The Accidental Homosexual Incident

Aaaaand we're back!

Gorbash the young dragon, Sir Jayson Oakwood the Cyber Knight and Michael Baradhi the Leywalker/Wizardy type went to the spider creatures to claim Baradhi's reward. (Booker Dayes the gunslinger had been called away to babysi escort a merchant, and was therefore absent.) They said the reward would be ready in a few days, could we perhaps come back later?

The group decided to go to a nearby town and spend the night. While drinking in the local pub, we came across a friend, Gerald, who was drowning his sorrows because his wife's merchant caravan had gone missing. Could we perhaps look into it for him? Seeing as how he offered us $300k for the trouble, who were we to say no?

When talk turned to heading to bed, Gerald somehow interpreted our response to mean we wanted to join him. In bed. This made him uncomfortable, although we had no idea what he was on about. It did cause some tension later, when Baradhi woke up to find Gorbash leaning over Sir Jayson's sleeping body, nose to nose ... Said Cyber Knight has been having (k)nightmares recently, and might or might not involve having a Necromancer as a nemesis.

Gorbash made a new friend, female dragon Ixchel, in whose territory Gorbash spends a lot of time. Fortunately, she's a friendly kind of dragon. Unlike Milan, from the previous adventure, who would rather see Gorbash dead, so now both Baradhi and Jayson now want to have the title Dragonslayer. No reason.

Oh yeah, and the shipment thingy? Found the transport ... and the bony remains of two bodies, one of which seemed to belong to Gerald's wife.

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.

Why would we sell our friends to Aslan?

We continue the Jurisfiction adventure. We're in Narnia, investigating contraband Christmas ornaments that might be disrupting the narrative. At least if we let it, which we won't, because we're Jurisfiction agents.

Here, the agents meet Mr Tumnus, with his ehhhh interesting wardrobe, and then head off to a hidden pub called the Golden Lion, where Mr Tumnus's brother Brian is having a tea - because you can't get alcoholic beverages in this children's novel. Not even rum.

And Aslan, peh, he's not good for pub business. What with turning water into wine and everything. Bloody cheapskate.

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.

I have to lick … I mean, tend to his wounds

Part two of Meanwhile in Narnia, where the team of Jurisfiction agents have finally made it into Stephen King's The Shining, which is apparently a children's book now.

At the snow-covered Overlook Hotel, the agents look for statues of what are probably petrified Narnians, avoid being read by diving behind a bush and then interrogating little Danny Torrance, busy riding around the hallways on his tricycle. Admittedly, the GM has never read The Shining and therefore based everything that happened here on the Stanley Kubrick film, which of course has very little to do with the actual novel.

Also, there were clues, leading Alice to suspect Mr Tumnus from Narnia might be involved. Who else has hairy legs, horns and wears a red scarf? The Turkish deligh definitely must come from Narnia!

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 ...

Running with Molotovs

For the epic final showdown, we found ourselves dungeon-crawling for the better part of the session. We went to the place where we thought Trevor's sister was being held (she was kidnapped last session), but there was no on there. In the park was just a building for a junior football club or something like that. However, in the cellar, there was a hidden door ... and underneath it: dungeons!

The dungeons were mainly empty, save for a chav that was scared off by someone pointing a gun at him, and a creature that could make itself invisible. We found a stone table (no Aslan), and eventually emerged in a wide ditch, where Agatha and the (useless) bodyguard were tied to a big rock. There was some kind of Lovecraftian-looking creature there, previously known as Smith, and zombies.

We might have eaten through Willpower points and Conviction like they were candy, but by golly we saved the world Derby! :D

Aberrations of evolution, as chosen by God

Things turned interesting for the group this session. While the men in the group hid to avoid detection, Tilly tried shielding the girl/victim we found and ended up being hidden in plain sight. Something's obviously going on there.

Eddie went berserk with his axe, Zolistagol got to speak Russian ("Vladivostok!") and Trevor ... had his skin badly burned. To soothe it, Tilly grabbed some holy water from her bag (like you do), and lo and behold, the witch had apparently obtained magical powers, and the skin started healing!

