I have to lick … I mean, tend to his wounds

Part two of Meanwhile in Narnia, where the team of Jurisfiction agents have finally made it into Stephen King's The Shining, which is apparently a children's book now.

At the snow-covered Overlook Hotel, the agents look for statues of what are probably petrified Narnians, avoid being read by diving behind a bush and then interrogating little Danny Torrance, busy riding around the hallways on his tricycle. Admittedly, the GM has never read The Shining and therefore based everything that happened here on the Stanley Kubrick film, which of course has very little to do with the actual novel.

Also, there were clues, leading Alice to suspect Mr Tumnus from Narnia might be involved. Who else has hairy legs, horns and wears a red scarf? The Turkish deligh definitely must come from Narnia!

What happens off page stays off page

As we only had a couple of weeks before breaking off for the holidays, we decided to have a one-off. Seeing as how we'd be joined by a friend we don't see very often, and who'd like to play some more of Jurisfiction, that's what we decided to do.

In the seasonal Meanwhile in Narnia, there were reports about petrified Narnians being sold off as souvenir statues to unsuspecting visitors, and a group of agents assembled to go into Stephen King's The Shining, as that was so far the only lead Jurisfiction had.

A child was interrogated. One of the agents kept wanting to drink another agent's blood. A pirate's parrot turned out to have a rather foul mouth, and a 200-year-old politician didn't know who to trust.

Starring:

• Alice, 7-year-old (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
• Carmilla, vampire (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla)
• Long John Silver, pirate (Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island)
• Louis Gridley Wu, politician (Larry Niven, Ringworld)
• Polly, parrot (sits on Silver's shoulder)

Here's part one ...

Running with Molotovs

For the epic final showdown, we found ourselves dungeon-crawling for the better part of the session. We went to the place where we thought Trevor's sister was being held (she was kidnapped last session), but there was no on there. In the park was just a building for a junior football club or something like that. However, in the cellar, there was a hidden door ... and underneath it: dungeons!

The dungeons were mainly empty, save for a chav that was scared off by someone pointing a gun at him, and a creature that could make itself invisible. We found a stone table (no Aslan), and eventually emerged in a wide ditch, where Agatha and the (useless) bodyguard were tied to a big rock. There was some kind of Lovecraftian-looking creature there, previously known as Smith, and zombies.

We might have eaten through Willpower points and Conviction like they were candy, but by golly we saved the world Derby! :D

Aberrations of evolution, as chosen by God

Things turned interesting for the group this session. While the men in the group hid to avoid detection, Tilly tried shielding the girl/victim we found and ended up being hidden in plain sight. Something's obviously going on there.

Eddie went berserk with his axe, Zolistagol got to speak Russian ("Vladivostok!") and Trevor ... had his skin badly burned. To soothe it, Tilly grabbed some holy water from her bag (like you do), and lo and behold, the witch had apparently obtained magical powers, and the skin started healing!

After much ado, we ended up torching the warehouse to destroy evidence (might have accidentally burned someone alive, but hey ho), borrowed a fake brick of Nazi gold from the Russian mob, and the girl wasn't perhaps so much as a victim but a ghoul in training, or something like that. She wanted feeding to complete the process, and unfortunately, we were on the menu. No gratitude at all, that one.

We tied her hands and locked her in one of the bathrooms at Trevor's. And then we were visited by Tony the Ghoul, who told us what was actually going on. By that point, we couldn't really say sorry, we'd rather stay in with a pizza, beer and watch the Rams game on Sky Sports.

Finding Axcalibur with a d10 frag grenade

Seeing as how we were going to check out a warehouse, we got tooled up. The Russian especially, he went to B&Q and really went to town. Tilly went home and got tooled up mentally, by looking through books, finding an obscure reference to a Czechoslovakistani blood ritual cult from the early 1800s, headed by a guy whose name even the GM had trouble pronouncing, but "Tonsillitis" is close enough.

After meeting up at Starbucks, we also got tooled up very below board in a car park. Now we're carrying some old, sawn-off shotguns with ammo, a couple of handaxes and a bigger, diamond-edged axe Eddie took such a shine to that he named it Axcalibur.

At the warehouse, we heard voices ... saw footsteps ... and witnessed the carrying of a big box that definitely was from an Indiana Jones film, even though the GM insists the box really doesn't contain the Ark of the Covenant. Shots were fired (not by us), and suddenly we found ourselves face to face with the warehouse owner. In the words of the Teletubbies: uh-oh.

Football is the answer to everything, including cake

At Trevor's mansion (it has a long drive, it's a mansion), we settled down for the night. Cans of Stella, football on telly, zombies trying to break through the back door ... the usual. We also found Trevor's sister Agatha in the basement - but she seems to have lost the plot.

Eddie sacrificed his precious pimped-out baseball bat hitting at the zombie, and we all got away relatively unscathed. Well, apart from the bodyguard, but hey, he's just an NPC.

And then we had pizza, looked at old school internet message boards and made contact with a potential ally in Nottingham.

It was an eclectic sort of session.

Are we doing one dead body a day now?

After we busied ourselves with doing things like trying limited edition crisps with weird flavours, we got down to actual roleplaying. We had food in the same fancy restaurant as before (Eddie wasn't happy about his fish and chips, because herb-crusted seabass and frites or something like that wasn't greasy enough), and when meeting up at the university, in Tilly's office ... shit got real. As in, there we were, having a nice meeting, and what happened? Murderous zombies attacked us. It was very uncalled for.

