Rolling a double 20 is very 2020

So, there's a massive hole in the ground in Thistlehold. There are things coming out of that hole, and we fight them. They keep coming back with more friends. And then there's a wizard abomination thing, and that's not good - especially when neither Hairy Dog nor Yahana are with us. They were kept out of the city because a giant spider and a (sort of) tame kotka are a bit ... eye-catching.

In the middle of the fight, a nice double 20 (it was 2020 at the time, after all) ensured Murmei's bowstring snapped. Things continued along those lines. Deadorna very nearly died in the fight. Fortunately, it turned out that a counterspell was useful, because that wizard had a big Corruption cloud, and let's not?

Finally some Templars showed up to help, but there's still a bunch of Corruption boiling up from that hole in the ground, so things aren't exactly looking fabulous, shall we say?

Damnit, I have narrative blue balls!

This is a combination of two sessions, partly because they were both short so not a lot was said, and because they both covered Elysium. The first was short because the GM had internet troubles and instead of having no game, we desperately improvised by ending up doing a group call using actual telephones. #OldSchool

So, Elysium. We were at the Met, sitting in the auditorium watching Faust: Part 1. There was a young man with Jeanine, but we didn't recognise him, nor did she introduce him to anyone, and when she did spot Frankie she didn't appear to recognise him? Don Cerro, the Brujah Primogen, talked to Jeanine who introduced the young man as Steven Maslowe. Who?

Nor did it appear the Prince knew, when he invited Lottie and Julius to speak with him. The Prince had invited the Sabbat (!) to Elysium, for a hitherto unknown reason. The Prince asked the two Malks to keep an eye on them, which they did from the Malkavian Primogen box. Lottie wasn't pleased at the Sabbat referring to her as a "morsel".

Frankie told Theo about the knife Jeanine (allegedly) gave him, as she broke into a third party's house to deliver it. Theo later invited Frankie to the Brujah Primogen box and offered to take him under his wing. Don Cerro was, perhaps understandably, a little miffed about this.

So, in front of the entire Camarilla and the Sabbat, Jeanine finally introduced Maslowe to the perplexed Prince as ... her previous Childe from Atlanta, who is hoping to make his mark on New York City. The only people happy about this were the Toreadors, who thought it was hilarious - except for Charlotte (we don't know why) and Val, because his cousin was just very publicly disowned by his Sire. The Brujah were not happy being screwed over by one of their own, but at least Frankie wasn't declared Caitiff as a result. Phew?

The Prince wanted a private word with the two newbies. Did Frankie realise how fucked he was? Sort of? Not really? (Frankie doesn't get politics.) But yeah, he's pretty fucked, as is probably everyone he cares about. (This is just about the worst thing to tell a character who is fiercely protective of his mortal family and who also isn't adjusting well to being a vampire ...)

The Prince said he could potentially offer the Mangano clan a boon of protection, but they would need to ask him the question he had granted them - specifically without Julius being there. Lottie asked about the broken twin ghouls, which the Prince was unable to answer, but said he'd look into. He then granted everyone "of Frankie's blood" the boon of protection, so that's one crisis averted - and another one created. Frankie's uncle (a.k.a. Lottie's "dad") is of course being actively harmed by another vampire's ghoul, so Angela will quickly have to stash him in some care home so he's out of the way. At least his mind is so broken now that he'll never regain proper consciousness ...

(We shouldn't worry about Charlotte being mind-controlled. We'll find out soon enough.)

Val had left with Charlotte, so Lottie and Frankie rejoined Julius and went back to the couple's Manhattan home to discuss events. Frankie went to bed early while Lottie talked about blood bonding with Julius in private, offering. Julius succeeded a Willpower roll to not throw himself at her.

And that's where we left it.

I'm the Aston Martin of barbarians

We met with barbarians! Deadorna and Valgai offered to heal people attacked by blight elks, but the barbarians refused. Deadorna spoke to them, because barbarians are her people after all. They mentioned a Sovereign Oath and a Blood Daughter.