After much ado, we ended up torching the warehouse to destroy evidence (might have accidentally burned someone alive, but hey ho), borrowed a fake brick of Nazi gold from the Russian mob, and the girl wasn't perhaps so much as a victim but a ghoul in training, or something like that. She wanted feeding to complete the process, and unfortunately, we were on the menu. No gratitude at all, that one.

We tied her hands and locked her in one of the bathrooms at Trevor's. And then we were visited by Tony the Ghoul, who told us what was actually going on. By that point, we couldn't really say sorry, we'd rather stay in with a pizza, beer and watch the Rams game on Sky Sports.

Finding Axcalibur with a d10 frag grenade

Seeing as how we were going to check out a warehouse, we got tooled up. The Russian especially, he went to B&Q and really went to town. Tilly went home and got tooled up mentally, by looking through books, finding an obscure reference to a Czechoslovakistani blood ritual cult from the early 1800s, headed by a guy whose name even the GM had trouble pronouncing, but "Tonsillitis" is close enough.

After meeting up at Starbucks, we also got tooled up very below board in a car park. Now we're carrying some old, sawn-off shotguns with ammo, a couple of handaxes and a bigger, diamond-edged axe Eddie took such a shine to that he named it Axcalibur.

At the warehouse, we heard voices ... saw footsteps ... and witnessed the carrying of a big box that definitely was from an Indiana Jones film, even though the GM insists the box really doesn't contain the Ark of the Covenant. Shots were fired (not by us), and suddenly we found ourselves face to face with the warehouse owner. In the words of the Teletubbies: uh-oh.

Football is the answer to everything, including cake

At Trevor's mansion (it has a long drive, it's a mansion), we settled down for the night. Cans of Stella, football on telly, zombies trying to break through the back door ... the usual. We also found Trevor's sister Agatha in the basement - but she seems to have lost the plot.

Eddie sacrificed his precious pimped-out baseball bat hitting at the zombie, and we all got away relatively unscathed. Well, apart from the bodyguard, but hey, he's just an NPC.

And then we had pizza, looked at old school internet message boards and made contact with a potential ally in Nottingham.

It was an eclectic sort of session.

Are we doing one dead body a day now?

After we busied ourselves with doing things like trying limited edition crisps with weird flavours, we got down to actual roleplaying. We had food in the same fancy restaurant as before (Eddie wasn't happy about his fish and chips, because herb-crusted seabass and frites or something like that wasn't greasy enough), and when meeting up at the university, in Tilly's office ... shit got real. As in, there we were, having a nice meeting, and what happened? Murderous zombies attacked us. It was very uncalled for.

On a happier note, Trevor went and got himself a bodyguard. The bodyguard turned out to be less than ecstatic over his 10k/day salary when he realised we'd be chased by near-indestructible zombies and not just general thugs. In the end, we made our way to Trevor's it's-a-house-not-a-mansion, for some televised football and lager (Eddie), breadmaking (Trevor), bathing (Tilly), and researching (Zolistagol). And then we were attacked again, and it all got a little unpleasant.

We don't need no edumacation!

In a bizarre, Matrix-esque twist, we kept coming across people called Eric Smith. One of whom was Eddie's brother Daniel - who was in two places at once. One version was Dan the Man, the other one was a clean-cut Daniel in a crisp, white shirt. A very disturbing sight. While looking through some files, we also discovered an Eric Smith who was the spitting image of Lord Trevor ... and an Erica Smith, looking like Dr Tilly's twin.

There were also scenes in university lecture halls, posh restaurants (Trevor paid, so we like him), kebab shops, mansions and terraced houses. Oh, and Lord Trevor decided to hire himself a bodyguard for lots of money. The two university lecturers, less well-endowed money-wise, had to settle for living on the same street as Eddie, and Eddie takes care of His People.

Oh, and the next table over had a delightful singalong, which we managed to hijack. :D