My Life As A Writer: No, Eckhart, It's Because The Writers Suck

I'm taking this Pop Cult video as a jumping off point for a very common Space Opera problem: Bad Scaling.

That's a lot of cope. It's this simple: most writers have no clue what they're talking about. Uncle George has real limits that his chosen medium imposes, reinforced further by deadlines and financial constraints, but novelists and comic authors do not.

The sort of "major fleet action" that constitutes climatic battles marking the apex of a narrative arc in Uncle George's Space Opera (and the Mouse Wars knock-offs) are skirmishes in E.E. Smith's Lensman series and Yoshiki Tanaka's Legend of the Galactic Heroes. By the time those series reach narrative peaks, we're looking at hundreds of thousands or millions of capital ships per side with tens or hundreds of millions of combatants.

That is the sort of scale that truly epic Space Opera requires, and very few authors even comprehend what that is- nevermind how it would work or what two competing forces of that size and scale would do to defeat the other. Uncle George, and others in his sphere like Battlestar Galactica (both versions), didn't even try- and George, at most, implied it was possible.

The problem is that these writers fail to see that combat--at any scale, from man-to-man all the way up to universal scale--is nothing more (in narrative terms) than a stage to develop character and advance plot. The difference is that you do so by action--what someone does and how they do it--instead of by dialog. In film or comic terms, this leads to the ideal of a scene where the entire narrative unfolds without a single word or grunt uttered; all character development, and plot advancement, occur silently.

This, by the way, is hardly impossible. Ryan vs. Dorkman did this on a lark 16 years ago, and you'll see others with experience in stunt work or fight choreography do short films like that on the regular- both to stay in practice and to add to their film reels for big boy work.

And no, Hellmouth and OldPub writers as a class don't do Git Gud so they won't put in the work required to make their Space Opera better. They rely on nepotism and corruption to get paid, just like their fellow travelers elsewhere in the Death Cult, so you're going to have to go old-school, go Indie, or go East to get your eyeballs on stuff that doesn't suck.

The Business: There Are Never Enough Giant Robot Games

Super Robot Wars 30 is now available on Steam. A friend of mine pre-ordered it and streamed it over the week. My reaction?

(Art by Isiyumi, posted to Twitter here.)

It's not going to suddenly convince you to play if you didn't like the last three releases--V, X, T--but man does it deliver on its promise to be a celebration of mecha anime and manga.

And the scary thing is that the core of this style of game is not that complicated to make; it's the animations and legal permissions that drive the game's production costs up.

There are a handful of all-original characters/units games--the Original Generation series--that demonstrate this in action. There is no reason that a small team of indie developers couldn't make their own game in this style.

Hell, if you can figure out how to drive the costs of animations down to nearly nil, you can even have those as part of your not-SRW game.

Go ahead, ask around how much it would cost to make a game like this without the animations.

If you're looking for a videogame to break into the indie world with, this style of game should be on your list to consider, especially as Metroid-style games--"Metroidvainia"--are saturated right now.

My Life In Fandom: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Playing Space Mace 39K

Luetin09 put this out the other day, talking about 40K lore.

Luetin should have been cashing checks from Stupid British Toy Company, because he's done far more to make the professional incompetence of the company's IP management into a thing that works than they ever have.

What he points out in this video is that there is a serious issue with maintaining continuity of a historical narrative across generations, especially when there's been one or more Civilization-ending events that tend to disrupt or sever intergenerational transmission of culture, and there is a particular irony involved with a militant anti-theist (The Emperor) having to resort to the very institution he destroyed (Religion) to sustain the very historical narrative that he wishes to promulgate.

The Emperor doesn't call it a religion, but it is one nonetheless because it has all of the substance of a religion:

• Cult (a consistent body of rituals for public worship)
• Code (a set of moral rules)
• Creed (a canon of shared myths that defines a shared identity)

Which translates thusly in practice into how it explains Past, Present, and Future:

