It's nice to have unlife goals

Lottie ends up near the Washington Heights library. It seems Lladislav the Tzimisce's return is welcomed. It's rather touching. While having a sniff around the place, she also discovers some Jewish gangsters who seem to be involved in this, and a Setite is following her? (Is Ellie more concerned about her than the Prince?) She then overhears Turlev and Blaise telling off Lladislav for having "undone decades of work" with his stunt in Harlem. He really can't be around when Ecaterina gets back - unless he, too, would like to become a head shorter.

Meanwhile in Harlem, Val's car screeches to a halt in front of Frankie. Julius is also in the car, badly injured. They speed north to find Lottie, but Julius sends Val off to the Bronx while he and Frankie jump out of the car and run on foot to get to a safehouse near Columbia University. He makes some decoys and sends them off in a different direction.

Lottie does a number of impressive jumps between moving cars to avoid getting followed to get to the second nearest safehouse - incidentally the same one Frankie is carrying Julius to. Finally the two player characters are in the same building again!

There's a hole in my city, dear Liza, dear Liza

We’re back in Thistlehold! Talking to the head witch, it turns out the rubbings we had of the stone tablets were nothing more than simple merchant receipts or something like that. So much for that, huh?

Murmei is told that his sister Rilia has gone missing, which he already knows - she is, after all, a full-fledged barbarian now and calls herself Deadorna ... who is shown the place where we caught the Flayer, and told the story of how that came to be.

We see Elsiosi a couple of times: first when she comes around looking for her betrothed (who hides in his bedroom, pretending not to be in), and second when she comes around sporting a corrupt basalt ring. This time Murmei isn't hiding and, after botching a roll, tells her stories of how brave they were in Davokar.

There's a message to meet with a Prios person in a bar. The big, city-wide warning bell, which has been silent for the past four years, goes off. There are Colossi coming through the forest - witches normally ride those? Deadorna talks to barbarians about a well, and we finish on what sounds like a great big explosion in Thistlehold. Not so much an explosion as a giant sink hole suddenly opening up and swallowing a considerable chunk of the city.

Say no to unsafe blood sex

AltLottie came out to play, suggesting that maybe Angela had been mindwhammied by Julius at a previous date and that's why she was so, ahh, low on inibitions last session. (She was so forward even Frankie was thrown by it, although he didn't exactly complain at the time.) On the plus side, AltLottie also insisted on Val getting un-mindwhammied.

Julius also finally got the Charlotte situation, with his (presumed) relatives being Jeanine's ghouls. Allegedly. Is Jeanine the problem or is she being set up as being the fall guy? Is Charlotte the actual problem here, maybe? What game are they trying to play? We concoct a plan to meet Charlotte at Val's place (her being his sire and all) and watch her aura for clues. Maybe someone's mindwhammied HER?

You're one of those Old Ones, aren't you?!

This session was AMAZEBALLS.

We had no dreams, yay! Val went off doing business stuff ... because his player sadly wasn't feeling well. This meant the only guy with an actual Driving skill wasn't present, which caused a few issues. (Turns out you if you don't have the skill you can't roll it, unlike Rifts where only stunt driving kinda thing requires the skill but generic "Sunday driving" doesn't. Or at least it does in our game.)

Julius was kind enough to gift us all some armoured clothing - in Lottie's case an Edwardian evening dress. Lottie asked Julius to get some kind of tracking thing be put on her so he'd be able to find her.

Lottie, Julius and Frankie went over to the house where Lottie grew up, and where her father Andreas is being cared for by Angela, who was finally going to be turned into Lottie's ghoul. The two Malkavians headed upstairs. After tasting his blood, Julius let Lottie know that Andreas isn't her father after all. Her mum had a thing with a bartender in Sicily before emigrating, so Andreas has never been a blood relation ... and subsequently Lottie isn't actually a Mangano after all. They decide it's probably best not telling anyone else about that.

