Every evil wizard has to start somewhere

Welcome to Rifts! It's 11 March 104 PA and a roleplaying party has been hired to babysit Marcus the Mage while he gets his shizzle together for some kind of spell around the Solstice time. There are bug-like creatures trying to kill him, and down with that sort of thing.

The problem is, once we got there and started digging into things, we came to realise maybe he wasn't such a good guy after all, and maybe, just maybe, the world would be better off without him - except then we wouldn't get paid, so there is that. We got him to sign a contract saying that if he locked himself inside his den (where we weren't allowed) and got killed, we'd still get paid, so we might be able to find a way around that ...

Well, if the bugs don't get us first.

Starring:

• Booker Dayes, Gunslinger
• Gorbash, Dragon
• Michael Baradhi, Ley Walker
• Sir Jayson Oakwood, Cyber-Knight

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.

Stop that, it's Scilly

Monty Python Monday could be like a thing.

Oh dear, we haven’t even started playing

One player down, we decided a game of the boardgame Pandemic would be a good idea. And it was - we won. By the skin of our teeth, perhaps, but still. After that, seeing as how we had plenty of time left, we started rolling up some characters for the next roleplaying game we're doing: Rifts.

There wasn't a lot written down from this evening, but luckily, a couple of us went roleplaying over the weekend as well.

The Saturday game will be perhaps one session a month, and is the Warhammer 40k based Only War. A group of Imperial Guards have been trapped in a hive for quite some time, until one day, the tech priest finally managed to get the doors open.

No one's outside.

Trying to find some supplies, the party headed out and ... were eventually shot at. And we ended the session on a cliffhanger!

Play it again until I kill someone!

We stayed around the radio telescope and continued the investimagations and interrogations. McAffe tried to convince Bones to break into the chalets, while Mulligan continued to bully the telescope staff. Trying to find the wifi password (they didn't have a guest network, go fig), McAffe ended up using his hacking skillz in order to grant him and Cully internet access in order to do background checks on staff.

And then hell broke loose. Literally.

A maniac came after Bones and nearly beat him to death with a baseball bat, and when patched up by McAffe, he was so preoccupied with saving the world that Cully had to sedate him and handcuff him to to a bed as he really was in no shape to save anything.

Then there was lots of shooting of telescopes, re-pointing where the telescopes thought the general direction of the Nemesis Star was so that it wouldn't be found again, and some kind of strange being helped in the destruction of said radio telescopes.

But umm, we all made it out alive, and with our sanities intact, so that's another job well done for X Cell!

Don’t worry, it’s only the end of the world!

We went to bed, and in the middle of the night, Bones receives a phonecall from an unidentified source, saying the radio telescope must be stopped or Ghroth (?) would come sooner rather than later. Mulligan has taken to wearing ear plugs at night, and didn't hear Bones banging on the door. McAffe did, but told him to shove off. Cully lent him a sceptical ear, and got the other two out of bed. Early in the morning, we headed back out to the telescope array ...

And were very nearly run off the road by some lunatic surveyor, whose tires we had to shoot out to get him to stop. An ambulance was called, because the man did not appear to be at all well. In Hayden, we - or rather, McAffe - drove over someone's leg, but he was lying in the middle of the road because apparently the poorliness was contagious. And the garage we visited last week was ablaze.

Finally made it out to the telescope array, where we were shot at, but Bones shot back. Unfortunately, for purposes of finding clues, he's a very good shot and blew the guy's brains out. But at least he shot first. (Anyone telling you differently is lying. Yesss siree.)

What then followed were Mulligan pestering telescope staff for information, McAffe and the ever increasingly paranoid Bones going through chalets searching for clues (seeing as how Bones shot the clue we had), and Cully played CSI with the crime scene. It all had a sense of impending doom over it. Is the end of the adventure nigh?

Why does this CD rack have 'Made in R'lyeh' on it?

Still slightly mentally scarred from seeing big, red eyes in the sky, the show had to go on. Cully went back to North Platte to do some research - not that anything useful really came from it. Bones and McAffe headed up to Three Mile Lake to check if it was a portal to R'lyeh or not. They founds lots and lots of flies, so ... probably not. Or maybe. We're not sure yet.

Mulligan, meanwhile, went to have another look at the girlfriend-murderer's house, and by the computer, found a peculiar sort of CD rack looking thing. When the right sort of rolls had been made, it was found that the discs contained a very long and rambling message about the End Times. The ones who bothered reading this lost a bit of Sanity in the process. (Cully declined to read any of it for religious reasons.)

