This got spicy real fast

Lottie and Frankie continue their discussion about what happened while they split the party. Lottie then explains to Angela why Frankie can't take her out on a date, and her reaction leads the players to surmise that a certain crush might actually be reciprocated. She also gives strict orders about which Kindred are allowed inside the house, i.e. definitely not Charlotte.

In this week's "ghouls acting kinda weird": Angela gives Frankie's neck a funny look.

The Commissioner of Plants and Buildings in Brooklyn is apparently excited about the Brooklyn Bridge building works, which are taking place during daylight hours and begun the same day that the three cousins were Embraced.

Frankie meets Val to discuss plans, how Val needs to talk to his police contacts to find out everything he can about the hits on Red Hook. This turned into a more personal conversation between the two cousins, where Val finds their new lifestyle to suit him very well, but he notes that Frankie might never get used to it - as highlighted by Val, who had brought them a couple of women to snack on, was busy sweet-talking his before biting, whereas Frankie apologised to his.

Val, it turns out, is worried about the situation between Lottie and Charlotte. That the air gets frosty when Charlotte is mentioned around Lottie is one thing, but it also seems to be happening the other way around ... However, if it comes down to it, he's on his cousins' side. He also kindly offered to stake Jeanine for Frankie. So thoughtful!

Meanwhile, because of the lack of a phone in the Manhattan residence, Julius says he's getting a new place, which will have a telephone. He's confident he can get that house tonight ... because he wasn't planning on paying for it. The family living there are mindwhammied into submission, will be great at answering the phone and taking messages and acting as snacks. Plus, he's just given Lottie a family, which she's never truly had. It's incredibly romantic - and sexy. They can totally take time out for a bit of bedroom fun, despite previously telling a certain cousin that there's absolutely no time for anything other than business right now.

Left brooding after Val's heart-to-heart, Frankie asks Benny to arrange a flower delivery for Angela. In a further doubling down on his humanity, backed up by dice, instead of driving to Theo, he thinks about happy childhood memories and somehow ends up outside Golconda Park. All sounds and all lights around him fade out, spooking him and making him return to the car, handing a passing drunk some spare change in the process.

So in a strange turn of events, Val might actually become a sort of bridge between two cousins who are clearly heading in opposite directions on the morality scale.

 

Girl's gotta have bubbles

Okay, I have no notes about this session, and I don't remember exactly what we did, but whatever it was it was GLORIOUS.

Other than we found a way to get in touch with Julius, because he didn't give us a number to call him on, because he's been around centuries before telephones and he's old-fashioned that way.

Was this the session where Val's car got wrecked, perhaps?

Anybody who is anybody will soon walk through that door

It's 1922 and the Mangano crime family are keeping their part of New York, uh, safe? Going about their daily lives, three cousins run a speakeasy and a gambling den, things like that. One day they're told they're going to be Made Men (and Woman), and have the ceremony with lots of booze ... and the next thing they know they black out, and when they wake up they're in pools of blood and lack a pulse.

Huh.

It didn't go so well for little Lottie, whose mind was somewhat ... fractured in the process. At least her sire brought her a snack. Val discovered that while he might still bite the first hobo he came across, he wasn't going to eat him without first cleaning the guy's neck. Frankie decided to be cautious and not eat a cop, but instead went for a canoodling couple, because hey, dinner AND dessert! (He even offered some to his sire, who wasn't as impressed as he expected.)

This was sort of session zero, in which we get to know the characters and take them through the traumatic lovely memorable experience of being turned into vampires. Turns out the Cosa Nostra is a bit bloodier than expected ...

Starring:

• Carlotta "Lottie" Mangano, Malkavian flapper girl
• Frankie "Fatso" Mangano, Brujah speakeasy bootlegger
• Valtena (Val) "Pretty Boy" Mangano, Toreador gambling den maestro

We are NOT becoming the Columbos!

