Eat the Book Lady, even if she looks gristly!

The party loot the corpses of the people foolish enough to try and murder them last week before deciding they should probably start heading back.

Murmei, meanwhile, discovers that the owner of the Silent House (my notes for this session are really thorough, the previous sessions are scant at best, so don't look at me) lives in Ravenia. That's the same kind of area where his family's lands are.

He then decides to look and see if he can find any information about his beloved's family. Turns out one of them live in Thistlehold, and the place where we went in a previous session and saw monogrammed chairs had one that matches this person: RG. Do we really need further evidence that the Garlaka family are shady as fuck, though?

Seeing as how no one's come to pick him up, he's eventually thrown out of the Queen's Legate when they have to close for the night. Elsiosi intercepts him on the way home, and wonders what he's doing out alone late at night on dangerous streets. He pointed out he's a skilled adventurer, whereas she is a lady and should definitely not be out alone at night, so he escorts her back to her inn. Instead of coming upstairs for a drink, he bid her a good evening and stomped off back home to sleep.

In the night, the rest of the party return. In the morning, it turns out that the copper tablet contains the Prophecy of Sarkomal. Something about a woman on a throne. No one can make heads nor tails of this.

We go to look at Anadea the Templar's house, now that I believe she's no longer alive. There's a malnourished young mare cat in the box. Deadorna feeds it and decides to make it a pet while the others search the rest of the room.

There's a mysterious note and a map of what appears to be some kind of underground system. There's a sedative potion and some kind of reddish truffle-looking thing, but it's far too rare and advanced for Alchemy Novice Elindra to be able to identify.

I'm the best support class ever!

It's been a while since we were last on Faerûn with our new gods. Of course, last time we were thrown back out into the world after some time away in the Night Roads and other shenanigans. Our friends were basically gone, and things were looking rather bleak.

Maybe things can be less bleak going forward, because now we have clerics and paladins and rangers, oh my! Basically, because a bunch of gods have died, it seems we're a bit more powerful and if people choose to BUH-LIEVE then they get their powers back that were previously bestowed upon them by other gods. So that's pretty cool. (GM has also said he'll be using this version of Faerûn next time he runs D&D, which means our characters are going to be the gods of the game! Which sounds awesome.)

Tilverton has been taken over by Lolth and her people, so the plan is to go get our pantheon's capital back, thank you very much. We just need to get there first. By way of creating wolf pups and getting attacked by gnolls.

From Splugorth with love

We got inside the flying fortress, somehow, and tried working the computer terminals to figure out where in this massive construction we were supposed to be headed in order to place the bombs ... and then we struggled a little to actually open the doors to where we were going.

We did decide that we were basically season four of Babylon 5, the plan being to have a big finale of the series, trying to cram everything in ... and then we find out last minute we got renewed after all and so then have to make up season five. Well, that's provided we actually survive this thing, because let's face it, the odds are not in our favour here.

I'm not foreshadowing or anything

Having defeated the group of spider creatures, we had eventually made it to the bottom of the stairs and found the other troll we were looking for, along with six trolls in a singing circle. That was the end of the last session.

In this session, we took on a couple of Spites - the creature that stung the trolls and infected them with murdery larvae! We also had to deal with the trolls, but the ones that were too far gone, we murderised and the ones that could be saved were knocked out and saved.

We realised that the Spites were coming out of a hole in the ground, and plugged it to stop further attacks. As a reward we were given the title "Defenders of Erdugald" and given a blue gem that will glow when Erdugal is threatened, which means we're supposed to come running to help save it again.

Oh, and it turns out that the Old Prios symbol Valgai's carrying is actually a spider symbol of some kind. THE PLOT THICKENS. Except not right now, because this is our last Symbaroum session for a bit. We're doing a few boardgaming sessions and then it's off back to either Godbound or Rifts, but we'll be back in Davokar eventually.