When you have ridiculously high level Dementation, you can cause someone severe mental anguish for the rest of their miserable life by basically tearing their soul apart and putting it back together - repeatedly. Julius was happy to do this because FUCK THAT GUY Andreas Mangano! Lottie found Julius super hot torturing her not-actually-biological father that they ended up having sex in front of him afterwards. Well, he was a drooling wreck anyway.

Meanwhile downstairs, Frankie and Angela sat down together, because neither was welcome upstairs for obvious reasons. On the plus side, this meant the gift of the very fancy bottle of wine could be delivered, and, uh, asking Angela out turned out to be a LOT easier than Frankie expected. (The actual exchange had me as a player roaring with laughter.) He might've had a crush on her for the past couple of years, but apparently she's really rather into him as well. They had a walk around the garden.

Hrm, so anyway, making Angela into a ghoul went off without a hitch. The three vampires then went over to the Blackthorne to meet with Benny, so that Frankie also might get a ghoul. Benny was, uh, less easily convinced and required a lot of alcohol. He had to be mindwhammied (before AND after) to not freak out about his best friend and brother from another mother being a vampire. We'll see how that works out. At least we all have a ghoul each now.

Why did I end up with a fucking monster as a sire?!

Val and Frankie waited for Marco, who turned up with a couple of cabaret girls ... and turned out to be very keen on blood. He ... he might have become a blood junkie already?

Julius was finally introduced to AltLottie ...

I have a note that legit says "Frankie awkwardly having The Talk with Lottie" which I think refers to how she's a big girl now, and ... well, she's a vampire now, so not like she can get pregnant.

We met up with Charlotte at a house that contained ghouls gone wrong. She introduced us to two teenage ghouls who are alleged descendants of Julius, but that Jeanine has been keeping them as bait to see if Julius would break the Masquerade - because she’s pissed off with him spurning her a century ago. We don't know if this is genuine or not, but that's the explanation we were given. Lottie was very freaked out.

So, how can we plot to get Jeanine out of the picture without triggering Julius, or killing anyone - and making sure Frankie isn't on the line considering Jeanine is his sire.

Do we have dinner coming to dinner?

We wanted to go on a raid against the White Hand warehouse, but realised we were way outgunned. Genius idea - go to a hotel and borrow their phone and call the cops on the warehouse (because that's totally how the mafia do things ... we've realised much later when we found their code of conduct on Wikipedia). Then we just had to sit back and wait for the cops to bring the numbers down to a better level.

While doing this Frankie also received relationship advice from his cousins. Lottie's advice might have been slightly better than Val's, who was very matter-of-fact and didn't actually address the problem:

"How do I talk to her? You're good with dames, what do I say to her?"
"Well, if you want a girlfriend, she's technically the only and/or logical option. So good for you."
"... Uh ... thanks?"

At least Lottie suggested getting Angela a present, maybe a really fancy bottle of wine that could be used for when she ghouls her. The fanciest bottle available was swiftly requisitioned from the restaurant where we had camped out, and it was WELL fancy.

And then we had really weird dreams again. What's up with those?

Girl's gotta have bubbles

Okay, I have no notes about this session, and I don't remember exactly what we did, but whatever it was it was GLORIOUS.

Other than we found a way to get in touch with Julius, because he didn't give us a number to call him on, because he's been around centuries before telephones and he's old-fashioned that way.

Was this the session where Val's car got wrecked, perhaps?

Can we blame Canada if there's a devildemon incursion?

Sooooo the current situation is that we're now working from home and are doing our two weekly games (currently Rifts and Godbound) over Discord. The current situation, and self-isolating for a couple of weeks due to cold symptoms, are not particularly conducive to good mental health - even for hardcore introverts like me - so I've had real problems concentrating recently. And my concentration isn't the greatest at the best of times. I'm trying to work on it, but it's difficult. We're staying home and we're staying safe, that's the main thing.

That being said, this post is a combination of three sessions, so ... yeah. One of the sessions was mainly battling with a dragon, so we didn't say a lot anyway because we were busy with dice rolls. But ... yeah. Yeah.

