You're very pretty for an orc

Back in the wonderfully post-apocalyptic world of Rifts, we have encountered things like a kidnapping plot against Maria, a gang leader who might also be having a bit of handsome Cyber-knight whenever it takes either of their fancy. The plot was a way to get to us through Jayson (who would of course be obliged to rescue his damsel in distress, even though said damsel could definitely kick the bad guys where it hurts). You see, we were hiding out trying to avoid getting murderised by people who would be paid very handsomely for that deed.

Bizarrely, we didn't foil the plans, they just ... went away. The price on our heads, as it turned out, had been rescinded by Splugorth. Why Splugorth wants us alive, we aren't entirely sure about, but it's making us uneasy for sure.

We also met up with Ixchal and took a trip with the Kizzards in order to give Alistair's brother his life back. Alistair's brother is now a mute Kizzard with a human soul, and Booker discovered that Hecate has absolutely no sense of humour. You don't tell her jokingly that she should stop Jayson holding a blade to Booker's neck (a warning as he was starting to move in a very shifty way), because Hecate proceeded to lightning bolt Jayson, who, as it turned out, could smoulder not just in figurative ways but also in very literal ones.

Feeding Kanye West to an undead T-Rex

Our modern day superheroes have managed to restore the missing school to the physical world again, except it's relocated to Easter Island. The heroes relocated to Moscow to find our Russian characters frozen in stasis coffins. People having to act out two characters at once ensued.

Then there was a portal to Wall Street and fighting Eris, goddess of chaos, and suchlike until the world was saved. This involved a pillar that was supposed to have been a lava lamp but in fact was a couple of Appletiser cans stacked on top of each other, figurines in tiny cages, an undead T-Rex that had lived in the sewers, Kanye West and all sorts of weird and wonderful things.

In the end the bad guys were defeated and most of the characters were still alive to tell the tale afterwards. Good game, great campaign. :)

What does the desert fox say?

In this riveting final episode (for now) of Godbound, we discover that the god Gond isn't dead after all! And it's very possible Mystra isn't either!

We investigated a few places, and came across a Thayan wizard dude and there had been a lot of people dying and so on and so forth. Because Gunda took the Thor word, she walked along being some kind of lightning rod so that everyone else wouldn't get zapped.

We met a Shadow Prince as well. I have a sneaking suspicion I'm mixing up things here quite a lot, but it's been over a week since we had this session and I'm writing this half asleep. In fact, the Thayan wizard wasn't a Thayan wizard, it was Gond. The Thayan wizard was the dude with the flesh golem miners.

And then we came across a mountain where flesh golems were mining platinum, totally nicking our idea. They were ... taken care of. Turned out Gond had been stuck in some other plane of existance for quite some time. Some being tried to pretend to be Oghma, but this didn't seem right to Denethor, Oghma's second in command.

There was a city of platinum hidden in that mountain, and a portal to another place, so we sealed it up because things shouldn't come out of there. Nothing good comes out of there.

I spent all my dice on revolutions

This week's session was cancelled due to illness, so here's something we prepared earlier.

In Soviet Russia we decided what we were doing in the time between the end of the 1980s until 1994 or thereabouts. The communist state was overthrown. A hole was punched in the Berlin wall. Hulk Hogan became Hawk Hogan. A disillusioned propaganda/brainwashing machine went to England, a communist state, only to find herself in the midst of another revolution.

An assortment of TV show hosts (Lawrence "The Upholsterer", Alan "The Gardener", Dale "The Supermarket Sweeper" and a guy from Time Team "The Archivist") showed up to kick behinds. It was peculiar, although that's pretty common in M&M, to be fair ...

Let's get back to Mother Russia, because "at least it's home".

Problem is that suddenly this big planet or something had appeared through a tear in the sky, and there were now baddies flooding Moscow. Baddies with lots and lots of nukes and stuff.

(The Truth may have died, but she might also live on, having turned Evergreen into some kind of Horcrux. Or something.)

There was a battle. Supers fought bravely. Then the flashback ended ...

I love being a crazy god!

We went to check out the local Center Parcs holiday resort thingy. There were orcs. The orcs were having an argument about who should get to have a key. Elani made everyone in the party look like orcs and then challenged them - the key should go to him (her).