On a happier note, Trevor went and got himself a bodyguard. The bodyguard turned out to be less than ecstatic over his 10k/day salary when he realised we'd be chased by near-indestructible zombies and not just general thugs. In the end, we made our way to Trevor's it's-a-house-not-a-mansion, for some televised football and lager (Eddie), breadmaking (Trevor), bathing (Tilly), and researching (Zolistagol). And then we were attacked again, and it all got a little unpleasant.

We don't need no edumacation!

In a bizarre, Matrix-esque twist, we kept coming across people called Eric Smith. One of whom was Eddie's brother Daniel - who was in two places at once. One version was Dan the Man, the other one was a clean-cut Daniel in a crisp, white shirt. A very disturbing sight. While looking through some files, we also discovered an Eric Smith who was the spitting image of Lord Trevor ... and an Erica Smith, looking like Dr Tilly's twin.

There were also scenes in university lecture halls, posh restaurants (Trevor paid, so we like him), kebab shops, mansions and terraced houses. Oh, and Lord Trevor decided to hire himself a bodyguard for lots of money. The two university lecturers, less well-endowed money-wise, had to settle for living on the same street as Eddie, and Eddie takes care of His People.

Oh, and the next table over had a delightful singalong, which we managed to hijack. :D

Let’s get ready to fumble!

Ahh new week, new game! This time, we've gone for Hunter: The Reckoning, which the GM has set in modern day Derby. The new characters are as follows:

• Eddie Smith, 23, football hooligan
• Matilda Churchill, 53, parapsychology professor
• Trevor Simmons, 28, circuit judge
• Zolistagol Bagridan, 48, ancient history professor

Lord Simmons was in court, letting Eddie Smith's brother go. Meanwhile, at Derby University, the two professors held their respective classes. After work was done, the court people were driving home, the professors were on the bus ... and they all had strange visions. Someone, who turned out to be a monster, drove his - and Eddie's - car off the road, along with the bus. And it all got very, very strange ...

Can I take your Sanity?

For this session, we did two things: levelled up our Rifts characters, followed by a game of Mansions of Madness, one of the expansions. The GM had had a bad day, so he was definitely in the mood to inflict pain on us - but first, getting us into a false sense of security by being nice.

We got the clues, were doing okay, and when the character with the silver tablet was making a run for the exit, hell broke loose ... quite literally. And then we all failed horribly and the GM won. It was a fun session. :D

Harry Dresden and the Coffee of Intimidation

While we stuck around waiting for our contract to finish, Gorbash was visited by the dragon whose territory he was in. They had to strike a deal, or there would have been a big dragon show-down. Probably.

Booker tried to stay low, to avoid being spotted by the Rakshasa, who showed up sniffing around while he was conveniently out shopping. The rest of the party said the other person had gone, so ... he tried his best to live up to that.

Marcus the Mage, Baradhi and Jayson went shopping. As it happened, we found out that someone else had paid Marcus to do the spell. Wouldn't it be convenient to pay someone to do your dirty work if there's a high risk of dying while preparing the spell? Baradhi knew the spell the guy was casting wouldn't work, but that it also wasn't lethal.

Jayson bought a nice, cheap gem for Gorbash, which wasn't half as appreciated as the diamond Booker went and got him. Booker, strangely, decided to share the bonus money ... and not keeping anything for himself. He got gifts for the whole party, so repenting for blowing up the side of a building obviously agreed with him.

Baradhi got an Astral Plane visit from the creatures, whose queen we sort of allowed them to rescue. They were grateful to have their queen back, and said there would be a reward to pick up. Oh, and they would be back in ten days time to collect Marcus. As our contract to protect him would be up before then, we didn't see a problem with this - but were morally obliged to warn him. Not that he heeded our warning, but there you go.

Mission accomplished.

How to make friends and alienate creatures

Our shoot-out with the weird creatures continued. In the Mage's basement, where tentacles of DARKNESS tried getting at us, but some dragonbreath and plasma missiles later, the creatures were gone ... along with part of the wall.

Booker tried to convince us he was Jayne with naming his weapons. He also decided to shoot part of a building off and crush one of the Rakshashas - which was probably not the best idea ever. Not when their supposed leader came by to frown on us for being in the general vicinity and probably had something to do with it.

We were also considering our part of the deal being fulfilled, considering we were hired to keep the bugs out of the building, and seeing as how they got in and got their queen out, we're thinking the Mage is probably going to be left alone from now on ... But apparently, that's not good enough. What do you have to do to get paid in this system, eh?

Every evil wizard has to start somewhere

Welcome to Rifts! It's 11 March 104 PA and a roleplaying party has been hired to babysit Marcus the Mage while he gets his shizzle together for some kind of spell around the Solstice time. There are bug-like creatures trying to kill him, and down with that sort of thing.

The problem is, once we got there and started digging into things, we came to realise maybe he wasn't such a good guy after all, and maybe, just maybe, the world would be better off without him - except then we wouldn't get paid, so there is that. We got him to sign a contract saying that if he locked himself inside his den (where we weren't allowed) and got killed, we'd still get paid, so we might be able to find a way around that ...

Well, if the bugs don't get us first.

Starring:

• Booker Dayes, Gunslinger
• Gorbash, Dragon
• Michael Baradhi, Ley Walker
• Sir Jayson Oakwood, Cyber-Knight

Everyone back away, it’s Miss Marple!

