And remember, kids, the GM wants you to fumble!

We battled people in a corridor. It wasn't great for them. It wasn't great for us either, in fairness, Valgai got badly injured, but he lived and most of the people on the other side didn't.

Next session, the party left Murmei (and Knightlight) at the Queen's Legate to look at books to find out more information about house ownership, and so on, while they went to search through some houses. They get into a massive fight, because of course they did, and Deadorna for a long while was the only one really damaging them. Lucky for us, the party survived. The people (Templars?) attacking them didn't. Don't mess with motivated adventurers, FFS. Will NPCs never learn?

The prettiest Arch Enemy in the land

The first session I forgot to note down what we were doing, but it's fair to say it contained the licking of wounds in the aftermath of fighting all the things that were coming up through that hole. Possibly even fighting more of the same.

The second session, Elsiosi turned up being very concerned about Murmei. I think it was suggested everyone should pretend he died in the attack to get her to go away, but ... that didn't happen.

We decided we wanted to be the ones to go down the hole on an expedition. We're brave heroes, right? We are clearly best suited for the job! Which is also the reason we give Ordo Magica when we go to ask them permission to go down there. They make us take some old, scary-looking wizard with us.

Funnily enough, Elsiosi didn't fancy joining us down the hole. Sucks to be her?

He wasn't dying a moment ago

We went into some kind of other-dimensional house with a magic lift (elevator) and got stuck in various rooms and it wasn't necessarily all fun and games. Someone came upon a chained-up vampire that he decided to free (because why not?) and another room had a booze collection and Elgar records that simply weren't up to Elgar's usual standard.

And then Florence Nightingale turned out to be a bad guy, because these things tend to happen in M&M. :D

Damn dice behaving like dice!

Our last instalment of Hell on Earth had us in a hospital. The one where they make those bloated zombies we've kept seeing. We fought the doctor who created them, although for some of it we were just flailing around at the zombies rather than being competent fighters ... oh well. At least we lived to tell the tale!

Pretending we're in Venice and not Baton Rogue

Making our way down the river we eventually reached the flooded remains of Baton Rouge and met the locals, who were rather surprised to learn that a horse had been trained to go outside to take a dump. The locals seem friendly enough. Maybe next time we find out they actually want to turn us into gumbo?

Sixth Sense has been going off since I met you guys

We got reinforcements - by two players instead of just the one that had been missing the previous few weeks. Alistair is ... well, still trying to look for clues about his brother, probably, so instead we are now in the company of a werebear called Jeremiah, or Jerry for short, and a human Juicer called Donna. So now we have two females in the party, played by men, and of course Jayson is being played by a female. (This information will come in handy to understand a particular quote in a bit.)

Despite it being a suicide mission, because we'll all be hunted down as aberrations (or something like that), we decided to go toward Tolkeen. Or at least go into Coalition territory.

Best laid plans and all that ...

Border crossing, we were going to go past pretty much unnoticed, when we see a family of four being hunted down. Because we're the good guys, we of course got involved, because trying to murder children isn't something we approve of. Shooting ensued, but we did survive it to fight another session. :)

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.

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?

Can I buy that die off you and chuck it away?

After more travelling, we came to the house of Agatha the Banshee. We gave her a nice comb and she answered the question we posed. We just had to try to remember (as players) whose magic book we were supposed to ask her about. As it happened, the person who always writes everything down hadn't written that particular bit down.

The GM "helped", saying it was a funny name and it began with "Bow", because apparently, when it had been mentioned in passing many weeks out-of-game previously, the person who heard it had said "it's funny, because it sounds like Bojangle". Let's just say the clue didn't help, because the name wasn't actually funny.

Aaaaanyway. We then came across a wizard in a tent, guarded by zombies. We got rid of the zombies, and instead of sticking around and getting information from the wizard, we got rid of him too. Oh the things we do for XP ...

Why are we cooking the goblin?

After much ado, we decided to pick one of the many questing opportunities and try to sort out those Redbrands. Or something.

We entered into a cave system (this is D&D after all) with a rickety bridge over a chasm to kill unweary adventurers. Fortunately, we have a mage in the party, and the mage decided to pick Feather Fall when levelling up. It paid of pretty much straight away. Hooray!

In the cave, we met eliminated a Nothic aberration and some bugbears, and set a goblin thrall free. We're nice that way, but not nice enough to heal the poor fellow's bleeding hands first. We also found a room where a rat looked at us and then disappeared when it was shot at. It's an animagus, I tell you!

Does a person count as a flammable object?

Because we were - and this is going to sound a bit weird - one player up and one player down, and the new 5th Ed Player's Handbook was out, we got to re-spec our characters any way we liked.

So that's what we did, and as that didn't take all night but we didn't think to bring a game with us or something, we decided to have an early one for a change and then resume the adventure next session.

On the plus side, our new player is now in play. :D

Introducing the Duffel Bag of Destruction!

We didn't get very far in this session, to be perfectly honest. We plotted what we were going to do when meeting the guy Phage had lured to a café. Ugrub waited by the back door while Phage and Dru kept look-out by the front window, posing as coffee-drinkers. The job of talking to the guy fell on Teddy.

The guy was convinced defecting was a good idea, and Teddy suggested he go home and pack and be ready to leave home with his wife and family in about three hours. Basically, so that his current employer wouldn't find out and do something bad to him.

Shorty after the guy left, some guy in the booth next to where Teddy had been sitting also left, so we all went to red alert. Then Teddy mind-controlled the guy, who started shooting into a parked van on the other side of the street, and the rest of the session was taken up with that combat.