Welcome to Saerloon, home of ... stuff

The B team went to the city of Saerloon to investigate. Alwin managed to do a "Diagonally" instead of "Diagon Alley" on the way travelling through some sort of fire-to-fire transportation system and had a bit further to walk to catch up.

In the city, fighting ensued, because of course it did. We won, because we have plot armour. Or happened to be lucky. One of those.

(I may have forgotten to post stuff here for a bit.)

#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.

Ranger danger!

We went further into the Xiticix territory, there was an attack. Booker tried to "save" some people. They died. On the plus side, so did the gang of baddies that were stalking us previously, so it all worked out.

We also found a camp with a nexus point. Maybe we'll attack it next week.

Gorbash went to Psyscape to chat with The Dude, but the place left him rather unimpressed ...

I don't read the script, the script reads me

We discovered what the Key of Solomon is for ... and that it's an orb with a lady in stasis in it. It's pretty out there. It can also be very useful. We were perhaps not in agreement with the Grey Seers and the other Cyber-knight about what to do with it.

To cut a long story short, Gorbash wrote and directed a play based (in the end) on Booker's plan, in which Gorbash would say "screw you guys, I'm going home! And I'm taking the Key (and my new girlfriend who coincidentally is also called Maria) with me!" in order to lure the Coalition States into Xiticix territory so we could sit back and wait for them to obliterate each other.

Plan went off without a hitch. Even Hecate got in on the action, vaporising a dude. Good times!

I love being a crazy god!

We went to check out the local Center Parcs holiday resort thingy. There were orcs. The orcs were having an argument about who should get to have a key. Elani made everyone in the party look like orcs and then challenged them - the key should go to him (her).

The key was eventually found inside a platinum chest inside a vault. She showed the key to the orcs, making her alias the rightful leader of the orcs, and told them to go kill some Netheril to prove their worth. They went on their merry way and we emptied the vault and took the riches back to Tilverton to fund our new Pantheon.

Three sessions ago we only had a session or two left. At this rate, we have at least two more sessions. We like to take our time, clearly.

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.

Yer a druid, Harry

New game, new characters! Godbound is set in Forbidden Realms (D&D), but the characters turn out to have special powers. It's a bit like Hunter, or Exalted, or Changeling, except it's not World of Darkness.

At first, we considered being an all-Cleric party, and then there was a couple of Clerics and a Paladin, or a cleric, a paladin and an archivist researcher, and in the end we're like a druid, a blacksmith (who also does archiving and research) and Brienne of Tarth.

• Denny/Denethor: a human archivist researcher who is also a very competent crafter-of-things
• Elani Tiatha: an elf huntress with aspirations of becoming Boudicca, except for the dying bit
• Gunda: a human paladin of Tempus; see also: Brienne of Tarth

We started off by fighting some bad hombres and by doing so we discovered we had special powers, because we didn't use to be quite as kick ass as we had suddenly become.

Making your own gunpowder sounds way too methodical

This is short, but let's face it, it was a continuation of clearing out Rivergard Keep of a bunch of water cultists.

The party stormed the main keep, killed a wereboar, found a secret staircase and a hidden room, and really went to town on those cultists. They should now be considered a threatened species, soon to be extinct. As a GM, I'm very proud of them, of course.

I like my character but I don’t like my dice

One player down, we had a session where we couldn't start the Hell on Earth adventure, but instead of doing a boardgame like we'd normally do, we had a one-shot Dungeons & Dragons adventure. Or part of one, at any rate.

Our usual D&D GM would like to get to play the game as well as GM it, so I volunteered to do it, but having never run an adventure from a printed book we thought maybe I should give it a try first and see if I was comfortable doing it. Turns out I was so comfortable that I nearly wiped the party on their very first encounter. ;)

The players rolled up new level one characters to use going forward (that way they could get to try them out as well) and then we did as far as we had time for of part one of the 5th Edition starter pack adventure - being ambushed by goblins, finding a cave and so on.