Last week, we continued generating our characters for Rifts, and when you're busy trying to suss out your Cyber-knight's psionic powers - and just skills in general, to be honest (so much to choose from!) - you don't really pay much attention to what's going on around you. The adventure also took its first, gentle steps into plot.

But yeah, we'll save that to next week, so instead, as this was pre-prepared, here's the fifth and final part of Midwinter Murders, the very first Jurisfiction adventure. After chasing Vampire Bella from Breaking Dawn, the team have followed her into a quaint, English village - the sort you've come to expect from Midsomer Murders.

In a picturesque cottage, Miss Marple invites the party for a cup of hot, drugged chocolate. Half the party was snoozing and the other half circling the village in a stolen car looking for Bella. Ending up back at Marple's cottage, they call shenanigans on the old woman - who is obviously the mastermind behind everything!!

And then they bundled her into a bathtub, found Vampire Bella (who passed out because she started bleeding from a gunshot wound), bundled her into the bathtub as well, and went back to HQ with the knowledge of it being a job well done.

Stop that, it's Scilly

Monty Python Monday could be like a thing.

Oh dear, we haven’t even started playing

One player down, we decided a game of the boardgame Pandemic would be a good idea. And it was - we won. By the skin of our teeth, perhaps, but still. After that, seeing as how we had plenty of time left, we started rolling up some characters for the next roleplaying game we're doing: Rifts.

There wasn't a lot written down from this evening, but luckily, a couple of us went roleplaying over the weekend as well.

The Saturday game will be perhaps one session a month, and is the Warhammer 40k based Only War. A group of Imperial Guards have been trapped in a hive for quite some time, until one day, the tech priest finally managed to get the doors open.

No one's outside.

Trying to find some supplies, the party headed out and ... were eventually shot at. And we ended the session on a cliffhanger!

Play it again until I kill someone!

We stayed around the radio telescope and continued the investimagations and interrogations. McAffe tried to convince Bones to break into the chalets, while Mulligan continued to bully the telescope staff. Trying to find the wifi password (they didn't have a guest network, go fig), McAffe ended up using his hacking skillz in order to grant him and Cully internet access in order to do background checks on staff.

And then hell broke loose. Literally.

A maniac came after Bones and nearly beat him to death with a baseball bat, and when patched up by McAffe, he was so preoccupied with saving the world that Cully had to sedate him and handcuff him to to a bed as he really was in no shape to save anything.

Then there was lots of shooting of telescopes, re-pointing where the telescopes thought the general direction of the Nemesis Star was so that it wouldn't be found again, and some kind of strange being helped in the destruction of said radio telescopes.

But umm, we all made it out alive, and with our sanities intact, so that's another job well done for X Cell!

Don’t worry, it’s only the end of the world!

We went to bed, and in the middle of the night, Bones receives a phonecall from an unidentified source, saying the radio telescope must be stopped or Ghroth (?) would come sooner rather than later. Mulligan has taken to wearing ear plugs at night, and didn't hear Bones banging on the door. McAffe did, but told him to shove off. Cully lent him a sceptical ear, and got the other two out of bed. Early in the morning, we headed back out to the telescope array ...

And were very nearly run off the road by some lunatic surveyor, whose tires we had to shoot out to get him to stop. An ambulance was called, because the man did not appear to be at all well. In Hayden, we - or rather, McAffe - drove over someone's leg, but he was lying in the middle of the road because apparently the poorliness was contagious. And the garage we visited last week was ablaze.

Finally made it out to the telescope array, where we were shot at, but Bones shot back. Unfortunately, for purposes of finding clues, he's a very good shot and blew the guy's brains out. But at least he shot first. (Anyone telling you differently is lying. Yesss siree.)

What then followed were Mulligan pestering telescope staff for information, McAffe and the ever increasingly paranoid Bones going through chalets searching for clues (seeing as how Bones shot the clue we had), and Cully played CSI with the crime scene. It all had a sense of impending doom over it. Is the end of the adventure nigh?

Why does this CD rack have 'Made in R'lyeh' on it?

Still slightly mentally scarred from seeing big, red eyes in the sky, the show had to go on. Cully went back to North Platte to do some research - not that anything useful really came from it. Bones and McAffe headed up to Three Mile Lake to check if it was a portal to R'lyeh or not. They founds lots and lots of flies, so ... probably not. Or maybe. We're not sure yet.

Mulligan, meanwhile, went to have another look at the girlfriend-murderer's house, and by the computer, found a peculiar sort of CD rack looking thing. When the right sort of rolls had been made, it was found that the discs contained a very long and rambling message about the End Times. The ones who bothered reading this lost a bit of Sanity in the process. (Cully declined to read any of it for religious reasons.)

In other news, Marshal Bones is down to 20-something Sanity. He might not last to the end of the adventure.

This would make a great PowerPoint presentation

Once we got back to the hotel after a good day's work, we went to sleep ... and woke up in the middle of the night, because of a storm. Outside, a big, red sphere hanging in the air ... with eyes ... It caused a crapload of SAN to be lost (enough to kill off two characters) - and then we woke up. It had never happened. Still scared the willies out of us, though.

Well, aside from Mulligan, that is. He's come to terms with his own mortality that puny things like that don't cause him to lose Sanity.

We also met the car mechanic again. First, he whistled a tune across the street - and then he came at us with a tyre iron. Some grappling and handcuffing later, we finally had to tazer him to stop him from killing himself. Yes, it's against protocol and our training, but then again, neither are how to deal with the Old Gods.