In other news, Marshal Bones is down to 20-something Sanity. He might not last to the end of the adventure.

This would make a great PowerPoint presentation

Once we got back to the hotel after a good day's work, we went to sleep ... and woke up in the middle of the night, because of a storm. Outside, a big, red sphere hanging in the air ... with eyes ... It caused a crapload of SAN to be lost (enough to kill off two characters) - and then we woke up. It had never happened. Still scared the willies out of us, though.

Well, aside from Mulligan, that is. He's come to terms with his own mortality that puny things like that don't cause him to lose Sanity.

We also met the car mechanic again. First, he whistled a tune across the street - and then he came at us with a tyre iron. Some grappling and handcuffing later, we finally had to tazer him to stop him from killing himself. Yes, it's against protocol and our training, but then again, neither are how to deal with the Old Gods.

It's only paranoia if you're playing Delta Green

Meanwhile in Nebraska: Cully went back to North Platte to perform an autopsy. On the way back from Hayden, she was told to go meet a new guy in the hotel lobby. And sure, clutching a copy of the Fortean Times, there he was - FBI computer analyst James McAffe. (He has a driving skill of about 70, so he's the designated driver from now on.) They set off to autopsy the dead girlfriend, but didn't find anything because Cully somehow managed to roll 95 ... out of 90.

Over in Hayden, Bones and Mulligan got a lift out to the radio telescope array where their Sheriff's department driver got attacked by the guard dog they reportedly don't have. There was tazering involved, and then hog-tying.

The staff at the radio telescope array were a peculiar bunch, particularly one of the other computer guys - who seemed to get through his days using a steady stream of JD.

After meeting back up, introducing McAffe to the rest of the party, the four investigators went to the home of the murderer to see if they could find anything. Insects, is the answer, lots and lots of insects. Insects that seemed to home in on Cully. But then, what are improvised flamethrowers for?

As we didn't really find anything at the house, McAffe stayed behind to go through the computer a bit more and the rest went to a tavern to see what else could be got out of the drunken computer guy. In Bones's case, a massive headache ... that can't be a good sign.

Is Mansions of Madness like Cluedo for Satanists?

As we had to fill a session with something due to being a player short, we decided to try the Cthulhu boardgame Mansions of Madness - a relative of Elder Signs and Arkham Horror. Three investigators went to an old mansion, where axe murderers abound!

... We didn't succeed. The GM won. Oh well.

Will the real Harry Potter please stand up?

As we unfortunately was a player down due to illness this session, we were going to play something else. I got instructed to bring a game I'd like to play, so I brought Jurisfiction. It just so happens that I've always wanted to do an adventure set in the Harry Potter books, and suddenly, both inspiration and opportunity presented themselves.

Agents Hastings (Agatha Christie) and Van Helsing (Bram Stoker) had to leave their Enid Blyton pet project behind in order to go over to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to investigate a Potions book that had been stolen and replaced with a cheap knock-off. As they dawdled, Severus Snape himself arrived at Jurisfiction HQ to convince them to get a move on.

From there, they ended up force-feeding a Puking Pastille to Fred or George Weasley, charging Snape with assault, admiring off-duty Dumbledore in what can only be described as Rocky Horror Picture Show gear, listening to a PageRunning Draco Malfoy's teenage woes, finding beautiful Fanon Snape snogging his favourite student Hermione over in Fanfiction, and learning that Harry Potter enjoys going on Character Exchange trips to Fanfiction, where he doesn't have to put up with any of that false modesty nonsense, and can be worshipped like the freakin' BookWorld rockstar that he is.

Oh yeah, and Marvin the Paranoid Android occasionally works in the admin department at Jurisfiction HQ. (He doesn't enjoy it, brain the size of a planet, and so on.)

Whatever they did, that copy of the Half-Blood Prince's old Potions textbook, which is just a teeny tiny bit pivotal to the plot, was still nowhere to be seen ...

Gitmo's got nothing on Nebraska

Joining the very Special Agents Mulligan and Cully is a US Marshal, Robert E Bones, who has taken some time out from trying to hunt down Dr Richard Kimble. We're also going to get another player coming along in a few weeks, so that'll be fun.

Anyway, this time, we've been called to Hayden, somewhere in Nebraska, where we got caught in a freak hailstorm and needed to see a mechanic. A man claiming alien involvement went crazy and beat his wife to death. Might it have something to do with the big radio telescope array outside of town? There's only one way to find out ...