Does she need all her limbs?

Now armed with another PC in the party - yay! - we seemed to spend a heck of a long time trying to come up with a plan to maybe blow some stuff up and get an imprisoned god (?) from the ruins, and then that was decided against or something. It all got very jumbled up by the end of it that I lost track completely, and let's just say we're going to spend next session battling it out. Possibly in a Leeeeeeroy Jenkins style, because the Juicer might get bored with all the planning.

Is Davokar in Narnia?

Turned out that yes, ice trolls could get out. While we were camped up inside Elindra's witch circle, four of them came sniffing about, along with an abomination and an undead that sort of looked like a mummy. Luckily, we kept quiet and they went away - and we weren't going in the same direction anyway. Not that we got lost on the way or anything, not at all.

When we did get our bearings again and set off in the morning, we eventually came across a troll in fancy clothing, but he was badly injured. There was a stinger left in his neck - apparently he had been attacked when asleep - and his friends were infected too. With some nasty parasite thing, eww.

How to solve this? First by removing the stinger remnants so he can actually regenerate, and then by letting the pet spider poison the troll to kill off the parasite but not the troll - using healing to make sure of that.

Anyway, it turned out the troll was Damaka, one of the two trolls we were tasked by that arch troll to find. Well, here he is, and we just saved his life, yay! And there was Erdugald as well, the mysterious place, which turned out to look like a tower.

A very moist tower, that also played with our senses because we're not trolls. Going down into the structure we eventually came across a dead troll, who looked to have had the same idea as us, i.e. use poison to kill the parasite. Unfortunately he also killed himself in the process.

And then we heard FOOTSTEPS approaching ...

Can we run away now?

We came across a clearing, of sorts ... It was sort of an island, but instead of water around it, there was a deep abyss and a rickety rope bridge. We carefully crossed the rickety rope bridge one by one and had a look around. Turned out it used to be a village and they all belonged to a cult, and sacrificed themselves.

We found a troll metal sacrificial knife in a sarcophagus, and decided to skedaddle before night would fall. Watching from the other side of the rickety rope bridge, there were ghosts and skeletons and it was like Halloween had come a month early. They didn't cross to our side of the bridge, though, so we got out of there.

And then we found another clearing and a hill with twenty graves on. Eight or nine of them cracked open and we just about managed to fight them off when a bloody Death Prince emerged. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu...

We're middle management with magnet armour

The GM started regretting he set this adventure in Forbidden Realms rather than a non-D&D setting right about when the ranger/druid character (Elania) thought it would be a great idea to use the local fauna as miners.

Was this before or after we had a great debate about cold versus hot custard? Because that was a thing. Hot custard vs cold vaniljsås. Your mileage may vary depending on if you're British or Swedish.

Anyhoo. Game-wise we headed south, and entered a thing called Land's Mouth, which is some kind of opening to another dimension or something like that. The map looked like a diagram of female anatomy, at any rate. There was a crashed sky city in there, and creatures that drew metal spikes and swords out of their arms in a decidedly creepy way.

Let's see if Nxla can be distracted by ice cream

We're in Nxla's realm! Or, as we found out later, not Nxla's realm at all, but a place where he'd once got to and liked it so much he decided to stay.

A bit of Nxla was found playing with some kind of creature on one side, and on the other, a human being brutalised by some other kind of creature, a sort of lizard-cat type thing carrying a globe. We made short work of the creature and rescued the human. Yay for us!

Unfortunately, right about then the Nxla tentacle spotted Booker and we had to leg it. Being the slowest one in the party, Jayson was picked up by Elyssia and casually tossed over her shoulder. (Whether or not she took the opportunity to cop a feel, we'll leave unsaid.) Not the most dignified means of travel, but at least it was effective.

Meanwhile, Gorbash decided to play hide and seek with Nxla to avoid the rest of the party getting tentacled.

Turned out the lizard-cat people had a whole village where they were keeping stray humans safe, because they are good guys. And we just murdered one of them. Oops? Luckily for them, they have some kind of resurrection thing going on, so the one we offed won't stay dead for very long.

Pretty much all humans are in the lizard-cat village, so all we need to do now is to herd them back to the gate and wait for it to open so we can all go through and return home. Or at least that was the plan until we found out that Alistair is looking for the soul of his brother which he believes to be in this particular realm. Fun times await?

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?

Let's be mean in game terms!

Because people are away next week and we finished this bit of Rifts last week, we decided to play some light boardgames, i.e. cardgames, namely Exploding Kittens followed by Cards Against Humanity.

Meanwhile, we tried to figure out what we want to do after the Christmas and New Year's break. It's looking like we're starting out by trying the Doctor Who roleplaying game, so that should be interesting. We're all going to be inept companions, no doubt ...

I can't kill my character, I'm the Chosen One

We were on our way to a town we were supposed to be investigating when Booker got distracted by some lights. Turned out that Hecate wasn't keen on him going there, but we ended up going anyway.