THAT'S how you kill someone!

Elindra had a look around town and came across some shady people in an inn. The other two went to the Ordo Magica, as it would probably be prudent for Murmei to report for duty now that he's in town. The surly gatekeeper wasn't too happy with us trying to skimp on formalities, especially not when we kept coming and going all the time.

Turned out "Master Vernam" had signed himself in the ledger after his untimely demise and taken a book out of the library. A book on how to break links to objects, such as that crown that the elves were looking for.

Puzzle pieces suddenly came together and we tracked down the skin-stealer, the book and the skull/crown thing. Valgai very nearly died, what with going down to zero hit points because his Bale dice have "always had a personality". A murderous one at that, it seems. ("More of a chaotic neutral screw you roller dice.") The GM rubbed it in a bit extra a few days later: "Just thought I highlight that failing 11 and below on 6 rolls in a row is about 0.83%".

Well, at least it turned out alright in the end. Bad guys dead, us still alive, book and creepy skull/crown combo artefact recovered. Now where to put the crown so that no one else thinks it's a good idea to put it on?

Don't walk off alone, especially to the toilet

We started our arduous trek across the Titan mountain range. When we stopped and got firewood we were attacked by a snow wraith, a dark caller and two draghouls. We just about made it out of there alive, much tanks to Elindra's assassin senses tingling so she went running after us.

A note on the dark caller turned out to be written in troll runes - which Murmei, to everyone's surprise, could decipher. Turned out the group had been sent to assassinate Elindra.

While Bartalom lived through the battle, he didn't survive the evening. Someone slit his throat, which wasn't noticed until Valgai noticed a bloodstain on Murmei's robes. Oh yeah, Keller had bumped into him earlier, and caused an INK BLOT on the page. Keller was nowhere to be found, nor was Bartalom's Sunstone ... until we (well, Elindra) tracked Keller down. He was hiding out in a dilapidated tower. Feet were stamped on, because you don't just go around killing wizards, that's not on!

This is going to be a long trip

We've started a new game: Symbaroum (read more about it here)! This first session was mostly putting our characters together, and after much ado, the line-up is as follows:

• Elindra: A changeling (an elf raised as a human) rogue/assassin
• Murmei: A human wizard's apprentice and son of a noble
• Valgai: A human warrior and veteran of many a battle

The basic plot is that the population is moving across a big mountain range. We're one of the few remaining groups and it's now our turn to do the trip. An order of wizards have decided to give one of their apprentices the job of chronicling the journey for posterity. It's a very important and prestigious job, and Murmei (hapless idiot that he is) totally bought that explanation. In truth, they were just happy to be rid of him for a while.

Thing is, other people might also want to be rid of him for purposes far greater than "he's a bit of an idiot", hence why Valgai has been hired as his bodyguard, and Elindra as ... well, also kind of a bodyguard. Murmei is just happy to be there, because writing down everything that happens on the trip (provided the ink doesn't freeze - this is a great concern) is super important.

There is a caravan getting ready to cross the mountain range at first light tomorrow, and the group asked the caravan's leader (a merchant called Argostos) to join, along with some NPCs. Argostos was happy to let the party join him. After all, considering one of the NPCs, a wizard called Bartholomew, has a Sunstone on him, and having magical artefact that can bring light and heat as the first snowflakes of the season starts to fall might be a very good idea. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it ...

#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.

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

You make Samurai sound like dicks

So things went a bit hectic with opening a café and stuff, but here are - finally - some quotes from the most recent game we've played - Legend of the Five Rings. I was barely conscious during these sessions, which is why three of them are combined into one here, as not a lot of stuff was noted down at the time.

Adventurers are the worst kind of people

After having named the goblin hostage Sooty, we continued through the woods with him (her? it?) as a guide. It took us through some dangerous bits, and in one particular place, we encountered a wolf pack.

