and Karl’s a good dude. Check it out!
Storm Between the Stars, the start of an exciting new space opera adventure, the Fall of the Censor!https://t.co/qPSJaIjypk#KindleUnlimited #ebook #book #kindle #scifi #sciencefiction #galacticempire #spaceopera
— Karl K. Gallagher (@KarlKGallagher) July 10, 2020
July 9, 2020
This will make you feel better. I promise.
The goal of performance is to create something with this much love in it.
