Anybody who is anybody will soon walk through that door

It's 1922 and the Mangano crime family are keeping their part of New York, uh, safe? Going about their daily lives, three cousins run a speakeasy and a gambling den, things like that. One day they're told they're going to be Made Men (and Woman), and have the ceremony with lots of booze ... and the next thing they know they black out, and when they wake up they're in pools of blood and lack a pulse.

Huh.

It didn't go so well for little Lottie, whose mind was somewhat ... fractured in the process. At least her sire brought her a snack. Val discovered that while he might still bite the first hobo he came across, he wasn't going to eat him without first cleaning the guy's neck. Frankie decided to be cautious and not eat a cop, but instead went for a canoodling couple, because hey, dinner AND dessert! (He even offered some to his sire, who wasn't as impressed as he expected.)

This was sort of session zero, in which we get to know the characters and take them through the traumatic lovely memorable experience of being turned into vampires. Turns out the Cosa Nostra is a bit bloodier than expected ...

Starring:

• Carlotta "Lottie" Mangano, Malkavian flapper girl
• Frankie "Fatso" Mangano, Brujah speakeasy bootlegger
• Valtena (Val) "Pretty Boy" Mangano, Toreador gambling den maestro

We are NOT becoming the Columbos!

So, here's what happened. We have that Gamma World game run every month or so. The February session was cancelled because people weren't feeling well. It was rescheduled to the end of March, and by that time we were in lockdown and decided to get together over Discord instead. Because reasons we decided to put the Gamma World game into hiatus for now, and maybe get back to it when the world appears slightly more normal than it does at present.

Question was then what to do instead, as we still fancied roleplaying. Our Gamma World GM had an idea for a gangster Vampire: The Masquerade game set in 1920s New York. "Gangster vampires, eh?" said the players and so it was decided on as an idea. I've never played this game before, but the other two players suggested we all play newly turned vampires so that they would both be as clueless in-game about the specifics as I am in real life. (Read: part of my struggles with some games we've played before is that everyone knows the setting extremely well except for me, so I feel left behind when I don't know stuff everyone else takes for granted, and it means I don't enjoy playing.)

Plus, who can resist 1920s New York gangsters who turn into vampires? RIGHT?!

Having decided this is what we were going to do, and the other players saying I'm allowed to tell them off if they start to go over my head with their combined decades of experience, we tried to figure out what characters to play and how they'd fit together, and what their family name would be. We ended by having decided not to be relatives of Detective Columbo, but to be of the Mangano family, of Italian-American mobster fame, and were left generating our characters as homework before the next session.

How often we're going to play remains to be seen.

There might even be Medium Teeth

As per the previous post, we're gaming over Discord instead of meeting up twice a week around our kitchen table. On the plus side, no one has to drive home afterwards, so if we happen to get stuck in a battle, it doesn't matter so much because no one has to get up and drive for an hour (give and take) to get to work, and don't even have to change out of pyjamas.

On the negative side, the person with attention problems finds concentration even harder than usual, so this is the result of three sessions. Or, technically two, because I was so all over the place last Monday that I forgot to open the document I've been using for notes, and never even realised until the session ended. FUN TIMES. Look after your mental health y'all.

There was a table where we were sucked into some other dimension and Gunda got to speak to Tempus and was named his successor. And then there was a library and a clone of John Irenicus who was a dick, unsurprisingly. And he was alive, but somehow not, and he was trying to die properly, but because Silvanus cursed him, he kept coming back in different bodies. Something like that.

Can we blame Canada if there's a devildemon incursion?

Sooooo the current situation is that we're now working from home and are doing our two weekly games (currently Rifts and Godbound) over Discord. The current situation, and self-isolating for a couple of weeks due to cold symptoms, are not particularly conducive to good mental health - even for hardcore introverts like me - so I've had real problems concentrating recently. And my concentration isn't the greatest at the best of times. I'm trying to work on it, but it's difficult. We're staying home and we're staying safe, that's the main thing.

That being said, this post is a combination of three sessions, so ... yeah. One of the sessions was mainly battling with a dragon, so we didn't say a lot anyway because we were busy with dice rolls. But ... yeah. Yeah.

Under the Dome was a bit different to this

We got to a town currently covered in a massive dome. Our friends are inside, and we need to get inside to talk to them. Unfortunately they're also besieged by a bunch of gnolls or related monsters. There was a big artefact, which Denethor eventually crashed his precious airship-not-a-warship into, and somehow we ended up killing Gruumsh, despite siege engines being teleported just as we were about to hit them.

It was a big battle, though, so we didn't "say" much. Hence why the session after is also included.

Fun fact: Blogger has updated and is very confusing now and you can't backdate posts. Blegh. Thankfully, the option to revert back was there so I didn't have to go through the rigmarole of migrating the whole thing to WordPress.

Microchips in a crisp bag

Coming across some weird purple stuff on the ground, shining a light on it made it sprout tentacles and suddenly we made a new friend - it called itself Terminus and the group decided to give it a moral compass. Like don't take stuff people need to survive, don't kill people (unless they're trying to kill you first), family is important, that kind of thing. Gunther added that it "shouldn't let the bastards grind it down", which may or may not be good advice? The thing grew and grew and maybe we have unleashed a monster on the world.

We got back to the barge-on-wheels and were stopped by some other mutants, who wanted to jab us with needles before explaining what they were for. Turned out to be some kind of vaccine, but as far as we saw it, it was an unprovoked attack and they were trying to inject us with goodness-knows-what, so we put the pedal to the metal and drove out of there. The vaxxers were very insistent, however, and gave chase. They exploded in a fireball, but not before taking out one of our wheels - Cecil was NOT amused.

