A little bit of sick, a little bit of Slick

The swamp turned out not to be such a big deal after all. Us players were the biggest challenge. To begin, we had a big discussion as to the name of the guy from CSI: New York - not Kevin Bacon but in fact Gary Sinise, whether or not The Stand was a film or a TV series and when it was from ... and then it turned into a discussion who Gary Busey is, what he's been in, and in particular, who was in Leathal Weapon, and so on. Hence why we decided in the end that next time we're trying to think of an actor, we'll say it's Kevin Bacon and leave it at that, or we're stuck for at least half an hour before someone has the idea to use the IMDb app on their phone ...

At the same time, it was decided  that any film we also couldn't think of would be Care Bears, meaning that later on, when the question accompanying a banjo tune, was "aww, what's the film called?!" the answer was Care Bears rather than Deliverance ... and we imagined a hybrid of the two ... we completely lost it and roared with laughter for five minutes.

(You had to be there.)

In-game, we found the town of Blacktree, mainly because the GM thought better of leaving us in the swamp, what with the inbred Care Bears and the ghost of Slick roaming around below the surface, and said we reached the place in a very quick time. Huzzah! We obtained a sample of the eponymous black tree through the cunning use of squirrel, and then discovered the master healing potion maker was in fact a witch. (You should have seen the look on Set's face when the GM told him the witch was an old woman ... Priceless!)

While Jack's negotations with her didn't seem to help all that much in getting her to co-operate, Hugo's 20 gold dross quickly won her over. Flora got to see the potion being made, took notes, and is considering spending a working holiday there. After the potion was finished, we got the bottle and started heading back to Nottingham as quick as we could. As Jack saw a merchant with his missing father's sword in the crowd, he decided to chase after him, with Finn in tow, while Alysiana, Set, Flora and the bottle - and some NPCs - started in the direction of home. Quickly.

What shall we do with the drunken Sidhe?

After being assaulted by Rat Boy (again), Finn locked himself in a cupboard and completely missed Alysiana in the nude. Jack and the GM were sitting next to each other talking plot, which the rest of us didn't catch, but we were happy bunnies anyway, because even though Finn crushed his precious eggplant, perhaps Flora could restore it.

Jack decided to have turned twelve recently, which means the party in his honour was in fact his birthday party. He's now a Wilder rather than a Childling, and it has caused him to stop drinking, much to Finn's dismay. On the plus side, we entered the Dreaming, where Alysiana got very drunk on chimeric ale. Meanwhile, Flora tried her hand at drug-pushing, with Set conveniently being somewhere else entirely, being useful.

And then we tried to charter a ferry across a river, even though we didn't think to ask until afterwards if it would be big enough to take Set, seeing as he's, y'know, an enormous Troll. We left off on the shore, by a big swamp, having just been dropped off from the boat. Here's the journey up until then ...

Well, that didn't pan out

You guessed it, we're still dungeon crawling our way through the Devil's Tower. We sneaked upstairs, fought a Madonna squad of monsters (they were re-enacting Vogue, we swear!), nearly blowing ourselves up in the process and then sneaked on through a maze. There were traps in that maze.

Slick and Reynard found a blade trap and tried to figure out how to jam it, but they were taking too long, so Sam decided to sneak off in another direction to do some investigating. There, he came across some bat men (well, they dropped on him from the ceiling, specifically), forcing the rest of the party nearby into attack mode.

Gunney used his newly found ray gun to help and blew off one of Sam's legs ... and then his guts, completely by mistake. Trying to use potions to bring him back to life, it didn't work out so well. Sam came back as a living dead (nearly a barf zombie - we really got our hopes up for a bit there) and clawed Gunney's guts out. Slick had to finish him off with a Greek Fire potion.

So now, we've lost two characters and thereby 40% of the party ... We're gonna cause Armageddon, aren't we?

Let’s not use blowing stuff up as a way to get upstairs

Still dungeon crawling our way through the Devil's Tower, we managed to make our way to the cave containing a way upstairs. Soon after that, we found the next staircase we wanted to go up ... but we also found a hidden door, and what do roleplayers to when they find a locked door? They try to break it down. Slick didn't manage it and Sam's new alien super-claw broke the locking mechanism so Mary couldn't pick the lock, so we had the brilliant idea to let Reynard blow the door off its hinges.

The roof caved in, blocking our way to the staircase. Oh, what a surprise.

So instead, we had to take the long way around (fortunately, Gunney's pace has improved - this whole Armageddon-preventing trip must be rejuvenating), being chased by an acidic, black blob that causes temporary paralysis and which doesn't even taste very good. Unlike the bug-like creatures who attacked us in our sleep, who, when cooked, taste a bit like chicken. With Slick in the party, a whole new world of culinary delights have really opened up for us. This week, he surprised us all by actually managing to make cheese and cucumber sandwiches WITHOUT people in them!

Also, there's a new word on the block: scrota, a portmanteau of "scrotum quota". Best not to ask, eh?