Everything IS better in Brooklyn

Lottie met back up with Julius who told her about an 8th gen/800-year-old vampire called Ekaterina the Wise, a.k.a. the vampire Val met the previous session. Her jaw is all messed up from an attack (that was meant to hurt people close to her?) that didn’t fully heal when she was turned. They decided not to tell Frankie about this, because a Frenzying Brujah in the living room sounded like a bad idea. (Frankie's murdered sister Caterina is his berserk button.)

Meanwhile, Frankie and Val (henceforth an NPC as the player dropped out) went to a restaurant in Lexington to meet up with "Cola" Schiro. Cola was successfully intimidated and spilled that he'd met Jeanine before, at a party in Staten Island, and had been giving her info for the past two months while she used him for snacking. She was particularly interested in Frankie as of three weeks ago (read: a week before the cousins were turned). Once interrogated, our cousin Vince was left to take care of him.

Weirdly, Prince Wellsley showed up in disguise to tell us he wanted Umberto Valenti disposed of, quickly and quietly. He will grant us one question truthfully answered, but we decided to save it for later.

Back with the Malkavians, they do some research, because parks are losing their auras. There's a planned road called Anaconda Street, and its planned path goes through a park. The work started the same day our cousins were Embraced. The park, it turns out, has "no voice".

They also met with Aisling Sturbridge, a Tremere friend of Julius's, to investigate the park situation by way of a ritual. There were runes, blood and a chalk circle and they felt uncomfortable. Lottie insisted on her blood being used instead of Julius's.

In Harlem, the guys investigated the scene of the drive-by looking for clues, and followed a trace to an old Family safehouse, where they discovered an old vampire with a forked tongue - a Follower of Set. He wanted an unspecified favour in return for giving up the location of Umberto Valenti. Val tried to Dominate him, but it didn't work and the guy got a bit grumpy. They then had to high-tail it back to Julius's Manhattan place to not get fried by approaching dawn.

Lottie and Julius had a long-awaited talk about blood-bonding, deciding to say yay to double-sided, nay to one-sided. We'll see what happens with that. It was getting light outside, so everyone went to bed, meaning to discuss the night's details the following evening.

We're going to Chicken Pizza!

So, ahem, I think I may have been slightly distracted here, because my notes literally say "we do a robbery?" (someone died, and we feel bad about it ... I think) and then mentions something about a pig truck and aligning with a good goddess whose name I can't remember. The interesting thing to note here is that Hecate was willing to let go of Booker, provided he do her a favour (it was finding someone and/or killing them?) and in turn he got to swear fealty to this new goddess that we had just helped.

Maria was happy to receive swords from Gorbash. He treats his professional girlfriend quite well, it seems! The second session I didn't make memory notes for, so ... someone who is not me might have a functioning memory in order to recall what we were actually doing.

It's up to you, New York

The cousins Mangano continue to try to get used to the idea of being vampire gangsters in 1920s New York City ...

Door Murderer - Scourge of the Side Quests!

We finished up in the caves/tunnels/dungeons and decided to burn assorted weaponry in a room. How the weapons would manage to melt in an enclosed room with limited oxygen supply ... well, never mind.

In the cellar under the Redbrand mansion, we found the wife and children of a man who had been murdered. We tried to be reassuring and sympathetic, but it perhaps didn't pan out very well.

At any rate, we got rid of (in an Al Pacino way) most of the Redbrands, strongly suggested others might want to skip town and never return, and took a few as prisoners. Said prisoners were then hastily juged by the person we saved from that other cave, who assumed control of the town and Mayor Spineless didn't mind this at all, and executed.

Pats on the backs all 'round.

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!

Didn’t you say we were going to finish tonight?

Last session we had a shoot-out in a café, where we were supposed to meet up with a team of Hunters from Nottingham. Instead, we got attacked by some creatures and had to leave. Tilly got a bit upset because a creature was actually an innocent (she can see people's souls now) ... which didn't stop the rest of the party killing it.

This session we went to Trevor's and met the Hunters there instead. It turned out we all had pets, in one way or another (Eddie is Trevor's pet, vodka is Zolistagol's, and then there's Tilly's little Rommel, of course).

The other team were a bit weird - one of the women was about as doolally as Trevor's sister Agatha, and she talked about monsters being in the house, but we didn't see any. The Nottingham team spraypainted a corner of the living room.