It's only paranoia if you're playing Delta Green

Meanwhile in Nebraska: Cully went back to North Platte to perform an autopsy. On the way back from Hayden, she was told to go meet a new guy in the hotel lobby. And sure, clutching a copy of the Fortean Times, there he was - FBI computer analyst James McAffe. (He has a driving skill of about 70, so he's the designated driver from now on.) They set off to autopsy the dead girlfriend, but didn't find anything because Cully somehow managed to roll 95 ... out of 90.

Over in Hayden, Bones and Mulligan got a lift out to the radio telescope array where their Sheriff's department driver got attacked by the guard dog they reportedly don't have. There was tazering involved, and then hog-tying.

The staff at the radio telescope array were a peculiar bunch, particularly one of the other computer guys - who seemed to get through his days using a steady stream of JD.

After meeting back up, introducing McAffe to the rest of the party, the four investigators went to the home of the murderer to see if they could find anything. Insects, is the answer, lots and lots of insects. Insects that seemed to home in on Cully. But then, what are improvised flamethrowers for?

As we didn't really find anything at the house, McAffe stayed behind to go through the computer a bit more and the rest went to a tavern to see what else could be got out of the drunken computer guy. In Bones's case, a massive headache ... that can't be a good sign.

Is Mansions of Madness like Cluedo for Satanists?

As we had to fill a session with something due to being a player short, we decided to try the Cthulhu boardgame Mansions of Madness - a relative of Elder Signs and Arkham Horror. Three investigators went to an old mansion, where axe murderers abound!

... We didn't succeed. The GM won. Oh well.

Will the real Harry Potter please stand up?

As we unfortunately was a player down due to illness this session, we were going to play something else. I got instructed to bring a game I'd like to play, so I brought Jurisfiction. It just so happens that I've always wanted to do an adventure set in the Harry Potter books, and suddenly, both inspiration and opportunity presented themselves.

Agents Hastings (Agatha Christie) and Van Helsing (Bram Stoker) had to leave their Enid Blyton pet project behind in order to go over to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to investigate a Potions book that had been stolen and replaced with a cheap knock-off. As they dawdled, Severus Snape himself arrived at Jurisfiction HQ to convince them to get a move on.

From there, they ended up force-feeding a Puking Pastille to Fred or George Weasley, charging Snape with assault, admiring off-duty Dumbledore in what can only be described as Rocky Horror Picture Show gear, listening to a PageRunning Draco Malfoy's teenage woes, finding beautiful Fanon Snape snogging his favourite student Hermione over in Fanfiction, and learning that Harry Potter enjoys going on Character Exchange trips to Fanfiction, where he doesn't have to put up with any of that false modesty nonsense, and can be worshipped like the freakin' BookWorld rockstar that he is.

Oh yeah, and Marvin the Paranoid Android occasionally works in the admin department at Jurisfiction HQ. (He doesn't enjoy it, brain the size of a planet, and so on.)

Whatever they did, that copy of the Half-Blood Prince's old Potions textbook, which is just a teeny tiny bit pivotal to the plot, was still nowhere to be seen ...

Gitmo's got nothing on Nebraska

Joining the very Special Agents Mulligan and Cully is a US Marshal, Robert E Bones, who has taken some time out from trying to hunt down Dr Richard Kimble. We're also going to get another player coming along in a few weeks, so that'll be fun.

Anyway, this time, we've been called to Hayden, somewhere in Nebraska, where we got caught in a freak hailstorm and needed to see a mechanic. A man claiming alien involvement went crazy and beat his wife to death. Might it have something to do with the big radio telescope array outside of town? There's only one way to find out ...

Reneesme is obviously a runaway, sparkly vampire pig

IN WHICH WE RIP THE S#!T OUT OF TWILIGHT. Err ... Again!

Okay, so last week, there was no session, so here's another one of them filler posts from an old session. Next week, the quotes will be back to Delta Green, as that's what we played in this week's session. (If you hadn't noticed, the quotes are posted the week after the session where they originated.)

Meanwhile, he's what happened when the Jurisfiction agents decided to venture further into the Twilight series ... where they first encountered Pregnant Bella, followed by Vampire Bella - who may or may not be the mother of a pig.

To recap: A group of fictional characters, agents of Jurisfiction, are policing the BookWorld, namely:

• Alice from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Arthur Hastings from random Agatha Christie Poirot novel
• Frankenstein's Monster from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, nicknamed "George"
• Gabriel Betteredge from Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone
• Hari Seldon from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series (although he was mostly asleep)
• "Outlander", i.e. one of the players playing himself, from the Outland

The strangest thing is, today's post is only from about 20 or so minutes worth of playing ... make of that what you will. I thought there was only maybe one more post out of what was left of the recording, but apparently we're looking at two posts at the very least.

Killing zombies with cake - possibly

As we had to fill another couple of sessions due to being a player short, we decided to have another go at zombie boardgame Zpocalypse. The first time we played it, it didn't go so well (we didn't survive the end of the first night), because we didn't have a strategy worked out.

By playing the game, we realised what we should have done ... so we thought we'd give it another go, doing all the things we realised we should have been doing in the first place. And sure enough, we survived the end of the first night! And the second! As we still had another couple of hours left, we decided to play on and see how far we could get. Third night went off without a hitch, but on the fourth night, one player's squad got killed just before we managed to take out the last zombies. But in the words of Meat Loaf, two out of three ain't bad.

This game was split over two sessions, as we ran out of time after the first night. However, as there were only a few quotes from each session, the two sessions are collected in this one post instead.

