Tearing down windows and doors and I could not find eyes like yours

This whole session was basically all dream. Except this time they were in the same one (sans Val) - the Egyptian primordial sea of darkness thing. Lottie turned on Auspex and discovered her and Frankie were floating in what will basically become aura/everything.

A pyramid and an Egyptian god emerged from the water, Tatenen with the sun crown. Turns out if you use True Sight on a god you can get a seizure, a splitting headache and get glowing, golden eyes.

Tatenen wanted to know the cousins' names. Lottie negotiated some sort of immunity for three people each of their choosing in return for giving the names. She only really wanted the immunity for Julius, and offered her other two spots for Frankie. He chose to decline them, and after giving it a lot of thought chose the other three people that are now connected to their new unlives: cousin Val (who we guess was left out of the dream not because he was lucky, but because he's now an NPC), and ghouls Benny and Angela. Tatenen told them to stay and learn.

They observed fighting snakes-with-frogs-heads, the sun rising (doing them no harm, which was nice), and then blood with black aura streaks gushed forward, so they ran to avoid it. There was a creepy and quickly developing foetus that came out of a piece of flesh, and another god stabbed himself in the right hand. It was all very strange and neither characters nor players had a single clue WTF was going on.

Frankie woke up with bite marks in his hands, and since he botched the understanding roll, Julius must have some kind of a rat problem. Lottie woke up with golden eyes - huh. Val, it turned out, had also had wet dreams, but in the other sense of the word. They told him and Julius about the weird dream and about what happened the night before.

Lottie worried that she was the one choosing Julius as a sire because she had asked for him to be protected at the very beginning of time. He tried laying those fears to rest, and complimented her on her new eye colour, which she now hopes will be permanent ...

Everything IS better in Brooklyn

Lottie met back up with Julius who told her about an 8th gen/800-year-old vampire called Ekaterina the Wise, a.k.a. the vampire Val met the previous session. Her jaw is all messed up from an attack (that was meant to hurt people close to her?) that didn’t fully heal when she was turned. They decided not to tell Frankie about this, because a Frenzying Brujah in the living room sounded like a bad idea. (Frankie's murdered sister Caterina is his berserk button.)

Meanwhile, Frankie and Val (henceforth an NPC as the player dropped out) went to a restaurant in Lexington to meet up with "Cola" Schiro. Cola was successfully intimidated and spilled that he'd met Jeanine before, at a party in Staten Island, and had been giving her info for the past two months while she used him for snacking. She was particularly interested in Frankie as of three weeks ago (read: a week before the cousins were turned). Once interrogated, our cousin Vince was left to take care of him.

Weirdly, Prince Wellsley showed up in disguise to tell us he wanted Umberto Valenti disposed of, quickly and quietly. He will grant us one question truthfully answered, but we decided to save it for later.

Back with the Malkavians, they do some research, because parks are losing their auras. There's a planned road called Anaconda Street, and its planned path goes through a park. The work started the same day our cousins were Embraced. The park, it turns out, has "no voice".

They also met with Aisling Sturbridge, a Tremere friend of Julius's, to investigate the park situation by way of a ritual. There were runes, blood and a chalk circle and they felt uncomfortable. Lottie insisted on her blood being used instead of Julius's.

In Harlem, the guys investigated the scene of the drive-by looking for clues, and followed a trace to an old Family safehouse, where they discovered an old vampire with a forked tongue - a Follower of Set. He wanted an unspecified favour in return for giving up the location of Umberto Valenti. Val tried to Dominate him, but it didn't work and the guy got a bit grumpy. They then had to high-tail it back to Julius's Manhattan place to not get fried by approaching dawn.

Lottie and Julius had a long-awaited talk about blood-bonding, deciding to say yay to double-sided, nay to one-sided. We'll see what happens with that. It was getting light outside, so everyone went to bed, meaning to discuss the night's details the following evening.

This looks like a job for fusion blocks!

Sooo ... Gorbash went and had a chat with one of his dragon friends, and now we're apparently supposed to go on some kind of suicide mission because attacking a flying fortress - the Death Star, basically - is somehow a reasonable thing to do???

All in all you're just another dwarf in the door

Another dwarf lady showed up on our doorstep only to murder herself. This time Murmei was present and could do a live translation. Not that it really helped, because she was having a go at Valgai for not having left yet and reiterated that the old Symbaroum king is after him.

Meanwhile, the future Mrs Murmei has been found to potentially be an assassin. Her last two tutors have gone missing, never to be seen or heard from again. Her lovesick would-be future husband was undeterred - he just thought it made her sound really cool.