Encountered a Shemarrian, who informed us that reinforcements were coming and that we couldn't enter the town in question because humans are puny, even if they're the Chosen One. Gorbash went anyway. Alistair got fed up with the Shemarrian and went to a nearby nexus point.

The town was full of dead people. The Shemarrian wanted to add Booker to that pile, but Jayson intervened and she skidaddled. Apparently she had trouble seeing the Cyber-Knight and kind of thought Booker managed to stop bullets in the air.

The nexus point was full (oh well) of necromancers. Alistair called for backup, and we rushed to his aid. By this point, both Elyssia and Alistair had managed to get soul tag-alongs as well, and after getting rid of the necromancers, everyone except Booker was about to be sucked through a portal to Nxla.

Booker, now having come to terms with being the Chosen One, put his gun skills to good use and severed the soul links and thereby saved the rest of the party from being sucked through the portal.

This was not quite what the GM had in mind, and we ended up actually finishing this chapter of the adventure. Oops? We did it in an epic fashion, though, so points for that, surely. We set it up so nicely for the next season ...

What kind of a spaceship IS this?!

With Steve and/or Dave being a new wallpaper pattern, it was glaringly obvious we had a bit of an Eldar problem aboard the Arkadius. Rusty managed to shoot one to oblivion before Nemiel showed up. Fulgentius tracked down all the intruders for us to take down. There were flamethrowers shot down airshafts and everything!

On the bridge, Orlandis used gravity (or lack thereof) to play Asteroids with dead bodies and a hidden Eldar. Lucius wasn't too keen on being thrown around the place thanks to the creative piloting.

Once the intruders were dispatched of, a team were sent down to the planet below to infiltrate a mountain complex. Turned out to sort of be less of a mountain and more of a problem. A problem which wasn't solved when Nemiel managed to summon a demon prince from the Warp.

But at least we fired a warning flare first ...

You can definitely feel the d4

Carrying on up the river, the threat of having his li'l Captain forcibly removed made the keelboat captain sing like a canary. Not that he had that much to say that the party didn't already know, but still.

The unconscious crew were set ashore a few hours upriver, while the party then moved on. After stopping off at Summit Hall to rest up, have a meal and dump the keelboat captain in a dungeon, they continued further upstream to where the people from whom Shoalar obtained a certain set of books had been ferried across. They then found the place of the ambush and made their way to the suspected hideout of the water cult.

I'd apologise but this is hilarious

Ahh, our first Hunter session since May 2014. It's good to be back, even though we're technically back in Derby.

So, the world's about to end in about a week's time and apparently, there is some old Japanese legend of people who bear the mark of a curse that go through a sacrifice of fire in order to cleanse the world of the curse. It looks like an orange circle, this curse mark thingamajig, and is currently occupying the skin of both Eddie and Tilly.

Since May, we have of course lost Tommy Crane's player, but we've instead gained Alex Surname, a 30-35-year-old war veteran who spent a couple of years in a mental hospital being treated for PTSD after coming back from a tour in Afghanistan. There was a werewolf, and there are no werewolves in real life, that sort of thing. He also made friends with Keles Moriton (formerly known as Rommel) in Afghanistan, and now he told Alex to make friends with us lot.

Alex also has an Alsatian, but an adult version called Karl. He pointed out that Tilly's 10-week-old puppy wasn't a puppy at all, and despite the party's best efforts at gesturing him to STFU and not trigger the Russian, Zolistagol finally realised that Rommel (the puppy) wasn't a puppy and freaked the hell out. It almost ended badly.

Not as badly, however, as things ended for Eddie's "chemical analysis lab" in a generic warehouse. The hollow Nazi gold bar we found turned out to contain something that turned people into radioactive barf zombies (!), and they're hell-bent on spreading themselves upon Derby like a bad case of Ebola. Err, yay?

What does a critical hit do these days?

We continued our foray into the woods. Or, rather, into the cave we found last time. There were goblins inside that cave, and a big brutal bugbear.

We're happy to report that the cave is no longer infested with such vermin - because in D&D, ethnic cleansing is not only not frowned upon, it's positively encouraged!

After the first session, which we will henceforth refer to as the pilot episode, series one started out with some changes to the cast, so here's the smashing new line-up:

• Hematite Frostbeard, dwarf cleric
• Karak-Dag, human fighter
• Malinda Hornraven, dragonblooded human sorceror
• Rhogar Shieldbiter, dragonborn barbarian
• Tan Elin, half-elf monk

Stop that, it's Scilly

Monty Python Monday could be like a thing.

A Room with a View of Poo

Special Agents Mulligan and Cully are back! This time, they've been tasked with going to San Antonio in Texas, to investigate a bloke who seemingly predicted an earthquake in the area, which destroyed a building. The same building he had, in fact, ran into a couple of days earlier, shouting about how it would be destroyed.

We officially suspect that he's a terrorist, of course. Inofficially, we're not so sure.