And yeah, at least half of these quotes were snagged from the adjacent Mutants & Masterminds table again, because they're actually roleplaying, and their quotability is higher than our boardgaming ...

The long, generic twilight of the BookWorld

We spent last session playing Zpocalypse again, to a much greater success than the first time, and we'll be playing that next session too. Since there was only like half a page worth of quotes from that session, I figure it would be better to post the two sessions in one go instead, so that's happening in next week's post.

Meanwhile, we're going back to the BookWorld to continue the investigations of the Jurisfiction agents. They've now left Wuthering Heights and decide to go and check out Twilight, because if you're looking for a modern novel that's badly written, you might as well just start there.

Amongst all the Generics in Forks High School's cafeteria is Bella Swan, who seems more preoccupied with dreaming about her bewuved Edward than the fact she's being accused of multiple homicides. (Each to their own, and that ...) And then the agents have a brainwave as to how to solve the problem of Bella missing from the narrative if she's brought into questioning: have Frankenstein's Monster take her place.

Roleplayers, eh? Can't take 'em anywhere!

Dances with zombies?

After having successfully obtained the zombie boardgame Zpocalypse off Kickstarter, we decided to play it, as we're still a player short, and therefore want to wait until starting Delta Green back up.

In Zpocalypse, the zombie apocalypse has happened and you're trying to not get swarmed by zombies (we did), or get our brains eaten (we did), but y'know, survive and kill them all (we didn't). We didn't even survive the first night.

As we played, though, we realised how we should have been playing it from the beginning, so if we play it again, we're probably going to try that instead and see how we could hopefully become a bit more resilient.

Although, it should be pointed out, at least half of these quotes were snagged from the adjacent Mutants & Masterminds table. *cough* We love you?

50 Shades of Enid Blyton

We're doing some other bits for a couple of weeks or so, while one of the players is away. For this session, we played a two-player Jurisfiction adventure, to see what that was about.

Arthur Hastings, from Agatha Christie's Poirot novels, joined forces with the new recruit Dr Abraham van Helsing, from Bram Stoker's Dracula. The Bellman never told them that it's technically a single-player mission, but hey, if you take a complete rookie and the somewhat dimwitted veteran Hastings, it sort of adds up to a single, competent player.

The mission itself was a simple matter of internal plot adjustment: making Shadow the Sheepdog by Enid Blyton have a happy ending. It should have been a simple mission that couldn't possibly go wrong, but ... alas ... they got out of a sticky situation by teaching a bunch of villagers all about S&M, in a bid to turn their idyllic rural village into something from Midsomer Murders.

Tearing monsters a new bottom

Last time, we got to a field past a sugarcane field and there was shooting. Murphy was down to three injuries, Sutcliffe was still injured from previous sessions and the "unlucky" Hatch somehow didn't have a scratch on him ... which is more than can be said for the NPCs.

We continued the firefight - this time aided by the Bayou Ranpan, a.k.a. the big, scary, invisible monster. Somehow (read: open-ending dice rolls by lots at the right time) we took it down. And then we took the last minion down, while Father Etienne beheaded the other remaining baddie.

And then we saved the lady, only to find she hadn't just lost her brother, but indeed her entire family had been tortured and then butchered by the same guys we had just "taken care of" (read: dumped their bodies in the Bayou). Sadface. At least we got to steal the baddies' remaining truck so we didn't have to take the train back to New Orleans.

We returned the dame to Fat Dan in his Absinthe House, got our $100 bar tab (and free drinks to celebrate!), slept soundly and then went to cash in our $200 reward with the guy at Hexaco, seeing as how we had removed his problem from the swamp and had the exoskeleton to prove it. Thanks to a very open-eneded dice roll, Hatch made sure he couldn't screw us out of the reward money and got it in writing.

So now we're RICH! And also alive. That was unexpected.

Murder on t' winding, windy moors

As we ended up playing Relic last week, which didn't end up being very quotable, here's something we played earlier. At a ChimeraCon in fact. This session was the Blogkeeper's first ever go as a tabletop GM.

To recap: A group of fictional characters, agents of Jurisfiction, are policing the BookWorld, namely:

• Alice from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Arthur Hastings from random Agatha Christie Poirot novel
• Frankenstein's Monster from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, nicknamed "George"
• Gabriel Betteredge from Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone
• Hari Seldon from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series (although he was mostly asleep)
• "Outlander", i.e. one of the players playing himself, from the Outland

At this stage of the session, the characters have been briefed about some gruesome murders taking place within the world of fiction - murders that shouldn't have happened in the characters' usual narrative - and after much ado, they set off into Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

They got to Trushcross Grange (try saying that quickly three times in a row!) only to discover the Lintons' fancy manor house was on fire, which is very out of character for it. But with their parents away, can the Canasta-playing Edgar and Isabella actually be saved or will the murderer have claimed two more lives?

Is sugarcane flammable?

This session was going to be the last one, but as luck would have it, combat tends to take longer than expected, so we had to pack up and leave it for next time.

You see, we went back to Manchac. The town had been torched by some bad guys, who had driven up to Morgan Freeman's house (the one Sutcliffe didn't burn down). We requisitioned a vehicle and drove up there, blew up one of the trucks and walked through fields of sugarcane toward gunfire.

On the plus side, we found the dame we'd been looking for, and her brother, and a Voodoo priest.

On the downside, we also found a gang of baddies with a tommy gun.

On the other hand, the invisible monster was also about to show up ...