So, here's what happened. We have that Gamma World game run every month or so. The February session was cancelled because people weren't feeling well. It was rescheduled to the end of March, and by that time we were in lockdown and decided to get together over Discord instead. Because reasons we decided to put the Gamma World game into hiatus for now, and maybe get back to it when the world appears slightly more normal than it does at present.

Question was then what to do instead, as we still fancied roleplaying. Our Gamma World GM had an idea for a gangster Vampire: The Masquerade game set in 1920s New York. "Gangster vampires, eh?" said the players and so it was decided on as an idea. I've never played this game before, but the other two players suggested we all play newly turned vampires so that they would both be as clueless in-game about the specifics as I am in real life. (Read: part of my struggles with some games we've played before is that everyone knows the setting extremely well except for me, so I feel left behind when I don't know stuff everyone else takes for granted, and it means I don't enjoy playing.)

Plus, who can resist 1920s New York gangsters who turn into vampires? RIGHT?!

Having decided this is what we were going to do, and the other players saying I'm allowed to tell them off if they start to go over my head with their combined decades of experience, we tried to figure out what characters to play and how they'd fit together, and what their family name would be. We ended by having decided not to be relatives of Detective Columbo, but to be of the Mangano family, of Italian-American mobster fame, and were left generating our characters as homework before the next session.

How often we're going to play remains to be seen.

Can we blame Canada if there's a devildemon incursion?

Sooooo the current situation is that we're now working from home and are doing our two weekly games (currently Rifts and Godbound) over Discord. The current situation, and self-isolating for a couple of weeks due to cold symptoms, are not particularly conducive to good mental health - even for hardcore introverts like me - so I've had real problems concentrating recently. And my concentration isn't the greatest at the best of times. I'm trying to work on it, but it's difficult. We're staying home and we're staying safe, that's the main thing.

That being said, this post is a combination of three sessions, so ... yeah. One of the sessions was mainly battling with a dragon, so we didn't say a lot anyway because we were busy with dice rolls. But ... yeah. Yeah.

My Jetpack skill is called Gorbash

Once inside the bridge (or one of the bridges, at any rate) of the flying fortress thing - not to be confused with the Boeing B-17 bomber, which is considerably smaller - we had to set the charges ... or rather, we had to work on opening the doors, setting the fuse (or whatever), chucking the bombs and getting the hell out of there.

We had seven tries before they'd blow up in our face. We got the door open on the sixth.

After that we just had to try and find our way to the outside, somehow, and then literally jump ship. Thankfully we're friends with a dragon, so some thrilling aerobatics later and we were safely on the ground, having severely incapacitated a big-ass flying fortress. With the cunning use of a vengeful dragon and some dragon friends and an air elemental. We have the best of friends, clearly!

Captured by a wine storm

It's been a long time, but we're now back in Rifts for a while. We took care of some rescues and went back to Magestar ... by way of a ley line storm. The water turned into wine, and as a plot twist, the wine had healing properties. Surprise! Our armours were getting fixed, Booker reunited with his Cyber-knight girlfriend Joan, and after seeking the advice of a wizard, had Bally/Barry/the symbiote removed from him by Gorbash. The Chosen One is now a bit more squishy than before, especially as we gave away the protective medal to those White Rose people as a token of good faith.

Was that a racist grumble?

Having made it across the Titans, we're now heading toward more civilised areas. Civilised if you don't count the corruption abominations that attacked after someone decided to improve the soup kitchen's stew recipe with interesting berries.

Then there was an escaped Night Lady who was some sort of high priestess of an earth goddess before people decided to say down with that sort of thing, and we might now be landing ourselves right in the middle of a civil war between two religions. Because that always works out for the best of everyone ...

We're not here to assassinate the guy from The Fast Show

In the third and final part of this Victoriana session the party have dinner with Lord Ralph, make countless references to The Fast Show, find out that Ted's wife is actually Mrs Doyle, and try to find out if Ralph, Ted or Mrs Ted know anything about why they might have crashed an airship in a field nearby.

