When a Malkavian says someone's crazy ...

Lottie and Julius discuss theories with Aisling. Lottie removes Aisling's anxiety, because right now, there's a fuckload to be anxious about and she needs a clear head. Is the Prince trying to do something without the Primogen council knowing? Might it involve tunnelling under Central Park? No wonder the werewolves might be a bit miffed. Can we talk to the werewolves?

They also do need to speak to the Prince, but going in there with all their memories isn't a good plan. They need to somehow temporarily remove or edit a number of memories just in case. Fortunately, they have a Tremere at hand who knows just what to do.

Frankie's history lesson from Theo continues, and they also discuss hunting grounds and territory and so on. He also finds out about Hunters and Mages, and that there also seem to be Faeries and Ghosts. All this because he asked if there were other things beside vampires and werewolves he should know about. It's also suggested that if he comes face to face with Ekaterina, he should do nothing except to leg it.

Maybe you should consider a Path?

In Staten Island, Adelaide says she Sees spiders all over Jeanine, digging into her and eating her regret. (WHY IS DOES IT ALWAYS HAVE TO BE SPIDERS?!) Lottie "convinces" Jeanine to put some of her blood into a thermos flask. Looking at the thin blood in the flask, Adelaide freaks out, saying it's "cold, so cold". She doesn't mean temperature-wise.

After Jeanine puts the lid on the flask, it's put into some oven gloves for an extra layer of protection. Lottie and Julius strategise what to do with Jeanine, and they decide to leave her there for now, and make their way back to Brooklyn. She asks him about his first Childe, who appears to be missing, presumed dead, after angering some werewolves.

Meanwhile in Brooklyn, Frankie and Benny are thinking ahead. If you're in a Prohibition setting, your character is a bootlegger, his ghoul is a bartender in a speakeasy, you and your cousins are planning to open a blood donation clinic, and the house rules say you can mix alcohol with blood to make it fine to drink, it would be rude not to combine these factors, right? If one was to find out which types of blood goes best with which types of alcohol, there's a whole new market to tap into right there.

In the end, the two cousins finally meet up again, at "Angela's", where Frankie was considering heading anyway, after a brief phone conversation. Frankie starts telling his cousin and her Sire his side of what's happened while they were away, and the two Malkavians are not exactly thrilled about his and Theo's raids on the Giovanni affiliated speaks in Little Italy ... If only they knew it was (sort of) Frankie's idea ...

I can't keep playing Humanity Roulette like this

Lottie and Julius dream about the other person's personal traumas, lying naked in each other's arms in a basement in Staten Island. Frankie and Val head back home to Brooklyn, and to be on the safe side, Frankie stays over at Val's. In the evening, Val heads off to do some stuff, while Frankie got to see his apartment - and a change of clothes! - for the first time in what seems like forever.

Lottie doesn't lose Humanity for what was inflicted on Jeanine. Nor for jointly breakfasting on Tommy the Fool followed by jointly snapping his neck. How romantic!

Frankie goes to see Benny at their speakeasy, and places a number of calls to check on business. Everything is fine, but there is stuff happening in Red Hook. 25 people, running legit businesses and none of them connected to the mafia, have been arrested on shaky grounds, like "running mob fronts". Some premises were completely smashed, others roughed up a little, or basically left alone. It's puzzling. Seb is looking into it further.

Meanwhile, Lottie and Julius go to meet the old woman, Loretta, and her Childe, Adelaide. The Prince doesn't know about Adelaide, who was turned a year ago. Loretta tells the story of who Adelaide is (kind of a serial killer?) and where she found her (an asylum), how she got her out of there, and rescued her by Embracing her.

While Julius and Loretta have a discussion in private, Lottie and Adelaide get acquainted upstairs. Adelaide is well aware they have to leave before the Prince finds out about her. She wants them to go to Georgia. (Maslowe's from Atlanta. Coincidence?) She also talks about how there's something in the water near the Brooklyn Bridge, but she was afraid to look. She could see what seemed like a cold, bright star in that direction - bearing in mind this is supposed to be 6 km away. Loretta didn't see it. Lottie and Julius did see something in some of the very first sessions ...

