The Green Machine

The Green Army must change to maintain its relevance for the evolving strategic environment. To provide our Great Green Empire strategic options for mastering the complexity of that environment, The Green Army has committed, in its Vision three seasons ago, that "as magic, smithing, and other discoveries allow, we will begin to erase the distinctions between the heavy and light green forces." In the Great Green Army, the horned green helm has become a symbol of excellence of our specialty units. Soldiers of the Special Green Forces, our airborne units, and the Green Rangers Regiment have long demonstrated such excellence through their legendary accomplishments and unmatched capabilities. Their deployability, versatility, and agility are due, in part, to their organizational structure and equipment. But more significant is their adaptiveness, which keeps them ready to take on any mission, anytime, anyplace.

Today, the distinctive emblem of these units is the wear of the horned green helm. But, over the past 500 years, horned helms have been worn by a variety of Green Army formations--airborne, armored mithril troops, cavalry, infantry, militia, rangers, special forces, and others. The black horned helm was being worn by formations Green Army-wide, when it was approved by the Green Army for wear by the Black Ranger Regiment in dr324. Today, it remains one of our symbols of excellence in The Green Army as reflected by its wear in the Black Ranger Regiment.

We are transforming today's most powerful Army in the world from a sleeping-Arragoth Legacy Force to an Objective Force with early entry capabilities that can operate jointly, without access to fixed forward bases, and still have the power to slug it out and win campaigns decisively. This Transformation will correct the condition in today's Legacy Force where our heavy forces are too heavy, and our light forces lack staying power. To master this strategic transition and to establish the parameters for decisiveness in this changing world, The Green Army must become adaptive to be strategically responsive and dominant across the entire spectrum of military operations.

To symbolize The Green Army's commitment to transforming itself into the Objective Force, The Army will adopt the horned green helm for wear Army-wide. It is not about increasing recruiting; we achieved our recruiting target of 80,000 recruits last year--while still sporting the black horned helm in many squads. It is not about retention; for the second year in a row, we exceeded our reenlistment goal by a wide margin--again with the black horned helm. It is not about morale; Our Green Soldiers are ready today to go into harm's way anywhere, anytime. It is about our excellence as Soldiers, our unity as a force, and our values as an institution.

Effective today, the first Green Army birthday in the new millennium, the Horned Green Helm will become standard wear in The Green Army--Active, Reserve, and Intelligence Components. Special operations and airborne units will retain their distinctive horned green helms with green fire-tongue enchantments.

Soldiers remain the centerpiece of our formation. We will march into the next era as The Green Army--the strategic joint force of choice for the new Isles!

The underworld is a strange place, I must say. New wonders and oddities appear every day, but we continue to press on and explore as much as possible. We had to clean a bunch of rotting, decaying, maggot-infested creatures from the orc's torture racks...not sure how long they had suffered there.

(The orcish torture racks)

(These guys popped in but didn't stay long, not sure who they were.)

(A shrine to one of the underworld deities, possibly A'laxtreygo)

We've found some reincarnated fish down here (long story, ask the friar when he next contacts you in The Third Garden), and they apparently sing as well, so we have allowed them to join us as the Green Machine band.

As I mentioned previously, some gnomes we found down here (and, as you might remember, I reported finding them in a, shall we say, less than dignified activity), have shown us how to combine the strange pumice stalactites and lava flows to produce excellent alcohol stills. We've been working in much of our spare time to bring quite a few online.

We've mainly been enjoying our new distillery in the underworld, and, between 'shroom parties, have been mixing up a little drink we call the 'Mean Green Machine': melon liqueur, orange liqueur, vodka, and lime juice. True, I've lost a few soldiers down there, but the ones that come back seem pretty happy! (And the gnomes are even friendlier now, if you can believe it!) I know some of those alcohol terms I used may not make sense to you. I'm preparing a treatise on the various forms of alcohol we've learnt of so far, and will send it to you as it becomes more complete.

I found a text from a sage who resides in the plains above us, just as we were entering into the underworld realms; indeed, some locals talk about the 'warg', as this text discusses. Thought you might be interested:

The Roggenwolf is a local demon that lives in grainfields and ambushes peasants, strangling them. This creature, essentially a type of werewolf, is represented in the local rituals at harvest-time by the last sheaf, which is called 'Wolf' and tied up to nullify its malignance. The Roggenwolf has a sinister mother, the Roggenmutter or Kornmutter. An interesting connection is the fungus ergot, which is particularly associated with rye. This fungus, which gives the grain an unpleasant appearance, is sometimes known as Wolf or Wolfszahn ('Wolf-tooth'). There is a link between ergot and warg: different variants of warg cause moral and physical corruption and disease, and some of these same afflications are also known to be caused by local skinwalkers with argr or ergi, brews of ergot. The wargs are reported to be homosexuals, and the recipient of anal intercourse is often called the 'ergot'. It is also used to describe Hodir, as a consequence of his use of the magical technique called seithr, an art appropriate only to women. Warg indicates the transformation of man into wolf, arg (ergot) denotes the notional change of man into woman.

Sounds to me like this guy just has too much time on his hands.