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.

We'll all be Malkavian by the time this is done

In the basement of a little cottage in Staten Island, AltLottie and Julius have a frank discussion. Turns out Lottie is actually the third person Julius has sired, gasp. AltLottie tells him a few home truths about Lottie's and his relationship - he needs to shape up or ship out, basically - which has the desired effect, as he really does want the relationship on offer. AltLottie switches back to Lottie, and to save time Julius gives her a memory dump of everything that's happened, and the interrogation of Jeanine continues.

Jeanine hands over the key to her house (well, she won't be needing it ...) and reveals that, unsurprisingly, Maslowe was going to be her heir, but she didn't have a chance to formalise it yet. For a short while she had considered Frankie, but she kinda went off him because he's very stubborn when it comes to having ethics. Lottie gets her two write two back-dated letters, one that names Frankie her heir, one that signs over the ghouls to Julius. Just in case.

That knife of hers? It was used in some rituals. It also went missing, and she did not in fact carve that J into the guest bed at Val's ... She also gives background on the ghouls. Where they come from, how she tracked them down, and so on. Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned, and she might've been better off taking up a different hobby.

Lottie and Julius blood bond right in front of their torture victim (with Tommy the Fool cowering in the corner), because bare cell with a drain in the floor is just so romantic, ya know? (They were in a similar room the first time it happened. Is this going to be a thing now?) They follow this up by going full Malkavian mindshredding on her, which, true to form, makes them super horny again.

In Manhattan on the way back to Charlotte's apartment, Theo divulges his rivals for the Brujah Primogency. Out of the other three, Frankie has only met one: Delilah, from Elysium! When asked if Charlotte can be trusted, Theo says "to a point". The two of them have a sort of off-and-on thing going on. It's currently on. Frankie admits that when it comes to himself, “it’s complicated”, because saying he has the hots for his cousin's ghoul seems like a thing best kept to himself at this stage.

Don Cerro, the Brujah Primogen, is waiting for them back at Charlotte's. He agrees the Brujah had to make a show of strength, but geez, Theo (and Frankie) couldn't have been a bit more subtle about it? Turns out a Setite doing garbage disposal in Harlem and the Bronx has had a lot of business in Little Italy recently. The Giovanni wanted rid of dead bodies (!) and agreed to a one-off slave trade with the Setites, who wanted some live bodies. Not that this means anything in particular at this stage?

Charlotte spoke with the Toreador to get more information about the Giovanni ghouls and found out her Primogen and some guy called Tamoszius are planning to nominate Frankie for Scourge (!), which is of course completely ridiculous considering he's a baby in vampire terms - it hasn't even been two weeks! He clearly won't say yes, and saying no would hurt future career prospects, except what fucking career prospects does a non-political 13th Gen have anyway, even before taking into account that he narrowly avoided being declared Caitiff after being publicly disowned by his Sire? So is that really such a loss? Theo finally suggests they beat the Toreador at their own game: have the Brujah put that Tamoszius guy forward for Scourge first. Having him turn it down would hurt his social standing wayyyyy more than it would Frankie, and the Toreador couldn’t counter-nominate Frankie without it looking like sour grapes.

Deadliest Catch: Human Slaves Edition

In the final session of Rifts, for what might be a very long time because we've complicated things for the GM now, our best laid plans involved using a warlock to create a distraction. He unleashed a water elemental that would turn the town of Moreno into a lake. A lot of people, including the vampires' human slaves that we wanted to save. Gorbash managed to save a handful, and took them to safety, but not without a body count because he had to do it very quickly, in a kind of trawler manner.

But we got the people we were sent there to save, so that's good? Mission accomplished? There were a number of vampires in storage somewhere else and they appear to not be there any more, but that's not going to be a problem, right? No, let's head back home to Blackstone Juggernauts HQ and get ready for our next adventure, I'm sure it'll be fine.

Pretty Princess Dress-up Orc

We deal with the aftermath of killing the parasite god and having new powers and some of our followers now being exarchs. We also managed to fit in a trip to Cormyr, specifically the ruins of Zusail, where the prince is still hiding. We put our friend Alwin (now an exarch of Gunda) in charge until they can get a duke or something in from next door to work as a steward. Then we went back to Tilverton, because stuff had managed to mess up again in our absence. You can kind of see why some deities decide to be more hands-off, really ...

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.