Going to the man's house - a paranoid schizophrenic, btw - we found a man with a gun. He was shot a little, and died en route to hospital. He was a representative of some crackpot church, and his cronie was busy being blind on the floor. The paranoid schizophrenic had collected his excrement in various jars, which we found out when some smashed on the floor. He was taken into custody. Just to make sure.

Something's not right, though ...

Dude, where's our beer?

Okay, well, I couldn't quite stop myself to jot down a few comments, primarily mentioned while driving. Roadtrip!!

These are comments between Vianden in Belgium and Munich in Germany ... where we may have gone to the Oktoberfest. We'd post a review, if it was that kind of blog, but it isn't, so instead, some craziness. Mostly about our Germanic neighbours.

Read everything in a German accent, and you get the idea. In fact, you should have heard one of the tour guides at one of the castles visited. He spoke English in German. Sort of like Arnie, except with an even heavier accent. So read some of the comments in that accent for a giggle.

Genghis Khan would've approved

After the first session's adventurous night, Brown and the Deadly Hummingbird went to get drunk. Someone challenged them to a fight, but as luck would have it, managed not to have Brown beaten up.

Meanwhile, Boaty investimagated the Tube tunnels and found someone at a distance who refused to run for help, as well as someone who was hurt or possibly dead. There was a hole in the wall too. All this was duly reported to other policemen to take care off while he went home for the night.

Miss Duckworth got home only to interrupt the oldest child telling the younger two a scary story. At a very strategic moment, involving thunder and lightning. Poor kids, lost sanity points and are now terrified of their governess. If only they knew their daddy was brutally murdered.

Troubled by nightmares, Brown finally woke up and got himself ready for some work at the Bath Manor, where Abigail found herself in charge of the household, as Lady Bath and the children were elsewhere, and Lord Bath ... well, he's the ex-Master. A handsome naval lieutenant (who was the right sort of jerk to make a spinster a good husband in them days) came to collect some things from Lord Bath, and Abigail gladly handed them over. Possibly not the best of ideas, considering he left his shadow behind. In proper Victorian fashion, fainting ensued.

Brown was polishing the bannisters when Boaty and Cecil came by to let the household know Lord Bath was no more. After they'd left, a corpse showed up at the door ...

I’m Nyarlathotep and so is my dog!

When you begin an adventure, you first have to create characters, which it took us a little time to do, so there's not a whole lot of text this week, but chances are, there will be plenty more next week. These characters are tremendously quotable, as it turns out. Populating Victorian London and trying to investigate the occult, in alphabetical order:

• Abigail Duckworth: Confirmed spinster (she's 24) and governess to the three children of Lord Bath.
• Harold "Boaty" Boatman: Chain-smoking police officer who would rather retire, but the Victorians didn't retire, they worked until they died. Which might be sooner than expected!
• Hubert "the Deadly Hummingbird" Smythe: Renowned moustachioed strongman and keen balloonist, except his balloon is currently held by the police.
• Michael Brown: Handyman who gets accosted by anything from small children to scary monsters, and who'd rather they left him alone. The only one yet who's lost Sanity points ...

The story begins in London 1891, the first tube line has just been opened, and we've all ended up at a party to celebrate this momentous occasion. There's a buffet and everyone's having a jolly good time, even if one of Lord Bath's children try to force-feed a handyman peanuts and oysters, and another keeps being called "Kiwi" by a strongman.

Lord Bath leaves the party early, only to be found in the Underground station a while later with his throat ripped out, which the men of the party discover, much to their horror.

Back at the party, the lights go out, and a lieutenant asks the governess to meet with an eccentric professor to pick some things up on behalf of her employer ... although she has no idea her employer is no longer alive.

Let the investimagation commence!

These boots were made for stompin'

When we're one player down and face certain death, there is a coping mechanism we tend to employ in the group. It's called "procrastinating until Death goes away". We've done it in Deadlands before, and now ... we just ended up talking all manner of bollocks just for our own amusement. All the while, of course, aware that the more we stall, the less chance there is of us getting killed in that particular session.

It very nearly failed to work, when the GM threw a bunch of genestealers on us. Nasty critters, they are. They pack a savage punch, and we took damage. Had it not been for a few strategically used Fate points, there would have been more body parts missing than just an eye. Or, as it turned out, having your leg very nearly shot off.

Before going into the next Xenos-battling, however, someone said that would be a good place to leave it, so that the missing player wouldn't miss out on as much. The other players quickly agreed, as did the GM. So now, battered and bleeding, we go into the next combat with a full squad.

There's disciplin, and then there's DISCIPLIN

After a most epic battle which ended with us saving the Dreadnought (who had a convenient bit of amnesia, go fig), we continued through the desert, finding where someone had been spying on us. Then we went to the town where the Governor was supposed to have showed up if he hadn't got lost somewhere along the way.

Eventually, we found ourselves at the Rift, in a camp with a commander more than happy to execute his information officers. (Hence the mop and bucket. You'll see.) We also managed to recruit a poor young lad into the Imperial Guards. We'll see how that pans out. He might forgive us eventually. Maybe.

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 ...