And then came a policeman, Detective Black, who asked strange questions. As his car left the driveway, there was a noise from the roof - David Hayes (Trevor's bodyguard) had shot the guy. Great. Super-strength junkie woman (who kept babbling an awful lot) dragged the car up to the house and hid it in a barn, because now the mansion apparently has one. How to get rid of the evidence? Well, apparently creatures like the one Rommel is (when he's not just a puppydog) can go all CSI and eat any forensic evidence. So that's useful - and ever so slightly horrifying.

Beavers and buttheads

After talking to Brian Tumnus in the pub, the group of Jurisfiction agents skipped ahead a few chapters and went to see the beaver couple, to check if they had any Christmas decorations stashed away, or at least knew anything about it. They had, and they did.

Van Helsing and Carmilla, in some kind of Mexican standoff, waited outside the beaver hut while Alice said hello to her idol Lucy Pevensie and her older siblings Susan and Peter. (Edmund was of course off somewhere fraternising with the enemy over some Turkish delight.) Lucy turned out to have more in common with a certain modern female character than anyone could have anticipated - much to the distress of Alice and the players.

Meanwhile, Louis and Long John went around investigating ... and met a nameless dwarf, who had a few things to say about his employer (the White Witch), his lack of a name, and the reason behind the recent influx of Christmas decorations in the book. Louis was kind enough to give the dwarf a name: Louis. Just a shame it won't last.

Equal rights for people with no pulse!

The first ever Jurisfiction adventure to span more than one session! In this one, the group left The Shining to meet up with Abraham van Helsing at HQ, before moving on to Narnia. Van Helsing and Carmilla instantly took a disliking to one another. While the rest of the party gathered at the lamp post, Carmilla, thanks to botching a Bookjumping roll, ended up in Wonderland. Well, she WAS rather preoccupied with Alice ...

On the other hand, the Red Queen was keen to get her hands on a Narnian statue and gave Carmilla a bag of Christmas ornaments as payment. But she had better come back with a bear, or heads will roll.

What happens off page stays off page

As we only had a couple of weeks before breaking off for the holidays, we decided to have a one-off. Seeing as how we'd be joined by a friend we don't see very often, and who'd like to play some more of Jurisfiction, that's what we decided to do.

In the seasonal Meanwhile in Narnia, there were reports about petrified Narnians being sold off as souvenir statues to unsuspecting visitors, and a group of agents assembled to go into Stephen King's The Shining, as that was so far the only lead Jurisfiction had.

A child was interrogated. One of the agents kept wanting to drink another agent's blood. A pirate's parrot turned out to have a rather foul mouth, and a 200-year-old politician didn't know who to trust.

Starring:

• Alice, 7-year-old (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
• Carmilla, vampire (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla)
• Long John Silver, pirate (Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island)
• Louis Gridley Wu, politician (Larry Niven, Ringworld)
• Polly, parrot (sits on Silver's shoulder)

Here's part one ...

Everyone back away, it’s Miss Marple!

Last week, we continued generating our characters for Rifts, and when you're busy trying to suss out your Cyber-knight's psionic powers - and just skills in general, to be honest (so much to choose from!) - you don't really pay much attention to what's going on around you. The adventure also took its first, gentle steps into plot.

But yeah, we'll save that to next week, so instead, as this was pre-prepared, here's the fifth and final part of Midwinter Murders, the very first Jurisfiction adventure. After chasing Vampire Bella from Breaking Dawn, the team have followed her into a quaint, English village - the sort you've come to expect from Midsomer Murders.

In a picturesque cottage, Miss Marple invites the party for a cup of hot, drugged chocolate. Half the party was snoozing and the other half circling the village in a stolen car looking for Bella. Ending up back at Marple's cottage, they call shenanigans on the old woman - who is obviously the mastermind behind everything!!

And then they bundled her into a bathtub, found Vampire Bella (who passed out because she started bleeding from a gunshot wound), bundled her into the bathtub as well, and went back to HQ with the knowledge of it being a job well done.

Reneesme is obviously a runaway, sparkly vampire pig

IN WHICH WE RIP THE S#!T OUT OF TWILIGHT. Err ... Again!

Okay, so last week, there was no session, so here's another one of them filler posts from an old session. Next week, the quotes will be back to Delta Green, as that's what we played in this week's session. (If you hadn't noticed, the quotes are posted the week after the session where they originated.)

Meanwhile, he's what happened when the Jurisfiction agents decided to venture further into the Twilight series ... where they first encountered Pregnant Bella, followed by Vampire Bella - who may or may not be the mother of a pig.