We're the very best at being BAD guys

Dr Sutcliffe is Harrowed, which is something both Hatch and Murphy seem to have accepted surprisingly quickly. They've gone out to get him meat and new clothing as if he was your perfectly ordinary convalescing OAP.

Not that any of us still have any sort of clues as to what has happened to the lady we're trying to find. Instead, we decided to have a closer look at Hexaco. We thought maybe we could sneak in, decided against it and tried to think of new lucrative business ideas to branch out to - like extortion and kidnapping. Then we ended up going to see one of the Hexaco people mentioned in an article about the "sabotage" in the swamps.

For some reason (i.e. money), we ended up accepting his offer of ridding the swamp of the swamp monster before the end of the week (in-game, it was Thursday) for a $200 return. Just to see if we could learn more about the swamp monster, we went to where the Voodoo people hang out, and spoke to Trevor ("call me Trevor - you can't pronounce my real name"), who gave us a spell type thing to use in order to make the spirit come into the mortal world and thus be killed.

Next session has DOOOOOOOOOOM written all over it.

Son of a gun, we'll have some MORTAL PERIL on the Bayou

So there we were, party of three stranded in the middle of a swamp on an oil drilling platform, where we after much deliberation decided to spend the night. In the morning, after shooting an alligator right between the eyes, we started heading back to Manchac ... this time without a guide.

We came across some redneck trappers, who were apparently both hairy and Cajun (they still exist!), and who later decided to kill us. They caught Sutcliffe and Murphy in beaver traps, and we had a hard time getting out of there.

Fortunately, Sutcliffe made them pay for the ambush. Unfortunately, he left the battle with a hole where his chest used to be. Seeing as how he's Harrowed (YES, HATCH AND MURPHY FINALLY REALISED!), it meant he didn't stay dead. As the trappers so rudely tried to get rid of us, we looted their bodies before continuing back to the town. Murphy passed out from exhaustion, as we hadn't thought to pack any food. Fortunately, she woke up and could take the train with Hatch, while Sutcliffe (bundled up in beaver pelts) had to pay double for his ticket.

Back in New Orleans, Sutcliffe came back from the dead the next day, and he finally had some 'splainin' to do!

Method acting on the Jeremy Kyle show

After rescuing the family, who were so kind to let us stay over, from their burning house (only one casualty), we were informed by Sutcliffe that he'd seen the car we were looking for - and had been asking about around town the day before - and we all shook our fists and blamed evil petroleum company Hexaco for the arson.

Because little do we know it was actually Sutcliffe's Manitou that was responsible ...

We decided to go to the oil derrick that the singer's brother allegedly (read: according to Hexaco) sabotaged, and found a bloke willing to take us through the swamp on his bateau. Three hours later, we found the deserted derrick and investigated.

And then the bateau guy was sliced in half by some kind of invisible spirit creature that we tried fighting. We survived, but only because it decided to dissolve into thin air after Sutcliffe managed to hurt it with magics. We then had to fix the bateau so we could get out of there, as the spirit thing might have seen us as Hexaco people returning to keep mutilating the precious eco system of the swamp - which is probably what caused the destruction of the derrick in the first place.

But now it's dark, and we're three hours away from being out of the swamp ... and there are alligators nearby ...

Some of these things make more sense than others

As the next place we needed to get to was about an hour or so away by car, we had to weigh our options very carefully. How could we get to the singer's home town, Manchac, and still have money left to pay rent at the end of the month? In the end, we decided to go to Fat Dan at the Absinthe House (a.k.a. the client) and ask if he had a car we could perhaps borrow, because we really needed to get somewhere.

He did. And he also got one of his guys to drive us up there.

We found out the family lived about four miles north of the town, which meant we had to say goodbye to the driver and walk. At the end, Morgan Freeman and his family were very hospitable and served up a tasty seafood gumbo, and then we went to bed.

Doesn't sound like a lot happened, perhaps, but just as we were finishing off the session, the GM asked Sutcliffe for a Spirit roll. After having spent his final Bennie on a re-roll, he botched ... It's Manitou time!

Welcome to Louisiana Fried Rat, can I take your money?

Exciting times ahead! Hatch and Murphy are still blissfully clueless their new accomplice is long dead, because he's still doing things like moving around and talking. Ohhh the hilarity that will ensue when they finally succeed on those Notice checks!

In other news, the team decided to find out where the singing dame's fanboy/stalker lived by tracking down his place of work (a bank), pretending they wanted to interview him for a newspaper article. He hadn't come in to work, as it happened, but by promising to do a favourable article on the bank manager - and later do him a favour pro-bono (it's difficult even typing those words!) - by discreetly investigating why the guy wasn't at work, the trio finally found their way to his apartment.

Sadly, it seemed to mostly be a dead end. And there wasn't even any money in it. Hey GM, we've all got rent to pay, you know!

We’ll make a dick of you yet, doctor

We're back in the bayou! Or at least, we're back in New Orelans in 1935, where detectives Hatch and Murphy have decided to pool their resources together and therefore both are now living in the office. One morning, Hatch woke up to find a very old gentleman asleep in the doorway: Doctor James Sutcliffe. Well, if he wasn't a doctor originally, he is one now, because he can actually fix people, and he has a black bag. And introduced himself as a doctor.

What neither of the two dicks know is that he's a Grifter (they don't have Hucksters anymore) ... and whenever either of them finally manage to make a good enough Notice roll to smell anything other than tobacco smoke, they'll notice he's actually been dead for quite some time. That's right, he's Harrowed. Because that worked out so well last time!

