It's nice to have unlife goals

Lottie ends up near the Washington Heights library. It seems Lladislav the Tzimisce's return is welcomed. It's rather touching. While having a sniff around the place, she also discovers some Jewish gangsters who seem to be involved in this, and a Setite is following her? (Is Ellie more concerned about her than the Prince?) She then overhears Turlev and Blaise telling off Lladislav for having "undone decades of work" with his stunt in Harlem. He really can't be around when Ecaterina gets back - unless he, too, would like to become a head shorter.

Meanwhile in Harlem, Val's car screeches to a halt in front of Frankie. Julius is also in the car, badly injured. They speed north to find Lottie, but Julius sends Val off to the Bronx while he and Frankie jump out of the car and run on foot to get to a safehouse near Columbia University. He makes some decoys and sends them off in a different direction.

Lottie does a number of impressive jumps between moving cars to avoid getting followed to get to the second nearest safehouse - incidentally the same one Frankie is carrying Julius to. Finally the two player characters are in the same building again!

I feel like we've just met a vegan elf

Ah, I was wrong. This is actually where we tried to get the big ox god’s head up the big hole in the ground. The god is dying and the head needs to get back to where it was taken from. We finally put it on a cart and dragged out of the city.

We get rides from barbarians with ginormous creatures. Two hours later we get to a clearing with a big ox corpse in the presence of elves, and save the god.

The next morning, Elsiosi barges into Murmei’s bedroom. He tells her off. Valgai throws her out (for barging in like that), then invites her back in when she's suitably apologised. She comes bearing a letter from Mother, summoning Murmei to Ravenia. Elsiosi also wants to give Murmei tea to cure the abomination problem that he doesn’t actually have - he's just wearing a belt.

Valgai announces he's planning on retiring and heading back across the mountains. The rest of us convince him to maybe come with us first to Ravenia so Murmei and Deadorna can tell Mother to shove it.

Blame it on the fiancée

We were essentially mostly fighting in these sessions. First of all we went to a tannery, and after some long stairs there was bad magic surrounding good magic and an abomination clinging to the ceiling. There was a hole in the floor.

We later had to go interrupt a ritual in the big hole in the ground, among the subterranean crystals ... and fought some more stuff. Cultists and abominations, oh myyy!

We're pretty good at fighting. No one's died yet. Touch wood. We also had to lug an ox head out of there and reunite it with its body? Or we returned it to there. Something like that. It was months ago now. 😆

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?

Gunfight at the OK 5th Precinct

Sometimes we have to remember that we aren't just vampires, but also gangsters, and do some gangstering.

Well, first of all Janine is showing herself to be very untrustworthy by sending Frankie a messenger with a fancy bottle of wine. He declined to try it, and he also didn't use the messenger boy as a snack. In fact, he was kind enough to give the kid a bottle of cheap booze as a tip.

Lottie is trying to find a HQ for us, sort of a blood bank perhaps, and maybe it could masquerade (har-har) as a clinic for sailors ... We'll see how that develops.

Anyhoo. Now that we're made men and woman we were going to a meetup of different mob bosses, as some stuff had been going down. Even more stuff started happening. Gunshots. Someone had gunned down a mob boss outside the 5th Precinct, and there was more gunfire about.

The mob bosses at the meet had to be evacuated, and shit would probably rain down on all of us. The speakeasy had the emergency shutdown orders executed, and we strongly suspect one of our NPC cousins to have taken a photo of Lottie's dad from the speakeasy - possibly with a view to kill him and set him up as a fall guy.

What's worse is that our sires seem to know about what's going on here, and we don't like it.

Oh, and there was some frost on the water as we crossed That Bridge again, but hey it's only May, so it's perfectly normal, yeah?

Captured by a wine storm

It's been a long time, but we're now back in Rifts for a while. We took care of some rescues and went back to Magestar ... by way of a ley line storm. The water turned into wine, and as a plot twist, the wine had healing properties. Surprise! Our armours were getting fixed, Booker reunited with his Cyber-knight girlfriend Joan, and after seeking the advice of a wizard, had Bally/Barry/the symbiote removed from him by Gorbash. The Chosen One is now a bit more squishy than before, especially as we gave away the protective medal to those White Rose people as a token of good faith.

Ice trolls are dicks

We were in Runvid's Cairn, about to disrupt some runes on gholem-type statue things. We succeeded, and they didn't come to life when we passed a certain point on the map. Instead, we found a room with a tomb, and a shield on the wall. A shield that, as it turned out, gives out bolts of lightning when you touch one of the rocks on the burial mound thing.