I've missed the harassment and forgotten how to roll dice

After a whole month's worth of not roleplaying, we decided to change Tuesdays into Mondays so we could continue.

The party ended up going to the Temple of the Grey Seers. We had to remove our weapons, which made us slightly uncomfortable, and then a room exploded. See, there was this guy who was kinda psychic and he bombarded us with messages to the point where even the Cyber-Knight started crying for his mother, just before he passed out.

Then there was the Sunaj bloke, Martin, who was responsible for putting Bob the Symbiode on Booker's back. He died. The party did try to kill him quickly, but he had really good armour and stuff, so it took a while.

Ulmolf is trying to teach Gorbash how to do rune magic as well, so they considered turning the soul of the Sunaj into a runic spoon.

Basically, Gorbash probably isn't falling from graces, he's more sauntering downwards in a leisurly fashion ...

This is completely unrealistic!

A player couldn't make the session last week, and instead of continuing the raid on the water cultists, we decided to play some boardgames instead. However, I didn't bring the quote pad, so here's a little something we prepared earlier.

Still D&D, just a different group and a different adventure. This group is doing the Hoard of the Dragon Queen, and while most of the players are different, the GM is the original D&D GM in our regular group, and contrary to popular stereotype, I'm not playing the Cleric: I'm a Forest Gnome Wizard! The GM described a Forest Gnome Wizard as "a little like Radagast" and went on explaining further. My comment was "YOU HAD ME AT RADAGAST". :D

I think these two session excerpts are the very first two sessions of the campaign.

It’s a very entertaining scene

The party respectfully relieved the slain cultists of their earthly possessions before moving on down to Womford.

When investigating the village, they came across villagers who wanted to be left alone, a number of ruffians, and a jolly sea captain who had some interesting books to sell. Later that night, Kyla entertained the people from the ships which gave the other party members time to search one of the keelboats for clues. It seemed very likely that at least one of the boats was water cult-related.

After all the sailors having gone to bed drunk, an attack was made. The crew summarily slaughtered, the party tried to interrogate the captain ... by promising that Aial would do very bad things to him indeed. Then they stole the boat and headed upriver, horses and all.

A symbiote is for life, not just for Christmas

First session of the new year, woo! We started by having a chat with Rita, who we found out last time was the goddess Hecate. Or a part of her. Or something like that. She found our party to be very interesting, seeing as how we're such an eclectic mix of people ... and other entities. Booker with his new back parasite, for instance, smelled particularly intriguing.

We brought her along to see Rolf, a.k.a. the guy who hired us to find his "wife" Rita. Booker showed him the list of expenses (which were previously agreed in the contract drawn up on accepting the mission), which was about ten times more than the 100k base fee. After deductions. Well, at least he paid up before Rita killed him.

On the plus side, we made a new friend: a Norse dwarf called Ulmolf, a Runesmith, who is a welcome addition to the group.

Needing to stake out the Crow Bar for a gargoyle called Granite, Booker had apparently misunderstood the instructions for this, so we spent a good long while drinking a concoction which took us to a funky cloud room in the astral plane. This "room" was later destroyed by Baradhi and Gorbash, who tried to find a door out to the normal astral plane. No one has ever been barred from the Crow Bar before, but umm ... we might be the first. Possibly.

We were only meant to stake out the place and wait for Granite to show up, so we could persuade him to give up some information. No need for astral plane stalking. Oh well. While we did that, Gorbash turned into a dwarf and went drinking with Ulmolf and Gorbash. Jayson, who didn't have time to get jiggy with Maria earlier, found some time with her now. Baradhi waited down the road from the bar and when Granite showed up, followed him back to what appeared to be Gargoyle Central. Oops?

Do orcs need toes?

We nearly died in an attack - two players down, yay - but managed to get back up and win the day. We found the Wyvern Tor and a cave full of orcs and an ogre, and finally managed to take a hostage. Unfortunately, the spitting little git didn't know anything, so the "Lawful Good" Tan cut off his thumb, which Hematite dutifully bandaged. Then the party decided to dangle the orc over the side of a cliff and let him drop ... only to cast Feather Fall.

Long story short, he's now pining for the fjords.

On the way back to the Yellow Brick Trail, we encountered a group of goblins. Since goblins were the ones who actually had something to do with the Rockseeker brothers, we managed to take another prisoner who DID know stuff. He was hogtied in a very ... umm ... imaginative way. Let's just say it would appear Karak-Dag has some very exotic interests ...