They find out that there's another manor not too far away, belonging to the Waldegrave family (who may or may not be shady), and that there's a vicar who might know something that could help them.

Gorgons are the Spanish Inquisition

We continued the fight at the nexus point. The good thing about having impressive weapons and skills is that you can get rid of your enemies with ease. A bit too easy, perhaps, as the GM found out after we'd murderised all his baddies.

Anyhoo. We took back the nexus point for the Rakshasa and celebrated. The next morning we got the info we needed in order to find where John, the head of the Blackstone Juggernauts (a.k.a. our boss) and Gorbash's sort-of-adoptive father, had been taken to. It's in Texas. So next week I guess we put on our Stetsons and get ready to barbecue some meats. Oh, and rescue our friend/boss. Maybe.

This game is too unrealistic!

Our modern day characters also went to Russia and attended some kind of shindig. While dressed up to the nines we still managed to kick the butts of a number of bad guys.

Also, the Donumancer was inadvertently invented. It's a villain that makes people hunger for donuts, or something like that. It made sense at the time.

Why is there not a Save vs Dumbass?

A session in which we all decided to become citizens, because it seemed like a good idea. Probably just as well because then we went to talk to the kind of people who look up to Booker because he's the Chosen One and all that. When we finished, the people in the house across the street (Nxla cultists) were less keen on seeing the Chosen One. Fighting ensued ...

We're nice and very comforting people

Ehhhhh, long time no see?

We opened a café and, uh, things have been a bit hectic ever since ...

Life is too short to remove safely

Finishing off the Rivergard Keep, the party came out victorious. Lo-Kag, being a noble paladin, decided to dig graves for all the slain cultists as a penance for having killed them. When Kyla and Aial tried to help (using magic instead of shovels), he got a bit upset at their blatant disregard for honour that he'd rather they not help at all.

This worked out well for the rest of the party, who went to check out the rest of the castle in case anything had been missed off. They went back to the hidden boats and found that going in one of them and rowing into the darkness meant some kind of creatures trying to capsise them.

When the creatures in question were eventually returned to death and the whole party were assembled, they rowed all the way to the main water cultist temple, because this is what roleplayers do. That's not what the adventure book thinks should be done for another couple of levels ...

The person who comes last can be Wil Wheaton

For the past few years we've hosted a New Year's boardgaming extravaganza at our place. This New Year's Eve was no exception.

We warmed up by playing Dixit, then Cards Against Humanity, and Betrayal at House on the Hill - which saw in midnight - and the next day, we rounded off by a few games of King of Tokyo.

That's right, we sure know how to party! #wearehorriblepeople

WOULD PEOPLE STOP BEING SCARED OF US?!

After getting a good night's sleep back home at the Blackstone headquarters, we followed clues. Booker went to the Crow Bar and got sloshed on psychedelic potions for "research purposes", and Gorbash went to see if Ixchal was home. She wasn't.

However, Jayson flashed some Cyber-Knight armour, making shopkeepers a bit nicer to us, and we found clues that took us north east, to the Silversmith Gang territory. Apparently they're quite nice ... as gangs go.

Further on from them were the East Side Boys, another gang, a couple of whose members were seen escorting Rita roundabout when she went AWOL. The ESB were really rather concerned about our presense, because our reputation preceeded us. Their attitude was along the lines of "PLEASE DON'T KILL US". We had no plans to. Although, their leader Maria's reliance on a "powerful mage" called Lion was a bit creepy. Lion insulted the lot of us to various degrees. For instance, claiming the Cyber-Knight wasn't a Cyber-Knight. Maybe we'll feed him that fusion bomb next session. You can't trust people who claim to be powerful mages when they're defrauding people with psionics!

On a sad note, we've lost our Glitter Boy player due to him having other commitments (we wish him well). On the other hand, he might or might not be replaced by a guy who's already familiar with this blog, because he's been quoted on here before. It might up the madness a bit more. GASP!

