Chipmunk stripper ghouls in bow ties

Lottie and Julius need to melt their piece of brass somewhere, so Aisling takes them to a place she knows in Manhattan. As they drive across the Williamsburg Bridge, the Malks Auspex the water, and there's a shape lurking below the water. As it breaks the surface, it's a pyramidal mound. We've seen those before - in dreams ... Both Malks pass out, and are woken up by Aisling, who didn't even realise what had happened until she pulled up at the place.

At the ironworks, the metal is melted down into an amulet and they do the ritual. They get a teeny bit distracted by the smell of each other's delicious blood, because they have to part with some of it to submerge the amulet in. They also have to kiss the blood-soaked amulet, and not licking their lips is a bit like not licking your lips when having a sugar-covered doughnut. They succeed with the ritual, and successfully give themselves selective amnesia.

They go to speak to the Nosferatu in order to get a message to meet with the Prince. The Prince's twin ghouls show up and drive them to a post office location on the outskirts of Harlem. It's the Hell Gate Station. Not at all worrying ...

Meanwhile at Coffey Park, a car comes screeching to a halt. Edgar, another Brujah, shows up to say that the Sabbat are moving in on Harlem right now. Instead of going "oh, is this one of those times we should think before we act?" Frankie, Val and Theo pile into a car and follow Edgar up to Harlem.

Turns out the source was Ellie Harewood, the Setite the cousins had met previously. Some Tzimisce went right up to her, in front of some Kine customers that had to be adjusted, and fleshcrafted talons saying they were taking over. Or words to that effect. Either way, was Red Hook only a distraction and their actual target is Harlem? Which is fine by Frankie, because Harlem isn't Brooklyn. That shovelhead we "encountered" in one of the first sessions did say something about how the Manganos were supposed to be lured south, away from Harlem.

 

I can't keep playing Humanity Roulette like this

Lottie and Julius dream about the other person's personal traumas, lying naked in each other's arms in a basement in Staten Island. Frankie and Val head back home to Brooklyn, and to be on the safe side, Frankie stays over at Val's. In the evening, Val heads off to do some stuff, while Frankie got to see his apartment - and a change of clothes! - for the first time in what seems like forever.

Lottie doesn't lose Humanity for what was inflicted on Jeanine. Nor for jointly breakfasting on Tommy the Fool followed by jointly snapping his neck. How romantic!

Frankie goes to see Benny at their speakeasy, and places a number of calls to check on business. Everything is fine, but there is stuff happening in Red Hook. 25 people, running legit businesses and none of them connected to the mafia, have been arrested on shaky grounds, like "running mob fronts". Some premises were completely smashed, others roughed up a little, or basically left alone. It's puzzling. Seb is looking into it further.

Meanwhile, Lottie and Julius go to meet the old woman, Loretta, and her Childe, Adelaide. The Prince doesn't know about Adelaide, who was turned a year ago. Loretta tells the story of who Adelaide is (kind of a serial killer?) and where she found her (an asylum), how she got her out of there, and rescued her by Embracing her.

While Julius and Loretta have a discussion in private, Lottie and Adelaide get acquainted upstairs. Adelaide is well aware they have to leave before the Prince finds out about her. She wants them to go to Georgia. (Maslowe's from Atlanta. Coincidence?) She also talks about how there's something in the water near the Brooklyn Bridge, but she was afraid to look. She could see what seemed like a cold, bright star in that direction - bearing in mind this is supposed to be 6 km away. Loretta didn't see it. Lottie and Julius did see something in some of the very first sessions ...

Adelaide seems to have some kind of weird fortune-telling power. She asks if she can look at Lottie "properly", then says something cryptic about there being something in the blood, "something that feeds, something thin" before snapping out of it and asking if she's looked at her yet. What the actual fuck?! Maybe skipping town is the best option after all.

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?

Do Doomsayers glow in the dark?

We're on the road again ... or, well, three of us are: Jack the Road Warrior, Vincent the Syker and Maggie the Law Dog.

I think we ended up somewhere in Wyoming, where we spotted some guys on the side of the road. They were looking for something, so we decided to help out. Turned out to be related to burned out corpses. Doomsayers are in the area, and them folks are bad news in general.

Eventually, modifications were made to the cannon mounted on top of Jack's truck and Maggie might glow in the dark, but it's all good ... even though the truck is now a rolling bomb waiting to go off at any second ...

The GM's a pain in the ass

Our Victorian superheroes went across the globe to India, where they were subsequently attacked, because roleplaying game! :D

Oh well. What's a Royal Ball?

Doc seems to have taken the lead (he can namedrop Luke Skywalker et al and have the selfies to proove it) wanted some scouting to be done in the capital of Gerrenthum. The obvious (?) choice for this were Konvoru and Nole, who got on so famously last session. One was to gather intel, the other keep an eye out for security.

Stopping at a local market, an NPC suggested that he had some intel to part with ... for 100k worth of credits. Our current party funds are in the region of 160. (That's 160.00 not 160k.) Nole, probably because he's spent a lot of money in such establishments, suggested they might raise some cash if Kon took her top off. This did not go down well with her. At all.