And that's when a couple of bodies were found in the street, and things took a turn from there. Especially as a third one was later found as well ...

How was stuff safer in Davokar?

We're back in Thistlehold. Elindra went to speak with the guards, who weren't happy about her admitting to having murdered some people that were up to no good. They said she should wait for a ritual to finish, and stay hidden until that was done, so she headed over to the Ordo Magica, who it was safe to presume had a protective circle she could sit in for a bit.

Murmei was summoned to Ordo Magica because rumours were abound about him having fraternised with elves. He disagreed. Being very nearly murdered by elves was not exactly cavorting with them, so there. He later went back to ask them to fund the expedition into Davokar. It ... didn't go as planned. First, they had the audacity to say he had to wait until his mother had got to Thistlehold, and then that he had to spend two weeks with her. Pointing out that actually, time is of the essence because people are trying to kill him made them insist that he move to Ordo Magica HQ where a room would be prepared to keep him safe. In return, he'd only have to spend a week with his mother ... and a proposed future wife.

Valgai ... abides. He's getting himself some upgraded armour and a nice cup of tea with Elvis. On the plus side, he has now been given Master Vernam's house, because he's a noble that doesn't have lands of his own, and someone needs to look after the house now that Murmei's effectively in wizarding protective custody for the next three weeks.

The funniest thing of all is that the GM thought we'd be on the road by the end of the session!

I only have a small retcon this week

We continue toward civilisation. Murmei got a papercut from the old map - the meaning of this has yet to be revealed, but might become important later - when we do the sidequest the troll gave us instead of the main quest.

As we were making our way through the forest, we saw a big snake-type creature coiled around a tree branch, but it completely failed to spot us - somehow - so we decided to leave it alone. It's the type of creature that will pick off people one by one so it can eat in peace, and we didn't much like the thought of being eaten, frankly. Besides, if it hasn't noticed us ... let's just move along.

Moving along, we came across some elves. Elindra talked to them, making sure to name-drop some winter elves we had befriended previously. This made them decide among themselves that we weren't worth the bother killing, so we didn't have to fight them either.

The guide proved so observant we didn't notice we were nearing a cairn until we were almost on top of it. It rumbled and a hole opened up, with a couple of undead coming out of it - the type that would indicate a necromage might be in the vicinity - so we decided to give it a wide berth.

In fact, we made it all the way back to Thistlehold without murdering anything. So, true to form, Elindra decided to change that, by murderising some people that had "our" house under surveillance ...

The GM is laughing AT us, not WITH us

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off into Davokar forest we go!

And we get attacked by corrupt fairies with beady little eyes and long, sharp talons and things!

And we have to convince our hired hands to follow us into a bit of the forest known to generally not let people return. But that's where we had to go, because the elf that kept intruding on Murmei's dreams was. We're now friends with that guy, and have those elves' protection, so that sounds pretty good.

... Right?

Sneezing fire majestically

In this instalment, we fought a big-ass golem, and encountered a High Magus called Armand. There were fusion blocks involved, and we got out alive. That's about all I can remember, bearing in mind this happened over a month ago now and only a couple of days after my dad suddenly passed away, so I may not have been in the best frame of mind to remember these kind of things. :( It's also why there are few quotes, but I think that's also partly down to us mainly fighting through a dungeon, which generally means there's more dice-rolling than quipping.

If you've wondered why the blog's been quiet for a while, it's because we had no sessions for a month, due to people being unavailable for a variety of reasons. We're back now, though, so here's the last bit of Rifts for [insert time period here].

Cool! We're Switzerland!

We continued having a look below Tilverton and found the vampire's lair. He had a fleshy-looking coffin with feet, but instead of being a quaint piece of self-ambulating storage à la Discworld, it was all pulsating and evil and wrong. It was destroyed.

We also found a guy who had been cut open and the innards had been placed on display, so to speak, but still connected to him, and he was still alive. If you can call it that. We collected him and all his bits and put them in a box to let our wizard friend read through all the research books the vampire had left and maybe he could put the guy back together. (He could. Deeply traumatised man, however, was no longer at home.)

Things like that. We also progressed the re-building of Tilverton and our own followings.

Why are we so atrocious?

We went to a town called Angels and were going to use Booker as bait. After much arguing about this point, Alistair and Ulmolf had enough and decided to go check out the town by themselves. As Gorbash and Jayson also went to have a look around, Booker decided he was going to agree to the bait plan all along. Following on from this, Booker went around various hotels checking in but not actually making use of the rooms.