To recap: A group of fictional characters, agents of Jurisfiction, are policing the BookWorld, namely:

• Alice from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Arthur Hastings from random Agatha Christie Poirot novel
• Frankenstein's Monster from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, nicknamed "George"
• Gabriel Betteredge from Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone
• Hari Seldon from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series (although he was mostly asleep)
• "Outlander", i.e. one of the players playing himself, from the Outland

The strangest thing is, today's post is only from about 20 or so minutes worth of playing ... make of that what you will. I thought there was only maybe one more post out of what was left of the recording, but apparently we're looking at two posts at the very least.

The long, generic twilight of the BookWorld

We spent last session playing Zpocalypse again, to a much greater success than the first time, and we'll be playing that next session too. Since there was only like half a page worth of quotes from that session, I figure it would be better to post the two sessions in one go instead, so that's happening in next week's post.

Meanwhile, we're going back to the BookWorld to continue the investigations of the Jurisfiction agents. They've now left Wuthering Heights and decide to go and check out Twilight, because if you're looking for a modern novel that's badly written, you might as well just start there.

Amongst all the Generics in Forks High School's cafeteria is Bella Swan, who seems more preoccupied with dreaming about her bewuved Edward than the fact she's being accused of multiple homicides. (Each to their own, and that ...) And then the agents have a brainwave as to how to solve the problem of Bella missing from the narrative if she's brought into questioning: have Frankenstein's Monster take her place.

Roleplayers, eh? Can't take 'em anywhere!

We should have our own TV show, we’re so badass

After a lengthy and very serious and utterly brainy discussion about matters of life, the universe and everything, we finally managed to get started with the game ...

Finn and Set have captured a semi-conscious bad guy who fell off a building, handcuff him (with pink, fluffy handcuffs) to Jack's limo and then move on to checking out the contents of the minibar. And so the beertini was invented. Good thing Flora keeps a steady supply of hangover-curing potions ...

Alysiana promised, on behalf of the party, that no one in the car would hurt the prisoner, which later led to a big discussion about whether or not the rest of the party was held to that ... as they hadn't actually sworn anything.

Back at Wollaton Hall, Jack decided to build a guillotine to execute the prisoner, who, after all, had broken a number of Changeling laws. And then he went to bed. The rest of the party had already decided to head off, as they were squeamish about the whole thing. Because of the oath, though, no one could hurt the man, so it was decided to leave his execution until the morning. To make him

Set volunteered to watch over the prisoner, being handcuffed to him, and eventually passed out from lack of sleep ... once he had knocked the prisoner to sleep, as he wouldn't stop screaming because of the cold iron tied to him. We sure know how to treat guests here in Nottingham!

Roll Death and Athletics, shagging Satan is bestiality

In a session that took us through the sewers and eventually ending up in the Dreaming version of Victorian London, where a group of cartoonists with a funny accent chased after some people purely because of their religion ... Set rescued people from a burning building, which ... was burning in real life. And then he chased after an assassin over the rooftops. Very heroic.

Meanwhile, Finn was trying to talk himself into being un-squired by Jack, and instead ... ended up getting knighted. So that ... panned out? He's making an impressively swift ascend up that career ladder, that's for sure.

The rest of us got to spend some pent up XP, Flora became a Saint, and half the party stood around in the sewers while Sir Finn set off after Sir Set - it was dangerous footing. At least until he decided to make use of the only element he hadn't tried so far - Air - and flapped about to actually fly to a portal.

We're a very heroic party, obviously. Especially when we get hooked on discussing male genitalia for an extended period of time. Most of which hasn't made it into writing. ... Most of. (Just imagine what the actual session was like in real life!)

Feed the crocodiles, tuppence a Rog

So, Jack and Finn went after a merchant who had Jack's father's sword. Apparently, he had won it in a card game, off some bloke. Instead of persuading the man to part with the sword with Diplomacy, Jack stole the sword while Finn distracted the crowd with an impromptu guitar performance, and they both legged it. How are they ever going to find the bloke who lost the sword in that game?

Meanwhile, the rest of the group made it through the swamp and to the ferry ... which was already too far out in the water to catch. Our dear (?) friend (?!) Chinface the Redcap was there ... and ended up feeding some crocodiles because Set kicked his proverbial peaches. Flora made sure to loot the body (or what was left of it) for the potion bottle, so they'd have one spare, just in case.

Finn and Jack were without a guide in the swamp and had to fight a crocodile that very nearly got them. In the end, by using a couple of swords, they dispatched it. Finn decided to use swords more in the future, even though he inadvertently became a Squire by accepting the sword Jack gave him. The only Knight he can be a Squire to is Set. We'll see how that pans out ...

