Did we win?

So, we were faced with a number of creepy evil clowns and then a big octopus monster thing and creepy Walt Disney type dude? I may have got my notes and memories a little scrambled. We take it down, the deadland becomes ... not so bad any more?

Going back to the people we were trying to save and the town to tell them of our progress, Vince accidentally chatted up a widow by botching his pheromone roll. She was planning on dumping her kid and coming with us ... but um, we got the heck out of there. Because ain't nobody got time for that. He was very sad about it, it was touching. But at least he got laid, eh? ;)

Just like the French

It has been a while since we did this (don't believe the posting date, it's a month later) and my notes are a bit scant, so it's anyone's guess what we did at this point.

Something about an adult dragon being a dick, teleporting 5m up into the air, almost forgetting Booker, Jayson on the ground, and "Shemarrians here?!"

For the second session, we went to Roswell and looked at Naruni weapons and the Coalition States came to blows with the Shemarrians and Splugorth.

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.

I've seen this trap before!

We finally made it back to Deadlands. And then we very nearly died when we got inside a building with a big mechanical centipede. It was big and mechanical and in charge of people. Still, we all made it through and live another day.

The Paladin we were looking for, on the other hand, was not so lucky.

In Soviet Russia 'flubber' is a verb

We didn't have a roleplaying session this past Monday, so here's one we played earlier:

Our Soviet Russian characters have now moved into the 1980s, and oh the 80s music punning that ensued ...

The GM thinks this is a wonderful plan

We scouted out the bit around the nexus point. Turns out the Rakshasa structures around it were to protect from stuff coming through the nexus point, rather than protect from outside forces. The surrounding woodland was pretty much Narnia, what with all the stone statues everywhere.

A lot of prowling happened.

Gorbash has learned the Stone to Flesh spell, so he can turn the statues back into people, and practised it by turning a perfectly ordinary not-previously-a-human stone to disturbing results. Would not recommend.

Fact-finding mission done, we later decided to go back and attack the devils who had taken it over, because better the devils you know. (Yeah, that the Rakshasa are the good guys here (sort of) was painful to admit.) Right?

Falling for the plot device

Jack tried to flirt with the tanker truck driver he decided last session he was going to marry. She wasn't impressed.

Vince had a chat with the other Syker in town and Maggie discovered they had come to some sort of hipster vegetarian hideout where they grew their own food and served bran muffins and stuff.

We then helped to build a fence around the town and waited to be attacked. And so we were. Epic Syker blew head off bad guy - there was a mini mushroom cloud and nuclear fallout and everything! \o/

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.

Is now the time to botch?

Let's start by introducing ourselves:

• Duke Carpenter, junker and wannabe Space Marine
• Jack Burton, road warrior and van owner
• Maggie Murphy, lawdog
• Vincent Gordon, psyker

We kicked off the adventure by driving along in the van. There was a tree blocking the road and a military vehicle. It looked like an ambush, but we weren't the ones ambushed. Getting out (Duke only after putting on his mech suit) we investigated the place, and found dead bodies with flies all over them.

Later, we found a camp full of sick people. Luckily, they had nicked a device that allows you to check your health status. Turned out to be an infection of unknown origin. As it also turned out, some of us had become infected. (So that's why you shouldn't use Vigor as a dump stat. No wonder my character was the first one infected!)

Now we just need to find some kind of cure, before our skin melts off our faces too. Yay?

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.

Can I buy that die off you and chuck it away?

After more travelling, we came to the house of Agatha the Banshee. We gave her a nice comb and she answered the question we posed. We just had to try to remember (as players) whose magic book we were supposed to ask her about. As it happened, the person who always writes everything down hadn't written that particular bit down.

The GM "helped", saying it was a funny name and it began with "Bow", because apparently, when it had been mentioned in passing many weeks out-of-game previously, the person who heard it had said "it's funny, because it sounds like Bojangle". Let's just say the clue didn't help, because the name wasn't actually funny.

Aaaaanyway. We then came across a wizard in a tent, guarded by zombies. We got rid of the zombies, and instead of sticking around and getting information from the wizard, we got rid of him too. Oh the things we do for XP ...

The long, generic twilight of the BookWorld

We spent last session playing Zpocalypse again, to a much greater success than the first time, and we'll be playing that next session too. Since there was only like half a page worth of quotes from that session, I figure it would be better to post the two sessions in one go instead, so that's happening in next week's post.

Meanwhile, we're going back to the BookWorld to continue the investigations of the Jurisfiction agents. They've now left Wuthering Heights and decide to go and check out Twilight, because if you're looking for a modern novel that's badly written, you might as well just start there.

Amongst all the Generics in Forks High School's cafeteria is Bella Swan, who seems more preoccupied with dreaming about her bewuved Edward than the fact she's being accused of multiple homicides. (Each to their own, and that ...) And then the agents have a brainwave as to how to solve the problem of Bella missing from the narrative if she's brought into questioning: have Frankenstein's Monster take her place.

Roleplayers, eh? Can't take 'em anywhere!

50 Shades of Enid Blyton

We're doing some other bits for a couple of weeks or so, while one of the players is away. For this session, we played a two-player Jurisfiction adventure, to see what that was about.

Arthur Hastings, from Agatha Christie's Poirot novels, joined forces with the new recruit Dr Abraham van Helsing, from Bram Stoker's Dracula. The Bellman never told them that it's technically a single-player mission, but hey, if you take a complete rookie and the somewhat dimwitted veteran Hastings, it sort of adds up to a single, competent player.