After various unsuccessful attempts at disabling the lightning trap (we later found out you're not supposed to be able to) we gave up, and left. Turns out the forge thing was best left alone as well, so Murmei was right to insist not to become a blacksmith. Of course later he took the skill anyway, because it meant he'd be able to patch up Knightlight himself.

We continued our journey and came across the Fortress of Solitude. Despite his previously flawless negotiation tactics ("hi, let's be friends!") Murmei was unsuccessful with the ice trolls, who decided the party would be best eaten. The party disagreed, almost wiped, but finally took out the lot of them, and got a fancy magic spear in the process.

Turned out there was a ginormous wolf creature, who had apparently eaten a dragon previously, guarding a big door inside the ice cave. Elindra talked to it, but it wasn't being helpful either. Apparently there's a portal to another realm behind the door, and the ice trolls want to take over this world, but so far they haven't come very far ... and besides, they're also trapped inside a big bubble you can't simply walk out of.

At any rate, we got out of there, found a treehouse, rested up, and we left off having found a couple of dead ice trolls and a dead boar, and the air was getting chilly again ... to anyone not wearing a cold immunity ring.

Let's have a pre-emptive NOPE

The making-a-rat-drunk experiments continued, but we eventually had to let the little fella go. If there was poison in that wine, at least it wasn't meant for rats.

As luck would have it, we could now finally start our journey into Davokar! You know, the thing we were supposed to have done ten sessions ago but got side-tracked when Murmei was put into protective custody.

On the very short road leading into the forest, we found a small camp of witchfinders. The wine was mentioned. They took one look at it and said it was very bad mojo indeed. There was darkness in those bottles, make no mistake. As they knew what to do with said cursed liquids, we gave them the rest for safe disposal, while we continued into the forest.

We were attacked by a Skullbiter named Steve, and after much deliberation decided not to attack the group of them we found a bit further away, because while we could take down one of them (somehow, it has stupid levels of armour) we couldn't guarantee the same with a whole group. When it was killed it turned into a pile of earth with a piece of a runic spear in it. Interesting.

Near a place where it was fabled a dragon had been taken down ages ago, there seemed to be a witch's circle protecting the area. Somehow we ended up in a bubble of sorts, by a cottage occupied by a ghost we decided to call Rafe. Apparently in order to get away from there, we'll have to come up with some very tricky questions and the answers? We ... we might be stuck for a while.

The green, green flames of home

We finally decided to name our pantheon - the Church of the Green Flame. We fought a fire being, proving that distraction really works - someone distracts it (misses), allowing the next person to successfully hit.

There was an ex follower of Denethor's, who had gone a bit loopy and blinded himself, and he was taken down as well ... as were the five women strapped up about to be sacrificed. They were taken down in a very different way, I should add. Rescued, as opposed to killed.

We ended up seeing Tanith again, the Child of Baal we met ages ago, who turned into some kind of murder ball (murder Baal?) in a very ... distressing way. Oh, and we opened a spa and a Green Flame temple franchise in Saerloon. Yay the B team!

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 ...

Roll Save vs being afraid of the dark!

Deeper into the forest of Davokar we go! We were attacked by giant hairless cats who were so hungry they decided we should be food. That didn't happen, through the cunning use of weapons and grappling hooks on people floating down the river. On the plus side, we made it to the Ordo Magica outpost! Some people were huddling inside, but were happy to see us.

As we made our way toward the headquarters out there, we came across freeze-dried spiders, weird purple lily of the valley where everything else was dead (did someone see a picture of a bluebell and didn't think to look further than "it looks a bit like a lily of the valley, but not white").

The Ordo Magica HQ was now full of goblins. Fortunately, Murmei knows how to speak their language and is proving to be strangely proficient at diplomacy. The goblins spoke of being scared of a "darkness". They also had a trap door (under which they kept a hungry troll), a wizard who was quite out of his mind, and a communication circle going straight to a big spider creature who said she was very benevolent and kind indeed.

The story continues ... and will hopefully be finished by Christmas at this rate ...

It's fun to heal at the OMHQ!

Valgai got the minimum amount of healing possible from someone at the Ordo Magica because dice are evil. We also delivered the book back to Master Eufrynda, who was so delighted with us she gave us another task we could do. Someone had gone missing in the Davokar forest and would we mind awfully going after them?

