Paranoia isn't a bug, it's a feature

 Before heading off to bed, Julius was fed some bottles of blood to make him wake up again, and that's just as well, as half his face seems to be missing. (Thanks, Ecaterina!) That's going to take a while to heal back up.

Lottie lures a group of fratboys back to the house as Julius is in no position to go on a hunt in his current state. The couple's particular way of feeding is somewhat unsettling to watch for anyone who isn't them.

They then have a catch-up. There's going to be an outright war with the Sabbat, and an Elysium will have to be called ASAP. The gold auras are gone. As new safehouses are needed, and a safehouse for LJ isn't safe if anyone but them know about it, Lottie hands Frankie the key to Jeanine's place, saying Jeanine left it with them (they swear they didn't kill her, but don't tell him they tortured her), that it's intended for him, and unlike the places he might want to go in Brooklyn, it's warded.

They have an outing to said apartment, near Morningside Park. Looking around the place (using one of the fratboys as a canary) they come across a kitchen drawer of "oppressive nothingness" and Jeanine's will, listing Frankie as her heir ...

Julius quickly averts his gaze from the creepy drawer, but Lottie goes full on Auspex on it - and starts having a seizure. She leaks blood and gold from her face, and Julius goes after her.

In the Dreamscape, as that's where Lottie ended up, she's seeing both Nordic mythology's icy plains with a giant trapped inside the ice, and a snake wriggling around his feet trying to eat through the ice. The Egyptian mythology's pyramid is also there, and she can see shadows of herself and the others from previous visits. The pyramid is bigger and more ornately decorated.

Neith, the goddess who wasn't there last time we encountered the Egyptian mythological dreamscape, talks to Lottie, offering her all the knowledge and answers she wants/needs, but it will hurt. She's fine with pain, as long as it doesn't hurt Julius. The gods propose a bargain of "perfect preservation" of LJ's relationship, but that sounds too much like a trap so Lottie doesn't take them up on it. She's told to climb the pyramid ...

We don’t need this level of fanservice!

After a two-month break, we're back in New York. The Prince's ghoul delivers a note to Lottie which confirms that the broken ghouls are indeed Abrogard relatives, and they are indeed Jeanine's. The letter is the Prince's handwriting, but it's perfumed. Is he siding with the Toreador for some reason?

Lottie and Frankie drop into Theo's to let him know maybe getting too hard on the Toreador is ill advised at this stage.

Lottie and Julius go to Angela and instruct her to get Andreas into whichever nursing home will take him at short notice. She's also instructed to (and then made to forget having done it) calling a particular phone number to say on behalf of Charlotte Hansard, "J Calloway" isn't to disembark any ship. Could Jeanine be headed for Staten Island, where the Anarchs are?

Frankie, meanwhile, goes to get both the knife and the plans from Benny. The note left by the contact in the planning office is weird. It's in English but is hard to read, and looks like a lot of nonsense? Frankie brings it to Lottie and Julius, who get weird vibes off it. They try to look at it in a mirror, in case of some kind of magic filter, but it still doesn't work. It's put in a locked drawer for later.

The three of them then go over to the Staten Island ferry. Frankie drops the two of them off and drives off. Lottie and Julius are met by Tommy the Fool, a fairly useless mook, in case they need someone to do the heavy lifting. Or maybe in case they want a snack on the way, you never know.

Smite, smote, smitten

In this round-up post of the last of the Godbound campaign for now, we did some big battle scenes, but they don't render well into quotes because it's a bunch of dice rolling that keeps you busy. It involved going to Thay, where it turned out Varion used to be one of the Red Wizards. (Elani wasn't impressed, but I don't think any of us were in fairness.)

We connected to Faerûn's world engine so that was finally stabilised and fixed and thus because proper gods, and in the end managed to convince Mystra to give us a chance to show that we're fixing things so there's really no need to unleash an apocalypse after all. We did good. Praise be to us!

The Emperor ... selectively inhibits serotonin re-uptake?