• Origin Story (explains the Creed): Mankind once rose to greatness and reached forth from Earth to the stars, but in its arrogance thought itself master of all things as it was blind to the Immaterium, and through its arrogance became dependent upon its devices and creations in all ways despite believing itself Enlightened. First their creations turned upon them, and then the evils of the Warp exploited this despair to promise false deliverance by embracing its gifts, and Mankind fell back into barbarism. Only by the divine intervention of the God-Emperor did Mankind not only survive this fall, but once more rose again to fight those that would destroy it, uniting all Man into one Imperium.
• Daily Life (ritual laws to observe): Obey The God Emperor and His appointed servants in all ways. Shun and abjure Chaos and all its heresies, lest it corrupt your flesh, your seed, and take your soul into oblivion beyond his divine light. Understanding is not required, only obedience. As your life cannot exist without the Imperium, so must you render all as demanded to it to secure Man's future against the Ruinous Powers and all other things alien and unclean. Purge the alien, the mutant, and the heretic without mercy or question.
• Eschatology (the end of the narrative): The God-Emperor shall be restored, rise from the Golden Throne, and with his divine power destroy Chaos and exterminate all that is not Man from all that is in a final Great Crusade and Man shall ever after live free under his divine protection.

It is ironic, and I doubt it is as intentional as I frame it, that this is what was intended by the God-Emperor of Mankind. I can--and have--interpreted it in a manner that makes the company's past and present IP developments not look like the amateur hour attempts that they really are. Therefore it is entirely accidental that this nonetheless arose; it shows that even folks who are in real life anti-religious cannot avoid creating religion because religion creates culture and culture forms (and informs) politics.

In the hands of a competent narrative craftsman, this property could be--should be--far more influential that it already is, but it almost never was and it certainly isn't now.

I wonder what a competently-executed example would look like?

Administration: Moving Star Knight To The Study

I've begun the process of reposting all existing Star Knight lore posts to the Study, where the existing Page has been replicated. Once this process is complete, the existing Page here will be altered to redirect to the Study.

The next edition of "Reavers", and all future Star Knight books, will point to the Study and the Study will focus on literary topics: Star Knight, publishing, book reviews, etc. just as Empire is where the political stuff now goes.

My Life In Fandom: 2021-The Year The Giant Robots Came Back

Mecha ain't dead. Gigguk and the other Fake Weebs are going to be eating shit next year.

Megaton Musashi, a mecha game by Level-5, will be getting an anime adaptation in 2021. pic.twitter.com/TxvYSMTfS3

— SRW.D180223 (@180223) November 3, 2020

That's one year. Sure, three of them are Big Brand IPs, but the rest are not and show that genres in the medium are as cyclical as they are in live-action media. In short, we're coming out of a fallow period and that's great. While we in the West aren't able yet to join the party, outside of a resurgent BattleTech alongside writing original books and a few comics, seeing a resurgence out of Japan will bring attention to the category generally and thus more people within reach of our respective hawking of our wares.

Get ready, folks. Next year is the year to hit and hit hard.

My Life In Fandom: Space Opera Can't Have Too Many Super-Weapons

Things got you wound up? Need something stupid to laugh at? Eckhart's Ladder--the most fanboyish of fan channel for Space Wizard Fun Time--has you covered.

Of the complaints made here, only one doesn't play: "there are too many superweapons".

We're talking a galaxy-sized setting. Space Is Big. There are too few superweapons, not too many, and the galaxy is stupidly under-populated even for the agranian worlds. A galaxy-spanning civilization, even one riven by competing states, will nontheless be measured in the hundreds of trillions in population and should be expected to field Death Stars as if they were Star Destroyers (and Star Destroyers as if they were actual destroyers and not battleship/carrier hybrids).

This sort of thing is what E.E. Smith--the father of Space Opera--got right with the Lensmen series, and man did the super-weapons in that series get crazy: trans-galactic railguns using dead planets as ammo, weaponizing entire stars as super-lasers, planet-sized webs that disintegrated what they touched, and so on. Compared to what he wrote, the super-weapons of both Western and Eastern Space Opera in comics, film, and television is often pathetic.

(Note: You have to start thinking in terms of Getter Emperor, Mazinger Zero, Ideon, the Third Impact, fully-powered Zeorymer, Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann/Super Anti-Spiral, etc. to get on Smith's level. Iserlohn and Geiserberg from Legend of the Galactic Heroes are entry-level efforts by any galaxy-spanning civilization worth a damn.)

And that's before we start talking biological weapons. That's when things really get nasty.

My Life As A Writer: While The Hounds of Nimrod Run Loose

Today's Star Knight lore post is something that covers what's going on before and during "Hounds of Nimrod", but it doesn't get much attention due to it being irrelevant to the story told. Instead, what's present in the book is there purely to ensure that readers have some idea of what went into the events of the following book, "Siege of Second Salisbury".

