It's nice to have unlife goals

Lottie ends up near the Washington Heights library. It seems Lladislav the Tzimisce's return is welcomed. It's rather touching. While having a sniff around the place, she also discovers some Jewish gangsters who seem to be involved in this, and a Setite is following her? (Is Ellie more concerned about her than the Prince?) She then overhears Turlev and Blaise telling off Lladislav for having "undone decades of work" with his stunt in Harlem. He really can't be around when Ecaterina gets back - unless he, too, would like to become a head shorter.

Meanwhile in Harlem, Val's car screeches to a halt in front of Frankie. Julius is also in the car, badly injured. They speed north to find Lottie, but Julius sends Val off to the Bronx while he and Frankie jump out of the car and run on foot to get to a safehouse near Columbia University. He makes some decoys and sends them off in a different direction.

Lottie does a number of impressive jumps between moving cars to avoid getting followed to get to the second nearest safehouse - incidentally the same one Frankie is carrying Julius to. Finally the two player characters are in the same building again!

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.

Why are we in a field and who are you?

Filler post, so here's where the Victoriana adventure begins!

Three people wake up in a field on a fine English summer day. The first one to wake up (Cid) is dressed, but the second (Bob Afette) isn't - he's stark naked. The third is Baldrick Unlike. Neither of them know any of this, because they're all suffering from amnesia.

Cid turns out to be wearing Bob's clothes. Following a smoke plume a bit further away they discover an airship crash site and a dead parrot. They decide this is where they came from, and finding some fetching clothes Cid changes into these - ladies' clothes, for some hitherto unknown reason - and Bob gets his clothes back.

But where are they? WHO are they? And what the hell happened?

It's so dull I’m checking Facebook

Last session we played the Firefly boardgame and I didn't take notes because I was too busy cruisin' the 'Verse. Sooo here's one we prepared earlier!

(It's the last one of this year's Eurovision posts, honest.)

A quick re-cap: Austria won in 2014, meaning the two semi-finals and one final were hosted in Vienna. Brits don't really care much for Eurovision, but it's a massive thing in Sweden (spoiler: they won ... again) and there are two Swedes in the roleplaying group, so commenting on Eurovision is kind of a given.

This session was made up of 50% Swedes and 50% Brits, in 100% snark mode.

Courtesy of Saturday 23 May 2015's Eurovision Song Contest grand final.

“You know if Japan was in it, they WOULD have a mech suit.”

“So it starts off on a bored note.” (Slovenia)

“It would be funny if they tripped on the headphone cable.” (Slovenia)

“You know what she needs, don’t you? A moustache.”
“It may have come last, but it’s still catchier than any songs this year.” (France)

“Well, at least he didn’t end the verse by saying ‘and now I’m going to kill myself’.” (Israel)

“This song is REALLY uneven.”
“YES.” (Israel)

“I remember this. It’s Johnny Cash meets Buddy Holly.” (Estonia)

“He still can’t sing low notes.” (Estonia)

“Turkey basters?!” (United Kingdom)

“They’re no Engelbert Humperdinck, but maybe that’s a good thing.” (United Kingdom)

“You wanna get some ice cream? And heroin.”
“You want to comfort eat?” (Armenia)

“So for this group they chose women who could sing and men who couldn’t.” (Armenia)

“Even the cat’s trying to hide his head more. Look!” (Armenia)

“This sounds like Mumford & Sons used to.” (Lithuania)

“Did they kidnap Florence from her Machine?” (Norway)

“Doesn’t do it for me, but neither did Euphoria and that won by a landslide.” (Sweden)

“What the fuck is that woman on the left wearing?!”
“Diapers?”
“The 80s called, they want their prostitute back.” (Australia)

“WHY DOES THAT HAT NOT HAVE CORKS ON IT?!” (Australia)

“You’re evil! I can’t believe you laughed at that!”

“It sounds even more like a Bond theme now.” (Belgium)

“He looks like Russell Howard trying to be creepy.” (Belgium)

“That piano’s on fire! Health and safety!” (Austria)

“Hey, it’s Cat Deeley!” (Greece)

“He’s got a nature theme going on.” (Montenegro)

“Why’s he talking about his B.O.?” (Montenegro guy pretends to be an airplane) “Oh, THAT’S why.”

“They sing about what they know, black smoke.” (awkward pause) “Because they smoke a lot in Germany.”
“You took the moral high ground there.”
“Someone had to.”

“Latvia is so dull I’m checking Facebook.”

“I would be checking Facebook I if my Nexus was here. I have a cat instead.”
“The cat’s nicer.”
“Than Facebook?”

“EEieEEO? We really needed that translated.” (Spain)

“Is that HAL in the background?”
“You will vote now, Dave.” (Spain)

“Is that Gallifreyan?” (Hungary)

“This song makes me sad.”
“D’you want to get my Nexus then?”

“Meh.” (Georgia)

“It’s not like he’s a good singer either, so it’s confusing AND shit.” (Azerbaijan)

“If Russia won, they’d have to host the gayest event of the year. The IRONY.”

“Impressive.” (Italy)

“Did Ireland have a Latvian invasion that we don’t know about?”

