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.

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. :)

If everyone hates you, you have to be clever

Here's another collection of quotes from our Victoriana game, played over a few weeks in July and August 2012. This is part two of the character generation session, so nothing in particular happens, aside from generating characters and talking bollocks.

We were going to be playing Rogue Trader, but unfortunately one of the players called in sick, so we played Forbidden Stars, a 40k boardgame, instead, which I inexplicably managed to win. But, in the words of Orson Welles, "If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story", which is basically what happened.

I’m making my own rules

Having come across reviews of the Princes of the Apocalypse campaign, the GM (i.e. me, who has never really run a pre-written adventure before) was happy to conclude that feeling like a shit GM was less about actually being a shit GM and a lot more to do with a poorly edited and very confusingly laid out adventure book where the reason you can't find something is because it's spread out all over the place, and not necessarily in chronological or alphabetical order, or any other kind of order you would expect.

Anyway. The characters continued the partying at Feathergale Spire. Aial decided to check out the commander's private quarters while no one was looking, and then set it on fire to hide evidence. The order lost all of their initiates in the ensuing fire ... but of course the party wasn't present at the time the fire went off. Kyla, who earned a gold star with the order for killing the manticore last session, was taken aside and got the "hello, my name is Elder Knight and I would like to share with you this most amazing cult" talk. She later helped out with healing the wounded to show that yes, she's definitely initiate material. (As if.)

After a night when the party was randomly attacked by jackalweres (why they're not called "werejackals" we have no idea), the party headed down the road toward Womford. Stopping for a bio break, they came across some water themed soldiers that were suitably skewered by Lo-Kag and then turned into kebabs by Schnicktick.

You know, it's like there's some sort of elemental theme going on here ...

This conversation has ceased to make sense

After examining some shallow graves, the party headed over to some kind of tower that they could see in the distance. We were intercepted by ginormous insects that tried to eat us. Adventurers, like we are prone to do, dispatched of them. Kyla took some of the meat with her, because it seemed a good idea at the time.

The tower was full of knights and things. They had a kitchen full of new recruits trying to make dinner, and Kyla wanted to cook the insect meat. There was only one initiate who didn't consider the underground-dwelling ankhegs to be too "spiritually dirty" to eat, but he was probably just starving.

The party was invited to stay for dinner, and the entertainment of the evening turned out to be manticore hunting. Again, the monster was dispatched. There's clearly nothing odd about this order of so-called knights. Nothing at all ...

Bacon-flavoured breakfast ale needs to be a thing

We are now in the final dungeon, a big cave system called the Wave Echo Cave, because we're still trying to find Gundren's missing brothers. So far, we've met an ochre jelly and assorted map-making.

We left this session being attacked by some ghouls. Two out of five characters are paralysed ...

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!

Don't fear the Reaper - fear us!

After deciding to implant the dead body with a smartphone, tucked nicely somewhere under the stitches from the recent organ transplant, Special Agents Mulligan and Cully headed to Providence to follow up on another lead.

In a cottage somewhere in the woods, we found one of the other transplant cases, a "tortured artist", who was still semi-coherent. He was cuffed to a woodburning stove and tranquilised. Meanwhile, Cully looked at his paintings, lost 5 Sanity, and had to have a breather outside.

That's when the remaining two transplantees showed up ... and we had to barricade ourselves inside the artist's bungalow. Axes were involved. Cully sneaked out of the back door, aiming to get to the stolen car the transplantees had brought with them. If the mastermind's head was in it, we could destroy it, and no one would have to die.

Well, the axe-wielding maniac had to be taken out, and the 12-year-old girl unfortunately noticed the not-stealthily-sneaking FBI agent and started shooting. Fortunately, she missed. Everyone else, however, didn't.

And then we lived happily ever after, humming along to Don't Fear the Reaper ...

It's all gone a bit Laudanum

Here's a collection of quotes from our Victoriana game, played over a few weeks in July and August. The three players (one regrettably dropped out between character generation and the start of the game a couple of weeks later) were elves, and they woke up in a field somewhere in the English countryside, not far from a burning airship.

Robert Affette ("Bob") was naked, Cedric Ignatius Dashwood ("Cid") wore ill-fitting clothes (because they were Bob's), and no one dared touch Unlike's rags. No one remembered who they were, where they were or how they had got there, but the burning airship and dead parrot probably had something to do with it.

Trying to find civilisation, they came across an awkward lord, Ralph, and his shy Irish farmhand, Ted Doyle, who were discussing what to do about the pesky drainage in the lower field. The gang invited themselves to the lord's manor, where they got offered tea by Ted's missus, who insisted. A lot.

After some investimagating, it was decided to go and talk to a nearby vicar, who might have some clues, and so the vicar did. He recognised them as the paranormal investigators he had hired to suss out what the ghostly nun haunting grounds of the new-built rectory wanted. Poltergeist phenomena occurred, orbs went missing from crypts, churchwardens muttered, and the residents of the local manor house might or might not have murdered one of their maids.

And not once did anyone bat as much as an eyelid at the adventure being set at the most haunted house in England. Guess not everyone is as obsessed with Borley Rectory as myself. *cough* As I ran the game, there was less time to write things down, but I'm planning on transcribing the sessions in the next few weeks.