The party of three then came across a new case - a singer didn't show up for her performance yesterday. Has an obsessed fan kidnapped her, or does it have anything to do with all the voodoo paraphernalia the party later discovered in her snazzy house?

Roleplayers invent new measurement

This week's post is the conclusion of our Arkham Horror the boardgame adventure started a couple of weeks ago. We have a new member of the group, which proved very, very useful for winning the game. Well, that and reading the actual winning conditions in the manual ...

As a bonus, some twaddle from a gaming day at a friend's house - where we got through both Relic, Articulate and The Good, the Bad and the Munchkin.

Midwinter Murders is not IKEA

As we didn't have a session last week, here's something we played earlier. In fact, this session was the Blogkeeper's first ever go as a tabletop GM. Using a bastardised version of the Mortal character sheet from Exalted, the group of tired ChimeraCon players decided to delve into the world of fiction.

The setting is from Jasper Fforde's BookWorld or Thursday Next series, so it takes place within the world of fiction. The characters are taken from classical fiction and are playing Jurisfiction agents, basically the police of the BookWorld, and they have been sent to investigate a string of gory murders ...

Starring:

• Alice from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Arthur Hastings from random Agatha Christie Poirot novel
• Frankenstein's Monster from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, nicknamed "George"
• Gabriel Betteredge from Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone
• Hari Seldon from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series

...And one of the roleplayers even decided to play himself as an Outlander. What could possibly go wrong?

It's always Nyarlathotep

The Delta Green GM had brought in Arkham Horror the boardgame, so we played that all session. We were doing quite well, despite it only being the three of us, but we eventually ran out of time and had to start packing up. It was fun playing, though. :)

What's that coming out of the ground, is it a monster?

In the adventures of Mulligan and Cully, shizzle really hit the fan. Not only were the ATF storming the cult's compound, all guns blazing, because the person put in charge of them had body-swapped with a Japanese member of the mother cult, the rogue body-swapper was also trying to Do Something.

Mulligan jumped into a helicopter and tried to figure out how to smoke him out of the building by dropping something through the roof, and Cully went with an FBI team around the back. As soon as there was an earthquake and the building started to sink into the ground, she turn and ran, while Mulligan frantically called to Dieter the helicopter pilot to climb, because we had seen this sort of thing happen before.

True to form, a big tentacled monster came out of the ground, waved its tentacles around, ate the body-swapper and then decided to slink back into its cave. A broken stone/egg type thing might have had something to do with it, we're not sure.

Either way, the mission was a great success. Sort of. As long as Mulligan can rest up in a hospital for a month and Cully doesn't lose any more Sanity.

In Cthulhu, it’s death or nothing

We got the translation of the manuscript in Japanese, the place featured on the photo the insane guy had on him when we had him sectioned was found, and Special Agents Mulligan and Cully went out there to have a look.

This was widely regarded as a bad move.

They found a barn with a hole in the ground. In the shadows, a green jelly monster. Down the hole in the ground, we dug up a piece of rock that was probably hollw inside. And then there was a big, black, tentacled monster.

Throwing all caution to the wind, Mulligan lowered a box of dynamite down the hole and set it on fire with a flare gun - and then legged it. He was one point away from death ... when he finally made a successful Jump roll, landing him face first on the bonnet of an FBI car. At least he lived to tell the tale.

Now we just hope the monster is an ex monster.

Must be talking to the tinfoil hat

Because Mulligan had an epic dice roll for whether or not people in a restaurant had a camera, it turned out a photography convention was being held at that hotel ... The photo in question was taken of a couple of Japanese fellas standing outside with a black Mercedes. We've been joined by the original offshoot of the Aum cult!

And we have reasons to believe we're going to need tinfoil hats going forward. In fact, the plan is to make stetsons with a Faraday cage inside, because we're all sophisticated, like. After all, isn't the tinfoil really meant to ward off things like radio waves? Then a Faraday cage is what you want! Simples!

Our journalist pal took us to see her father, who managed to translate enough of the old scroll we had in our possession to realise it wasn't the lyrics to a Eurythmics song. But we definitely agree that there are shenanigans afoot in Texas.

The real world would be proud

Starting out where we left off last session (funny that), Mulligan went to talk to meteorologist Hank Long, who turned out to be a lot like himself, only a few years down the line and with some more Sanity points lost. He was totally tying the room together, man.

Cully went to have a coffee at the brand of coffee shots that measure their sizes in "Tall", "Venti" and that other one we couldn't remember the name of. Oh, with the journalist woman who wanted to interview Brian, the schizophrenic we had reunited with the friendly men in white coats last time. She had lots of info about the weird-ass church Brian belongs to. They have ties with the Aum Shinrikyo cult, and might or might not have caused that earthquake using some sort of EMP device.

And then we tagged along with the ATF who were going out to the church's compound to say hello ... and suddenly, it appeared to be a re-run of Wako, which, funnily enough, is just up the road from San Antonio.

A Room with a View of Poo

Special Agents Mulligan and Cully are back! This time, they've been tasked with going to San Antonio in Texas, to investigate a bloke who seemingly predicted an earthquake in the area, which destroyed a building. The same building he had, in fact, ran into a couple of days earlier, shouting about how it would be destroyed.

We officially suspect that he's a terrorist, of course. Inofficially, we're not so sure.

Going to the man's house - a paranoid schizophrenic, btw - we found a man with a gun. He was shot a little, and died en route to hospital. He was a representative of some crackpot church, and his cronie was busy being blind on the floor. The paranoid schizophrenic had collected his excrement in various jars, which we found out when some smashed on the floor. He was taken into custody. Just to make sure.