Moral of the story: if you're regenerating, eating weird berries is fine. To everyone else, they're less fine.

Welcome to the minimum damage club

The bigger thing that came out we did some damage to, and then it fell through a hole in the floor along with the other creature. We battled some things and a giant tentacled brain in the middle of the goop pool, until it exploded.

Maybe we should get out of there? Dragging an unconscious Orson along with us (his player couldn't make it, unfortunately) we found a room with lights, and Jetstream picking up said lights made things rotate and all of a sudden the spaceship (yes, we were in a spaceship) decided to start a countdown for take-off. We managed to convince the system to stay put until all the terraforming bits and other things had been recalled. Which happened kind of quickly.

We found an engine room full of what appeared to be weird sex dungeon loot, and the vents in the floor turned out to be exhaust vents. As we had to scarper, we jumped down and fell out in the crater below the spaceship ... and ran for cover, because that thing was taking off!

Starring:

• Cecil, a grumpy plastic ladybird toy come to life
• Gunther von Lunar, a vampire from Unspecified European Country
• Jetstream, a regenerating speedster who does Science with bowling balls
• Mr Johnson, a seismic shapeshifter with some very good ideas ... on paper
• Orson, an unconscious hypercognitive octopoid scientist

I'm the best support class ever!

It's been a while since we were last on Faerûn with our new gods. Of course, last time we were thrown back out into the world after some time away in the Night Roads and other shenanigans. Our friends were basically gone, and things were looking rather bleak.

Maybe things can be less bleak going forward, because now we have clerics and paladins and rangers, oh my! Basically, because a bunch of gods have died, it seems we're a bit more powerful and if people choose to BUH-LIEVE then they get their powers back that were previously bestowed upon them by other gods. So that's pretty cool. (GM has also said he'll be using this version of Faerûn next time he runs D&D, which means our characters are going to be the gods of the game! Which sounds awesome.)

Tilverton has been taken over by Lolth and her people, so the plan is to go get our pantheon's capital back, thank you very much. We just need to get there first. By way of creating wolf pups and getting attacked by gnolls.

I need more than a Venn diagram

Gorbash went to speak to Ixchal, and managed to encounter an adult evil dragon calling himself Roka. He was clearly looking for something, such as the feathered serpent which Booker let slide to someone he shouldn't have. Apparently they're rare and super magical or something like that.

"Show me yours, I'll show you mine", Roka [insert lineage blurb here] said to Gorbash, who complied. Ixchal was less willing. Especially when the other dragon the first one rode into town with also turned out to be Splugorth-aligned. We really hate those guys.

Someone's also trying to get to Booker's head to get the information about the feathered serpent, so he's currently renting a place in downtown Stormspire, as if someone does something there, there will be hell to pay.

Warlord Doom is a stupid name

So, how do you follow up the massive feat that is hitting the Emperor of Coalition States with the Orb of Solomon? By finding out that the Cyber-knights are aware of a Situation developing up in Calgary in Canada. They're digging a massive hole in the ground and there are a lot of demons-or-devils involved and did I mention it's like a 3-mile wide hole in the ground? They're gearing up for battle, and a massive supernatural creature war taking place on Earth is not ideal.

I think we may have gone into Psyscape and had a chat with people there as well, I'm not sure. (I haven't actually written any notes at all in the margin here. Hrm.)

Time for some thrilling heroics

Booker (or technically Barnabus Dayson - have I mentioned he had a make-over and a name change?), pretending to be Sergeant Anderson, got picked up by Coalition States troups and brought into Lone Star. Meanwhile, Jayson and Gorbash hid a bit away from there, waiting for The Signal.

While he didn't manage to get an audience with the Emperor, undercover Booker did manage to get close enough to lob the Orb of Solomon at him. It grew in size and out popped the naked lady. She was quickly shot to pieces and as things were kicking off, Booker got out of there.

Eventually finding his way to lab and shown the way by monkeys who showed him the way out - or at least the way to the rats.

The Signal was signalled, as it were, and Gorbash turned himself and Jayson invisible and flew in. Who'd have thought his Dance skill finally came into good use, dodging through the air? The duo reunited with Booker and a magic portal was opened to a bit further away, everyone got out just in time for the Coalition States to set off 16 missiles on where we had just been!

And then we flew a bit further away, but as we hadn't teleported away we managed to get away alive. And it does seem like the Orb of Solomon was successfully delivered to the Emperor. Question is how he's going to use it.

The Emperor ... selectively inhibits serotonin re-uptake?

We parted ways for a bit in order for Gorbash to go back to Blackstone Juggernauts and give John a heads up about the trade agreement Booker had negotiated with the murdery alien dudes. They had hardly finished talking when the guy showed up. That was surprisingly quick!

Booker and Jayson went to see a battle, and then went back to wait for Gorbash at a hotel in Roswell, where the group had decided to hang out.

We later went back to one of the battlegrounds to salvage whatever could be salvaged, and set Booker up as a one of them, by changing an ID of someone who was the closest match we could find. Unfortunately, it was done by Gorbash and all humans look pretty much the same to him ... He did finally get to use his Singing skill, though!

The plan being that Booker, disguised as lone survivor Nathan Anderson, would go into Coalition States and gain access to the Emperor by being the sole survivour of a terrible battle. Because surely the Emperor would want to pat him on the back for that?