The Remote Range
Arena Modifier 🐧
Penguins
Visiting team's physicality and aggression stats are suppressed. You can't play mean in front of 2,347,816 penguins.
Lore
The Remote Range is the largest arena in the world by capacity. Its 2,347,816 seats are occupied by penguins. The human population of McMurdo Station—approximately 1,000 in summer, 200 in winter—also attends, but they are a rounding error. The Penguins modifier suppresses visiting team aggression and physicality. Le Council's behavioral scientists attribute this to the psychological effect of being watched by over two million silent, attentive birds. Players report feeling 'judged' and 'gently disappointed.' The Monoliths are the league's slowest team, their play style as immovable and patient as the monolith from which they take their name. Nobody knows what the monolith is. It was there before The Almighty Ice. The penguins were there before the monolith. The penguins will be here after.
The Building
The building, if it can be called that, is an amphitheater carved from the Antarctic ice shelf. There are no walls. There are no doors. The seating is the landscape itself—concentric rings of packed snow and ice descending to the rink, extending outward for kilometers in every direction. The 'capacity' of 2,347,816 reflects the penguin colonies that occupy these natural terraces, sitting in orderly rows with a patience that suggests they understand what they're watching. A small heated structure near the rink provides seating for the human attendees—McMurdo staff and the rare visiting dignitary—with glass walls for viewing. The rink itself is indistinguishable from the surrounding ice except for the boards and nets, which were installed by Le Council and are the only manufactured objects visible in any direction. The monolith stands beyond the far end of the rink, approximately 400 meters from The Almighty Ice surface. It is black. It is smooth. It does not reflect light. Le Council has measured it. The measurements are Glacified. The Remote Range is not a building. It is a place where Hockay happens to occur, in front of an audience that was already assembled.