Assault on Malstorm Base C1 – Google Docs
I want to start putting up snippets from this book on this website, because I’m trying to write said book and everything — but if I want people to follow along, you’re going to at least need the first chapter. Chapter 2, by the way, is undoubtedly going to be this month’s Patreon ‘short story.’ I figure that they won’t mind.
A few thoughts that came to me as I was supposed to be asleep.
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1. Is the skin-stealing a condition caused by our narrator’s race (some sort of lizardman) or some other cause? Aside from being a vehicle for his capture and subsequent conscription, is it going to show up again?
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2. I appreciate how effectively you have conveyed “mormons in a world where magic, including priestly magic, is real”. They probably discuss how to exorcise demons and consecrate ground against the undead a couple times a year. Also, considering that until the federal government sent an army to squash a (mostly imaginary) rebellion they were a theocracy, of course mormons turn their emancipated heartland in to a theocracy.
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3. Why the Nauvoo Legion? I can understand them using Legion to designate the soldiers who answer to the theocracy instead of the state, but Nauvoo is back in Illinois. Unless Deseret either managed to get all the way to the Mississippi before the Dominion drove them back to the Rockies or they have designs to expand that way, I don’t see why they would invoke Nauvoo.
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I suppose Nauvoo might have evolved in their post-apocalyptic consciousness to be the true home of Mormonism and represent the place from which they were evicted unjustly. Even then, I would expect them to cling more tightly to “Zion”(as they called Missouri) than “Nauvoo”.
1). It’s absolutely going to show up again. Snek-dude is descended from a bunch of people who got cursed in the same way that two sets of folks on the East Coast got cursed; the proto-Dominion mage overseeing that project was a Lovecraft fan, and in all three cases the curse failed spectacularly in everything except aesthetics.
2). Demon-summoning is actually not too prevalent in this setting, except of course for the Marxist lunatics that took over the Pacific coast of Canada; all ‘good’ nations ban the practice and the Universal Dominion is uncomfortable with the concept of ‘demon.’ That implies that there are also ‘angels,’ which implies ‘deities,’ and if there are any deities at all then the Dominion’s leadership is utterly hosed. As in, hosed even more than they are right now.
3). ‘The Nauvoo Legion’ is a very romantic name, if you’re the member of a nation that got driven out of your own capital city for several hundred years, forged a new empire in what used to be California, and has spent the last few centuries smashing the bastards who desecrated your holy places with such vicious glee. Also, the Legion represents Deseret forces specifically, not the troops that various western city-states and pocket-countries provide as part of their alliance.