The key was eventually found inside a platinum chest inside a vault. She showed the key to the orcs, making her alias the rightful leader of the orcs, and told them to go kill some Netheril to prove their worth. They went on their merry way and we emptied the vault and took the riches back to Tilverton to fund our new Pantheon.

Three sessions ago we only had a session or two left. At this rate, we have at least two more sessions. We like to take our time, clearly.

Is it bestiality if you're a metamorph?

Further delvings into the floating city we found last week. There was a tower, where a door mysteriously happened to be open (it's good when you've got a person with the Luck word in the party!). At the top we discovered something with vampire glass, so the building started to melt. Stuff like that.

There was also an orb that could, umm, turn nuclear. Our pet wizard turned it into a staff, because he didn't get an artifact weapon like the rest of us. Problem is that if he's ever to drop the damn thing, we'll all die in a Michael Bay style explosion.

When we got back to Tilverton we found that we had received summons to our respective gods' temples. Answering those summons meant that we're now properly middle management, sub-gods to the major gods Silvanus, Oghma and Tempus. Varyon's going his own way, because he's big-headed the world lacks a god of magic.

We're middle management with magnet armour

The GM started regretting he set this adventure in Forbidden Realms rather than a non-D&D setting right about when the ranger/druid character (Elania) thought it would be a great idea to use the local fauna as miners.

Was this before or after we had a great debate about cold versus hot custard? Because that was a thing. Hot custard vs cold vaniljsås. Your mileage may vary depending on if you're British or Swedish.

Anyhoo. Game-wise we headed south, and entered a thing called Land's Mouth, which is some kind of opening to another dimension or something like that. The map looked like a diagram of female anatomy, at any rate. There was a crashed sky city in there, and creatures that drew metal spikes and swords out of their arms in a decidedly creepy way.

Cool! We're Switzerland!

We continued having a look below Tilverton and found the vampire's lair. He had a fleshy-looking coffin with feet, but instead of being a quaint piece of self-ambulating storage à la Discworld, it was all pulsating and evil and wrong. It was destroyed.

We also found a guy who had been cut open and the innards had been placed on display, so to speak, but still connected to him, and he was still alive. If you can call it that. We collected him and all his bits and put them in a box to let our wizard friend read through all the research books the vampire had left and maybe he could put the guy back together. (He could. Deeply traumatised man, however, was no longer at home.)

Things like that. We also progressed the re-building of Tilverton and our own followings.

I really hope you're kill-stealing

In this riveting installment, we came across a gnome called Snails. Except he was tall for a gnome, and he could slither into very small spaces in a very uncharacteristic way. Not to mention he chopped off his own arm and grew a new one just to get away from us.

Following said gnome into the catacombs underneath Tilverton, we encountered a weird sphere of what seemed to be a bone-like material. It didn't contain a multitude of spiders (this was a genuine concern of at least one party member), but instead a massive caterpillar type thing made up of a lot of different beings. It was VERY Lovecraftian.

It died.

Later, we came across another Godbound, Batman, and a group of dire squirrels and zombies. They all died, and we learned about how dying works in this system. So that's a positive!

Are you trying to abuse your powers?

Forgot to post this last Sunday, because we have been busy playing what is effectively Godbound the computer game - Divinity: Original Sin 2. We didn't have a roleplaying session this week, but it was time to post this, on the other hand.

We continued to work on the town. There was a visit to a nearby farming community to talk to the people there about how Tilverton had been liberated and they could now go home. Then a visit to that person's sister was paid, and reiterated that Tilverton was free and it was time for re-building rather than invading, and so on.

Then we all met up again and went into the cave system underneath Tilverton in order to find some people who had gone missing down there. There were bone golems, but luckily we had brought meat shields.

ACME miracle maps of Gibraltar!

We started the rebuilding of Tilverton with the help of the locals. A delegation of soldiers from Cormyr showed up to say that it was their town - we disagreed. There might be repercussions later.

Denny - or Denethor to give him his proper name now that he's a would-be god - was busy making weapons and armour. Elani made herself useful by recruiting allies in the animal world. Gunda started training people, as making sure the city can defend itself sounded like a good idea. She also got to try being a platinum dragon for a bit thanks to Elani - Elminster was not amused.

