Grind, the Checkerboard Moon

so as it turns out, copy-pasting google docs into blogger doesn't really... go well. i wanna play around with a solution to this issue, but right now i'd rather put out content rather than wait to put it out because i'm too busy trying to figure out how.

luckily, this post was written by hand in a notebook, and needed transcribing/finishing anyways. it's about one of the moons.

Lunar Ichor

It was discovered in 36 A.E.M. (After the Emergence of Mortals). A third moon, hiding out in the sky. Because of the black dirt coating its surface, it was invisible at night and looked like a hole in the heavens during the day. The giantine society known as the Ruby Star had a thriving scientific community, and the astronomers among them used their telescopes to confirm it as a celestial body. Because of its appearance (or lack thereof) at night, they called it the Ashamed Moon.

But dig half a foot down and Grind's soil turns bright red. Nowadays, it looks like a warped checkerboard - hence its epithet. Other titles include the Patchwork Moon (considered slightly more offensive) and the Scarred Moon (considered much more offensive, but is also the most "accurate" of the bunch). Children often remark that it reminds them of a many-eyed beast (more often than not a spider), glaring down at them. But the learned know the crimson is the ichor of a celestial body - bloody evidence of Grind's many wars.

(Sidenote: most celestial bodies in the Loomverse give birth in some way. Planets birth gods, and moons are eggs that eventually hatch into eldritch monsters. The embryo in Grind is literally bleeding.)

To the south of Starfyk there's a large island called Carnelsica. Its two main exports are high-quality steel and books detailing its rich history of knights, nobility, a indigenous demons (like how Arthurian legend has a weird amount of both Christianity and fairy shit). It's primarily inhabited by tieflings. Its main tourist attraction is the Quillatakiy - a natural teleporter pad a few miles long. Once every century, thousands of vagabonds disappear from atop its surface, replaced by refugees from Grind that clustered on their own identical Quillataiky.

New arrivals on Grind inevitably approach a marketplace on their first day there, eager to bite into the ripe red flesh of the moonfruit on display. The tiefling merchant inevitably laughs when the newcomer presses silver pieces into her hand. On Grind, everything is bought with blood. 

That's not some poetic way of talking about glory and battle, either. The tiefling returns the coins, grabs the domesticated tubeworm they use to charge customers, and asks if they prefer to be pricked in the arm or the neck.

Fiendish History

Around 10,000 years before the emergence of mortals, a myriad of events caused the Archlords (six creator gods) to descend into civil war. This was known as the Fall of the Archlords, and resulted in one of the bunch being stripped of his title (Alenta, now called the Exarch) and another being wiped from history entirely (The Fallen). One of the main aggressors in this messy business was Ose - the father of all fiends. Though he himself was a pacifist, his creations were not. So once the war was over and the reparations paid, he imposed exile on himself and his people. 

Ose and his progeny left for other planes of existence. But tieflings, while more humanoid than fiendish, were forced by stigma to vacate too - not necessarily the whole Material Plane, but at least Loom. So they used the Quillataiky (they called it something else then, but that word is lost - what we use now is the giantine name) to travel to Grind and live in relative peace. As time wore on and the Fall of the Archlords was seen less as history and more as mythos, some returned to Loom's surface and settled Carnelsica.

The tieflings who stayed, though, found a bizarre ecology. Loom's body is prone to physically blocking out the sun for long periods of time, so its basic food web starts with chemosynthesis instead of photosynthesis. Tubeworms send a long proboscis down into the earth, absorbing chemical nutrients that some helpful bacteria convert into food. Not all of them are actual worms, and some are more like sponges or coral (but don't get me wrong, there's a lot of worms).

Everything else is pretty much an arthropod. This means anything from isopods to Morrowind-style silt striders to giant horseshoe crabs (or spiders, if you swing that way). These sometimes get teleported onto Loom's surface and become really big nuisances (if they aren't crushed by the higher gravity). A lot of Carnelsican legends involve a knight slaying some kind of huge bug or worm.

