Moe Lane

Knockerhood – Google Docs

The Knockerhood

For as long as men have gone down into mines, they have told stories about mining spirits.  Sometimes the spirits were considered malevolent, but more often — particularly in the British Isles — they were essentially seen as being benevolent entities who would warn human miners of dangerous conditions. The Cornish and Welsh called them Knockers, or Bucca; and, like all good tale-telling traditionalists, the miners brought the idea of the Knockers along when immigrating to America.  

Where the Knockers promptly joined the union.

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101 Classic Insults in Helltongue – Google Docs

101 Classic Insults in Helltongue

This handsome leather-bound work runs to about 220 pages, has no printer information, and incorporates illustrations that force the average human reader to blank out the pictures in sheer neurological self-defense.  That last bit tends to encourage people to believe that 101 Classic Insults in Helltongue is in fact ‘real,’ given the rather obvious reality-warping going on.  Given that the rest of the book features lengthy phonetic transcriptions and short translations of what sound like fairly bizarre statements (“Your brood-mate cleans its horns with second-rate bone sand,” that sort of thing), it’s likely that dilettantes wouldn’t bother with the book otherwise.  There’s also a section which earnestly assures the reader that showing dominance over spirits via the use of ritual insults is a time-tested way to safely summon demons.

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Oak Island Base – Google Docs

Oak Island Base

How do you keep a secret?  By not keeping anybody around who can see it.  Oak Island is a small island in the Lake of the Woods that was ceded to the United States by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, ostensibly to resolve surveying errors but mostly because the British government preferred that the underground derelict alien base found on it become the headache of somebody else. British savants had prodded and poked at the stupid thing for forty years, they got nothing out of it, and perhaps Brother Jonathan would have better luck.  Or else get themselves blown up by randomly touching things.

The American government — with, admittedly, a lot of help from first the British, then the Canadian governments — has been themselves nervously poking at the place ever since.  Oak Island Base is an extensive underground facility with ten levels, and enough space to host about five hundred humans; based on the size of the ‘beds’ and ‘tables’ in the facility, it was capable of hosting about seven hundred or so of the aliens.  Most of the facility is empty: the aliens apparently took everything with them that could be easily removed.  It wasn’t until the 1930s that researchers realized that there was an electrical system in the place, and the 1960s before somebody figured out how to refuel the nuclear reactor that powered it.  Discovering that there were embedded video screens to switch on didn’t occur until 1998; people have been trying to decypher the digital menus and library ever since.

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The Lake Niangua Extrusion – Google Docs

The Lake Niangua Extrusion

Lake Niangua is an extremely shallow lake in Camden county, Missouri. Ostensibly. Well, yes, it really is a shallow lake.  You can fish there, and everything.  Just don’t do a chromosomal analysis of the fish, because their DNA is left-handed.

And it’s not just the fish; the entire ecosystem of that lake is left-handed — or, to (mis)use the technical terms: the ecosystem there displays mostly Z-DNA helical structures instead of Earth’s more usual B-DNA structures.  Which seems to make the fish look weird and taste a little funny, but that’s about it.  But what makes the situation very strange is that the effect is absolutely limited to that one lake; flora and fauna taken from it (or introduced to it) prove remarkably difficult to transplant.

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Healing Mortar Rounds – Google Docs

Healing Mortar Rounds

There’s a case (sixty-four count) of these things, and Healing Mortar Rounds (HMRs) work just as advertised: shoot one out of a standard World War 2 8 centimeter Granatwerfer 34 mortar, and the shell will heal everybody within a ten foot radius, wherever it hits. ‘Heal’ is kind of subjective: the energy will close wounds, clean out infections and foreign matter, and repair minor breaks, but if your arm has gotten blown off the best one of these things can do is heal over the stump.  Still, the mortar rounds reliably work.

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Blame this.

