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?