Yes, yes we would, but here we are, putting together an expedition and planning to escape the town unnoticed ...

Speaking of unnoticed, Elindra was trying her hardest to spread misinformation around the beggars and cutpurses ... but was so terrible at Persuasion she ended up murdering a whole bunch instead. C'est la vie?

Can I have your autograph?

Elindra went around town doing some investigations and interrogations. This led to CLUES! There was also a guy who looked very quest-givery, so we ended up heading off into the wild in order to find Lady Elsana a.k.a. the Night Lady in order to bring her back to the capital for lots and lots of money.

We bypassed a troll cave and ended up in a secluded village in a sort of basin type thing. It was a bit Maze Runner-y. She agreed to come with us, even after Murmei asked her to autograph one of his books ...

Was that a racist grumble?

Having made it across the Titans, we're now heading toward more civilised areas. Civilised if you don't count the corruption abominations that attacked after someone decided to improve the soup kitchen's stew recipe with interesting berries.

Then there was an escaped Night Lady who was some sort of high priestess of an earth goddess before people decided to say down with that sort of thing, and we might now be landing ourselves right in the middle of a civil war between two religions. Because that always works out for the best of everyone ...

Can we just call it Kill Bill-ing?

Our journeys across the Titan mountain range continue! When out looking for stuff, we came across a group of Jakaars (Jakkars? Whatevs) and what looked to be some kind of big bad wolf, but was in fact a shapeshifted elf. They were most definitely hunting our travelling companions Balen and Ludo, who SWORE (because of course they did) they had done nothing wrong.

A group of elves later came to camp to point a finger at them, and go "J'ACCUSE!" and wanted to take them away and kill them, because reasons involving being corrupted. We later pressed them on this, and whaddaya know? Balen hulked out into an abomination. His demise was swift.

And we made it across the mountain range with the help of said elves, and we as a group went "what, that's IT?!" and made the GM promise we'd continue with the next adventure next session, because three sessions is nothing when you're trying out a new system!

#NotAllWizards

The next three months in the lead-up to the actual adventure passed with remembering the name of our wizard friend (or frenemy if you're Elani), huzzah! We put Dominion points into Denethor's continued work on our airship stroke floating pantheon, everyone adding their own special something (i.e. Words) to it.

We found a husband and wife team of Tyr worshippers, one of them being a child of Baal. They helped us with a few things, and even though some might have wanted them dead to begin with, it did appear that they were not there to kill us. Considering they could basically teleport us, that was good. It meant they could take us to north of Icewind Dale where another Tempus-worshipping Godbound was trying to pick a fight with goddess Auril. He was persuaded to stand down, after a special guest appearance by Tempus himself.

Elani was busy trying to keep a couple of our followers on the straight and narrow, because Gruumsh is making his presence known.

The tourney was going great (well, what remained of the participating Tempus and Gunda Paladins ended up having to be disqualified because they got all murdery with each other), until - with impeccable timing - three children of Baal appeared in the middle of the arena just as the finale was about to go down. They asked what year it was and then disappeared. We're puzzled by this, because as far as we were aware the children of Baal were all dead ... save for the guy we met earlier.

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy

After levelling up (level 8, wooh!) we somehow got into a discussion about Cthulhu and tentacle porn and found out that yes, the internet will provide if you do an image search for Cthulhu dressed as a Japanese schoolgirl. Uh. Like you do?

Anyway. In actual gaming terms we went to the market, and most of the party pretended to be slaves belonging to Gorbash, who in turn pretended to be a Rakshasa. We found Alistair and his Shemarrian assistant/slave in a cell down at the slave pens, so that's good. That we found them, that is, as that's what we were there to do.

A couple of brothers, whose other brother we may have previously disposed of, recognised Booker. And then the setting off of explosions ensued ...

Sit down, shut up and roll initiative

Trying to get out of Coalition State ... Going so-so. Especially since we're also trying to save some people along the way. Oh, if only we were the bad guys, we wouldn't have tobe all helpful and stuff!

Opening the portal is less epic and poetic than I imagined

Innuendo aside, we went to clean up the abandoned town of Angels. The cleanup was successful. We also found some Shifters who realised that they could open the portal without having to kill people. Soooo ... they opened the portal, avoided activating some very nasty runes, and we went through ...

Scenery was a little less epic than pictured, although we recognised it from visions, dreams and such. Now we just need to find the missing people and get them back through the portal without waking up Nxla ...