What Would Lottie Do?

Theo's Vampire 101 class continues, teaching Frankie about the Sabbat. After being asked why they'd have to wait until Elysium before nominating that Toreador guy to Scourge (isn't the point to get in there first, so why wait?) he's told the "wheels are already in motion" for it.

Lottie and Julius decide Aisling should be in charge of the Fetish they're making - no, not the one they seem to have about blood bonding and then having sex in torture rooms with drains in the floor. This Fetish is to do with hiding memories. They decide to leave a cryptic message in the package Frankie is supposed to pick up from Seb tomorrow, so they'll get a prompt to go back to Aisling to restore their memories. They also discuss what/how much to hide away.

When it comes to the guys in Red Hook, Val shows up to report on how his chat with the police contact went. Turns out the cops further down know the charges are bogus, but they're scared to bring it up with their superiors? Smells like mind control. Theories abound. They should, however, not go charging in there, because that sounds exactly like what they'd be expected to do - and exactly the kind of stuff Lottie said not to do. She would be so proud of her cousin!

In Queens, they start looking at brass to use for the Fetish. It has to be brass, and made in the shape of an amulet. The piece they have appear to have been a part of the steel mill explosion in Red Hook, belonging to a Japanese guy. Hopefully they can shift the bad mojo from it before making it a magic item?

There are no safe mental spaces

Lottie and Julius take the Staten Island ferry, while being followed by the Nosferatu Primogen. Sneaky Prince. AltLottie comes out to play and she, along with Julius, agree that killing Jeanine is bad.

At Theo's, he looks as the dagger and says she's seen both Jeanine and Charlotte with it. Frankie agrees to sign a formal complaint against Jeanine. As the two Brujah leave to find their Primogen, another car T-bones them and tries to run them off the road and shoot at them. Theo gets some shots off before Frankie gets them out of the way. (This will have “interesting knock-on effects” says the GM.) After all, if the unknown assailants shoot back with the Tommy guns they're sporting? Heads probably go splat, which is bad for vampires. Failing to find Don Cerro, they end up at ... a house where we know from previous (way back near the beginning of the campaign) that Charlotte has two apartments in? And Theo has a key?!

Staten Island smells funny. Following a scent, the Malkavians find Jeanine in an inn, looking ... poorly. Tommy the Fool tries to get a room, but they take Jeanine up to the room she already has, where Julius pricks her finger. Jeanine has somehow become Thin-blooded?! How the fuck is that even possible?! This complicates things enormously. What to do? AltLottie suggests skipping town. Julius declines.

I'm the Aston Martin of barbarians

We met with barbarians! Deadorna and Valgai offered to heal people attacked by blight elks, but the barbarians refused. Deadorna spoke to them, because barbarians are her people after all. They mentioned a Sovereign Oath and a Blood Daughter.

Murmei made his sister a set of snake armour. It's dark green, making her look like the Green Arrow, which is excellent news.

We met with Kathman, the chief witch of the Vajvod tribe and also Deadorna's mentor. He's very knowledgable. Apparently there have been visions of an icy cold creeping into the world from Korratix Domain - that place we were stuck inside which had an opening to some kind of ice troll world ...

Elindra offered to bestow Xanatha's blessing on Deadorna, who chose to think about it.

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?

Gunfight at the OK 5th Precinct

Sometimes we have to remember that we aren't just vampires, but also gangsters, and do some gangstering.

Well, first of all Janine is showing herself to be very untrustworthy by sending Frankie a messenger with a fancy bottle of wine. He declined to try it, and he also didn't use the messenger boy as a snack. In fact, he was kind enough to give the kid a bottle of cheap booze as a tip.

Lottie is trying to find a HQ for us, sort of a blood bank perhaps, and maybe it could masquerade (har-har) as a clinic for sailors ... We'll see how that develops.

Anyhoo. Now that we're made men and woman we were going to a meetup of different mob bosses, as some stuff had been going down. Even more stuff started happening. Gunshots. Someone had gunned down a mob boss outside the 5th Precinct, and there was more gunfire about.

The mob bosses at the meet had to be evacuated, and shit would probably rain down on all of us. The speakeasy had the emergency shutdown orders executed, and we strongly suspect one of our NPC cousins to have taken a photo of Lottie's dad from the speakeasy - possibly with a view to kill him and set him up as a fall guy.

What's worse is that our sires seem to know about what's going on here, and we don't like it.

Oh, and there was some frost on the water as we crossed That Bridge again, but hey it's only May, so it's perfectly normal, yeah?

It had to be maggots

In this thrilling instalment, Elindra was ambushed. It turned into Valgai also being ambushed and them killing a bunch of people before they had a chance to kill them. Maggot bomb spells were thrown, and it was gross and painful.

They caught a survivor and decided to interrogate him, while another of the survivors had legged it through the south gate. Murmei eventually was helpful in getting to some messages that were found, and another link to Ravenia was discovered.

Plot, thickening, and so on.

Like Jesus but with a feminine touch

While Denethor worked on sealing the hole back up, we (well, mostly Elani) talked to the moth man, the Child of Auriga, who thought it would be a great idea for there to be more of its kind. So Elani got to work and spawned about a thousand of them.

