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

 

This looks like a job for fusion blocks!

Sooo ... Gorbash went and had a chat with one of his dragon friends, and now we're apparently supposed to go on some kind of suicide mission because attacking a flying fortress - the Death Star, basically - is somehow a reasonable thing to do???

#NotAllWizards

The next three months in the lead-up to the actual adventure passed with remembering the name of our wizard friend (or frenemy if you're Elani), huzzah! We put Dominion points into Denethor's continued work on our airship stroke floating pantheon, everyone adding their own special something (i.e. Words) to it.

We found a husband and wife team of Tyr worshippers, one of them being a child of Baal. They helped us with a few things, and even though some might have wanted them dead to begin with, it did appear that they were not there to kill us. Considering they could basically teleport us, that was good. It meant they could take us to north of Icewind Dale where another Tempus-worshipping Godbound was trying to pick a fight with goddess Auril. He was persuaded to stand down, after a special guest appearance by Tempus himself.

Elani was busy trying to keep a couple of our followers on the straight and narrow, because Gruumsh is making his presence known.

The tourney was going great (well, what remained of the participating Tempus and Gunda Paladins ended up having to be disqualified because they got all murdery with each other), until - with impeccable timing - three children of Baal appeared in the middle of the arena just as the finale was about to go down. They asked what year it was and then disappeared. We're puzzled by this, because as far as we were aware the children of Baal were all dead ... save for the guy we met earlier.

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'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.

Opening the portal is less epic and poetic than I imagined

Innuendo aside, we went to clean up the abandoned town of Angels. The cleanup was successful. We also found some Shifters who realised that they could open the portal without having to kill people. Soooo ... they opened the portal, avoided activating some very nasty runes, and we went through ...

Scenery was a little less epic than pictured, although we recognised it from visions, dreams and such. Now we just need to find the missing people and get them back through the portal without waking up Nxla ...

Morality is overrated in the 'Verse

Again we were a couple of players down so we decided to play the Firefly boardgame with all the expansions again (except the Kalidasa expansion, which we didn't know about until we had finished). This time we actually managed to get a winner, and with a little time to spare! It was a closely fought match.

People were eaten by Reavers, the Alliance space deck was reshuffled an ungodly amount of times and fun was had.

First, however, we start with some "before the session" chatter from Facebook because this is why I love our group!

Back to the scene of the final boss fight!

After Orlandis decided it wasn't the best idea in the world to kill the Sister of Battle after all, he and the rest of the ground party carried on into the heart of the icky flesh mountain. They encountered the final boss creature thing and killed it.

I believe there is a big crater in the ground where flesh mountain used to be.

Meanwhile on the ship, the space crew continued with repairs and preparing for the attack of the Tyranids. And then they lived happily ever after ... or at least until we pick up the story again at some point. :)

We had our chance of dying horribly but we failed

Better late than never, right?

Nemiel managed to one-shot kill the demon prince and the group lived to fight another session. Somehow, despite a surprising number of botches around the table, we made it to the end of the session with only minor mental trauma - and a dead NPC, which Orlandis took very hard because they were friends.

Meanwhile on the Arkadius, the ship was being shot at from the ground and had to go into hiding behind a moon. Oh, and a small group of Tyranids are coming our way. Fun!

What kind of a spaceship IS this?!

With Steve and/or Dave being a new wallpaper pattern, it was glaringly obvious we had a bit of an Eldar problem aboard the Arkadius. Rusty managed to shoot one to oblivion before Nemiel showed up. Fulgentius tracked down all the intruders for us to take down. There were flamethrowers shot down airshafts and everything!

On the bridge, Orlandis used gravity (or lack thereof) to play Asteroids with dead bodies and a hidden Eldar. Lucius wasn't too keen on being thrown around the place thanks to the creative piloting.

Once the intruders were dispatched of, a team were sent down to the planet below to infiltrate a mountain complex. Turned out to sort of be less of a mountain and more of a problem. A problem which wasn't solved when Nemiel managed to summon a demon prince from the Warp.

But at least we fired a warning flare first ...

Relic is like Talisman, but enjoyable

At very nearly the last minute we realised that the GM had the week off, and so there would be no Rogue Trader that session. Keeping up the 40k theme, we opted to play the 40k boardgame Relic instead, and for once I actually brought the quote pad with me and kept notes.

