Are we SURE we're the good guys?

We had a look at the records over at the Queen's Legate to see which (read: whose) houses went down the hole, in case that has some significance. The archivist there seems to have the hots for Valgai.

When going to speak with a Father Servola, people threw lanterns at us, and we ended up in a fight with some cultists? They weren't being very nice to us, at any rate.

Then some kind of "special" (in a Chosen One kind of sense) 6-year-old child proclaims Murmei is evil. This is a surprise to everyone, because being a bit of an idiot? Sure. Evil? Umm ...? Valgai's Witch Sight confirms this - the belt makes it look like Murmei's some kind of corrupt, evil thing. Perhaps it's a good idea to un-bind himself from that belt at the nearest opportunity?

Can we blame Canada if there's a devildemon incursion?

Sooooo the current situation is that we're now working from home and are doing our two weekly games (currently Rifts and Godbound) over Discord. The current situation, and self-isolating for a couple of weeks due to cold symptoms, are not particularly conducive to good mental health - even for hardcore introverts like me - so I've had real problems concentrating recently. And my concentration isn't the greatest at the best of times. I'm trying to work on it, but it's difficult. We're staying home and we're staying safe, that's the main thing.

That being said, this post is a combination of three sessions, so ... yeah. One of the sessions was mainly battling with a dragon, so we didn't say a lot anyway because we were busy with dice rolls. But ... yeah. Yeah.

Deliberately breaking the Left Hand Rule

So curse the old guy's sudden but inevitable betrayal. Because Elindra's spider-talking was non-verbal, he didn't notice her doing that - instead he focused on Murmei's knowledge of different languages, and him speaking with the giant in particular, to decide he was a demon and ... battle ensued.

RIP crazy old man.

We found the Tomb of Horrors, or at least the Cairn of someone or other. The door was locked, but we made it unlocked and headed inside. It was full of pit traps. Fortunately (even the spider-weary in the party agreed on this term) Elindra has a pet spider who can crawl on things other than the floor.

Eventually we found a big room with a ritual anvil, so the party decided Murmei was somehow best suited to become a blacksmith and turned an ordinary axe into an axe that makes you blind when you carry it, even if you're dragging it behind you on a rope. He also only narrowly missed out on taking permanent corruption during the forging, and wasn't keen to have another go making another perfectly usable weapon useless - despite both Valgai and Elindra thinking it would be great to have a blacksmith in the party.

It was basically a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl, and there's more where that came from!

Like Jesus but with a feminine touch

While Denethor worked on sealing the hole back up, we (well, mostly Elani) talked to the moth man, the Child of Auriga, who thought it would be a great idea for there to be more of its kind. So Elani got to work and spawned about a thousand of them.

We even had time to go on a few tangents, which has been a while. One was which dragon breath would be most useful, another which Marvel or DC superheroes we best represented. Gunda liked being a Thor/Wonder Woman cross.

Aaaand then we went back to Auriga to say hey, we got rid of the Rotting Court, and ... she was different. She was much stronger, but her memories were very different. What did we mean her not being able to separate herself from the World Engine? That wasn't a problem. She also didn't remember a bunch of other stuff, and Yeenogh freaked out when meeting her because there was so many people there who also ... weren't there. It seems Auriga has a bad case of split personalities going on, and one of them is a kid called Hedwig the Winter General.

Apparently the Court of the Sign of Madness is also in the house!

This isn't a good thing.

We built this weapon for rock 'n' roll!

After playing with a plant, growing it to gignatic proportions and hatching one of Auriga's protectors from it, we took Denethor's Floating Wagon to a hole in the ground. A big, big hole in the ground full of necrophages, eww. Down there we found a thoon hulk, some spider type creatures and a throne.

Battle ensued.

We were looking rather out-gunned, then Auriga's moth creature crawled under the throne platform, and it eventually cracked, and there was a big ass Rotten Court general hiding there. Which we, by the skin of our teeth, managed to somehow down.

And then we got pelted by dropping dead necrophages and got the hell out of there.

We beat the plot

We took a different route back to civilisation, Murmei's "great aunt Sandra" a.k.a. the Night Lady in tow. Elindra, out scouting, came across a patrol of Templars, so led them on a wild goose chase while Valgai, Murmei and "great aunt Sandra" sneaked past.

