Moe Lane's Blog, page 98
March 4, 2025
Tweet of the Day, I Think We Can Risk Meddling In God’s Domain This ONE Time edition.
I’m seeing this tweet going around…
They've spliced woolly mammoth genes into mice.
— Isley (@IsleyResistance) March 4, 2025
There are now… WOOLLY MICE.
If you don’t wanna talk about this, we have nothing to discuss. pic.twitter.com/xRmumlJfqw
…and now that I’ve decided that it’s not AI – if it is, it fooled the BBC, so we’re good here when it comes to being embarrassed about it – I’m of several minds of this. On the one hand, there’s the entire ‘meddling in God’s domain’ thing. On the other hand, aren’t those just the cutest little things you’ve ever seen? Do they breed true? Because if they make good pets, there’s cash in breeding woolly mice. I’m telling you that, right now. People with more money than sense are going to want these.
And, on the gripping hand… the next step is woolly mammoth. I imagine that woolly mammoth tastes delicious. Delicious enough that our ancestors hunted them to extinction, in fact.
So what the heck. It’s not like they’ll be immune to high-caliber weaponry.
These are the last days of the Fermi Resolution Worldbook Backerkit!
Less than forty eight hours to go on my tabletop roleplaying game project! The Fermi Resolution Worldbook is useful for both gamers and my fiction readers, as it doubles as a reference for the Fermi Resolution series. Plus, there’s art, maps, and even hints about future stories! I’m not saying you have to get it, but it’ll be useful.
Check it out today!
March 3, 2025
‘Liquor Store.’
It’s March, so it’s time for Irish music! …Sorta. I mean, this is Celtic-American-punk from Nebraska. Which still counts!
#commissionearned
The Asterix & Obelix: The Big Fight Netflix trailer.
Asterix & Obelix: The Big Fight is somehow so bad I want to watch it. Or maybe ‘bizarre’ is a better term. I mean, it made me laugh, so it’s not really bad. Besides, it’s not like people read Asterix comics for actual history.
Huddles, Part 2 (Fermi Resolution)
I don’t know if I’m going to need this, but better to have something written ahead of time.
Huddles in the War
It took the Dominion longer than it should have to realize that huddles were a strategic resource for them, particularly in what quickly had become a defensive war. More than one Dominion military campaign ended in failure because their strategists operated under the assumption that any losses among their mind-dulled soldiery would be routinely made up by captured military and civilians. It took them a while to switch to a model where huddles were allocated sufficient resources to survive, and possibly even increase, and even then the decentralized nature of the Dominion meant that directives from Supreme Archmages to be more ‘efficient’ did not always have the effect they desired. Many Sephiroths did not take the Grand Alliance seriously as an enemy, right up to the moment where their towers caught fire.
Captured huddles proved to be an interesting problem for Alliance forces. The general living conditions typically conditioned huddlers over the age of twelve into being utterly servile to anyone bearing armor and arms. Attempts to break them of this conditioning proved only variably successful, although their children at least would prove to be more independent-minded. Many huddles were simply evacuated en masse, and brought to new homesteads far from the front lines, ‘ruled’ by retired soldiers that could be trusted not to take advantage of their situations. Many of these settlements still exist. Even after years or decades of assimilation, their inhabitants can be a bit… anomalous.
Reasons for Visiting Abandoned Huddles
Unfortunately, the primary reason is that abandoned structures in Dominion territory make excellent monster lairs. The Dominion has always designed its monsters that way; every ruined town full of ravenous, flightless geese is one less town that can be used contrary to the wishes of the Universal Dominion. Cleaning out abandoned huddles is remunerative, if mildly risky work, well suited for Adventurer companies and other freelancers. There won’t be any loot from the original inhabitants, but fresher victims might have had valuable things in their pockets.
A second reason is that while the Mississippi valley during the Old American period might not have been as built up as the East and West Coasts, it was still home to a thriving industrialized civilization. Many huddles ended up being within walking distance of promising archeological sites. A few can even be found over those sites; the original inhabitants invariably at least attempted to mine them for useful metal or plastic. Sometimes the makeshift mining operation is the reason why there are no longer any original inhabitants.
The third reason is considered a delicate topic. Dominion huddles are places of deliberate, careful misery, applied over centuries without relief or reprieve. This makes them prime candidates to be haunted. Huddle ghosts are angry, distrustful, and thankfully very rare — and where there’s one, there’s usually another twenty. In that state, they’re also dangerous to travelers.The Alliance is divided in how to handle this problem — or, rather, the Second Republic disagrees with everybody else.
