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.

Killing zombies with cake - possibly

As we had to fill another couple of sessions due to being a player short, we decided to have another go at zombie boardgame Zpocalypse. The first time we played it, it didn't go so well (we didn't survive the end of the first night), because we didn't have a strategy worked out.

By playing the game, we realised what we should have done ... so we thought we'd give it another go, doing all the things we realised we should have been doing in the first place. And sure enough, we survived the end of the first night! And the second! As we still had another couple of hours left, we decided to play on and see how far we could get. Third night went off without a hitch, but on the fourth night, one player's squad got killed just before we managed to take out the last zombies. But in the words of Meat Loaf, two out of three ain't bad.

This game was split over two sessions, as we ran out of time after the first night. However, as there were only a few quotes from each session, the two sessions are collected in this one post instead.

And yeah, at least half of these quotes were snagged from the adjacent Mutants & Masterminds table again, because they're actually roleplaying, and their quotability is higher than our boardgaming ...

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!

Dances with zombies?

After having successfully obtained the zombie boardgame Zpocalypse off Kickstarter, we decided to play it, as we're still a player short, and therefore want to wait until starting Delta Green back up.

In Zpocalypse, the zombie apocalypse has happened and you're trying to not get swarmed by zombies (we did), or get our brains eaten (we did), but y'know, survive and kill them all (we didn't). We didn't even survive the first night.

As we played, though, we realised how we should have been playing it from the beginning, so if we play it again, we're probably going to try that instead and see how we could hopefully become a bit more resilient.

Although, it should be pointed out, at least half of these quotes were snagged from the adjacent Mutants & Masterminds table. *cough* We love you?

50 Shades of Enid Blyton

We're doing some other bits for a couple of weeks or so, while one of the players is away. For this session, we played a two-player Jurisfiction adventure, to see what that was about.

Arthur Hastings, from Agatha Christie's Poirot novels, joined forces with the new recruit Dr Abraham van Helsing, from Bram Stoker's Dracula. The Bellman never told them that it's technically a single-player mission, but hey, if you take a complete rookie and the somewhat dimwitted veteran Hastings, it sort of adds up to a single, competent player.

The mission itself was a simple matter of internal plot adjustment: making Shadow the Sheepdog by Enid Blyton have a happy ending. It should have been a simple mission that couldn't possibly go wrong, but ... alas ... they got out of a sticky situation by teaching a bunch of villagers all about S&M, in a bid to turn their idyllic rural village into something from Midsomer Murders.

Tearing monsters a new bottom

Last time, we got to a field past a sugarcane field and there was shooting. Murphy was down to three injuries, Sutcliffe was still injured from previous sessions and the "unlucky" Hatch somehow didn't have a scratch on him ... which is more than can be said for the NPCs.

We continued the firefight - this time aided by the Bayou Ranpan, a.k.a. the big, scary, invisible monster. Somehow (read: open-ending dice rolls by lots at the right time) we took it down. And then we took the last minion down, while Father Etienne beheaded the other remaining baddie.

And then we saved the lady, only to find she hadn't just lost her brother, but indeed her entire family had been tortured and then butchered by the same guys we had just "taken care of" (read: dumped their bodies in the Bayou). Sadface. At least we got to steal the baddies' remaining truck so we didn't have to take the train back to New Orleans.

We returned the dame to Fat Dan in his Absinthe House, got our $100 bar tab (and free drinks to celebrate!), slept soundly and then went to cash in our $200 reward with the guy at Hexaco, seeing as how we had removed his problem from the swamp and had the exoskeleton to prove it. Thanks to a very open-eneded dice roll, Hatch made sure he couldn't screw us out of the reward money and got it in writing.

So now we're RICH! And also alive. That was unexpected.

Murder on t' winding, windy moors

As we ended up playing Relic last week, which didn't end up being very quotable, here's something we played earlier. At a ChimeraCon in fact. This session was the Blogkeeper's first ever go as a tabletop GM.

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

At this stage of the session, the characters have been briefed about some gruesome murders taking place within the world of fiction - murders that shouldn't have happened in the characters' usual narrative - and after much ado, they set off into Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

They got to Trushcross Grange (try saying that quickly three times in a row!) only to discover the Lintons' fancy manor house was on fire, which is very out of character for it. But with their parents away, can the Canasta-playing Edgar and Isabella actually be saved or will the murderer have claimed two more lives?

Is sugarcane flammable?

This session was going to be the last one, but as luck would have it, combat tends to take longer than expected, so we had to pack up and leave it for next time.