What shall we do with the drunken Sidhe?

After being assaulted by Rat Boy (again), Finn locked himself in a cupboard and completely missed Alysiana in the nude. Jack and the GM were sitting next to each other talking plot, which the rest of us didn't catch, but we were happy bunnies anyway, because even though Finn crushed his precious eggplant, perhaps Flora could restore it.

Jack decided to have turned twelve recently, which means the party in his honour was in fact his birthday party. He's now a Wilder rather than a Childling, and it has caused him to stop drinking, much to Finn's dismay. On the plus side, we entered the Dreaming, where Alysiana got very drunk on chimeric ale. Meanwhile, Flora tried her hand at drug-pushing, with Set conveniently being somewhere else entirely, being useful.

And then we tried to charter a ferry across a river, even though we didn't think to ask until afterwards if it would be big enough to take Set, seeing as he's, y'know, an enormous Troll. We left off on the shore, by a big swamp, having just been dropped off from the boat. Here's the journey up until then ...

Go directly to jail, do not pass Wollaton Hall!

Finn's back, falling off a chandelier when waking up from a drunken night. We all got taken to the police station because the police arrived suspiciously early because they heard a couple of drug gangs were fighting it out at the Hall, and when the police looked through the house, found a pound of drugs in a safe. Turned out Jack's event manager was responsible, so we were all let off.

After speaking with our friend the Count, we got invited to a party, to celebrate Jack being raised to Baron. Huzzah! He immediately got plastered on really strong Troll ale and had to be restored by Flora. While Finn was on the scene playing guitar, Set ran off to help when hearing a Redcap had broken into the kitchen. This turned into a showdown between him, the Redcap, Hugo (one of the Count's men) and Jack, who had come to see where Set had rushed off to.

The Redcap, as it turned out, was breaking in to attempt reading poetry at Sophia Valdemar, the Count's daugher (whose brain tumour we still haven't been able to find a cure for), but he got locked up in the toilet instead. At least he wasn't killed.

Meanwhile, at the main table, Alysiana tried flirting her way into the skirts of a beautiful Sidhe woman, and Flora sat there nursing her ale, pondering what she'd put up at the crafts fair suggested by Jack. The session ended when we were just about to enter into a full-on drinking game, so that'll be for next time ...

So Soylent Adeen are people?

Before we finished the adventure - which we technically did last week, but we spent a whole session wrapping things up, half the party went to the Queen's Medical Centre (a hospital in Nottingham), to a ward for terminally ill patients, trying to get to Kaddapolix before he popped his clogs. As it turned out, there were evil Fae about, who looked decidedly like old ladies ... Then there were the bit where Jack researched Alysiana's non-Fae self on YouTube and came across a film that had us all talking. Meanwhile, Alysiana had something big to announce. A theory of who she really is ...

If you need to ask what your own vomit’s Realm is, you’re playing the wrong game

Did we finish the adventure? Does Set never see cause to facepalm? We were hot on the heels of the woman who killed Tag, and we also took her unconscious accomplice hostage. And spoke to the Count again, yay! And were attacked by some weird shadow thingy which made Set and Finn very, very ill indeed.

On a scale from one to ten, how Batman are you right now?

These are a collection of more quotes from 21 June 2011's Changeling: The Dreaming roleplaying session at Chimera. We just saved them for a rainy day, such as, when we've not had a session that week. Like this Tuesday. GM was missing, so we ended up playing some Munchkin (The Good, The Bad and the Munchkin to be precise) in store before calling it an early night. Quotes could probably be salvaged, but this is more fun.

It’s like stamp collecting, only more morbid

Hot on the heels of last week, Finn, Flora and Ronke decided to break into the house of a shady lawyer, while Alysiana kept him out of the way by interviewing him for a job on Jack’s legal team … and then we decided to meet up with him in the Arboretum, where he nearly died. And then we ended up finding a plot somewhere near the end of the session, by going to Mansfield.

Can "brainalyse" be the official word for hitting someone over the head?

After last week’s adventure concluded, a new one begun. Finn found an old friend’s necklace in a pawn shop and got a vision of her being killed by drug overdose by some people (rather than doing it herself). Finn wanted to sober up for the first time in his life and went off with Jack to use some very strange methods of intimidation on the pawn shop owner, like … actually paying for stuff.

Meanwhile, Set did some actual police work, and Alysiana used her own methods of investigation … Although it was more non-stop rumpy-pumpy by the sounds of it. Flora was suddenly glad she had decided not to go with her after all.

And then there was the spontaneous singing, where we joined in with the neighbouring table singing The Hero of Canton …

Welcome to the zombie disco party!

Last night at Chimera, we didn’t actually play Changeling: The Dreaming because our GM was otherwise engaged, you know, with actual real-life commitments. Instead, Our Deadlands GM brought along some boardgames, and as the group was in a cooperative mood and there were six of us (yes, we had a guest star!), we settled on A Touch of Evil, or as we like to call it, Sleepy Hollow: The Rip-off. We were mainly involved with trying to figure out how to play it and actually playing it, so the list of quotes isn’t as long today.