Can we put this moat on our expenses?

We continue our journey toward Mexico, the land where there are absolutely no vampires whatsoever. Except we found a bunch on the way, like a whole storage warehouse full of coffins. There were talks of constructing a moat and filling it with water, and ... yeah.

There were fewer coffins by the end of it. And then the vampires found us.

I need more than a Venn diagram

Gorbash went to speak to Ixchal, and managed to encounter an adult evil dragon calling himself Roka. He was clearly looking for something, such as the feathered serpent which Booker let slide to someone he shouldn't have. Apparently they're rare and super magical or something like that.

"Show me yours, I'll show you mine", Roka [insert lineage blurb here] said to Gorbash, who complied. Ixchal was less willing. Especially when the other dragon the first one rode into town with also turned out to be Splugorth-aligned. We really hate those guys.

Someone's also trying to get to Booker's head to get the information about the feathered serpent, so he's currently renting a place in downtown Stormspire, as if someone does something there, there will be hell to pay.

Is Davokar in Narnia?

Turned out that yes, ice trolls could get out. While we were camped up inside Elindra's witch circle, four of them came sniffing about, along with an abomination and an undead that sort of looked like a mummy. Luckily, we kept quiet and they went away - and we weren't going in the same direction anyway. Not that we got lost on the way or anything, not at all.

When we did get our bearings again and set off in the morning, we eventually came across a troll in fancy clothing, but he was badly injured. There was a stinger left in his neck - apparently he had been attacked when asleep - and his friends were infected too. With some nasty parasite thing, eww.

How to solve this? First by removing the stinger remnants so he can actually regenerate, and then by letting the pet spider poison the troll to kill off the parasite but not the troll - using healing to make sure of that.

Anyway, it turned out the troll was Damaka, one of the two trolls we were tasked by that arch troll to find. Well, here he is, and we just saved his life, yay! And there was Erdugald as well, the mysterious place, which turned out to look like a tower.

A very moist tower, that also played with our senses because we're not trolls. Going down into the structure we eventually came across a dead troll, who looked to have had the same idea as us, i.e. use poison to kill the parasite. Unfortunately he also killed himself in the process.

And then we heard FOOTSTEPS approaching ...

Can we run away now?

We came across a clearing, of sorts ... It was sort of an island, but instead of water around it, there was a deep abyss and a rickety rope bridge. We carefully crossed the rickety rope bridge one by one and had a look around. Turned out it used to be a village and they all belonged to a cult, and sacrificed themselves.

We found a troll metal sacrificial knife in a sarcophagus, and decided to skedaddle before night would fall. Watching from the other side of the rickety rope bridge, there were ghosts and skeletons and it was like Halloween had come a month early. They didn't cross to our side of the bridge, though, so we got out of there.

And then we found another clearing and a hill with twenty graves on. Eight or nine of them cracked open and we just about managed to fight them off when a bloody Death Prince emerged. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu...

Heeeeeeeeere's MOMMY!

We had a look below the floor boards and found some interesting-looking items. They're a bit necromance-y but ... who cares? We almost forgot to check somewhere else, much to the GM's dismay. When we did find the thing, it turned out to be a hole in the floor. Below it was a magic circle made of mosaic, which might have been active for centuries.

And then the inevitable happened: Murmei's mother arrived in town, and she was NOT happy. Why had her son not advanced? Why had he not had a bath? Which of the two girls she'd brought with her will be the next Mrs Vesuvion? Find out on the next The Ambrian Bachelor.

You can definitely feel the d4

Carrying on up the river, the threat of having his li'l Captain forcibly removed made the keelboat captain sing like a canary. Not that he had that much to say that the party didn't already know, but still.

The unconscious crew were set ashore a few hours upriver, while the party then moved on. After stopping off at Summit Hall to rest up, have a meal and dump the keelboat captain in a dungeon, they continued further upstream to where the people from whom Shoalar obtained a certain set of books had been ferried across. They then found the place of the ambush and made their way to the suspected hideout of the water cult.

Method acting on the Jeremy Kyle show

After rescuing the family, who were so kind to let us stay over, from their burning house (only one casualty), we were informed by Sutcliffe that he'd seen the car we were looking for - and had been asking about around town the day before - and we all shook our fists and blamed evil petroleum company Hexaco for the arson.

Because little do we know it was actually Sutcliffe's Manitou that was responsible ...

We decided to go to the oil derrick that the singer's brother allegedly (read: according to Hexaco) sabotaged, and found a bloke willing to take us through the swamp on his bateau. Three hours later, we found the deserted derrick and investigated.

And then the bateau guy was sliced in half by some kind of invisible spirit creature that we tried fighting. We survived, but only because it decided to dissolve into thin air after Sutcliffe managed to hurt it with magics. We then had to fix the bateau so we could get out of there, as the spirit thing might have seen us as Hexaco people returning to keep mutilating the precious eco system of the swamp - which is probably what caused the destruction of the derrick in the first place.

But now it's dark, and we're three hours away from being out of the swamp ... and there are alligators nearby ...

We found a clue and we killed it!

Still one player down, Reynard and Slick went looking for clues - and killed him, but they didn't know that at the time. Sam and Mary stayed back at the boarding house and tinkered with the whirlygig, which Sam then took for a spin ... to dispose of the clue body the others had brought back. In the end, we met a shady character (they're all shady, aren't they?) who offered us a job: to break his friend out of prison. Money-hungry Slick accepted before we actually had a chance to get the details. Such as: who that friend actually is, and if it's really in our best interest to break him out of a very scary jail ...