I love it when a plan falls apart

We got the attack victims back to the little ramshackle town from whence they came. Turned out they used to live in an abandoned city nearby, Tilverton, which had fallen victim to darkness like 150 years previously. Not that this was a deterrent for us.

We went into the city with the muffin top of darkness and slew a bunch of nasty creatures, and did a fly-by to grab an amulet off a Cthulhian type creature. This made the muffin top go away, along with all the nasty critters, so the townspeople could have their city back.

We're big damn heroes now. Severely injured heroes, in two out of three cases, but heroes nonetheless.

Yer a druid, Harry

New game, new characters! Godbound is set in Forbidden Realms (D&D), but the characters turn out to have special powers. It's a bit like Hunter, or Exalted, or Changeling, except it's not World of Darkness.

At first, we considered being an all-Cleric party, and then there was a couple of Clerics and a Paladin, or a cleric, a paladin and an archivist researcher, and in the end we're like a druid, a blacksmith (who also does archiving and research) and Brienne of Tarth.

• Denny/Denethor: a human archivist researcher who is also a very competent crafter-of-things
• Elani Tiatha: an elf huntress with aspirations of becoming Boudicca, except for the dying bit
• Gunda: a human paladin of Tempus; see also: Brienne of Tarth

We started off by fighting some bad hombres and by doing so we discovered we had special powers, because we didn't use to be quite as kick ass as we had suddenly become.

We're in the Shadow Realm of attack carpets!

Soooooo ... We've started playing Godbound, but I need to make a copypaste post and grab a logo and stuff, and since we're having the bank holiday Monday off, we're gonna need a filler anyway, so let's do that this week and start on the new stuff next week instead.

Victorian characters in their last outing for this adventure - gasp!

I've seen this trap before!

We finally made it back to Deadlands. And then we very nearly died when we got inside a building with a big mechanical centipede. It was big and mechanical and in charge of people. Still, we all made it through and live another day.

The Paladin we were looking for, on the other hand, was not so lucky.

The Dog-boy is a go(o)d-boy

This isn't very long, but it's the last bit of Rifts for the time being. We made it out of Coalition State - somehow. Not with intact SAMAS, though, but you win some and you lose some. At least we got John back and looked cool getting the hell out of Dodge. Or, well, dodging. Stuff like that.

It's always winter in Alaska

We did have a session to post here, but illness and stuff has prevented me to digitise it, so here's an ace up the sleeve instead.

Oh we were on fire here! Which was probably just as well, seeing as how we went to a snow-covered Alaska and did some stuff. Kanye West was there, because of course he was.

There was a character new to the party as well, who thought "Specials" meant "special needs", and we did nothing to disprove that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In Soviet Russia 'flubber' is a verb

We didn't have a roleplaying session this past Monday, so here's one we played earlier:

Our Soviet Russian characters have now moved into the 1980s, and oh the 80s music punning that ensued ...

Can the NPC fly a SAMAS?

Last week we left our group near Lone Star in Coalition State. This week, we did what we went there to do, and then got the hell out of there. Well, okay, we're still working on that part.

First of all we met Magali, one of the rat people. We think she's on our side, or at least we hope she is because we've just gone and told her everything about us. Gorbash got to be admired by rat kids and healed some very ill people, so at least they like us.

Then we went to get John, which included infiltrating a very big compound in order to break him out of jail. By pretending to be NTSEC. It went surprisingly well, even though Booker's fake ID card was commented on as being very old and should be renewed. Someone had him autograph a sign in sheet, which would be sent for handwriting verification, so we were on a strict timer.

John was obtained, and seeing as how the NTSEC officer whose ID card Booker was using had accepted his "usual" choice of transport without double-checking exactly what that meant ... we were shown to the roof, where six shiny SAMAS were waiting for us. None of us had a driving skill last week, so we sure as hell don't have a flying skill! Lucky for us the Dog-Boy could at least slave all the other SAMAS to Booker's, and show Booker how he's supposed to fly. We're still not in the clear, but at least we managed to take off without crashing to the ground.

The only one with a Driving skill is the NPC

We drove toward Coalition State, dressed up as Coalition State agents. Gorbash in particular found the suit very uncomfortable. Near the border we spotted some green spheres that were following us, but we got some help from our "friends" to take them down.