Those events involve the rebuilding of Red Eyes' fleet.

New Edinburgh, in terms of numbers, was a pasting for the pirates. However, it succeeded in its primary objective: to prove that a non-state actor could effectively contest a targeted state on its terms. All Red Eyes would need to seal the deal to bring more rivals under his banner was something unique and valuable, something only he could provide and thus something he could sell dearly- and that price was fealty.

Mentioned elsewhere, and debuting in "Hounds", is one of those things: the Endiku class of Limited Production Ace Custom mecha. Specifically, we're seeing Dashing Jack's unit as it's the first off the line. However, the other thing that's going to be mentioned is that Red Eyes is--for now--keeping the Hobgoblin variant mecha to himself and his chief subordinates (i.e. Dashing Jack) while freely sharing the Goblin with his new allies.

And by "freely sharing", that includes full production specifications. The result is that this mecha is soon to become ubiquitous across Galactic Christendom as every last workshop, guerrilla fabricator, and shady factory will churn them out. This also means that variations are going to proliferate, as much due to build constraints on materials as due to operator and operational preferences: missile boats, maritime variants, perma-hardwired pilots (ala 40K Dreadnoughts), and so much more.

The only catch? They are to share their modifications with Red Eyes and the rest of the Armada. The reason is said to be to ensure that good modifications spread swiftly and standardize. The real reason is that the Architect wants the data so he can adjust his own designs for the mecha he's producing for the next step in the plan to realize the Tower of Babel and its Satanic promise.

The same catch applies to the Endiku line, but that's strictly concealed by Red Eyes and the Architect.

As for whom these new pirates are, they are exactly what you expect: the biggest rival bands of traitors, heretics, losers, misfits, lunatics, outsiders, and others that just can't bend the knee to God. Smaller bandit and pirate groups are struggling to finds ways to contact Red Eyes, wanting a piece of the action, and soon enough will get through and sign on to not only recover the losses but greatly expand the Armada's size and strength. Second Salisbury is the first time the entire fleet operates together.

As with Red Eyes, these pirates mostly operate from vessels either stolen or rebuilt from scrap and so are their mecha. The quality of both increase with the status of their captains/pilots. Signing on with Red Eyes allows those vessels to be upgraded into proper warfighting vessels instead of glorified commerce raiders, though crew quality remains an issue.

The other issue with these bands signing on is that Red Eyes is now in command of a patchwork quilt with non-standard command and control practices and structures (if any), and as such they cannot be relied upon to act outside of their ordinary operational parameters. (e.g. Call the Narn Bat Squad when you need a boarding action, but don't mix them with anyone else if you can help it.) They also rely on promises of loot and other plunder to sustain their enthusiasm for the enterprise and maintain willingness to accept orders from someone other than their own.

In short, Red Eyes' warlord ambitions are far from being fully realized. Genghis Khan he is not, not yet.

My Life As A Writer: No Idiot Balls Allowed

When it comes to my fiction, I have a a couple of rules. One of them is this: "The people in charge are not idiots."

This applies regardless of their moral character. Stupid heroes are just as offensive to me as stupid villains, and I abhor the idea of "Because Plot" as the justification for an otherwise unbelievable event. Believable organizations have to function. They can be imperfect in their function, but they have to function and that means those running that organization have to know what they are doing.

This can be difficult to get across in prose. I struggle with it. Badly-done it is just as much "Because Plot" as stupid character inexplicably succeeding for no good reason because otherwise the plot doesn't advance. Properly done, it adds value to the book because it encourages re-reading to find the tells that build up to the logical conclusion that a reader would miss the first time through and gives readers something positive to talk about- and that enthusiasm, in the long term, results in more readers and more sales.

And I want people to read, and re-read, my books,

Of course, it can also go into absurdity, which works when presented properly. Example:

God help me put the words where they need to be to get the job done right.

On a side note, I have opened a store on Redbubble. Only offering cards, posters, and prints for now, and you can find options for the cover to Reavers here.

The Business: Making Star Knight Bigger

Plans.

In addition to the rest of the books, I see no reason not to make better use of my art resources by opening a merchandise front. I'm still able at this time to fly under the radar at places like Redbubble, Teespring, Merch By Amazon, Displates, etc. so I need not be confined to Cryptofashion; I can have accounts in multiple places, for now. If I don't do when "Hounds" launches, then I will when I gear up for crowd-funding "Siege of Second Salisbury".

