In space no one can hear your stress

We are trying out the new Alien RPG! The first session turned out to be a lot about getting used to the system and how Stress dice work. We found ourselves getting super stressed very quickly. Heeh. In the end there were some house rules we decided on for next time.

We began by having our characters waking up from cryosleep five days earlier than scheduled. Another spaceship had been found. There was a dead body floating around and a Synth that wanted to murder us. It very nearly succeeded because Stress is a tricky mechanic and we may have been doing it wrong? Oops.

For the next session again, we found another ship, the Potemkin, where we also came across a teenage kid hiding in a room. Wait, why do these things sound familiar? Is there a ginger cat around here somewhere too? ;)

And the last thing, which I believe was on a third ship, we found bodies hanging from the ceiling. Like thousands of them. Space is apparently not a very nice place, but then we're probably about to find some of those alien things, aren't we? Things are bound to go downhill from there!

Introducing the future victims:

• Don[atella] "Dry" Martini, pilot
• Joshua "Josh" Brown, doctor
• Michael Knight, Colonial Marshall

 

Tearing down windows and doors and I could not find eyes like yours

This whole session was basically all dream. Except this time they were in the same one (sans Val) - the Egyptian primordial sea of darkness thing. Lottie turned on Auspex and discovered her and Frankie were floating in what will basically become aura/everything.

A pyramid and an Egyptian god emerged from the water, Tatenen with the sun crown. Turns out if you use True Sight on a god you can get a seizure, a splitting headache and get glowing, golden eyes.

Tatenen wanted to know the cousins' names. Lottie negotiated some sort of immunity for three people each of their choosing in return for giving the names. She only really wanted the immunity for Julius, and offered her other two spots for Frankie. He chose to decline them, and after giving it a lot of thought chose the other three people that are now connected to their new unlives: cousin Val (who we guess was left out of the dream not because he was lucky, but because he's now an NPC), and ghouls Benny and Angela. Tatenen told them to stay and learn.

They observed fighting snakes-with-frogs-heads, the sun rising (doing them no harm, which was nice), and then blood with black aura streaks gushed forward, so they ran to avoid it. There was a creepy and quickly developing foetus that came out of a piece of flesh, and another god stabbed himself in the right hand. It was all very strange and neither characters nor players had a single clue WTF was going on.

Frankie woke up with bite marks in his hands, and since he botched the understanding roll, Julius must have some kind of a rat problem. Lottie woke up with golden eyes - huh. Val, it turned out, had also had wet dreams, but in the other sense of the word. They told him and Julius about the weird dream and about what happened the night before.

Lottie worried that she was the one choosing Julius as a sire because she had asked for him to be protected at the very beginning of time. He tried laying those fears to rest, and complimented her on her new eye colour, which she now hopes will be permanent ...

I've been trying to get disowned for years!

The weird thing here is that my first note from this session reads: "Spider god: GTFO." I can't remember if this was us encountering a spider god, meaning we need to GTFO; or if it was a spider god telling us to GTFO; or if it was a spider god actually hiding in that hill that people were trying to dig up, and therefore that's why we should all GTFO and stop digging. I think my personal RAM is on the fritz.

People are leaving the camp now, at any rate, and we suggested the powers that be that they should go to where Erdugald was, but beware the murder hornets ...

Murmei practiced making leather armour so he can make snakeskin armour for Deadorna once he gets enough XP to get Blacksmith at Adept, because the armour will be a lot better then. His sister is considering making him fancy ink to write with as a thank you.

In the end we bricked up the bit where people had got closest to breaking through to the thing inside the hill, so we can leave the place and the barbarian tribes can ward anyone off from getting too close. A job well done, we think!

Everything IS better in Brooklyn

Lottie met back up with Julius who told her about an 8th gen/800-year-old vampire called Ekaterina the Wise, a.k.a. the vampire Val met the previous session. Her jaw is all messed up from an attack (that was meant to hurt people close to her?) that didn’t fully heal when she was turned. They decided not to tell Frankie about this, because a Frenzying Brujah in the living room sounded like a bad idea. (Frankie's murdered sister Caterina is his berserk button.)

Meanwhile, Frankie and Val (henceforth an NPC as the player dropped out) went to a restaurant in Lexington to meet up with "Cola" Schiro. Cola was successfully intimidated and spilled that he'd met Jeanine before, at a party in Staten Island, and had been giving her info for the past two months while she used him for snacking. She was particularly interested in Frankie as of three weeks ago (read: a week before the cousins were turned). Once interrogated, our cousin Vince was left to take care of him.

Weirdly, Prince Wellsley showed up in disguise to tell us he wanted Umberto Valenti disposed of, quickly and quietly. He will grant us one question truthfully answered, but we decided to save it for later.

Back with the Malkavians, they do some research, because parks are losing their auras. There's a planned road called Anaconda Street, and its planned path goes through a park. The work started the same day our cousins were Embraced. The park, it turns out, has "no voice".

They also met with Aisling Sturbridge, a Tremere friend of Julius's, to investigate the park situation by way of a ritual. There were runes, blood and a chalk circle and they felt uncomfortable. Lottie insisted on her blood being used instead of Julius's.

In Harlem, the guys investigated the scene of the drive-by looking for clues, and followed a trace to an old Family safehouse, where they discovered an old vampire with a forked tongue - a Follower of Set. He wanted an unspecified favour in return for giving up the location of Umberto Valenti. Val tried to Dominate him, but it didn't work and the guy got a bit grumpy. They then had to high-tail it back to Julius's Manhattan place to not get fried by approaching dawn.

Lottie and Julius had a long-awaited talk about blood-bonding, deciding to say yay to double-sided, nay to one-sided. We'll see what happens with that. It was getting light outside, so everyone went to bed, meaning to discuss the night's details the following evening.