The charming NPC offered the group a job as alternative means of payment (transport some goods to a Hutt) and offered to take Konvoru to dinner later that night. This later happened, although she decided to pick Rhan as a bodyguard instead of Nole for reasons unfathomable to the latter and unknown to the former. Probably a good thing that she did, because on the way back, they were being shot at, but Rhan managed to kill six people in one round of firing.

Meanwhile back at base Doc continued to plot the upcoming assassination of the governor, when not busy making people pancakes for breakfast and recounting when he met Luke Skywalker. NG wasn't impressed by this, seeing as he had served as a medical droid previously and helped patch him up. Did you know Luke's hand is only a version 2?

If you haven't got the XP, it's not dead

We continued our foray into the Wave Echo Cave system. There were skeletons and bugbears and stuff in there. It's a good thing we have Malinda in the party - she whittled five bugbears down to one in one round of burning hands. Result!

We also managed to find a door that said bugbears had barricaded. Turned out there was a big, flaming skull behind there. We decided to close the door and explore one of the other directions ...

Can you abuse the system?

The new edition of D&D is out (sort of), and we're trying the starter set to see what it's like. The 4th edition was a bit hit and miss (mostly miss), but it seems as if they've taken the few good/useful bits of 4th and put on the useful/working 3.5 edition to make the 5th. Anyway.

I won't go into the plot, seeing as how it's the adventure in the starter pack, but it involved missing cousins, goblin ambushes, thickets and caves.

We're using the stereotypes in the box as they are (we might tweak them later when the actual book comes out), so here's the line-up:

• Cade Tealeaf - Halfling Rogue
• Hematite Frostbeard - Dwarf Cleric
• Karak-Dag - Human Fighter (Folk Hero)
• Rinn Moonbrook - Elf Wizard

Offhanded guess becomes true!

I think we can summarise this session with "wow".

So, in the crowd, we saw this weird dude - who turned out was a Sunaj called Marvin. A Sunaj is some kind of Splugorth minion. He offered to give Booker something that will help him/us in the fight to come, and Booker managed to make the Sunaj agree to help out with the Lion situation.

Lion was brought forth, shed his disguise and was - gasp say it ain't so - a Rakshasa. Surprise! (Not really.) Fighting broke out. Booker emptied his guns into Lion's chest and Gorbash then grabbed hold of Lion, who turned into mist form beacuse he could. Dragonbreath singed him slightly, we think. At any rate, the Rakshasa disappeared and we had helped save the East Side Boys gang.

Their leader, Maria, having had the Cyber-Knight as a full body shield in the fight took a shine to him, and spent the next few hours flirting with him over cups of tea in the company of Baradhi. Gorbash went to talk to Ixchal about what was going on (Rita requested her presense), and Booker went to receive his gift. The gift turned out to be an Elom, a symbiod creature whose only real downside (maybe) is that only servants of Splugorth are ever seen wearing them. At the back of their neck. Still, it might come in useful later, so Booker named it "Bally".

We finished off by finally meeting Rita, a.k.a. Hecate, who hadn't really thought to check what dimension she was asked to make a portal to/from. She agreed that maybe that gate needs stopping after all. But that's the next adventure. Cliffhanger!!

Arkham is FULL OF OWLS!

A year ago, pretty much on the dot, we played Sleepy Hollow: The Boardgame A Touch of Evil. As there were wishes to play Arkham Horror, a boardgame based on Call of Cthulhu, that's what we ended up doing instead of roleplaying.

We would not recommend having seven players, four of which had never played the game before, because it takes forever and you don't get very far. If anyone wants to know what the game is like, it's Talisman meets A Touch of Evil. If you've never played either of those, that's a lot of time saved, and well done to you for not having been sucked in. ;)

Soaking carpets in the Nottingham Chainsaw Massacre

We're back in the weird and wonderful ways of Changeling: The Dreaming again, and we left off with an Epic Cliffhanger of DOOOOOOM, in which our friend Count Valdemar was held at knifepoint in his own home. Well, it didn't exactly pan out. He got his throat cut after all, and even though Flora tried to save him, she couldn't stop the bleeding.

On the plus side, the rest of the party brought down all the bad guys, so yay for us! Jack then found some papers, while Alysiana sneaked off to administer one of the super-mega-deluxe healing potions to the princess, with Finn and Flora a couple of minutes behind. Potion administered, the princess ... well, we've yet to find out, actually.

Needless to say, Set is awesome - even chainsaws can't bring him down! Now all we have to do is to not get caught in the middle of a number of Fae nobles who want to rule Nottingham. Or get arrested for the bloodbath that is currently Count Valdemar's residence. Maybe there's an old lady somewhere we can pin it on?

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 ...

We’re gonna need a bigger airlock

Last weekend played host to ChimeraCon 6 - a 24 hour roleplaying event at Chimera in Beeston. These are the quotes from the first session's Eclipse Phase game (3 December 2011), which was a continuation of the story from ChimeraCon 5 in September.

We didn't have a session on Tuesday night because the GM was ill and another party member was away. We should be starting the next Changeling adventure this following Tuesday, though.

Anyway, in this session's eventful Eclipse Phase, we went to a space station, fought an airlock, conversed with a big orca whale who later got sucked out of an airlock, and other crazy aliens that had read too much Animal Farm. And then we sort of turned the ship into a portable Pandora Gate, or something like that, with only a couple of original bodies actually surviving. Hats off to our fallen comrades!