Night Lady delivered to her fanclub, and we proceeded further to Yndaros. Crossing a big river we were subjected to very thorough immigration controls (that's where the latex comment comes in), but managed to get through and boarded the rope ferry.

The Templars caught up with us, but by that time we had already made it to the other side. We managed to burn the rope, halting their progress for what might be a few days, and met up with more of the fanclub. Full payment received, we went shopping, as we were still a bit away from our final destination - Thistle Hold.

We're middle management with magnet armour

The GM started regretting he set this adventure in Forbidden Realms rather than a non-D&D setting right about when the ranger/druid character (Elania) thought it would be a great idea to use the local fauna as miners.

Was this before or after we had a great debate about cold versus hot custard? Because that was a thing. Hot custard vs cold vaniljsås. Your mileage may vary depending on if you're British or Swedish.

Anyhoo. Game-wise we headed south, and entered a thing called Land's Mouth, which is some kind of opening to another dimension or something like that. The map looked like a diagram of female anatomy, at any rate. There was a crashed sky city in there, and creatures that drew metal spikes and swords out of their arms in a decidedly creepy way.

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.

We're a bleak bunch of bastards

Having some delicious cake and a long, very good game of Cards Against Humanity with a special guest star. :)

You do crit damage on a fumble if you crit on the damage roll

So, this is where it ends. Well, not entirely, of course, but for now.

We broke out Alistair and his Shemarrian assistant/slave from their prison, there was fighting and some of us got our heads encased in ice. Lucky for us we all had a spell on us which meant we didn't actually have to breathe, so it was more of an inconvenience than anything else.

Somehow we got out of there alive, all of us, and headed back to Magestar. But where, oh where, is our Beloved Leader of the Blackstone Juggernauts, a.k.a. John?

He can thank me later

We're still in Soul Harvest, that magical place full of reanimated skeletons and corpses. Zombies as hotel bellhops, with cheeks made up to look slightly less dead. Creepy.

Booker's back in the game (being played by the GM last week, we all thought he was acting strangely out of character!) and wasted no time associating himself with someone who seemed important - a vampire, apparently. Didn't try to drink any Château de Booker Dayes, though.

The rest of the party gathered information and were deciding whether or not to get citizenships as well, seeing as how Donna was acting a bit Cyndi Lauper and just to be safe, maybe the rest also should be citizens. May we live in interesting times and all. Interesting, necromancy-infested times.

Averaging our way through the apocalypse

It's a new year and new zombies to kill!

We went aboard a riverboat, which we meant to blow up (because zombies) but the evening was young and so we decided to check it out first. There were zombies, but there were also a number of perfectly innocent slaves that the zombies hadn't yet eaten, so we freed them.

It was the best day ever.

A great game to get to know new people

We were meant to have the (potentially) final session of Legend of the Five Rings this time, but two character sheets were missing, some friends from Sweden were over for a quick visit, and when the GM had phoned one of his flatmates to bring him a book he had forgotten at home we decided to scrap the session in favour of Our Favourite Card Game. Everyone could join!

Of course, mutterings of a "Swedish conspiracy" were abound, yet in the end there was no outright winner, as four people had the same amount of wins, and those people were not all Swedish. So much for that conspiracy, eh? ;)

Can we just call this 'The Monumental Fuck-up'?

So, umm, bad things happened.

Well, there was thing thing called the Prometheus Project, which can allegedly extend Juicers' limited lifespans. This was appealing to Donna, for obvious reasons.

Then ... well it came to the point where she was fined for not being able to show her papers, she went to pay it, was asked for her papers again (we were still waiting for the new forgeries), and shit kicked off. She destroyed a toilet which caused the building to go into lockdown. Gorbash set off a fusion block outside, blowing a crater in the street and taking not just a couple of Coalition State soldiers with it, but a number of civilians. Seeing as how he sort of can't differentiate between civilians and soldiers because they're all Coalition Staters (basically "all Germans were Nazis") ... the characters with a bit more fixed moral compass (read: Elyssia and Jayson) are ... not very pleased.

Oh, and Gorbash doesn't like haute cuisine. It's too bland for him. It's like what an iced bun is to Swedes ...

Rapid fire!!

In a session where apparently it was difficult to remember that Kon and Nole are gender-swapped in relation to their players, we finally did what we were meant to do - take the Interdictor. Yay for us! There were epic lightsabre fights between Sarge and the Inquisitor, including some obligatory impressive jumping between floors.