The other thing I'm looking to do down the road--no earlier than this time next year--is to set up a site and migrate all Star Knight stuff there. This blog will revert to being strictly my personal blog, and I'll move all Star Knight posting to a blog there. I may open the Star Knight blog to others once it's got a readership I'm happy with. Think of it as being akin to the distinction between Vox Day's blog and the Castalia House blog, only VD actually posts to the latter.

And as for tie-in books, an art book is doable once the series is complete.

If you folks have any suggestions, Comment.

Star Knight Lore: The Sunday School Summary of the Cataclysm

Something like this is commonly taught in the parishes of Galactic Christendom regarding the Cataclysm.

The Tower of Babel was not the only attempt to bring all Mankind under the rule of one whom would rule them all, and holding them in thrall attempt to challenge God. However, every attempt that threatened to succeed would be confounded and the hubris punished, some more than others. The most severe to date was the attempt that ended the Old World and brought down the Cataclysm.

Those who long ago betrayed their Father in Heaven and threw in with the Architect of the Tower persisted. Over generations they would lie and scheme their way through all the nations of Man and seize control of every kingdom. In each corner of the world, they seized control over sites of power. In those sites blasphemous rites would continue, and as the power of Man ascended with his mastery of the arts and sciences, so did the potency of this network of blackhearts.

They would create influence networks from the vain, the ambitious, the greedy, and those given over to lusts unnatural. They would arrange for these vices to be slaked in return for these petty pawns renouncing God and writing their names in the black books kept by the servants of the Enemy. The cultists would use, abuse, and discard these pawns time and again over the generations and the complexity of these influence networks soon attained a critical mass as a result.

The cultists selected twelve of the greatest cities in the world. They used their network of pawns to arrange for weapons of great power to be concealed therein. They used the mastery of time to coordinate the detonation of those weapons at a time of great sorcerous import, conducting a mass human sacrifice of billions with the aim of bringing their great master back into this world whole and restored.

But God will not be mocked. He saw this coming. He turned their evil against them, and against those others so corrupt that they would not turn away from their evil.

The ritual scoured them from the face of the earth, as it scoured all that was unclean in His sight, a deluge of fire to match that of water.

And of those who were not burned, they faced their own dead returned to claim them as now they were the minions of Legion. It was a time of scouring, but not without mercy. Those that learned humility would be saved, while those that persisted in their pride would be consumed, and all the evils that the Enemy's thralls concealed was revealed, and now revealed could be destroyed- and in time, one by one, they were.

This is the myth told of the Cataclysm, leading up to the emergence of Ken (and his Sons) as well as the return of the Church from the City of God under Pope Simon I, the Miner's Son, albeit abridged- consider it the Sunday School Summary.

Is this myth literally true? Yes. A global network of Satanists created a front network of Globalists. They arranged for nukes to go off in the top twelve most populated cities in the world, timed a human sacrifice ritual to coincide with their synchronized detonation, and it all went wrong due to divine intervention. A powerful demon broke through instead of Satan and started the zombie apocalypse, and those who endured long enough to put him down were those humble enough to accept help from a zombie-eating mutant freak (Ken) and the Catholic Church (Simon).

There were others calling themselves saviors, and all of them turned out to be evil Dark Lords: sorcerers, Nephilim, etc. They would be fought after Legion went down, and they would be fought again and again as the Church lead a faithful and resurgent remnant in one Crusade after the next- first to reclaim Earth, and then pushing outward from there. About a thousand years later, Mankind dominates the galaxy. Deus Vult.

And yet the evil persists; they're trying again.

Admin: "Hounds of Nimrod" Campaign Ended

Late last night the campaign closed. The final total is $1355. That falls short of the Stretch Goal, but remains a success nonetheless. I will mail digital copies of Reavers later today. I will post a post-mortem in the near future here at the blog.

I am grateful to all of you for your support. Those of who who opted for an Illustration or Build-a-Mech will be contacted in new few weeks.

My Life As A Writer: "Hounds of Nimrod" Campaign Final Hours

Just over 15 hours (as of this post) remains in the campaign. These are the Premium Perk remaining:

• Character Illustration: Five slots remain
• Build-a-Mech: Two slots remain
• Build-a-Starship: Five slots remain
• Design the Back Cover
• Be In A Book: Three slots remain
• Die in A Book: Two slots remain

And you can still throw in for digital or physical copies as well, all of which you can find here.