Finally, the potion-bearers reached the Count's Freehold, where the doors were wide open. Unusual. Redcaps were present. Set and Hugo (with Flora at a safe distance behind) went inside, only to find most of the Count's court in pieces - Ogres with chainsaws generally have that effect on people - and the Count himself at the tip of a sword, courtesy of Vinnie the Rog ... and that was the end! We will not abide being left on such a cliffhanger, so the GM has got orders to write us some more adventure to get closure.

A little bit of sick, a little bit of Slick

The swamp turned out not to be such a big deal after all. Us players were the biggest challenge. To begin, we had a big discussion as to the name of the guy from CSI: New York - not Kevin Bacon but in fact Gary Sinise, whether or not The Stand was a film or a TV series and when it was from ... and then it turned into a discussion who Gary Busey is, what he's been in, and in particular, who was in Leathal Weapon, and so on. Hence why we decided in the end that next time we're trying to think of an actor, we'll say it's Kevin Bacon and leave it at that, or we're stuck for at least half an hour before someone has the idea to use the IMDb app on their phone ...

At the same time, it was decided  that any film we also couldn't think of would be Care Bears, meaning that later on, when the question accompanying a banjo tune, was "aww, what's the film called?!" the answer was Care Bears rather than Deliverance ... and we imagined a hybrid of the two ... we completely lost it and roared with laughter for five minutes.

(You had to be there.)

In-game, we found the town of Blacktree, mainly because the GM thought better of leaving us in the swamp, what with the inbred Care Bears and the ghost of Slick roaming around below the surface, and said we reached the place in a very quick time. Huzzah! We obtained a sample of the eponymous black tree through the cunning use of squirrel, and then discovered the master healing potion maker was in fact a witch. (You should have seen the look on Set's face when the GM told him the witch was an old woman ... Priceless!)

While Jack's negotations with her didn't seem to help all that much in getting her to co-operate, Hugo's 20 gold dross quickly won her over. Flora got to see the potion being made, took notes, and is considering spending a working holiday there. After the potion was finished, we got the bottle and started heading back to Nottingham as quick as we could. As Jack saw a merchant with his missing father's sword in the crowd, he decided to chase after him, with Finn in tow, while Alysiana, Set, Flora and the bottle - and some NPCs - started in the direction of home. Quickly.

What shall we do with the drunken Sidhe?

After being assaulted by Rat Boy (again), Finn locked himself in a cupboard and completely missed Alysiana in the nude. Jack and the GM were sitting next to each other talking plot, which the rest of us didn't catch, but we were happy bunnies anyway, because even though Finn crushed his precious eggplant, perhaps Flora could restore it.

Jack decided to have turned twelve recently, which means the party in his honour was in fact his birthday party. He's now a Wilder rather than a Childling, and it has caused him to stop drinking, much to Finn's dismay. On the plus side, we entered the Dreaming, where Alysiana got very drunk on chimeric ale. Meanwhile, Flora tried her hand at drug-pushing, with Set conveniently being somewhere else entirely, being useful.

And then we tried to charter a ferry across a river, even though we didn't think to ask until afterwards if it would be big enough to take Set, seeing as he's, y'know, an enormous Troll. We left off on the shore, by a big swamp, having just been dropped off from the boat. Here's the journey up until then ...

Welcome to the zombie disco party!

Last night at Chimera, we didn’t actually play Changeling: The Dreaming because our GM was otherwise engaged, you know, with actual real-life commitments. Instead, Our Deadlands GM brought along some boardgames, and as the group was in a cooperative mood and there were six of us (yes, we had a guest star!), we settled on A Touch of Evil, or as we like to call it, Sleepy Hollow: The Rip-off. We were mainly involved with trying to figure out how to play it and actually playing it, so the list of quotes isn’t as long today.

All I ever wanted to do was to get to Seattle

Courtesy of the last night's 1^st Edition Deadlands adventure at Chimera. This week on the Hellstromme Express, the geriatric Gunslinger has been hired as a bodyguard to one of the NPC mad scientists (our own couldn't make this session, unfortunately), and we had a guest star using our generic gunslinger character sheet, who was also hired for the same job.

Random comments from players and GM, along with a party also consisting of an Alchemist Snake-oil salesman, a prawn-pukin' Huckster, and a high-falutin' Reporter (who made her fame primarily as a popular dime novelist) who has ABSOLUTELY NO CONNECTIONS TO THE AGENCY WHATSOEVER. And an assortment of radioactive zombies, demon-huntin' Belgian detectives, Cider Man and a crash course in Norse Curling, because it's the only sport that's possibly more boring to watch than snooker.