We then found the city of Lone Star, and paid a visit to a local farmer so that Gorbash could flex his wings. Clearing out the barn, the sewer grate was found to lead not just to the sewers but to an entire population of human-rat hybrids ... that Gorbash casually threatened with genocide. Like you do.

Now we just need to find John at that outpost, rescue him, and get the hell out of there before things kick off.

Gorgons are the Spanish Inquisition

We continued the fight at the nexus point. The good thing about having impressive weapons and skills is that you can get rid of your enemies with ease. A bit too easy, perhaps, as the GM found out after we'd murderised all his baddies.

Anyhoo. We took back the nexus point for the Rakshasa and celebrated. The next morning we got the info we needed in order to find where John, the head of the Blackstone Juggernauts (a.k.a. our boss) and Gorbash's sort-of-adoptive father, had been taken to. It's in Texas. So next week I guess we put on our Stetsons and get ready to barbecue some meats. Oh, and rescue our friend/boss. Maybe.

This game is too unrealistic!

Our modern day characters also went to Russia and attended some kind of shindig. While dressed up to the nines we still managed to kick the butts of a number of bad guys.

Also, the Donumancer was inadvertently invented. It's a villain that makes people hunger for donuts, or something like that. It made sense at the time.

The GM thinks this is a wonderful plan

We scouted out the bit around the nexus point. Turns out the Rakshasa structures around it were to protect from stuff coming through the nexus point, rather than protect from outside forces. The surrounding woodland was pretty much Narnia, what with all the stone statues everywhere.

A lot of prowling happened.

Gorbash has learned the Stone to Flesh spell, so he can turn the statues back into people, and practised it by turning a perfectly ordinary not-previously-a-human stone to disturbing results. Would not recommend.

Fact-finding mission done, we later decided to go back and attack the devils who had taken it over, because better the devils you know. (Yeah, that the Rakshasa are the good guys here (sort of) was painful to admit.) Right?

Revenge is best served with fusion blocks

We continued the discussion with Sister Anna the Rakshasa. Turns out she wants our help to get a nexus point back. She's held it for over 70 years and now someone has taken it off her, and she's not happy. Despite feeling a bit iffy about calling a truce with the Rakshasa, we agreed to at least go and have a look.

Booker's box that went "ding!" last week turned out to have a bunch of Plot Devices in it. Or, as it may turn out to be, Deus Ex Machinas. They do point at us encountering Gorgons at some point. As in the Medusa type Gorgons, not the metallic bulls.

Perhaps the Rakshasa are the lesser of two evils ...

Axe, not ass - makes more sense now

After putting Deadlands: Hell on Earth on pause for a bit, we've instead arrived back at the Blackstone Juggernauts. Booker informed the crew that our friend and boss John has in fact been replaced by someone and we should look into that. Gorbash went to talk to Ixchal and give her that white rose petal - she was suitably impressed - and Jayson went for a booty call at Maria's.

Apparently there's a big bounty on all of our heads - except for Donna's, which Booker found incredibly suspicious.

Then a Rakshasa called Sister Anna wanted to meet us at a diner that did very nice burgers and milkshakes. She wanted some stuff back. And then there was an ominous ringing sound coming from Booker's coat ...

He wasn't dying a moment ago

We went into some kind of other-dimensional house with a magic lift (elevator) and got stuck in various rooms and it wasn't necessarily all fun and games. Someone came upon a chained-up vampire that he decided to free (because why not?) and another room had a booze collection and Elgar records that simply weren't up to Elgar's usual standard.

And then Florence Nightingale turned out to be a bad guy, because these things tend to happen in M&M. :D

Call me salty, but ...

Our Deadlands session was two hours shorter than usual, and we didn't do a whole lot, so there wasn't much written down.

However, we also have a boardgaming session saved up for times like these.

Falling for the plot device

Jack tried to flirt with the tanker truck driver he decided last session he was going to marry. She wasn't impressed.

Vince had a chat with the other Syker in town and Maggie discovered they had come to some sort of hipster vegetarian hideout where they grew their own food and served bran muffins and stuff.