The Reincarnation of Axcalibur

The pregnant Eddie tried to drown his sorrows (foetus) in vodka. Strangely, he wasn't getting drunk from any of it, but instead, his body got very toned all of a sudden. He had never sported a sixpack before! Pregnancy really suits him!

We went looking for clues in Alvaston (or rather, Trevor was looking for a place to turn into a community centre), a rough part of Derby, and unfortunately, that's when Eddie decided to give birth to the big stone egg. Well, first of all, there was a thing crawling up through his throat and Tommy had to perform a tracheotomy and pull it out to stop Eddie from suffocating. The thing was a baby tentacle monster, as expected, and its gunk was highly corrosive. Luckily, Tilly performed some healing magics on him so that he wouldn't bleed to death.

Unfortunately, Eddie was carrying twins. There was also an egg and it decided to come out through his plumbing, so to speak. Ouchhh. The monster baby was dispatched and thrown into a hedge, where a tentacle monster and his tentacle monster dog then went looking.

So that was mentally scarring. We had visits from the blue-eyed German guy again, and some of us entered into bargains with him, which we're not exactly sure if it was a good idea or not yet, but we hope he isn't Fey, because then we're screwed. Eddie got another axe as replacement for his dearly departed Axcalibur.

Later on, we went back and were going to talk to the man and his dog, but the man ran into Zolistagol, Tommy and a patched-up Eddie and they didn't go easy on him. The dog, however, was behaving the way these tentacle monsters were supposed to behave ... so Tilly decided to try befriending it. How that works out, we'll find out next time.

You can't make a Heroic Molotov without breaking a few eggs

We did what any normal roleplaying group would do: we brought the big stone eggs together at Trevor's, because there was one in Trevor's basement and one disguised as a book box at Tilly's. Bringing eggs together made them smash, and green goo went all over the place.

Zolistagol and Eddie quickly went to clean themselves off, but Tilly was fascinated by the gunk moving ... especially as it was actually moving OFF her. The goo went down on the floor and came together in a great Terminator impression. It became a baby hook tentacle monster that was almost sort of cute.

We did what any normal roleplaying group would do: KILL IT BEFORE IT KILLS US. Most of the party didn't seem too concerned about being baby-killers, except for Tilly who wasn't convinced we should have killed the thing in the first place.

It turned out there were a few eggs over at Eddie's as well, and that his old pal Dave was a tentacle monster. The cinnamon-smelling ganja smoke that filled up Eddie's living room had the unfortunate side effect of impregnating him ... with one of those stone eggs. The weird writing we had seen on the walls was actually a warning to stay away because 'ere be an incubator.

Dave was later shot and killed, which wasn't part of the plan, but at least we didn't do it.

MY BRAIN IS ON THAT THING!

We're back in Derby, picking up shortly after the end of the previous adventure. Eddie, or rather "Eddie", had ordered some goons to off the local police chief last time we played, so the real Eddie made sure to let his goons know to not just follow orders unless they're accompanied by a password, so to speak.

The group found a new (and slightly retconned) ally in the hospital porter Thomas "Tommy" Crane, who had some info about the semi-zombified people that were hospitalised. And later on, he was attacked by an invisible, brain-sucking ... thing with tentacles. It was unpleasant. But at least being attacked by otherworldly creatures means he's now one of the team.

And apparently, there's this guy with blue eyes who goes around warning people about "hollow knights" and burning buildings. What's that about?

Football is the answer to everything, including cake

At Trevor's mansion (it has a long drive, it's a mansion), we settled down for the night. Cans of Stella, football on telly, zombies trying to break through the back door ... the usual. We also found Trevor's sister Agatha in the basement - but she seems to have lost the plot.

Eddie sacrificed his precious pimped-out baseball bat hitting at the zombie, and we all got away relatively unscathed. Well, apart from the bodyguard, but hey, he's just an NPC.

And then we had pizza, looked at old school internet message boards and made contact with a potential ally in Nottingham.

It was an eclectic sort of session.