We're $280 shy of our Stretch Goal to upgrade all the physical copy backers with free catchup copies of Reavers, so if you've been holding out this is going to be your last chance. Once it's over, that's it.

My Life As A Writer: Again About The Five Star Stories

One of the anime influences on Star Knight is The Five Star Stories, which cannot be had in North America. So you're forced to resort to online sources to either watch the OVA (which only covers the very start of the story) or read the manga (which is a right-proper epic). Don't expect anything but a very expensive premium release to ever come out either; this isn't a popular property, in large part because it's not a shounen or shoujo property. This is a seinan property, and properties aimed primarily at adults (of either sex) don't have nearly the commercial appeal of those aimed at youths in late childhood or early adolescence even if they are often evergreen in their relevance.

It shouldn't be hard to see the influences. While the music is not a big deal here--this ain't Macross--the classical and mythological influence is very strong, albeit understated, and even the trappings of a non-monarchical government is just that: trappings. The real governance structure is monarchy, with all that goes along with it, and at most there are some republican (but not democratic) alternatives, and warfare centers around the use of giant robots and the warrior class that use them. Male-female relations are of primal importance, both in peace and in war, and as such those bonds must be respected and nurtured- and defiling or neglecting them leads to tragedy every single time.

The author has a psuedo-prequel (Gothicmade) with the same features, which I will check out at my convenience.

If I could get the OVA on disc w/ subtitles, or the entire manga in print in English, I'd be a happy man. Great Romantic storytelling going on here, and Galactic Christendom is very much a Romantic tradition example. I'm glad that you folks have picked up on that and also like it. Less than a week remains on the campaign for "Hounds of Nimrod", and just a few hundred more means we hit that Stretch Goal. Come to think of it, I should see if I can get an original music video made down the road. Who wouldn't want this sort of thing made for their media creations?

My Life As A Writer: "Hounds of Nimrod" Has Hit Goal

Late last night, we hit our goal. We are now into Stretch Goal territory, and a new Perk is unlocked.

• Stretch Goal: At $1500, I will upgrade all paperback backers to include a paperback copy of Reavers automatically. Yes, this includes Signed Copy backers.
• New Perk: Build-a-Starship, limited to five slots, is for those who folks prefer starships over mecha and take their inspiration from anime like Space Battleship Yamato, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, or Captain Harlock, as well as Western examples such as Battlestar Galactica, Blake's 7, and Star Wars. Otherwise just like Build-a-Mech, meaning collaborative design for a new item that enters Star Knight canon.
• Hidden Perk Announcement: If we hit the first Stretch Goal, I'll unveil a new Hidden Perk that is also for you design-hounds. Not a machine or tool this time, but something else that a place like Galactic Christendom should have plenty of, and I've been vague about so far.

In addition, I mentioned months ago that once I had enough art I'd be open to establishing a merchandise storefront. Every time one of you chooses a Build-a-Mech, Build-a-Starship, Character Illustration, or other art-specific Perk that gets me closer to a critical threshold I'd need to launch that, and it's very close now. Consider reaching that point a soft Stretch Goal. As this is now a sure thing to happen, tell everyone that's wary of this happening that they're good to get on board now that the goal's been hit.

My Life As A Writer: On Geek Gab Today

I'm appearing on Geek Gab today to talk about "Hounds of Nimrod", Star Knight generally, and whatever Daddy Warpig rants about. See you all in the chat, and you can back the campaign here.

UPDATE! We are funded! The last $300 came from a well-heeled backer flat-out donating to the project. That means it's Stretch Goal time. At $1500, every backer that chose a paperback copy AUTOMATICALLY gets a paperback copy of "Reavers" included.

New Perk: Build-a-Starship. Just like Build-a-Mech, and also limited to five slots, but aimed more at the lovers of Yamato, Galactica, Harlock, and the other great starships of Space Opera. ArtAnon must be thrilled that this is now on the table.

My Life In Fandom: The Containment Plan For Anime In Anglophonia Confirmed

I said that if they can't poz anime then they will try to contain it. The chokepoint will be distribution and localization. Hero Hei shows this to be the plan.

TLDR: Head of such a company is a Death Cultist and seeks to converge anime to serve the Cult, or to choke it off if he can't.

