Decided to make an effort to finish the collections of what factions I do have, with the first up being the Dropzone Resistance. Despite being done in my eyes, this is not a ‘complete’ collection. There’s a handful of models that I’m not interested in, nearly all due to aesthetics:
- Gunbus: If a militarized variant comes out.
- K9 Technical: If a militarized variant comes out, and possibly also if I ever find a solid 10mm military dog model. Not a fan of the single piece casts for the dogs, it makes things too visually repetitive for a model you’re theoretically aiming to have multiple of at once.
- Scout and Attack ATVs: Don’t do it for me.
- Berserkers: Not into the post-apocalypse/Mad Max/crazed cannibal/etc. theme that much.
- Columbus: Just kind of ugly, not into it.
- Colossus and Cerberus: If I’m ever bored, completely out of models to do and unable to find any other interesting ones, and have a pile of cash burning a hole in my pocket.
In any case, not too long ago I went through all the posts here and redid the tags to be more descriptive and specific, and in the process came back to the three pieces of fiction I wrote years ago, all shortly before starting this site. I recall at the time I had the itch to write something; not necessarily Drop stuff in particular, but I was considering making this site at the time as well and figured it would be a good fit. That and if it was something I enjoyed I’d have a place to dump more. And I did get enough of a kick out of doing it, but found the limitations of writing something that takes place in someone else’s setting to be a bit chafing, despite them all being already largely fueled by my own ideas. Regardless of whatever fondness there exists for said setting, I never ended up doing more.
So to self-indulge and compile thoughts on each of them:
- For Conversation, it started from wanting to practice writing some dialogue, and explore a bit of the relationship between UCM/PHR on the ground level. I came up with the idea of trapping them in a collapsed building to give an excuse for them to be stuck together with little to do but talk.
- Something that came up not too long after finishing caused me to go back and edit it. Originally, the PHR soldier referred to the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, which I thought was amusing as the PHR have a literal Theseus ship. However, not long after, the Marvel show Wandavision came out and one of the characters brought up the idea. I never watched the show and have zero interest in comic book media, so the contrarian in me was abhorred at the idea that people thought I might be referencing it. Luckily, the idea has a common variant in the “grandfather’s axe”, so I switched it over. Still sad to lose the Theseus reference though.
- The whole fight between the UCM woman and the Destroyer was because I felt the story needed some action. Reading it over now, I think it’s decent enough, but I’m not sure how essential it is. It does indicate some built up trust between the UCM/PHR soldiers due to the remote neural link aspect of the gun, but maybe the addition of some tension or physical conflict could have been done another way.
- I made sure the PHR soldier said everything without contractions, and otherwise had a ‘proper’ voice. It just felt right to have them emphasize how cultured and developed they are in comparison to the backwoods hicks of the UCM.
- I wanted to try exposing a bit more of the internal culture of the PHR with the epilogue bit. Theming their cybernetic network connection as threads, looms, knots, etc. again felt like something they would do, as it would put a coating of ancient culture over their technology and fit with the naming theme of their equipment. Everything except a reference to the ‘binding’ was made up with no basis in existing fiction, though.
- Something I didn’t set out to do at first but came up as I wrote was to dig more into the culture of the Scourge. Getting into that more with the next story.
- Liberation was written nearly immediately after, with the desire to try something from the Scourge perspective. This would, due to the lack of Scourge POV writing in the existing fiction, be based nearly entirely on my own ideas.
- Starting in writing the previous story, the question of what exactly their society would look like comes up immediately. What sort of values or social relations would an organism defined by parasitism look like? I settled on a few concepts:
- There is no overarching leader, but instead a group of competing individual Scourge that attain their power and status through how extensive their domination of lesser Scourge are. I referred to this as the “assemblage”, thinking of it as some sort of combination of political structure and physical/mental competition.
- Interacting directly with other Scourge of similar status is seen as both a massive weakness and faux pas. Why would you do something yourself that you could force someone else to expend effort on for, after all? It would also be an insult to contact another Scourge of similar status directly, implying that they couldn’t have a lesser status Scourge take care of it for them and you think that little of them. This is my attempt to explain one of the few bits of Scourge content, from the story where they contact the UCM to suggest a temporary truce, with the Scourge ‘ambassador’ appearing disgusted with the UCM president speaking for the rest of the council.
- The most nebulous idea was the “tithe of pain”. The Scourge seemingly enjoy their parasitic dominance in a masochistic fashion, and have some sort of biological wireless communication ability, so some sort of social structure concerning lesser status Scourge needing to share the experience of control with their greaters came about.
- Which hosts are delegated to which Scourge is determined by the strength of the highest status Scourge available, with the most powerful getting first choice of the spoils for their spawning.
- Germination is unashamedly Flowers for Pungarinon.
- The release of the Thresher ship, and it being a mixture of Pungari characteristics with Shaltari technology, rose some questions to me. It implies a level of intelligence and independence among the Pungari that isn’t present in any of their other descriptions. If it was entirely Shaltari-based, it’s surprising that they would allow the Pungari to go off and do their own thing with any of the ships, or even bother with permitting them to have their own vessels in the first place.
- I settled on the concept that the Pungari evolved to fulfill the ecological role of a wildfire. Their population goes through boom/bust cycles, clearing the land of flora and floral debris until the easy to reach vegetation is mostly gone. Rather than collapse in mass starvation, some of the remaining tubers/bulbs that were harder to dig up become the primary food source, and these trigger a hormonal response in some Pungari. This causes them to develop more intelligence and shepherd their groups into smaller and more sustainable populations, until the floral population cycles back and the rational Pungari fade away with their increasingly non-tuber diet.
- These intelligent Pungari serve two purposes: explain why the Pungari seem to have an innate drive to seek out someone to command them without question, and how they could have some sort of technological development of their own, albeit still fractured and not that advanced due to their population cycles.
- Another aspect of this is to emphasize what assholes the Shaltari are. By limiting access to the organic compounds that trigger their mental development and placing themselves into the role of group leader, the Shaltari are essentially enslaving a race of child soldiers to die for them.