Adelaide seems to have some kind of weird fortune-telling power. She asks if she can look at Lottie "properly", then says something cryptic about there being something in the blood, "something that feeds, something thin" before snapping out of it and asking if she's looked at her yet. What the actual fuck?! Maybe skipping town is the best option after all.

There’s no zealot like a convert

There's some kind of corrupt person that Deadorna speaks to on the crystal island, and is told people shouldn't go down there. Umm, well, duh?

We don't, in fact, get eaten by ginormous creatures, but instead a deal is made with the barbarians (?) down there that the blind death lizards won't kill anyone who's down there in the company of Deadorna or Elindra - everyone else is fair game. We're happy with that arrangement. and finally manage to emerge from the hole!

Murmei gets a note about meeting someone in an alley. That sounds as bad as it absolutely was - he, Valgai, Knightlight and Vizell get attacked by archers on the roof as well as on the ground. But it's fine, the ones still alive at the end of it get thrown into dungeons, because hello? RUDE!

Say no to unsafe blood sex

AltLottie came out to play, suggesting that maybe Angela had been mindwhammied by Julius at a previous date and that's why she was so, ahh, low on inibitions last session. (She was so forward even Frankie was thrown by it, although he didn't exactly complain at the time.) On the plus side, AltLottie also insisted on Val getting un-mindwhammied.

Julius also finally got the Charlotte situation, with his (presumed) relatives being Jeanine's ghouls. Allegedly. Is Jeanine the problem or is she being set up as being the fall guy? Is Charlotte the actual problem here, maybe? What game are they trying to play? We concoct a plan to meet Charlotte at Val's place (her being his sire and all) and watch her aura for clues. Maybe someone's mindwhammied HER?

We are NOT becoming the Columbos!

So, here's what happened. We have that Gamma World game run every month or so. The February session was cancelled because people weren't feeling well. It was rescheduled to the end of March, and by that time we were in lockdown and decided to get together over Discord instead. Because reasons we decided to put the Gamma World game into hiatus for now, and maybe get back to it when the world appears slightly more normal than it does at present.

Question was then what to do instead, as we still fancied roleplaying. Our Gamma World GM had an idea for a gangster Vampire: The Masquerade game set in 1920s New York. "Gangster vampires, eh?" said the players and so it was decided on as an idea. I've never played this game before, but the other two players suggested we all play newly turned vampires so that they would both be as clueless in-game about the specifics as I am in real life. (Read: part of my struggles with some games we've played before is that everyone knows the setting extremely well except for me, so I feel left behind when I don't know stuff everyone else takes for granted, and it means I don't enjoy playing.)

Plus, who can resist 1920s New York gangsters who turn into vampires? RIGHT?!

Having decided this is what we were going to do, and the other players saying I'm allowed to tell them off if they start to go over my head with their combined decades of experience, we tried to figure out what characters to play and how they'd fit together, and what their family name would be. We ended by having decided not to be relatives of Detective Columbo, but to be of the Mangano family, of Italian-American mobster fame, and were left generating our characters as homework before the next session.

How often we're going to play remains to be seen.

Welcome to Saerloon, home of ... stuff

The B team went to the city of Saerloon to investigate. Alwin managed to do a "Diagonally" instead of "Diagon Alley" on the way travelling through some sort of fire-to-fire transportation system and had a bit further to walk to catch up.

In the city, fighting ensued, because of course it did. We won, because we have plot armour. Or happened to be lucky. One of those.

(I may have forgotten to post stuff here for a bit.)

First past the goal posts IN SPAAAACE

We had to cancel the session last Monday, and the same reason caused me to forget to post this last Sunday, so here we go:

Denethor was hard at work with stabilising the planet's engine and the planet's goddess. Elani and Gunda went exploring on the surface of this new, if a bit collapse-y planet, which seemed to be full of snow - incidentally, it also didn't have Christmas, but we're pretty sure we weren't in Narnia.