The mission itself was a simple matter of internal plot adjustment: making Shadow the Sheepdog by Enid Blyton have a happy ending. It should have been a simple mission that couldn't possibly go wrong, but ... alas ... they got out of a sticky situation by teaching a bunch of villagers all about S&M, in a bid to turn their idyllic rural village into something from Midsomer Murders.

Murder on t' winding, windy moors

As we ended up playing Relic last week, which didn't end up being very quotable, here's something we played earlier. At a ChimeraCon in fact. This session was the Blogkeeper's first ever go as a tabletop GM.

To recap: A group of fictional characters, agents of Jurisfiction, are policing the BookWorld, namely:

• Alice from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Arthur Hastings from random Agatha Christie Poirot novel
• Frankenstein's Monster from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, nicknamed "George"
• Gabriel Betteredge from Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone
• Hari Seldon from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series (although he was mostly asleep)
• "Outlander", i.e. one of the players playing himself, from the Outland

At this stage of the session, the characters have been briefed about some gruesome murders taking place within the world of fiction - murders that shouldn't have happened in the characters' usual narrative - and after much ado, they set off into Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

They got to Trushcross Grange (try saying that quickly three times in a row!) only to discover the Lintons' fancy manor house was on fire, which is very out of character for it. But with their parents away, can the Canasta-playing Edgar and Isabella actually be saved or will the murderer have claimed two more lives?

Meta-gaming Blues Brothers kill Jesus

Since the last Changeling session back in August, about five weeks have passed in-game. Alysiana has voluntarily locked herself in a cell while we investigate who she is - or rather, whether or not she's really evil. There has also been time to make snazzy sunglasses, allowing a person to see dark fey, and a prisoner has been interrogated ... albeit not very successfully.

And then a group of angry Redcaps showed up, broke a reinforced gate camera at Jack's place (Wollaton Hall), and tried to get in and, err, cause trouble. And while this was going on, Finn managed to have fallen asleep on a chandelier - because that's the sort of mischief that might happen to a character when their player can't make the session. (We're waiting expectantly for his waking up on Tuesday, just to see his reaction.)

Oh, and Alysiana was given a once-over by a group of Nockers. It made for very fine roleplaying indeed. Could've been another one of them French art films ...

Yes, the inside of a demon looks like an Aero bar

Everyone present and accounted for, finally. Slick wasn't killed after all - he just passed out after smelling the rest of us. Then we were off to Grimme's Cathedral to fight a murder of demons. (Demons don't "flock" or "gaggle", they "murder", obviously.) The map the GM drew was a little ... special, but somehow we managed to live to tell the tale. This is it.

First encounter in the prison and one character is already unconscious

As it happened, we were a player down again – but a different one this time. Gunney woke up and promptly punched Slick unconscious for having given him food poisoning. The party then discovered that the meat he’d used for the gumbo was in fact “long-pig”, mm-mmh. So the unconscious Alchemist was tied up, because no one heard Mary’s insistence that it wasn’t Sam’s missing leg that had been munched on, but that Slick had just bought the meat from a shop around the corner.

Then it was off the Rock Island Prison, which we completely failed to blow up. Just trying to enter through the sewers made three characters fall unconscious for a bit, but at least they weren’t attacked – that page was apparently missed off on the print. Lucky us! We then discovered something akin to an old woman’s pantry in the Dreaming, which caused a couple of characters to gain a minor phobia, one aged a year and Mary … got lots of inspiration for her next dime novel, as she was the only one who didn’t fail her Guts check. (She’s surprisingly good at rolling high on those checks. It’s getting kinda suspicious.) We also managed to go the right way, quietly, and found Pete’s friend – but not that pesky diamond …

Oh, and biscuits might now count as really awesome poker chips. We just need to convince the GM to run with it.

And they wonder why there are no women in roleplaying

Being one player short didn't stop us. We killed a guy and then we suddenly decided to move from a nice hotel to a less than nice boarding house in the City of Lost Angels. Mary spoke to a guy from the Agency (of which she has absolutely no involvement whatsoever), and turned out to be the only person who lacked an arcane background and therefore lost out on great new facial features like horns, snake eyes or looking like a half-melted Terminator. We also ended up talking about how the gun in Cluedo is actually a six-barrel Gatling gun and not just ANY sort of gun, and arguing about whether or not the Harry Potter books are any good. So I guess it was a fairly normal Tuesday, all in all.

If you need to ask what your own vomit’s Realm is, you’re playing the wrong game

Did we finish the adventure? Does Set never see cause to facepalm? We were hot on the heels of the woman who killed Tag, and we also took her unconscious accomplice hostage. And spoke to the Count again, yay! And were attacked by some weird shadow thingy which made Set and Finn very, very ill indeed.

Does bending the rules always result in this?

Courtesy of the last night's 2^nd Edition Changeling: The Dreaming adventure at Chimera.

The Band (that's us) went to a casino to try and find clues as to the whereabouts of the Count's missing son. This meant Jack took a crash course in how to win at cards, Flora and Finn (aided by Jack, sort of) distracting the crowd by singing Grease medleys and Irish folk songs while Set broke into the "Staff Only" area, and Alyssiana distracting the big bad guy by taking him home to show her etchings, so to speak, even though she's normally a lesbian. Then we finished the session in style, by Set and Alyssiana's silver-munching ferret and later a Finn high on cocain and Valium ("I'm very concentrated but extremely not moving") staking out Nebuchadnessar Nessun Dorma a house with a peculiar name beginning with N.

This might get known as the "Sex, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll" session. For good reason.