We parted ways for a bit in order for Gorbash to go back to Blackstone Juggernauts and give John a heads up about the trade agreement Booker had negotiated with the murdery alien dudes. They had hardly finished talking when the guy showed up. That was surprisingly quick!

Booker and Jayson went to see a battle, and then went back to wait for Gorbash at a hotel in Roswell, where the group had decided to hang out.

We later went back to one of the battlegrounds to salvage whatever could be salvaged, and set Booker up as a one of them, by changing an ID of someone who was the closest match we could find. Unfortunately, it was done by Gorbash and all humans look pretty much the same to him ... He did finally get to use his Singing skill, though!

The plan being that Booker, disguised as lone survivor Nathan Anderson, would go into Coalition States and gain access to the Emperor by being the sole survivour of a terrible battle. Because surely the Emperor would want to pat him on the back for that?

Ohh, THAT apocalypse

The symbiote previously known as Barry was apparently actually called Bally according to the player's notes. We're not sure if that's an improvemen or not.

Anyway. Plot progressed. Turns out some bad nights were caused by visions of some cultists bringing Nxla back. Yeah! Them other cultists don't know how to act. And so on. There was a guy there who blended in with the ceiling, had a very pointy nose and a forked tongue and looked like it has something to do with Coalition State.

We went on a quest to speak to Psyscape, by way of meeting the Grey Seers again. We didn't cause a cell to burst into flame this time, so I think they don't mind seeing us again.

Are we dead yet?

Last week ended on a cliffhanger - a plague bear was coming right for us, along with some well-dressed dude. This session started with the well-dressed dude getting into our van while the rest of us took the bear down.

The dude didn't get to steal the van, which is what it seemed like he'd be doing. Instead, he told us he was trying to find some kind of lab that used to be in the area. That sounded like a good idea to us, seeing as how we might find a cure for whatever disease we'd manage to acquire last session.

We drove through the woods, following the tracks of the abandoned vehicle, and found a large log cabin. The people inside were doctors and quite friendly. They even offered us (Maggie, Vincent and the NPC) to freshen up. Meanwhile, outside, Jack patched up the two holes in his windshield and Duke stayed put in his mech suit. A black rainstorm hit, which was only a problem for Jack - luckily, he managed to avoid it.

Thanks to Duke deciding to switch his heart monitor on, and realising the only heartbeats were those of us, shit kicked off. Apparently the friendly people were in fact undead and everything around us was just an illusion ... The showers were basically just mud. So now, not only are we infected with icky plague, we're also covered in mud. Great.

Didn’t you say we were going to finish tonight?

Last session we had a shoot-out in a café, where we were supposed to meet up with a team of Hunters from Nottingham. Instead, we got attacked by some creatures and had to leave. Tilly got a bit upset because a creature was actually an innocent (she can see people's souls now) ... which didn't stop the rest of the party killing it.

This session we went to Trevor's and met the Hunters there instead. It turned out we all had pets, in one way or another (Eddie is Trevor's pet, vodka is Zolistagol's, and then there's Tilly's little Rommel, of course).

The other team were a bit weird - one of the women was about as doolally as Trevor's sister Agatha, and she talked about monsters being in the house, but we didn't see any. The Nottingham team spraypainted a corner of the living room.

And then came a policeman, Detective Black, who asked strange questions. As his car left the driveway, there was a noise from the roof - David Hayes (Trevor's bodyguard) had shot the guy. Great. Super-strength junkie woman (who kept babbling an awful lot) dragged the car up to the house and hid it in a barn, because now the mansion apparently has one. How to get rid of the evidence? Well, apparently creatures like the one Rommel is (when he's not just a puppydog) can go all CSI and eat any forensic evidence. So that's useful - and ever so slightly horrifying.

Do you sell disposable shotguns?

We had food again, which Eddie found himself actually enjoying (even though it was a really poncy kebab with green things in it).

We planned.

We got attacked.