You see, we went back to Manchac. The town had been torched by some bad guys, who had driven up to Morgan Freeman's house (the one Sutcliffe didn't burn down). We requisitioned a vehicle and drove up there, blew up one of the trucks and walked through fields of sugarcane toward gunfire.

On the plus side, we found the dame we'd been looking for, and her brother, and a Voodoo priest.

On the downside, we also found a gang of baddies with a tommy gun.

On the other hand, the invisible monster was also about to show up ...

We're the very best at being BAD guys

Dr Sutcliffe is Harrowed, which is something both Hatch and Murphy seem to have accepted surprisingly quickly. They've gone out to get him meat and new clothing as if he was your perfectly ordinary convalescing OAP.

Not that any of us still have any sort of clues as to what has happened to the lady we're trying to find. Instead, we decided to have a closer look at Hexaco. We thought maybe we could sneak in, decided against it and tried to think of new lucrative business ideas to branch out to - like extortion and kidnapping. Then we ended up going to see one of the Hexaco people mentioned in an article about the "sabotage" in the swamps.

For some reason (i.e. money), we ended up accepting his offer of ridding the swamp of the swamp monster before the end of the week (in-game, it was Thursday) for a $200 return. Just to see if we could learn more about the swamp monster, we went to where the Voodoo people hang out, and spoke to Trevor ("call me Trevor - you can't pronounce my real name"), who gave us a spell type thing to use in order to make the spirit come into the mortal world and thus be killed.

Next session has DOOOOOOOOOOM written all over it.

Son of a gun, we'll have some MORTAL PERIL on the Bayou

So there we were, party of three stranded in the middle of a swamp on an oil drilling platform, where we after much deliberation decided to spend the night. In the morning, after shooting an alligator right between the eyes, we started heading back to Manchac ... this time without a guide.

We came across some redneck trappers, who were apparently both hairy and Cajun (they still exist!), and who later decided to kill us. They caught Sutcliffe and Murphy in beaver traps, and we had a hard time getting out of there.

Fortunately, Sutcliffe made them pay for the ambush. Unfortunately, he left the battle with a hole where his chest used to be. Seeing as how he's Harrowed (YES, HATCH AND MURPHY FINALLY REALISED!), it meant he didn't stay dead. As the trappers so rudely tried to get rid of us, we looted their bodies before continuing back to the town. Murphy passed out from exhaustion, as we hadn't thought to pack any food. Fortunately, she woke up and could take the train with Hatch, while Sutcliffe (bundled up in beaver pelts) had to pay double for his ticket.

Back in New Orleans, Sutcliffe came back from the dead the next day, and he finally had some 'splainin' to do!

Method acting on the Jeremy Kyle show

After rescuing the family, who were so kind to let us stay over, from their burning house (only one casualty), we were informed by Sutcliffe that he'd seen the car we were looking for - and had been asking about around town the day before - and we all shook our fists and blamed evil petroleum company Hexaco for the arson.

Because little do we know it was actually Sutcliffe's Manitou that was responsible ...

We decided to go to the oil derrick that the singer's brother allegedly (read: according to Hexaco) sabotaged, and found a bloke willing to take us through the swamp on his bateau. Three hours later, we found the deserted derrick and investigated.

And then the bateau guy was sliced in half by some kind of invisible spirit creature that we tried fighting. We survived, but only because it decided to dissolve into thin air after Sutcliffe managed to hurt it with magics. We then had to fix the bateau so we could get out of there, as the spirit thing might have seen us as Hexaco people returning to keep mutilating the precious eco system of the swamp - which is probably what caused the destruction of the derrick in the first place.

But now it's dark, and we're three hours away from being out of the swamp ... and there are alligators nearby ...

Some of these things make more sense than others

As the next place we needed to get to was about an hour or so away by car, we had to weigh our options very carefully. How could we get to the singer's home town, Manchac, and still have money left to pay rent at the end of the month? In the end, we decided to go to Fat Dan at the Absinthe House (a.k.a. the client) and ask if he had a car we could perhaps borrow, because we really needed to get somewhere.

He did. And he also got one of his guys to drive us up there.

We found out the family lived about four miles north of the town, which meant we had to say goodbye to the driver and walk. At the end, Morgan Freeman and his family were very hospitable and served up a tasty seafood gumbo, and then we went to bed.

Doesn't sound like a lot happened, perhaps, but just as we were finishing off the session, the GM asked Sutcliffe for a Spirit roll. After having spent his final Bennie on a re-roll, he botched ... It's Manitou time!