We then helped to build a fence around the town and waited to be attacked. And so we were. Epic Syker blew head off bad guy - there was a mini mushroom cloud and nuclear fallout and everything! \o/

Do Doomsayers glow in the dark?

We're on the road again ... or, well, three of us are: Jack the Road Warrior, Vincent the Syker and Maggie the Law Dog.

I think we ended up somewhere in Wyoming, where we spotted some guys on the side of the road. They were looking for something, so we decided to help out. Turned out to be related to burned out corpses. Doomsayers are in the area, and them folks are bad news in general.

Eventually, modifications were made to the cannon mounted on top of Jack's truck and Maggie might glow in the dark, but it's all good ... even though the truck is now a rolling bomb waiting to go off at any second ...

Can I still be a grumpy racist?

So basically, we decided to go to Crimea - the bit with the war and Florence Nightingale (and Mary Seacole, who was left out of this story as well - how like life!) and also dropped in to see Baba Yaga (officially pronounced ˈbɑːbə jəˈɡɑː so now we've settled that as well) and met the real life version of Ursa. Except he used to be a real bear??? Anyway. What?

We're a bleak bunch of bastards

Having some delicious cake and a long, very good game of Cards Against Humanity with a special guest star. :)

You do crit damage on a fumble if you crit on the damage roll

So, this is where it ends. Well, not entirely, of course, but for now.

We broke out Alistair and his Shemarrian assistant/slave from their prison, there was fighting and some of us got our heads encased in ice. Lucky for us we all had a spell on us which meant we didn't actually have to breathe, so it was more of an inconvenience than anything else.

Somehow we got out of there alive, all of us, and headed back to Magestar. But where, oh where, is our Beloved Leader of the Blackstone Juggernauts, a.k.a. John?

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy

After levelling up (level 8, wooh!) we somehow got into a discussion about Cthulhu and tentacle porn and found out that yes, the internet will provide if you do an image search for Cthulhu dressed as a Japanese schoolgirl. Uh. Like you do?

Anyway. In actual gaming terms we went to the market, and most of the party pretended to be slaves belonging to Gorbash, who in turn pretended to be a Rakshasa. We found Alistair and his Shemarrian assistant/slave in a cell down at the slave pens, so that's good. That we found them, that is, as that's what we were there to do.

A couple of brothers, whose other brother we may have previously disposed of, recognised Booker. And then the setting off of explosions ensued ...

This is the strangest GM-ing I've ever done

Further (mis?)adventures of a bunch of Victorian superheroes ... basically because during our regular Monday session there was just the three of us and we played the crap out of Joking Hazard and didn't take notes.

Isis Isis baby

So the Egyptian obelisk, Cleopatra's Needle, was guarded by someone who turned out to be Isis, except she didn't know she was Isis.

And then, of course, fighting ensued. Booker spotted one of those Mystic Knights (or Sith Cyber-knights, if you like) and decided to blow up a building. It got a bit hectic for a bit. Turns out they were kind of ... anti-anti Cyber-knights and of an order to do with a white rose. Interesting times!

Human culture is weird

We're on the way - to, uh, wherever it is we're supposed to go - and on the way decided to stop at a charming little village which time seems to have forgotten about. It was a bit like a renaissance fair, and everyone was friendly and oddly unarmed. "Trouble doesn't seem to come this way", they said, which sounds utterly suspicious. Turns out it was also kind of correct. Seeing as how we didn't mean the town or its citizens any harm, we could see the town and enter it - others were not as lucky.

The next day we moved through a place which was rammed full of astral beings who might or might not be after a snack. It was creepy.

Almost as creepy as finding a lady by an Egyptian obelisk who insisted she wasn't the goddess Isis, despite compelling evidence that said otherwise ...

You know there's such a thing as dice rolling apps, right?

We continued fighting the Nxla cultists who so rudely interrupted us when we went to visit their neighbours.

Oh well, they're not standing anymore, that's for sure.

We then decided it was high time to get out of that town ... because even though we've paid for our citizenship, they will probably still frown on mass murdering ...

Help, I'm in a cage with a creepy paedo!

We did actually have a session last Monday, but it was just the three of us playing a couple of boardgames, so I gave the quote book a night off. Therefore:

Stuck at a creepy carnival, our heroes found themselves being asked to play various parts in some kind of Alice in Wonderland story. It was pretty weird.