There was a big monolith, but we didn't monkey around to Also sprach Zarathustra. Instead, some people were found, words were exchanged, and then we had to run because some undead, human-sized locusts came buzzing and we didn't fancy getting turned into one of those.

Our new-found friends led us to a system of caves, which were sealed from the surface. They had a spaceship, ginormous forges, a river of dust and took us to their leader, Zolya. She had a robot doctor friend, who informed us of what had come to pass since there was a riot on said spaceship and it ended up crashing on the planet a millennia or two ago.

We discovered we could absorb energy from dust, which they said was unheard of, and things got a bit tense. On the other hand, we found out that not only had the Undead Court been around, the Frozen Court had too, and they were still present. But at least Denethor could use some dust to repair the engine. In theory.

Using evil to do good

We had "rescued" the bodies of 24 gods, yet when we came back to look at them (and put them some place better), Varian's servants had put "the bags" into the furnace. Luckily the bodies hadn't burned yet. Pulling them out of the furnace, there were an additional ten of them, but Varian having selective amnesia meant he had no idea where they came from.

As we were doing our usual Godbound business (rebuilding Suzail and so on), a GINORMOUS black dragon flew overhead. The infamous Balefang. A large number of gnolls and other suspicious type critters were trying to dig holes into a mountainside, hoping to uncover the bodies of some gods previously slain, so that they could be resurrected. This wasn't appreciated by Asmodeus, one of the gods who killed said gods originally, hence the dragon.

We may have got involved in the ensuing fight. On the plus side, we didn't actually die and we disrupted the ritual to pull the god into a new body. On the downside ... the chapter ended by us being stranded inside the Night Roads. This is not unlike being stranded inside the Ways, and readers of the Wheel of Time will know what a bad idea THAT is. Even if we happen to basically be Rand, Mat and Perrin ...

Jeremy Corbyn sends a Tesla into space

Our GM said this session would be a quick way of deciding what we've done in the six or so months which have passed in-game since our last Godbound adventure. By "quick" we obviously meant to take the whole time only progressing through the first three months, because hey, that's us.

In those three months we managed to visit another town. It was on fire, so we put it out. Or, well, Denethor did, and he put up a building in his own honour and everything.

Elani made friends with a pack of hyenas ... which turned into an awful lot of hyenas, and there was a gnoll and a demon lord called Yeenoghu and demon lords aren't a good thing. They were sent packing.

Gunda is still struggling with being seen as divine, because as far as she's concerned, she's a follower of Tempus, and so should others be. She's the Jesus to Tempus's Jehova, if you will. After some clerical advice, she decided organising a tourney in Tempus's honour would be a thing to do.

ACME miracle maps of Gibraltar!

We started the rebuilding of Tilverton with the help of the locals. A delegation of soldiers from Cormyr showed up to say that it was their town - we disagreed. There might be repercussions later.

Denny - or Denethor to give him his proper name now that he's a would-be god - was busy making weapons and armour. Elani made herself useful by recruiting allies in the animal world. Gunda started training people, as making sure the city can defend itself sounded like a good idea. She also got to try being a platinum dragon for a bit thanks to Elani - Elminster was not amused.

Yer a druid, Harry

New game, new characters! Godbound is set in Forbidden Realms (D&D), but the characters turn out to have special powers. It's a bit like Hunter, or Exalted, or Changeling, except it's not World of Darkness.

At first, we considered being an all-Cleric party, and then there was a couple of Clerics and a Paladin, or a cleric, a paladin and an archivist researcher, and in the end we're like a druid, a blacksmith (who also does archiving and research) and Brienne of Tarth.