Oh yeah, and sometimes people domesticate the isopods.

This is partly why the economy is based around blood - the ecology happens to be, too. It turns out moonblood makes for a potent fuel source. And an expensive one, so mortal blood is sometimes used in its absence. There's a stock market that measures the value of different types of blood, and literal blood banks. And of course, nobody's truly broke until they've been bled dry. As it happens, the usual funeral rites on Grind involve bloodletting and then cremation. The skull is usually preserved, and the horns decorated with the same accoutrements the tiefling rocked in life (horn decoration is the foremost way of expressing yourself in most tiefling cultures).

The other reason for the predominance of sanguism is actually a philosophy held by Ose. Tieflings have a complicated relationship with their creator god, but they generally agree with a lot of what he says (while also being prone to misinterpretation). Ose often equated luxury with sin - in his eyes, nobody should thrive while there were still those who could not survive. The exact quote is something along the lines of "labor that begets only pleasure steals food from impoverished tables, water from impoverished throats, and blood from impoverished veins." It got taken a bit literally.

Source of Scars

So, eventually one of the other moons invented space travel. It is called Crest, and it's where Aasimar come from. So, naturally, when the angel-people find their neighbors are demon-people, it doesn't go well. This is further complicated when the third moon, Vessel, gets involved (it's populated by refugees from the Shadowfell and also eventually gets blown up entirely). 

The first Lunar War happens in 810 A.E.M., and there are about five more after that in the next 1,000 years. Grind is the first to get nailed with weapons of mass destruction, a trend that continues throughout the Lunar Wars. At first, it isn't that bad - the moon is living, and its "skin" (the black topsoil) can grow over the scars and mostly take care of things. But sustained orbital strike can leave more permanent scars, as can chemical weaponry (Crest was fond of the former, and Vessel utilized the latter).

So yeah, that's why the surface of Grind is so fucked up. This also means a lot of dust bowl style severe weather pretty commonly occurs, but the specifics of Loomverse atmospheres probably deserves its own post.

(Sidenote: the major advantage Grind had in the Lunar Wars was its access to Yugoloths, interstellar mercenaries from a planet a comet's throw across the solar system [known, fittingly, as Yugo]. They had an outpost on Grind and are generally on good terms with its governments.)

Practical DM Usage of All This

I'll just make a list:

• Opinions on how fiendish tieflings should be vary, but this lets us have the best of both worlds. More mundane tieflings - just horns, weird skin color, and occasional cloven hooves or tails - come from Loom's surface. But the more hostile environment on Grind gives an excuse to have some genetic variation, i.e. way more monstrous tieflings.
• If your players are cool enough to want to learn lore about various monsters, now you have that squared away for anything vaguely similar to an arthropod. Purple worms are pretty much tapeworms built for a moon-sized body, and I don't even know what to tell you if that isn't cool as fuck to you.
• Going to the moon is plausible at any time period. Of course, if you want it to be round-trip you're either gonna have to strand your players on the moon for a century or resort to space travel anyways. There are probably blood-themed methods of cryogenic freezing available for player characters with shorter lifespans if you wanna go the route of the former.
• An excuse to write rules for lower gravity. There's obviously the jumping thing, but increased carrying capacity, lowered armor restrictions, and increased range on projectiles are other options, depending on how much verisimilitude you want.

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Credit goes to my fellow Loom DM Jodi for lore regarding the Archlords as well as telling me to write about Grind in the first place (each of the three of us are taking a different moon). She wrote a lot of the initial lore for the place (blood economy, tieflings being the prime inhabitants, Lunar Wars stuff), and this is mainly just me expanding on it. Also, I wrote most of this post to the Nuclear Throne soundtrack, which I suppose is useful if you want to run something on Grind or just want a better idea of the tone I'm going for.