We even had time to go on a few tangents, which has been a while. One was which dragon breath would be most useful, another which Marvel or DC superheroes we best represented. Gunda liked being a Thor/Wonder Woman cross.

Aaaand then we went back to Auriga to say hey, we got rid of the Rotting Court, and ... she was different. She was much stronger, but her memories were very different. What did we mean her not being able to separate herself from the World Engine? That wasn't a problem. She also didn't remember a bunch of other stuff, and Yeenogh freaked out when meeting her because there was so many people there who also ... weren't there. It seems Auriga has a bad case of split personalities going on, and one of them is a kid called Hedwig the Winter General.

Apparently the Court of the Sign of Madness is also in the house!

This isn't a good thing.

Jeremy Corbyn sends a Tesla into space

Our GM said this session would be a quick way of deciding what we've done in the six or so months which have passed in-game since our last Godbound adventure. By "quick" we obviously meant to take the whole time only progressing through the first three months, because hey, that's us.

In those three months we managed to visit another town. It was on fire, so we put it out. Or, well, Denethor did, and he put up a building in his own honour and everything.

Elani made friends with a pack of hyenas ... which turned into an awful lot of hyenas, and there was a gnoll and a demon lord called Yeenoghu and demon lords aren't a good thing. They were sent packing.

Gunda is still struggling with being seen as divine, because as far as she's concerned, she's a follower of Tempus, and so should others be. She's the Jesus to Tempus's Jehova, if you will. After some clerical advice, she decided organising a tourney in Tempus's honour would be a thing to do.

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.

I'd apologise but this is hilarious

Ahh, our first Hunter session since May 2014. It's good to be back, even though we're technically back in Derby.

So, the world's about to end in about a week's time and apparently, there is some old Japanese legend of people who bear the mark of a curse that go through a sacrifice of fire in order to cleanse the world of the curse. It looks like an orange circle, this curse mark thingamajig, and is currently occupying the skin of both Eddie and Tilly.

Since May, we have of course lost Tommy Crane's player, but we've instead gained Alex Surname, a 30-35-year-old war veteran who spent a couple of years in a mental hospital being treated for PTSD after coming back from a tour in Afghanistan. There was a werewolf, and there are no werewolves in real life, that sort of thing. He also made friends with Keles Moriton (formerly known as Rommel) in Afghanistan, and now he told Alex to make friends with us lot.

Alex also has an Alsatian, but an adult version called Karl. He pointed out that Tilly's 10-week-old puppy wasn't a puppy at all, and despite the party's best efforts at gesturing him to STFU and not trigger the Russian, Zolistagol finally realised that Rommel (the puppy) wasn't a puppy and freaked the hell out. It almost ended badly.

Not as badly, however, as things ended for Eddie's "chemical analysis lab" in a generic warehouse. The hollow Nazi gold bar we found turned out to contain something that turned people into radioactive barf zombies (!), and they're hell-bent on spreading themselves upon Derby like a bad case of Ebola. Err, yay?

Like the Salvador Dali of monster hunting

So, the team - okay, Tilly - has acquired an Alsatian puppy/tentacle monster dubbed Rommel (because reasons), who might or might not have decided to do its business in Trevor's Land Rover.

Meanwhile, Eddie, Tommy and Zolistagol went gallavanting around the underground passages we recognised from the previous adventure, and found a tentacle monster disguised as a lady - who picked up the Molotov thrown at her. They responded by chucking the whole petrol can at her, but unfortunately Zolistagol's player forgot he has the "Heroic Molotov" skill. Which could have been useful at the time. At any rate, explosions were exploding.

Then we hung out with the eastern European dude who might or might not have gone by the name Rommel during World War II, we're not sure. Either way, we're seeing the light in the tunnel that is this adventure - we just have to make sure it's not a train about to run us over. Which is just as well, because when Zolistagol finds out Trevor scratched the paintwork on his precious, vintage Mercedes, there will be blood.

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.

Why does this CD rack have 'Made in R'lyeh' on it?

Still slightly mentally scarred from seeing big, red eyes in the sky, the show had to go on. Cully went back to North Platte to do some research - not that anything useful really came from it. Bones and McAffe headed up to Three Mile Lake to check if it was a portal to R'lyeh or not. They founds lots and lots of flies, so ... probably not. Or maybe. We're not sure yet.

Mulligan, meanwhile, went to have another look at the girlfriend-murderer's house, and by the computer, found a peculiar sort of CD rack looking thing. When the right sort of rolls had been made, it was found that the discs contained a very long and rambling message about the End Times. The ones who bothered reading this lost a bit of Sanity in the process. (Cully declined to read any of it for religious reasons.)

In other news, Marshal Bones is down to 20-something Sanity. He might not last to the end of the adventure.

Is sugarcane flammable?

This session was going to be the last one, but as luck would have it, combat tends to take longer than expected, so we had to pack up and leave it for next time.

You see, we went back to Manchac. The town had been torched by some bad guys, who had driven up to Morgan Freeman's house (the one Sutcliffe didn't burn down). We requisitioned a vehicle and drove up there, blew up one of the trucks and walked through fields of sugarcane toward gunfire.

On the plus side, we found the dame we'd been looking for, and her brother, and a Voodoo priest.

On the downside, we also found a gang of baddies with a tommy gun.

On the other hand, the invisible monster was also about to show up ...