• Denny/Denethor: a human archivist researcher who is also a very competent crafter-of-things
• Elani Tiatha: an elf huntress with aspirations of becoming Boudicca, except for the dying bit
• Gunda: a human paladin of Tempus; see also: Brienne of Tarth

We started off by fighting some bad hombres and by doing so we discovered we had special powers, because we didn't use to be quite as kick ass as we had suddenly become.

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 ...

Whose side am I supposed to be on?

So what happened was ... Hecate showed up in Ulmolf's head and sang her siren song again. For character replacement purposes, Ulmolf said "alright then" and had Odin show up in town, asking him wtf he thinks he's doing. They both disappeared through a rift back to Asgard.

Ulmolf's replacement is a demigod by the name Elyssa. On the plus side, Elyssa is a good person, so maybe we can keep Gorbash on the straight and narrow for a while yet ...

In the warehouse where we found the necromancer last session, there was indeed a necromancer. She had a half-dead bloke tied to a wall and she was very pleased to see Booker.

Apparently it was all some sort of ritual to give Booker all the knowledge in order to fight what he needs to fight as the Chosen One, but we didn't really know this when we may or may not have conked her over the head and having her dying on us and completing the ritual.

A lot of people in town (whose HP were powering the spell) died in the process and because the spell sort of backfired because Booker was supposed to be the only one present in the building and not the entire party, Alistair let Gorbash and Jayson know they ended up with a soul each tied to them ...

Morality is overrated in the 'Verse

Again we were a couple of players down so we decided to play the Firefly boardgame with all the expansions again (except the Kalidasa expansion, which we didn't know about until we had finished). This time we actually managed to get a winner, and with a little time to spare! It was a closely fought match.

People were eaten by Reavers, the Alliance space deck was reshuffled an ungodly amount of times and fun was had.

First, however, we start with some "before the session" chatter from Facebook because this is why I love our group!

Back to the scene of the final boss fight!

After Orlandis decided it wasn't the best idea in the world to kill the Sister of Battle after all, he and the rest of the ground party carried on into the heart of the icky flesh mountain. They encountered the final boss creature thing and killed it.

I believe there is a big crater in the ground where flesh mountain used to be.

Meanwhile on the ship, the space crew continued with repairs and preparing for the attack of the Tyranids. And then they lived happily ever after ... or at least until we pick up the story again at some point. :)

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!

The Secret Life of Zolistagol Bagridan

Eddie and Tilly have dreams involving people throwing themselves into fires. In other news, pancakes were made, and one player had to cut the session short because he was feeling so unwell he didn't even fancy cake.

The rest of the session went by with the rest of us learning that Zolistagol isn't the only Russian in town. Half of the Bagridan clan appear to have set up shop in Derby, and they're all some kind of relation to him or other. There is also a rival Russian gang, because why not? It's a roleplaying game - any similarity with any form of reality is purely coincidental.

Right?

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?

Are you SURE you're the Chosen One?

After complaining that it's really complicated and soul crushing to generate a Rifts character, we got the show on the road. Booker managed to officially get in Ulmolf's Grudge Book (it's a book in which he notes down all the people he has grudges against ... obvs) after having a morality discussion with young Gorbash. The discussion went along the lines of "all people look the same to you, but you know that if they're wearing red headbands, they're bad and should be killed, even if they're not actually Rakshasa bandannas?"

We also went back to the Crow Bar and had Baradhi corner Granite the gargoyle in the astral plane room thingamajig again. (Yeah, he was outside around the corner, seeing as he's actually barred from the establishment.) Granite wasn't pleased. Especially not when Baradhi blew up the room again. Fortunately, we didn't care, and moved his body elsewhere. He dropped a compass and an earth elemental.

The compass looked suspiciously like the compass Booker's had in his mystery chest for some time out of game, which he (and we) conveniently had forgotten all about. Hey ho. It could be used to find the urn containing a part of Rita's soul (THAT'S RIGHT, IT'S A GODDAMN HORCRUX) and we're running out of time fast. Did we mention we only had 48 hours left, and it takes about 24 to get the astral room back up and running? Eh, woops?