It got weirder.

People were killed, libraries exploded, robots were fixed, journals obtained, and ... yeah. Zombie magicians. Sloth being a walrus. Alice stuck in a cage. Pretty darn weird.

And we still haven't found the school.

Not all sayings work in Soviet Russia

And here we are ... in Soviet Russia, where we've now made it to the 1970s, because our Monday gaming session got cancelled. I love having backup posts ready to go like this!

Why is there not a Save vs Dumbass?

A session in which we all decided to become citizens, because it seemed like a good idea. Probably just as well because then we went to talk to the kind of people who look up to Booker because he's the Chosen One and all that. When we finished, the people in the house across the street (Nxla cultists) were less keen on seeing the Chosen One. Fighting ensued ...

He can thank me later

We're still in Soul Harvest, that magical place full of reanimated skeletons and corpses. Zombies as hotel bellhops, with cheeks made up to look slightly less dead. Creepy.

Booker's back in the game (being played by the GM last week, we all thought he was acting strangely out of character!) and wasted no time associating himself with someone who seemed important - a vampire, apparently. Didn't try to drink any Château de Booker Dayes, though.

The rest of the party gathered information and were deciding whether or not to get citizenships as well, seeing as how Donna was acting a bit Cyndi Lauper and just to be safe, maybe the rest also should be citizens. May we live in interesting times and all. Interesting, necromancy-infested times.

Can I roll sense motive on the fruit?

We're back in Rifts, heading toward the city of Soul Harvest. We met a fairy on the way, who was trying to get us to eat and drink things, but we declined. A lot.

Soul Harvest ... is an interesting place. They have undead as servants (whether or not they're unionised is a good question), and subject people to an introductory film to welcome newcomers. It ... was a bit dull. But we don't think it's brainwashed us ... We hope.

Damn dice behaving like dice!

Our last instalment of Hell on Earth had us in a hospital. The one where they make those bloated zombies we've kept seeing. We fought the doctor who created them, although for some of it we were just flailing around at the zombies rather than being competent fighters ... oh well. At least we lived to tell the tale!

The GM's a pain in the ass

Our Victorian superheroes went across the globe to India, where they were subsequently attacked, because roleplaying game! :D

I'm glad we're both stupidly heroic

Now that people were back from Reasons They Couldn't Make Last Session, the rest of us filled those people in on what we'd been up to in the meantime, i.e. killing bloaters on a riverboat and freeing a bunch of oar slaves.

There was a CLUE and everything, pointing toward a hospital about a mile or so away, so of course we decided that's the place to go. (It probably doesn't help that it seems like three people in the group have either Heroic or Brave or both.) Going by boat through the swamp soon attracted them bloaters, who promptly started to try boarding our ship - or at least drag us down to their level.

In the end, to cut a long story short, traumas were got and we got to the hospital.

Averaging our way through the apocalypse

It's a new year and new zombies to kill!

We went aboard a riverboat, which we meant to blow up (because zombies) but the evening was young and so we decided to check it out first. There were zombies, but there were also a number of perfectly innocent slaves that the zombies hadn't yet eaten, so we freed them.

It was the best day ever.

Headbutting the axe by accident

Ahem.

Our Victorian characters came across some Greek-or-Roman deities. Attacks were made. Damage was done. Mars/Ares had his weapon taken off him by a cheeky Irishman and Achilles was frozen in time and then stabbed to death, because people like him are not supposed to be alive and real and stuff - especially not if they're foreigners! (Groan.)

In the end, we moved back to our modern day characters who ended up at some kind of carnival/circus type thing, because that's never creepy.

A great game to get to know new people

We were meant to have the (potentially) final session of Legend of the Five Rings this time, but two character sheets were missing, some friends from Sweden were over for a quick visit, and when the GM had phoned one of his flatmates to bring him a book he had forgotten at home we decided to scrap the session in favour of Our Favourite Card Game. Everyone could join!

Of course, mutterings of a "Swedish conspiracy" were abound, yet in the end there was no outright winner, as four people had the same amount of wins, and those people were not all Swedish. So much for that conspiracy, eh? ;)