Murmei made his sister a set of snake armour. It's dark green, making her look like the Green Arrow, which is excellent news.

We met with Kathman, the chief witch of the Vajvod tribe and also Deadorna's mentor. He's very knowledgable. Apparently there have been visions of an icy cold creeping into the world from Korratix Domain - that place we were stuck inside which had an opening to some kind of ice troll world ...

Elindra offered to bestow Xanatha's blessing on Deadorna, who chose to think about it.

Aslan was my direbadger form

At the end of this session, all three of us actually managed to join up again, yay!

Tannhauser dared Gorbash to travel through dragon territory and say hi to the dragon kings. Gorbash said (tl;dr) challenge accepted, because he was going to travel to Tolkeen with Jayson - once Jayson got back from the spa retreat that is Psyscape. Psyscape has a psychic hobo as a chief who liked blowing some kind of weird smoke bubbles at people, and who had a really nice rug.

Booker, meanwhile, was travelling by boat toward the same place. Some Mystic Knights tasked the legendary Booker with finding and killing Aureol the Avenger and get the ancient artefact "Mobius Band" for them. This is on par with getting your mitts on the Holy Grail, but he didn't know that at the time. He also said he would do what he could within his capability, and killing an ancient Great Horned dragon is not what he considers one of them. Gorbash certainly wasn't pleased to hear of it!

Also: maybe Gorbash is some sort of reincarnation of Jesus. Like Aslan.

Can the NPC fly a SAMAS?

Last week we left our group near Lone Star in Coalition State. This week, we did what we went there to do, and then got the hell out of there. Well, okay, we're still working on that part.

First of all we met Magali, one of the rat people. We think she's on our side, or at least we hope she is because we've just gone and told her everything about us. Gorbash got to be admired by rat kids and healed some very ill people, so at least they like us.

Then we went to get John, which included infiltrating a very big compound in order to break him out of jail. By pretending to be NTSEC. It went surprisingly well, even though Booker's fake ID card was commented on as being very old and should be renewed. Someone had him autograph a sign in sheet, which would be sent for handwriting verification, so we were on a strict timer.

John was obtained, and seeing as how the NTSEC officer whose ID card Booker was using had accepted his "usual" choice of transport without double-checking exactly what that meant ... we were shown to the roof, where six shiny SAMAS were waiting for us. None of us had a driving skill last week, so we sure as hell don't have a flying skill! Lucky for us the Dog-Boy could at least slave all the other SAMAS to Booker's, and show Booker how he's supposed to fly. We're still not in the clear, but at least we managed to take off without crashing to the ground.

The Accidental Homosexual Incident

Aaaaand we're back!

Gorbash the young dragon, Sir Jayson Oakwood the Cyber Knight and Michael Baradhi the Leywalker/Wizardy type went to the spider creatures to claim Baradhi's reward. (Booker Dayes the gunslinger had been called away to babysi escort a merchant, and was therefore absent.) They said the reward would be ready in a few days, could we perhaps come back later?

The group decided to go to a nearby town and spend the night. While drinking in the local pub, we came across a friend, Gerald, who was drowning his sorrows because his wife's merchant caravan had gone missing. Could we perhaps look into it for him? Seeing as how he offered us $300k for the trouble, who were we to say no?

When talk turned to heading to bed, Gerald somehow interpreted our response to mean we wanted to join him. In bed. This made him uncomfortable, although we had no idea what he was on about. It did cause some tension later, when Baradhi woke up to find Gorbash leaning over Sir Jayson's sleeping body, nose to nose ... Said Cyber Knight has been having (k)nightmares recently, and might or might not involve having a Necromancer as a nemesis.

Gorbash made a new friend, female dragon Ixchel, in whose territory Gorbash spends a lot of time. Fortunately, she's a friendly kind of dragon. Unlike Milan, from the previous adventure, who would rather see Gorbash dead, so now both Baradhi and Jayson now want to have the title Dragonslayer. No reason.

Oh yeah, and the shipment thingy? Found the transport ... and the bony remains of two bodies, one of which seemed to belong to Gerald's wife.