We’ll cut the narrative off at the pass and leg it

We were half the team down last Wednesday, so those who were left played the Shadowrun card game in what we later discovered was the hardest mode possible, because we drew opponents from the wrong deck. Oops. Anyway, this is why this week's post instead is going to be a trip to Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and what happens when a group of Jurisfiction agents are told to go on a team-building exercise inside its pages.

The agents were told to strictly stay out of the narrative ... and while roleplayers would normally decide to completely ignore this, they didn't, so I never got to inflict my specially prepared Vogon poetry on them. I are still disappoints, two years later.

Here's the crew:

• Arthur Hastings, senior agent and a former military man and now occasional assistant to Agatha Christie's Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot.
• Captain Haddock, an old seadog fond of grog from Hergé's Adventures of Tintin graphic novels.
• Kaa, a snake from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.
• Macbeth, a mighty king of Shakespearean fame.

The first (of two) parts are when the agents have got aboard the Vogon ship and lasts until the Heart of Gold is about to be hit by a couple of Magrathean missiles ...