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?

I love being a crazy god!

We went to check out the local Center Parcs holiday resort thingy. There were orcs. The orcs were having an argument about who should get to have a key. Elani made everyone in the party look like orcs and then challenged them - the key should go to him (her).

The key was eventually found inside a platinum chest inside a vault. She showed the key to the orcs, making her alias the rightful leader of the orcs, and told them to go kill some Netheril to prove their worth. They went on their merry way and we emptied the vault and took the riches back to Tilverton to fund our new Pantheon.

Three sessions ago we only had a session or two left. At this rate, we have at least two more sessions. We like to take our time, clearly.

I don't get out of bed for less than 40 MDC

The Shemarrians would like to take the gate off our (squishy human) hands so that they can keep us safe from it. We thought it sounded legit. Some other people would also like to get their hands on said gate, and we're less cool with that.

Also, it turned out that Josh the Cyber-knight who wanted to go to Tolkeen to fight, despite this not being sanctioned by head office, had switched sides and is now some kind of mystic knight thingamajig. Or rather WAS some kind of mystic knight thingamajig. There may have been an altercation with us and some necromancers and stuff ...

Welcome to Louisiana Fried Rat, can I take your money?

Exciting times ahead! Hatch and Murphy are still blissfully clueless their new accomplice is long dead, because he's still doing things like moving around and talking. Ohhh the hilarity that will ensue when they finally succeed on those Notice checks!

In other news, the team decided to find out where the singing dame's fanboy/stalker lived by tracking down his place of work (a bank), pretending they wanted to interview him for a newspaper article. He hadn't come in to work, as it happened, but by promising to do a favourable article on the bank manager - and later do him a favour pro-bono (it's difficult even typing those words!) - by discreetly investigating why the guy wasn't at work, the trio finally found their way to his apartment.

Sadly, it seemed to mostly be a dead end. And there wasn't even any money in it. Hey GM, we've all got rent to pay, you know!

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.