“That wasn’t political. They actually liked it.”

We're actually boardgaming next session as well but I've brought the pad this time.

We're all about the failing today

After the joinage of a brand new player to the group, the crew of the Arkadius now has an actual played Navigator! Lucius of House Brabazon, a.k.a. Eyes.

Most of the party went down to the planet and talked to people, rolled badly and waded around in mud and that sort of thing, while aboard the ship one of the flight crew - Steve - went missing. With Dave sent to find him, Dave also went missing. One of them was found smeared on the walls of his cabin ... and one of them Dark Eldar nearby. CLIFFHANGER!!

It's all gone a bit Laudanum

Here's a collection of quotes from our Victoriana game, played over a few weeks in July and August. The three players (one regrettably dropped out between character generation and the start of the game a couple of weeks later) were elves, and they woke up in a field somewhere in the English countryside, not far from a burning airship.

Robert Affette ("Bob") was naked, Cedric Ignatius Dashwood ("Cid") wore ill-fitting clothes (because they were Bob's), and no one dared touch Unlike's rags. No one remembered who they were, where they were or how they had got there, but the burning airship and dead parrot probably had something to do with it.

Trying to find civilisation, they came across an awkward lord, Ralph, and his shy Irish farmhand, Ted Doyle, who were discussing what to do about the pesky drainage in the lower field. The gang invited themselves to the lord's manor, where they got offered tea by Ted's missus, who insisted. A lot.

After some investimagating, it was decided to go and talk to a nearby vicar, who might have some clues, and so the vicar did. He recognised them as the paranormal investigators he had hired to suss out what the ghostly nun haunting grounds of the new-built rectory wanted. Poltergeist phenomena occurred, orbs went missing from crypts, churchwardens muttered, and the residents of the local manor house might or might not have murdered one of their maids.

And not once did anyone bat as much as an eyelid at the adventure being set at the most haunted house in England. Guess not everyone is as obsessed with Borley Rectory as myself. *cough* As I ran the game, there was less time to write things down, but I'm planning on transcribing the sessions in the next few weeks.

We should have our own TV show, we’re so badass

After a lengthy and very serious and utterly brainy discussion about matters of life, the universe and everything, we finally managed to get started with the game ...

Finn and Set have captured a semi-conscious bad guy who fell off a building, handcuff him (with pink, fluffy handcuffs) to Jack's limo and then move on to checking out the contents of the minibar. And so the beertini was invented. Good thing Flora keeps a steady supply of hangover-curing potions ...

Alysiana promised, on behalf of the party, that no one in the car would hurt the prisoner, which later led to a big discussion about whether or not the rest of the party was held to that ... as they hadn't actually sworn anything.

Back at Wollaton Hall, Jack decided to build a guillotine to execute the prisoner, who, after all, had broken a number of Changeling laws. And then he went to bed. The rest of the party had already decided to head off, as they were squeamish about the whole thing. Because of the oath, though, no one could hurt the man, so it was decided to leave his execution until the morning. To make him

Set volunteered to watch over the prisoner, being handcuffed to him, and eventually passed out from lack of sleep ... once he had knocked the prisoner to sleep, as he wouldn't stop screaming because of the cold iron tied to him. We sure know how to treat guests here in Nottingham!

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!

We are the worst saviours of the future EVER

We were heading toward Salt Lake City The City of Gloom by train - well, except we had to catch it first, and had only just missed the previous one by a day. We had to camp out and Gunney attacked by a big maggot-looking thing. Not that he knew anything about it, he was fast asleep. Its smouldering corpse was ground down to powder by Slick, who added mint and called it a fine gum, but then again, his tastebuds have become rather peculiar as of late.

We then had the idea of flying to Devil's Tower, which ultimately ended in Reynard falling out of the damned craft (it had no seatbelts, see, because those things hadn't been invented at the time) plummeting to his death. Except he's not called "Lucky" for nothing. If he HAD died, though, he would've actually become Harrowed. Alas, he's still in the world of the living ... somehow. Well, at least until the next session.

Now we're stuck in the middle of nowhere, because our method of transportation decided to crash land because it wasn't made by our Sam. Sam, in turn, had his horrible cough cured by Mary, and the black gunk in his lungs turned out to be souls ... which Slick saved some of in a jar. Like you do.

So Soylent Adeen are people?

Before we finished the adventure - which we technically did last week, but we spent a whole session wrapping things up, half the party went to the Queen's Medical Centre (a hospital in Nottingham), to a ward for terminally ill patients, trying to get to Kaddapolix before he popped his clogs. As it turned out, there were evil Fae about, who looked decidedly like old ladies ... Then there were the bit where Jack researched Alysiana's non-Fae self on YouTube and came across a film that had us all talking. Meanwhile, Alysiana had something big to announce. A theory of who she really is ...

I love how we broke the plot again

Courtesy of the last night's 2^nd Edition Changeling: The Dreaming adventure at Chimera. To kick things off, our friend the Count has a son gone missing. Last time he was seen was at the goblin market, so it's off down the sewers of Nottingham we go ...