At Trevor's mansion decent-sized house, after catching up with Agatha and the woman we kept safely locked up in an upstairs bathroom and sending the latter on her merry way now that she's feeling better, a brain-sucking creature was going to stick its tentacles in Tilly's head, but luckily, Trevor was there to blow most of the creature away and scare off the other one. He needs to find himself some disposable shotguns because every time he uses one, it blows up thanks to the wrath of God.

At Tommy's there was strange writing on the walls and in his wardrobe, a mysterious hat box. With a big stone egg in it that couldn't be knocked over. It was so peculiar that he decided to put it in the bin for safe-keeping.

Eddie called one of his "cleaners" to Tommy's, seeing as how there were some corpses there from last week's session (not to mention this one), and the guys all decided to help - even when the instructions were "here, help me cut up these bodies". Zolistagol appeared to fit into the role of butcher a little too readily ...

Arriving at the rather gory scene, Tilly freaked out so much she went to watch Top Gear on Dave, later uttering things like "the Bugatti Veyron is a good car, apparently".

The universe wants us dead

It's not going well. After last week's party deaths, Reynard removed Sam's steam-and-ghost-rock-powered Gatling gun from the burning remains, to ensure it wouldn't blow up, while Slick helped himself to the contents of Gunney's pockets. Slick then decided the best thing was to put a bullet through the steam canister to make sure it wouldn't blow up in our faces - so it blew up in his instead. Pretty much.

Mary dealt out some healin' to the reluctant alchemist, and we headed off down the maze. We managed to find our way out of it eventually, only to find some aliens with force fields for protection. They were really difficult to shoot at. In fact, not until Slick put out Slumber Gas and Greek Fire did we manage to even damage one of them - but sadly, Slick died in the process because those aliens do pack a helluva punch.

Our previous encounter meant that we were getting low on chips (Mary had to use her two legend chips not to lose limbs), and once you're out of chips, you're out of life. Or, if you're Reynard, it doesn't matter, because you can't spend chips to negate wounds anyway. First Slick went down, then Reynard.

Fortunately (?) both quickly felt much better, even if they looked very Death Becomes Her, so to speak. Mary is now the only original PC left standing, but hopefully, with two Harrowed in the party, maybe she, Jackie and Scraps the dog can still manage to save the future. At least four of them have died trying.

Bringin' out the mad in Mad Science!

We finally managed to proceed on our way toward the Devil's Tower. Jackie, the NPC from the future, really wondered why the hell she picked us of all people to help save the world, seeing as how we've been doing so well this far ... On the other hand, we've met a Sioux who told us some useful information (except for a reliable number of how many baddies await us at that mountain) and gave us a blessing to travel through Sioux territory.

Also, Sam decided to work on his latest invention and left steering of the steam wagon train to Gunney and Reynard, which was ... interesting. Well, it was speedy, if nothing else. The two ladies of the party exchanged knitting patterns, because that's what women do, right? (They more likely compared guns and ammo, to be fair, but shhh!) Slick, when not trying to feed Sam people, spent most of the time in his wagon trying to stop all his bottles falling off shelves whenever we had to brake. And swallowed a Manitou in the process. Oops. May we live in interesting times.

We are the worst saviours of the future EVER

We were heading toward Salt Lake City The City of Gloom by train - well, except we had to catch it first, and had only just missed the previous one by a day. We had to camp out and Gunney attacked by a big maggot-looking thing. Not that he knew anything about it, he was fast asleep. Its smouldering corpse was ground down to powder by Slick, who added mint and called it a fine gum, but then again, his tastebuds have become rather peculiar as of late.

We then had the idea of flying to Devil's Tower, which ultimately ended in Reynard falling out of the damned craft (it had no seatbelts, see, because those things hadn't been invented at the time) plummeting to his death. Except he's not called "Lucky" for nothing. If he HAD died, though, he would've actually become Harrowed. Alas, he's still in the world of the living ... somehow. Well, at least until the next session.

Now we're stuck in the middle of nowhere, because our method of transportation decided to crash land because it wasn't made by our Sam. Sam, in turn, had his horrible cough cured by Mary, and the black gunk in his lungs turned out to be souls ... which Slick saved some of in a jar. Like you do.