When we talk about the Death Cult taking control of the culture, this includes the private elements whose business is to select winners and losers via whom they chose to promote and distribute to the population that they claim to serve. It's much like how it went down in OldPub, and I would not be surprised if the psychological profiles as well as life histories of people like this soyboi executive mirror those of the wreckers of the Pulps and the OldPub publishers before them.

I am now actively promoting the adoption of having English-subtitled releases on home video, as well as English-translated manga, be solely done through Southeast Asia. This is how the last three console releases for Super Robot Wars went, and each game was a huge hit abroad as well as at home in Japan. The cost is paying import prices as well as shipping times, but the benefit is shutting down SJW influence.

Yes, this means getting lazy casuals to stop being dub-only cucks and start learning how to handle subtitles, but this is home video; hit the damned pause button until your reading and comprehension speeds catch up. Or learn Japanese. I don't care.

And no, this is not a final solution. This is just a macro-level display of "Don't give money to people who hate you." and the Western anime industry hates its customers as much if not more than OldPub hates its customers (or, increasingly, how badly tabletop and videogame publishers hate their customers).

The point of promoting such a move is to get the Western--specifically the Anglophone part, as I'm unaware if it's bad for Spanish, French, etc.--business to collapse. Consider it akin to doing a controlled burn to form a firebreak big enough that an out-of-control inferno can't leap the gap and keep going. (It wouldn't hurt if we did bother to learn the language, but that's for another post.)

There's more to winning back the culture than just burning out the Cultists and doing controlled burns on institutions too far gone. We have to build and support replacements, and we have to support alternatives that are not yet afflicted. Sentai Filmworks, so far, has been a reasonable alternative for buying physical copies; sure it ain't dirt cheap, but that's mostly the licensing fee you're paying for, especially if you're sensible and go for the subtitled versions.

And yes, that also includes original creations. You say you want clean escapist entertainment? Put your money where your mouth is and buy it. You not only have to clear out the zombies, you have to replace the dead with the living and nurture the new life so that it grows into strong and tall properties that you and your descendants can enjoy for long after those who made them are gone. Don't just be a zombie-like consumer; you too have to take responsibility for making the culture you want to see.

Campaign Update: Still just shy of halfway to goal. There's a half-time update on the campaign page today, and folks who backed or are following it will be emailed that update. The big take-away is that I'll be on Geek Gab this weekend to talk about "Hounds of Nimrod" and to promote the campaign.

My Life As A Writer: Superversive Appearance Tonight

I will be on the Superversive Podcast tonight with Ben Wheeler to talk about anime, "Hounds of Nimrod", and so on. Since that usually runs concurrently with the Metro City Boys, I'll not be active in MCB chat tonight. Should be about 6:30 Central Time. I'll put in a link when I have it.

And yes, for your convenience, here again is the Indiegogo link. Still struggling to get to our goal, so please spread the word and remember to tell folks that they can get Reavers digitally for free if they put in for a digital or physical copy of "Hounds" so they don't have to worry about catching up.

My Life In Fandom: "The Penultimate Men" On The Gab Today

The Gab had the authors of The Penultimate Men today on the show. (Also at Amazon, by the way.)

The authors--Neal Durando, Schuyler Hernstrom, Jeffro Johnson, Jon Mollison--come on the show today to talk about their book and what it's about. The Description doesn't do it justice: "The age from which they spring has nearly drawn to a close. Yet some noble work remains to be done before the end. They come on, knowing that anything left undone, any chance let slide cannot be paid forward. Their game bags are heavy with a wealth meant to nourish the reader through the leanest of times. Four tales of a once-and-future apocalypse. Two meditations to challenge you to play harder in an already hard world. Introduced by Misha Burnett. Some say they are other than human; they are the penultimate men."

Most fantasy today is degenerate, being that it is a derivation of people playing Dungeons & Dragons wrong, and they'd been getting it wrong for about as long as I've lived due to not being in touch with either the literary or the ludological foundations of the game and arrogantly omitting or replacing what they did not comprehend. It's no surprise therefore to find that real D&D is very much a skirmish-scale wargame that leans heavily on liminality to reduce the workload to something appropriate for a hobby, or that every popular expression of fantasy world-wide is itself a memetic child of playing the game wrong.