The wolves (there were five of them) surrounded Rhogar. He went down, and failed the first Death Saving throw. As the rest of the party tried to get the wolves off him, what should have been a fairly easy "we have two rounds to heal him" didn't work out as planned, when Rhogar - after the GM prophesised he'd roll a one - rolled a one, thus instantly failing two Death Saves. As you only get three shots at not dying, Rhogar actually died. The rest of the players seemed more upset about this than Rhogar's own player, who immediately started working on rolling up a new character.

Meanwhile, the party went on to find Cragmaw Castle. We managed to find the boss room almost straight away. In it, we found the boss (King Wossname) and a few of his assistants. We also found Gundren, one of Hematite's missing cousins, and a chained-up elf.

Heroic battle win. Gundren was healed, and the elf turned out to be a rogue by the name Theren Siannodel. How fortuitous, we didn't have a rogue in the party before!

We'll miss Rhogar and his weirdly awesome Russian accent, but the adventure isn't over yet.

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.

Objects in the rear-view mirror may explode quicker than you think

We started where we left off last session rather than doing the entire scene again from scratch.

While Ugrub was held at gunpoint by the remaining survivor from the van, Dru got out of the car and planted explosives under the van and then telling everyone to get the hell out, as there was only a six-second fuse. Ugrub still got shot but managed to run off, with Dru running after him and Teddy hiding in an alley in the other direction. Phage managed to drive off, but surprisingly, so did the van. Phage stomped on the brakes of her car and the speeding van blew up a bit further down the street, causing a gridlock all over downtown.

She then picked up Harold, a.k.a. the guy we were supposed to convert, and drove him home. Because she suspected him of not telling her the whole truth and nothing but the truth, she shot him in the leg and then wanted Dru to talk her through patching him up over the phone.

The rest of the gang re-grouped, with Ugrub patched up, and walked for a bit until they managed to flag down a taxi to go to the gated community where Harold lived. As Phage got there first, she threatened Harold's wife Marie, because she wasn't panicked enough that a stranger had come home with her husband bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound to the leg.

PB&Z sandwich with a side of squishy mage

As Jayson woke up all sweaty and squee-worthy from the bad dream, Gorbash headed out of the window to find the zombies that were allegedly on the way. While waiting, Jayson got dressed (bow-chicka-bow-wow) and Baradhi went downstairs to help himself to a drink.

There were indeed zombies on the way. And a mage.

We slew the zombies (hard buggers they were too), and in a stroke of genius, Gorbash flew down and grabbed hold of the mage ... squishing him to pieces. Apparently that worked better than trying to shoot him with firebolts and laser cannons. He then went on to see if the body or the head would hit the ground first, because science, and because Gorbash is a young dragon eager to learn.

When we got back to HQ, Baradhi went and got tooled up in a weapons shop. He got a number of grenades, despite Jayson's objections. Baradhi didn't get himself any kind of skills to be able to handle the grenades - much to the seller's dismay - but at least he got a friendly cyborg to help train him a little.

While Baradhi practiced his new explosive toys, Jayson practiced with his new bow and arrow and then went to bed and finally got some proper sleep. Meanwhile, Gorbashi surveyed the land in dragon form only to find a place in the distance with the charming name Soul Harvest, which is probably where we need to go. Yay.

I have to lick … I mean, tend to his wounds

Part two of Meanwhile in Narnia, where the team of Jurisfiction agents have finally made it into Stephen King's The Shining, which is apparently a children's book now.

At the snow-covered Overlook Hotel, the agents look for statues of what are probably petrified Narnians, avoid being read by diving behind a bush and then interrogating little Danny Torrance, busy riding around the hallways on his tricycle. Admittedly, the GM has never read The Shining and therefore based everything that happened here on the Stanley Kubrick film, which of course has very little to do with the actual novel.

Also, there were clues, leading Alice to suspect Mr Tumnus from Narnia might be involved. Who else has hairy legs, horns and wears a red scarf? The Turkish deligh definitely must come from Narnia!