Can I use the ship's guns to shoot something on the planet from space?

Arranging a visit to the planet down below, the Captain and the Librarian were very nearly ambushed by some Chaos beings. Fortunately, the Chaos beings were taken care of by the cunning use of the Arkadius's onboard guns, blasting the Chaos to bits from space. A warning flare was totally fired beforehand, honest guv ... *cough* There's a fetching new crater on the planet now.

The actual, human, residents of the planet were much nicer.

Then some Dark Eldar came along, but umm, we may have shot them slightly - using the bigger guns of the derelict ship and a blatant disregard of the laws of physics. But hey, at least they weren't pirates out trying to steal the ship (again), and hopefully the Explorator won't have picked up the super virus from a transmission he listened in to.

The 40k universe is lovely

Here is a post containing quotes from two sessions: first, the character generation session and then the first actual session.

The crew are aboard the Arkadius, and went to look for a derelict ship that disappeared around 50 years ago but appeared to have been stranded near a planet for thousands of years.

Most of the player characters decided to have a look outside the Arkadius, except for Rusty, who sent Brian the trainee instead, because s/he didn't want to risk another ship getting stolen from under his/her nose.

The player characters are as follows:

• Fulgentius Sophus, Explorator and mostly metal
• Nemiel, Librarian (not the Syfy channel or Dewey decimal kind, the Deathwatch kind)
• Orlandis of House Dravonica, Rogue Trader and Captain of the Arkadius
• Rusty, Voidmaster of unknown gender who is a leaf on the wind

Stop turning me into a Space Marine!

We didn't start the campaign this session either, because we were too busy continuing the character generation. This is serious stuff!

On the plus side, the GM had made a mistake with our Veteran choice, which meant that we had to do some rejigging of points and Edges/Hindrances. On the plus side, my character didn't have to have a major phobia against cold, tetanus and sitting down. Only getting one fate chip is probably going to prove inconvenient, but not as inconvenient as those phobias. So yay for that!

I've never been so tense to start a boardgame

After finishing Hunter, we've had a couple of sessions of boardgaming. The first one was zombie survival game Dead of Winter, and yesterday, we played the XCOM boardgame - which is a very stressful (yet fun) experience.

We also started putting together characters for the next roleplaying game we've got lined up: Deadlands: Hell on Earth. It's like Deadlands, but in the FUTURE. With MUTANTS. And RAD POISONING.

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!

Arkham is FULL OF OWLS!

A year ago, pretty much on the dot, we played Sleepy Hollow: The Boardgame A Touch of Evil. As there were wishes to play Arkham Horror, a boardgame based on Call of Cthulhu, that's what we ended up doing instead of roleplaying.

We would not recommend having seven players, four of which had never played the game before, because it takes forever and you don't get very far. If anyone wants to know what the game is like, it's Talisman meets A Touch of Evil. If you've never played either of those, that's a lot of time saved, and well done to you for not having been sucked in. ;)

Dude, where's my app?

Last week, we procrastinated. This week, we met an old, blind bloke who seemed to be on eerily good terms with the genestealers. He got what was coming to him - as did the Judge. Sneaky bastard. One of them was split in twain by a large sword, which made us all feel a lot better.

Eventually, after slaughtering a number of the Xenos scum (in their sleep, badass bonus points for us) we found our way to a couple of rooms - one, a greenhouse, the other, a walk-in freezer. Something managed to escape the greenhouse. The patriarch genestealer in the walk-in freezer ... is no more.

And as we went back up to the surface again, Brother Drem'Tu started to fix the ship Gyos crash landed last week. While this was going on, the magnetic storm had lifted and we could finally communicate with our superiors. After we had done that, this part of the adventure was concluded, so we have a few weeks break from Deathwatch now, and will get back to where we left Changeling on Tuesday.

There's disciplin, and then there's DISCIPLIN

After a most epic battle which ended with us saving the Dreadnought (who had a convenient bit of amnesia, go fig), we continued through the desert, finding where someone had been spying on us. Then we went to the town where the Governor was supposed to have showed up if he hadn't got lost somewhere along the way.

Eventually, we found ourselves at the Rift, in a camp with a commander more than happy to execute his information officers. (Hence the mop and bucket. You'll see.) We also managed to recruit a poor young lad into the Imperial Guards. We'll see how that pans out. He might forgive us eventually. Maybe.