"Going back" is increasingly the rational response to our current insanity. This includes in things seemingly trivial like tabletop RPGs, which have exerted such an outsized global influence on popular culture for the whole of my lifetime, because by returning back the way you came you can find the value in the things so foolishly discarded and thus fix the errors made. Over time this too cascades out as more people see that and make the connections, but by then you're looking at 50-100 years and that has its own problems.

But that is what needs to happen. It needs to happen in literature, in gaming, etc. because we've screwed up and only by backing up can we unfuck ourselves. Once repaired and restored, we can--hopefully--resume our previous positive path. I'll talk about this some when I appear on Geek Gab to talk about "Hound of Nimrod" next week, and I hope you'll tune in then, by which I hope the campaign will have hit its goal.

By the way, there are two new Perks: Character Illustrations and Design The Back Cover. You'll find them on the Perk section at the campaign page. Remember that there are no Stretch Goals until we hit the goal.

My Life As A Writer: Goofed Out Of Excitement

I omitted a written summary of "Hounds". Oops.

We pick up where "Reavers" left off, with our story's focus shifting to Earth and her solar system. Countess Gabriela Robin is in hiding, but she's threatening to go to Earth to speak of her experience at New Edinburgh to the Court of Stars and thus directly threaten the master villain of that raid: Count Vikuun Qis.

Qis calls upon a new figure, Master Nimrod, to hunt her down before she can expose him. To ensure this succeeds, Qis throws Red Eyes and his pirates at the Solar Guard to keep them busy. The two strategies are meant to converge when Nimrod delivers Gabriela to the pirates to fulfill his promise to their mutual benefactor: the Architect.

The action and intrigue goes from Ganymede to Rome, and from ship-to-ship down to man-to-man, as both villain and hero attempt to outwit as well as outfight each other to determine the fate of the Songbird of Second Salisbury.

This means we're also going to seeing more of the people, places, and things of Galactic Christendom than before. Some of them I've posted about previously--see the Star Knight Lore tab--and others I'll talk about as the campaign progresses. As for the campaign, we're at 15% towards our goal as of this post, and hit 10% before 12 hours passed since launch. That's a good start, and as soon as the goal is hit new Perks unlock.

My Life As A Writer: Warfare In Galactic Christendom

Given what the settlement and development patterns are, warfare follows an equally predictable pattern of expression. This is because the objective is to capture existing holdings intact, rather than to just destroy them outright, so that constrains what means may be employed significantly. Manpower must be deployed and expended on both sides, which means that vast fleets need to be built and maintained, crews and marines recruited and trained, with all of the economics involved in establishing and hardening those logistical trains.

It also means that serious warfare of the sort known within Galactic Christendom, as in real life, as Total War is rare and serious. Such occasions are usually tied to the Church calling for a crusade, and there hasn't been any such event in living memory by the time of the dawn of the 4th Millenium. That's because Total War involves planet-killing weapons and techniques, from something as simple as fleets towing and launching asteroids at a target planet until its surface is ashes and dust to as awe-inspiring as moon-sized space stations being given Faster Than Light engines and equipped with planet-destroying weapon systems or weaponized solar systems wherein the star's output can be utilized as a cosmic super weapon.

The result is that warfare is mostly naval. Even if resistance on the ground or on the inside of a station is difficult, if time permits the defending population can be besieged and starved out, and if the invaders did their job then they have local supremacy such that the defenders have no realistic expectation of relief arriving in time. For planetary invasions, this process can take longer depending on how well-prepared defenders are; if the defenders can avoid orbital bombardment and maintain logistics, they can withstand an englobement and compel the invaders to attack their hard points while they resort to guerilla-style actions to wear invaders down in the manner of the historic Fabian Strategy.

The wars of recent years have been more constrained than this, being border skirmishes, pirate-hunting campaigns, and counter-insurgency campaigns with all of the shifts in methods and means one expects in such circumstances. Military procurements and practices have shifted accordingly, resulting in some degree of complacency and a rise in resorting to tournaments of wargames to satisfy the desires of militaries to maintain readiness.

The unfortunate consequence of a long period of relative peace has to been create an illusion of military expertise covering a complacency that would be shattered by the first actor to act contrary to, and in defiance of, this present paradigm with brutal and decisive military action. At the dawn of the 4th Millenium, that time had arrived, and from a quarter none expected. The raid on New Edinburgh was the Proof of Concept. The actions on and near Earth was the gut-check. The Siege of Second Salisbury was the watershed event, and of all the warfare that followed none hammered this home like the Siege of New Vienna.