Thus concludes this adventure.

Unfortunately in the process, we lost Declan, and with that his ability to roll extremely well, not to mention that he was personable - unlike NG, who, as it turns out (and unbeknownst to the rest of the party), had murdered him. Once an assassin droid, always an assassin droid. :( There was something about "Rebel scum" and hidden programming. Next time we do Star Wars, we're so screwed.

("Rapid fire" has been established as that's what Nole apparently says when he, ehh, reaches a critical point in his bunk.)

We need manpower, morale and proton torpedoes!

Where to begin? We were trying to get to the core and disable it, seeing as how a messed up droid brain had decided it was going to self-destruct Cloud City and set fire to the Bespin atmosphere, and we didn't want that.

On the plus side, we succeeded.

On the other hand, Sarge lost his sight. Doc nearly died trying to fix him, and eventually fell down the core shaft. Nole started off getting trapped in a room (it had a REALLY BIG GUN in it, okay?) which then exploded, and shortly after being patched up from that he was gunned down by that bounty hunter from a few sessions ago.

But on the PLUS side, we saved Cloud City from a deranged droid brain, and we did all make it out of there alive and back onto the ship. Admittedly, the ship has seen better days, but it's back up and running. For now ...

Can we take off with a forest inside the engine?

After missing a couple of weeks' gaming (one planned, one very much unplanned) we were back on Gerrenthum, disposing of a dead Stormtrooper by staging a hoverbike crash. There was some commotion at a nearby base, which ended in Rhan, not terribly closely followed by Nole, running up a mountain trying to help a fellow Rebel out by killing Stormtroopers. Konvoru helped by firing the ships guns at a group of Stormtroopers ... causing a crater, which launched assorted bits of woodland into the ship's engine. NG was not well pleased ...

Doc fixed up all the injured parties, and it turned out the guy fleeing the Men in White were the person we were supposed to have met with previous session. He took us to a nearby fallback base and introduced us to the handful of Rebels on site.

NG set to work on fixing things that needed fixing, Konvoru helped herself to the local flora (flower arrangement is very important), and Nole learned how to drive a hoverbike because it had a massive gun on it and he wanted one of those. Rhan was not very pleased when all of the Rebel's munitions stash had been brough aboard the ship "for safe-keeping in case we need to evacuate very quickly". Doc had the more sensible idea to install some med pods for later.

Planning of what we're actually supposed to do, mission-wise, ensued ...

Let's be mean in game terms!

Because people are away next week and we finished this bit of Rifts last week, we decided to play some light boardgames, i.e. cardgames, namely Exploding Kittens followed by Cards Against Humanity.

Meanwhile, we tried to figure out what we want to do after the Christmas and New Year's break. It's looking like we're starting out by trying the Doctor Who roleplaying game, so that should be interesting. We're all going to be inept companions, no doubt ...

There are Reavers in St Albans

Again we were a couple of players down so we settled in for another game of the Firefly boardgame. This time we played with all the expansions - specifically, the Blue Sun expansion which we hadn't tried previously.

We also had another player joining in, as he saw us setting up and hadn't played the game. Unfortunately none of us actually won by the time we had to start putting all the stuff back in the box, but we were quite happy to just enjoy the ride along the way. After all, the Firefly 'verse is pretty darn shiny.

Save him now and kill him later for the XP

We're back some time in the future! We re-joined the group at the very end of the previous epic battle against Nxla, and the party found that someone was looking at them. It turned out to be a ley line mage called Alistair. New party member!

Rita (a.k.a. Hecate) asked to be escorted back to Stormspire and that's the direction we were going anyway. She didn't waste time trying to get each and every party member to swear fealty to her, by pushing every character's possible buttons. Gorbash and Jayson quickly declined, Ulmolf considered it ... and then considered what Odin would do to him when he finds out Ulmolf's switched deities, and Booker said yes and then tried to negotiate the terms of the agreement. Rita's not really the kind of deity you negotiate with ...

Then there was a party, and then we tried to talk Booker out of going on a suicide mission ... or at least to not go without the rest of us.

Pro tip: don't play Sushi Dice in a store full of people. For hours. Why? The game involves ringing a bell far too bloody often, driving other people in said store to insanity. Because everything is accompanied by a DING! or even a DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!! if the players are particularly trigger-happy.