The enemy of my enemy is my enemy

After levelling up (level 8, wooh!) we somehow got into a discussion about Cthulhu and tentacle porn and found out that yes, the internet will provide if you do an image search for Cthulhu dressed as a Japanese schoolgirl. Uh. Like you do?

Anyway. In actual gaming terms we went to the market, and most of the party pretended to be slaves belonging to Gorbash, who in turn pretended to be a Rakshasa. We found Alistair and his Shemarrian assistant/slave in a cell down at the slave pens, so that's good. That we found them, that is, as that's what we were there to do.

A couple of brothers, whose other brother we may have previously disposed of, recognised Booker. And then the setting off of explosions ensued ...

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.

Ballooning with Portuguese Ninjas

Our investimagation took us back to the nutty professor, who gave us copies of the things he had given Abigail the night before - which was just as well. The navy lieutenant with the scary shadow was not the navy guy the paperwork was supposed to have gone to ... On the plus side, Brown got deputised, but it still didn't stop people from calling him "boy" even though he's 32.

Then we went down to the docks, stowed Hummingbird's darling balloon onto a ship, and sailed off to the islands off the coast of Spain, shown on the paperwork. Things would have been fantastic in the waters of Spain, if it wasn't for the fact that our characters were created for urban 19th Century London ...

The island we arrived at was something else. Hummingbird took Brown along in the balloon to do a bit of scouting. Fortunately, there was a more experienced balloonist there who could do most of the work. Hummingbird, we discovered, was 90% talk about how fabulous he is as a balloonist ... and only 10% actually skilled. It was quite possibly his very first time in the air.

Up at the manor, where Abigail had been suggested she go to find company better suited to a lady, everyone curiously had very familiar names. And meatcleavers, as it turned out. In the docks, Boaty enjoyed the local rum and was horrified at what the Spanish subject their omelettes to. (Potatoes? Who'd ever do such a thing?!) That was before all hell broke lose and he had to flee the scene, chased by a mob of flesh-eating maniacs.

Luckily, both party members were picked up in the balloon, which then developed a leak and, because of some brilliant dice rolls when they really needed to be brilliant, landed square on our ship. Sadly, there wasn't much left of the crew. Brown got taken over by evil smoke, Abigail fainted, and everyone jumped ship. Hummingbird made it to an island first ... and got his eyes ripped out by Brown, and then his head was turned a good 180. Boaty, seeing this from where he was swimming, mercy-shot Abigail and was about to kill himself when someone else did it for him.

50% dead and 50% have their souls taken over ... that's not that bad, is it? Well, this was the last session after all ...

Because stereotyping Japan is FUNNY

Umm yeah, so totally forgot to mention that last session was character gen of Deathwatch and didn't get funnier than:

"When I said 'do Valentinesy things before Blood for the Blood God', I didn't mean 'imagine Dr. Doom on Chat Roulette'."

and

"There's a MASSIVE difference between being AFRAID of the colour yellow and getting TURNED ON by the colour yellow."

and that doesn't go very far. We do, however, have a few previously unreleased quotes kicking about, which we were saving for a rainy day, and that might as well be right now. So, from 14 June 2011's Changeling: The Dreaming roleplaying session at Chimera, we give you Pantry: The Carnage:

Bark to the Future

After the explosion, Scraps dug a hole through the rubble to get Jackie (and a bunch of gear) out. Then we blew another hole ... in the wall, leading to the outside. Equipped with some kind of flying belt, we made our way up to the top of the mountain. Where we encountered Stone. That's right, the original harrowed himself.

AND WE PWNED HIM!

Yeah, suck on that for a bit! Okay, so Slick's Manitou took over, twice, first dropping Jackie off the edge - but luckily, he came to his senses at the last minute and rescued her. In the end, when Stone had melted through the floor - muttering something about we might have won this time, but like the Terminator, he'd be back - he did a similar thing to Reynard. Reynard answered by barbecuing him with a flamethrower on the way down, thus putting a crispy end to our trecherous friend, the homicidal alchemist.

Reynard then turned on the force field, bounced unharmed on the ground, picked up the strangely unharmed belt, which he then tried to argue with the GM about until the rest of us shouted to him to just roll with it. When the GM hands you a flight belt so you can fly back up the mountain unharmed and join your friends and live happily ever after (or die trying), you sure as hell don't argue the slight implausibility of the belt's working condition!

But yeah, we saved the day. Scraps ran toward the stone, Mary shot it away from the portal thingy it was in, Scraps picked it up by swallowing it, and ran toward her. She grabbed him and together, they flew back down to the portal room and headed to the future, closely joined by Jackie and Reynard. On the other side, the portal was sealed off, and everyone left with the conundrum of how to get the Heart of Darkness out of Scraps's belly without hurting him.

And that's all folks, thus concludes our story. The Posse is now stuck 200 years into the future. Here's how we got there:

The universe wants us dead

It's not going well. After last week's party deaths, Reynard removed Sam's steam-and-ghost-rock-powered Gatling gun from the burning remains, to ensure it wouldn't blow up, while Slick helped himself to the contents of Gunney's pockets. Slick then decided the best thing was to put a bullet through the steam canister to make sure it wouldn't blow up in our faces - so it blew up in his instead. Pretty much.

Mary dealt out some healin' to the reluctant alchemist, and we headed off down the maze. We managed to find our way out of it eventually, only to find some aliens with force fields for protection. They were really difficult to shoot at. In fact, not until Slick put out Slumber Gas and Greek Fire did we manage to even damage one of them - but sadly, Slick died in the process because those aliens do pack a helluva punch.

Our previous encounter meant that we were getting low on chips (Mary had to use her two legend chips not to lose limbs), and once you're out of chips, you're out of life. Or, if you're Reynard, it doesn't matter, because you can't spend chips to negate wounds anyway. First Slick went down, then Reynard.

Fortunately (?) both quickly felt much better, even if they looked very Death Becomes Her, so to speak. Mary is now the only original PC left standing, but hopefully, with two Harrowed in the party, maybe she, Jackie and Scraps the dog can still manage to save the future. At least four of them have died trying.

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.