Gorbash, trying to fit in, decided to make himself nicely inconspicuous ... by copying Jayson's looks, and because dragons are supernatural and therefore supernaturally beautiful, the end result (looking like Jayson's more attractive brother) did not go down very well with the Cyber-Knight, who's used to being Mr Fanservice.

Cups of tea were had. Stalkings were done. In the end, Booker got a message from a six-year-old girl to please help by rescuing her mum in a warehouse. Booker, being the nice chap that he is, decided to use her as a meat shield.

The child's mother wasn't in the warehouse, of course, but a necromancer was, so he bravely ran away.

The 40k universe is lovely

Here is a post containing quotes from two sessions: first, the character generation session and then the first actual session.

The crew are aboard the Arkadius, and went to look for a derelict ship that disappeared around 50 years ago but appeared to have been stranded near a planet for thousands of years.

Most of the player characters decided to have a look outside the Arkadius, except for Rusty, who sent Brian the trainee instead, because s/he didn't want to risk another ship getting stolen from under his/her nose.

The player characters are as follows:

• Fulgentius Sophus, Explorator and mostly metal
• Nemiel, Librarian (not the Syfy channel or Dewey decimal kind, the Deathwatch kind)
• Orlandis of House Dravonica, Rogue Trader and Captain of the Arkadius
• Rusty, Voidmaster of unknown gender who is a leaf on the wind

Are we dead yet?

Last week ended on a cliffhanger - a plague bear was coming right for us, along with some well-dressed dude. This session started with the well-dressed dude getting into our van while the rest of us took the bear down.

The dude didn't get to steal the van, which is what it seemed like he'd be doing. Instead, he told us he was trying to find some kind of lab that used to be in the area. That sounded like a good idea to us, seeing as how we might find a cure for whatever disease we'd manage to acquire last session.

We drove through the woods, following the tracks of the abandoned vehicle, and found a large log cabin. The people inside were doctors and quite friendly. They even offered us (Maggie, Vincent and the NPC) to freshen up. Meanwhile, outside, Jack patched up the two holes in his windshield and Duke stayed put in his mech suit. A black rainstorm hit, which was only a problem for Jack - luckily, he managed to avoid it.

Thanks to Duke deciding to switch his heart monitor on, and realising the only heartbeats were those of us, shit kicked off. Apparently the friendly people were in fact undead and everything around us was just an illusion ... The showers were basically just mud. So now, not only are we infected with icky plague, we're also covered in mud. Great.

Okay, duct tape bandage it is

This is the episode in which we get tooled up - at B&Q and a local garden centre, of course, we're not savages - and begin a dungeon crawl. The end of the world - and the campaign - draws near.

The cave system somewhere outside Leamington Spa had baddies in it, like a vampire and a werewolf and a Russian bear, and they had also abducted Eddie's brother. Things that generally put us in a bad mood. Armed to the teeth (in Rommel the pseudo-dog's case literally, he was carrying a knife in his mouth) we went after them.

Having found a chamber which split off in three different directions, we split up the group - with all the PCs going down the same route. There, we first found a table with chairs and some very familiar mystic symbols. Trevor, Zolistagol and Alex sat down by their respective symbols, and immediately zoned out. Worried, Eddie and Tilly quickly jammed something between the table and two of their party members' hands (well, there was just the two of them) ... leaving Alex connected to the table and thus able to hear the vision presented to them. A vision from a long, long time ago, and which might possibly be helpful when we find the Burning Man.

The abductees were drained of blood, but we managed to find Eddie's brother and heal him a little before he expired. There was a vampire there. Heroic Molotovs, axes and other weapons came in handy. Then we heard a scream, and discovered one of the other groups in trouble. One of them got stabbed in the back by Eddie's axe (he was aiming for the Russian bear), but on the other hand we also managed to get the Russian bear after a number of Molotovs, shots fired and grenades thrown.

To be honest, it's a surprise we're all still alive. Just-IIIICE!

You're not rolling particularly high, are you?

Two regulars down but with the addition of an occasionally recurring player, we decided on playing Betrayal at House on the Hill for this session. We were doing okay, and then the little boy turned out to be a traitor (AGAIN - seriously, third time playing this game in the group and all three times that kid's been the baddie!) and summoned a ghost.

The ghost took down three of the explorer characters and the traitor died but there was one guy left standing - who finished off the ghost and lived to tell the tale. Somehow they were making it out to be some kind of feminist conspiracy, because the female characters died first. Methinks feminism isn't a word that means what they think it means.