The Catallus Conspiracy – Google Docs

The Catallus Conspiracy

Who?  Gaius Valerius Catullus. He was a Roman poet of the late Republic era.  His poetry only survives to the present via the timely copying of a mysterious found, then lost manuscript — ah, yes, you’re wisely nodding your head.  Yes, trust those conspiratorial instincts of yours.  They will serve you well, in the Order.

So. Yes, those weren’t actually Catallus’s poems. They only exist because Catallus was a real person, who wrote real poetry, and who happened to be referenced by enough public figures later that it was deemed necessary to do more that time than simply bierce his poems and blame it all on those pesky monastery mice.  So our medieval ancestors in the Order had some of their best people at the time put together a suitable body of work, and passed it off as being from the poet.  Back in 1300 AD, this was simplicity itself.

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Blame this. Also: The Secret World had an awesomely cool Halloween mission every year that involves radios playing old-style spooky stories in-game, numbers stations, and ghosts. Presumably, so will Secret World Legends.

Anchor Station Medved – Google Docs

Anchor Station Medved

Are you familiar with numbers stations?  They’re legendary among the conspiracy community: radio stations broadcasting nonsense on the shortwave bands, transmitting out gibberish that’s as tantalizing as it’s creepy.  One of the most infamous ones is whatever-the-is MDZhB (or UVB-76) station that the old Soviets (and new Russians) that has been broadcasting since before the end of the Cold War.  The first layer of the onion claims that the station is a caretaker for an espionage resource, which is to be activated in wartime and then used to transmit information that could be decrypted via the use of one-time pads.  At least, that’s what the Russian spy agencies solemnly tell the current Russian regime.  There are more layers to the onion, however.

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Ballistic Ivy – Google Docs

Ballistic Ivy

Hedera helix munitionis

This hardy variant of English ivy is prized by the more discerning gardener and tactical security coordinator for its ability to actually reinforce the vertical surfaces on which it climbs — to the point where even a new transplanting of Ballistic Ivy can repel small-arms fire after a mere year’s growth.  A century’s worth of cultivation of this plant can produce an organic net that could shrug off an artillery shell.  Or at least keep the blast from penetrating the ivy.

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Empathic Potatoes – Google Docs

Empathic Potatoes

It is honestly by the purest accident that these vegetables look like Earth potatoes. Or that they can grow in Earthlike environments.  Or that, yes, they taste more or less like potatoes and that humans can gain nutrition from them — oh, why lie?  It is starkly incomprehensive how so many coincidences necessary for the existence of the Empathic Potato could have piled up. Which is why the Empathic Potato has been the official symbol of the Intergalactic Teleological Research Association since 2247.  

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D-Day Bullet – Google Docs

The D-Day Bullet

This item was the first bullet from a German Mauser rifle fired at Utah Beach that killed a member of the American military. There is a lot of occult discussion as to just who was the first real casualty of D-Day; as a result, there are several items that can be plausibly claimed to represent the first fatal shot made against the Allies that day.  This particular Bullet, however, is so powerful that it almost glows in the dark for non-magic users, so there’s that.

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Caojiawan Ghost Station – Google Docs

Caojiawan Ghost Station

…Well.  It’s complicated.  

Imagine the problems, if you would, of being one of the  administrators for the municipality of Chongqing.  The area has a population larger than Texas’s, with half of them living in one city.  It’s corrupt. It’s fairly poor, despite being heavily industrialized and a major transportation hub.  And it’s full of ghosts, of course.  

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Bee King – Google Docs

The Bee King

Bees, of course, do not have kings. So when bees encounter one, they tend to react about as horrified as a bee can manage.  You see, to them the Bee King is this horrible, enslaving entity that smells wrong and moves wrong and that can make regular bees grow weak and passively obedient and there’s nothing that can stop him.  The queens are helpless, the drones are helpless, the hive itself is helpless.  When the Bee King comes, the hive invariably becomes corrupted, and eventually dies.  And it doesn’t die easily; there is maximum suffering and misery involved, and the worst part is that there’s no discernible rhyme or reason to the destruction. All of which means that, to a bee, the Bee King is precisely the same sort of entity as Nyarlathotep would be to humanity.  

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