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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!