Something's not right, though ...

Deadlands Noir, directed by Quentin Tarantino

As we left last session still in the Bayou, having narrowly escaped being eaten by a ginormous zombie alligator, we returned to town to organise an auction with the Black Hand and the Red Sect. They met up in the Bayou, things kicked off, Malone took Emma and ran behind a shed and spent most of the fight there, which is a great way of not dying.

And then there was this big robot coming down from the sky, which was taken out by a Tommie gun in a spectacular fashion (although not by us). So in the end, we got the girl, weren't killed, and we even got some money to pay our bills. Yay!

An adventure triple bypass operation

Super investigators Hatch and Malone kept investigating this session, and in doing so, ended up skipping from part one to part five of the multi-part adventure. Because that's just how we roll.

Perhaps the shady guy who owed the Mob money was trying to get hold of some missing barrels from Hellstromme Industries ...

We ended up going into the Bayou with an inbred Captain Ahab, looking for a ginormous alligator. We found the alligator. It was now a ginormous zombie alligator, hidden in an old train cart. We spent so much time trying to get the door open ... when we could've just walked to the back, where there was no door - although we would've been eaten a lot quicker that way.

Second-hand lockpicks, here we go!

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
WEDNESDAY, 6 MARCH 1935

In this very first airing of our new characters, they were hired to look into the disappearance of a man's sister. She had been courted by a local slimeball, who may or may not have had something to do with the disappearance. Investigations ensued, taking us both on a stake-out and to a retirement home, with the mysterious Dr Chainsaw. The name might be a clue.

The heroes of this piece are the investigating team of Hatch and Malone. Private investigator Napoleon "Nape" Hatch likes to drink, and to ogle pretty dames. His colleague is a little bit harder to explain. Penny "Dreadful" Murphy is trying to become a full-time reporter, but these are troubled times and her articles aren't always selling - hence why she's also working as a private investigator. It would be a conflict of interest to write articles about cases you investigate, hence why she's using the (fairly obvious) pseudonym Molly Malone.

The two met while working on a case. Hatch was investigating whether or not some dame's husband was being unfaithful, and Malone was trying to get a scoop investigating the same thing, so they decided to work together. And then they thought it would be a good idea to continue working together. We'll see who regrets it first.

Born to not investigate, not to survive

We ended up generating characters for the next game, Deadlands Noir, instead of playing a boardgame. So far, we're not sure what to make of the Savage Worlds system, as it's more limited than 1st Ed Deadlands, but we'll see how we like it as we go along. If we decide against it, we'll just convert the characters (or create new ones, as the case may be) into the Deadlands we're used to, only using the new 1930s setting.

The heroes of this adventure are two investigators. Both are very savvy when it comes to investigating, tracking, searching and things like that. Being able to shoot a gun is sort of optional. We might hit, if we're lucky. As long as no one hits us back, because we sort of ran out of points to be able to get a Dodge skill. Ho hum.

In one corner, there's a gumshoe, a private eye, and a drunken one at that ... and in the other, a plucky yet impulsive reporter. How could this team of non-combatants possibly not succeed in a world full of [radioactive barf] zombies and evil spirits?

Don't fear the Reaper - fear us!

After deciding to implant the dead body with a smartphone, tucked nicely somewhere under the stitches from the recent organ transplant, Special Agents Mulligan and Cully headed to Providence to follow up on another lead.

In a cottage somewhere in the woods, we found one of the other transplant cases, a "tortured artist", who was still semi-coherent. He was cuffed to a woodburning stove and tranquilised. Meanwhile, Cully looked at his paintings, lost 5 Sanity, and had to have a breather outside.

That's when the remaining two transplantees showed up ... and we had to barricade ourselves inside the artist's bungalow. Axes were involved. Cully sneaked out of the back door, aiming to get to the stolen car the transplantees had brought with them. If the mastermind's head was in it, we could destroy it, and no one would have to die.

Well, the axe-wielding maniac had to be taken out, and the 12-year-old girl unfortunately noticed the not-stealthily-sneaking FBI agent and started shooting. Fortunately, she missed. Everyone else, however, didn't.

And then we lived happily ever after, humming along to Don't Fear the Reaper ...

Welcome to Zombies'R'Us! We have guns!

As we now had bodies to cut up, Cully set to work. There was no blue gunk or shifting, crystalline substances anywhere near here, however, but we learned that the zombie was in fact the guy who'd gone missing, and who we were looking for. Convenient! Not for him, granted, but for us.

We then followed leads, leading to an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, but there was nothing there, other than to show that the people we were hunting had been there.

On the way back, though, we were accosted by an overly friendly driver. Shots were exchanged and we eventually drove the guy off the road. Mulligan got shot, but seeing as how his partner is a certified MD, that wasn't so much of an issue. We responded by cordially blowing his head off.

Now we have more dead bodies to examine, although we're slightly concerned they'll decide to walk off on a homicidal rampage. Umm, help us Delta Green, you're our only hope?

Geek rage in the basement with a flashlight

We've now finally started playing the new adventure, in which we discovered the Mysterious Case of the Missing Body From the Morgue, a missing girl from a hospital and a missing hospital patient. They're all redheads - is this some sort of conspiracy? Following leads, we ended up in a dark and dingy basement, armed only with flashlights and guns ... although the GM insisted on having NPCs switch the proper lights on.

There was a zombie down there. A meatshield nearly died. It was the best day ever!