Most of the Alliance takes the position that these ghosts need to be counseled, relieved of their anger, and carefully, peacefully, and gently encouraged to Move On to the afterlife. The Second Republic instead favors a policy of lighting up a ghost-beacon, and leading the ghosts to the nearest Dominion encampment. Second Republic necromancers justify this on the grounds that spectral retribution can be very cathartic, really. And as for the targets of said retribution? Well, to quote the Old American folk hero: they were all bad.
72 hours left on the Lead & Chrome Backerkit!
Lead & Chrome is of course the Fermi Resolution Worldbook‘s cross-collaboration partner in Backerkit, and they’re having a great crowdfunding, too. But every little bit helps, right? Like mine, Lead & Chrome is a post-apocalyptic TTRPG, only with more guns and mutants. I was gonna say that if you were the kind of person who remembers Hell Comes To Frogtown fondly, you’d probably enjoy it – but apparently saying this dates me, because HCTF DVDs are going for insane prices on Amazon. Like, almost two hundred dollars a pop.
…I backed Lead & Chrome, okay? I would’ve even if we weren’t partnering up on this. Check ’em out.
#commissionearned
PS: I’d tell you that Hell Comes To Frogtown was one of the greatest movies ever made, except it would be a damn lie. Still: say what you like about Rowdy Roddy Piper, but the man was a trouper. Actually… you cannot say what you like about Rowdy Roddy Piper. He was a good dude.
Sorry, going off on a tangent, here. Back Lead & Chrome!
Paramount is doing a Star Trek… radio play?
I mean, they’re calling it something else.
Star Trek: Khan, the scripted audio series first announced in 2022, is coming this year as Paramount announces Lost actor Naveen Andrews as the title role.
Joining Andrews as Marla McGivers, the Enterprise crew member who joined Khan and his crew at the end of the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Space Seed,” is Wrenn Schmidt — known for For All Mankind.
“How did Khan go from a beneficent tyrant and superhuman visionary with a new world at his fingertips to the monster we think we know so well? Recently unearthed, the rest of Khan’s story will finally be told in Star Trek: Khan,” says Paramount’s formal announcement.
And that doesn’t… sound so horrible, actually? I like radio plays. A suitably scene-chewing Khan Noonian Singh would translate well to that format. God knows it won’t be a budget-buster. It Might Not Suck.
March 2, 2025
‘Mr. Crowley.’
#commissionearned
Please, God, let this week be normal.
That had to have been the single most unpleasant weekend I’ve seen on social media since before the pandemic, and I wasn’t even involved in it. How bad? This bad:
The Discourse in my timeline this weekend has sucked so much I've taken refuge in the 'For You' tab.
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) March 3, 2025
This was the sort of environment where I used to go around asking people, “What is your victory condition, here?” – because damned if I could figure it out. I noped out as much as I could, but there’s a limit to how much Baldur’s Gate 3 you can play.
Huddles, Part 1 (Fermi Resolution)
Working on this in case we make an upcoming stretch goal for The Fermi Resolution Worldbook.
Huddles
The Universal Dominion does not have towns, and it only has one city (Grand Moingoana, squatting on what was once the blameless city of Des Moines, Iowa). The basic political unit of the Dominion is the Tower, which are to Sephiroths as baronies are to duchies. Sephiroths are self-sufficient, with no external trade, very little internal trade, and only a limited need for industry. Their only real exports are tribute shipments to Grand Moingoana. Even their agricultural capacity was deliberately kept low, as a form of population control. All of this means that the usual conditions that produce towns are simply absent in the Universal Dominion.
What they had and have instead are huddles: collections of shacks and hovels with just enough associated farmland to keep the population mostly alive in any given year. A huddle was usually large enough to support spinners and blacksmiths, but metal in particular was extremely difficult to acquire. There were no roads, and no trade; huddles were dependent on whatever raw materials their magical overlords deigned to toss at them, or what they could themselves dig out of the ground. The Dominion avoided putting huddles on the site of an Old American town or city, but even the foundations of a long-vanished house can have useful metals in them.
Life in a huddle was typically miserable, stunted, and unrewarding. The population was expected to keep themselves alive, stay where they were, speak English in a way that Dominion mages could understand, and hand over any babies with magical potential. Aside from that, they were ignored.
Well, until the Dominion needed raw materials. The unpleasant truth is that huddles were largely human farms, deliberately placed out in the woods and surrounded by monsters. When the Dominion needed slaves for a particular purpose, they’d take what they needed from a huddle. If they took too many people? Well: there were other huddles. Every so often Dominion breeders would collect a few young people from other huddles, and transport them to one that had lost its population. The system was wildly inefficient and hideously cruel, but then: so was the Universal Dominion.
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