Wicker Valley, episode 32: Big Magic

I got to work on the book with Arthur, but it wasn't long before another black car, like the one Great Aunt Gertie showed up in, pulled up next to the van and a bunch of people got out. Arthur assured me it was fine and went away with them. I was starting to get a handle on what we needed to do to close the portal, when I got a text from Michael telling me to bring the water feature.

I teleported in to find him fighting an absolutely massive spider, put down the water feature, and went right in with my claws. It didn't like that, and made a horrible screeching noise, which I ignored, then sank a fang into my shoulder, which was harder to ignore. Michael sliced some legs off it, which separated it from me, and then I'm not sure what happened as Elizabeth put up a wall of ice around me and Michael. I suggested to him that we should start trolling Elizabeth, but I didn't have any good ideas for how to do that.

Anyway, by the time I got out of the ice wall, the spiders had disappeared. Outside, Adam was patching up Eddie who'd had a rough time with the spiders before I arrived. Elsa added a little healing magic, and he looked a lot better.

Back at the junk yard we collected everything we needed for closing the portal. It was a mobile portal, I'd learned from the book, so first we needed to move it close to some water. Specifically, Wicker Lake, which oddly enough some people seemed to have forgotten the existence of. It was going to take three of us, and I was a bit worried about that, as that morning's curse-delaying aside, Elizabeth and me didn't have a great track record of working together, and Arthur was out of the picture. Elizabeth assessed the other three. Adam was a no-go, and Michael kept insisting he wasn't magical despite a certain amount of evidence to the contrary. But Eddie, she said, had talent.

I suggested he cover his hair, to make sure we didn't accidentally set it on fire, and helped Elizabeth set up the magic circle. Then the three of us held hands and began the chant, and soon had the portal relocated. Then it was mostly a matter of holding it open while all the various yokai were pulled back into it, although the fact that they were trying to stab us on the way past made it pretty uncomfortable.

Adam and Michael were kept busy fending things off, and Adam clearly wasn't ready to use his flamethrower again after the djinn incident. Unfortunately, Michael wasn't ready to use it at all. Fortunately being right by the lake there was plenty of water handy. Now we had to try to keep going while being bitten by spiders and that was much tougher, as we had to sit there and keep the magic going while they swarmed over us. But in the end we got there. Big spider back in the hole, the hole closed up, and nothing on fire except some of the grass nearby. Apparently Eddie was exactly what we needed to balance our magic.

Adam tried to patch up my spider wounds after that, which I wasn't keen on, and it's only because of my demonic nature that he didn't make things worse. So I took myself to the hospital, where a lot of staff were suddenly freed up as the unconscious people started waking up. Kenji got his mum back. Not his dad though. He woke up again, but the spider curse had hurt him too badly, and he died later that day.

I got another visit from Toby the definitely not a gargoyle while I was at the hospital. He told me that since I had continued to not do the thing I was supposed to be doing regarding Michael, that I was getting my armour confiscated. Which I wouldn't mind so much if whoever They are would stop being so bloody enigmatic and just tell me what I was supposed to be doing!

I got the answer that night, via a dream. Combat training. Teach him to fight with weapons other than a cricket bat. Well that I can do. I normally rely on my claws, but you don't grow up demonic without learning a few weapons along the way. The challenging part is going to be getting Michael on board. We're in a different timeline, but he's still been chosen by someone for something, and I know it's important, even if he's still in denial.

Once we were all out of hospital, we met up again and discovered that Eddie has quite a collection of interesting items from the history of Wicker Valley. We decided it was about time our town had a museum, and since there's that abandoned warehouse full of teeth and scorch marks that nobody wants, we managed to get a venue for a good price. Elizabeth still doesn't have a job, so she's going to run the place. And once we've installed the scrying map and the healing water feature, it should be very useful.

Concrete Cow 24

The problem with volunteering to make the signs to direct people to the entrance is that you then have to arrive before the start in order to put the signs up. Accordingly I arrived 20 minutes early, a new record. Soon everyone else was arriving though, and we got down to some shopping at Leisure Games. I'd been thinking of picking up Dragonbane, and there it was.

Game 1: Monster of the Week

I kicked things off with my own scenario, Who Ate All The Pies? Each time I run this it gets a little more polish, and this one was fantastic, with the three players all playing off each other, and culminating in a scene involving a gas station hot dog and a nerf gun that will take some beating. Between that and some very bloody horror, this is a really fun scenario to run, and I think it's got a few more outings in it.

Game 2: Watford Paranormal

There were a lot of fantastic options for afternoon games, and it was a tough choice, but in the end I used my golden ticket to get into Watford Paranormal, a game based on the TV show Wellington Paranormal, and using a cut down version of Public Access.

We quickly assembled our team of dubiously qualified police officers. My own PC Sweets was joined by PC Darling, CSO Turner, and Dex the PRIC. We set out to investigate a variety of vegetable related crimes, in which Sweets and Turner both managed to vault over a fence in the style of Nicholas Angel from Hot Fuzz, and Darling and Dex arrested a very aggressive onion.

Eventually we saved the world from an alien invasion, using a troupe of dancing carrots and an impromptu concert on TikTok. It all seemed to make sense at the time.

Then it was time for takeaways, and the raffle, in which my ticket was pulled first, meaning I got away with a copy of Heart.

Game 3: Escape from Dino Island

I wanted to run something relatively quick and uncomplicated in the evening, so it was time to bring out the toy dinosaurs and run a game of Escape from Dino Island. The group chose to be a group of criminals on a score, with the Kid character being the son of the Don who they all worked for. And so began another exciting journey across Dino Island, discovering and occasionally killing dinosaurs with radio collars and bar codes along the way, until they completed their mission by getting hold of some triceratops horns for the Don, made it to the radio tower, and sent a message that got picked up by International Rescue who immediately deployed Thunderbird 2. But first they had to escape the team of ninjas sent by a rival crime family, resulting in the team's engineer getting turned into three dinosaurs, the rescue of a paleontologist, and the discovery that the genetically engineered quetzalcoatlus really liked popcorn.

Post-Con

The intention was to do another Sunday get-together, but with many people unavailable, it became a much smaller outing. Nevertheless, we had a lovely visit to the National Film and Sci-Fi Museum followed by lunch at Pho.

Reflections

Just a really nice day's gaming. The only downside is that I didn't get to talk as much as I would have liked with some of the people there, due to some games running a bit long. I came home exhausted but happy.

Wicker Valley, episode 31: Big Spiders

During the house search we'd found some kind of dimensional portal, which Arthur had temporarily disabled with one of his magical wards, but we knew that wasn't going to last. Up the ladder we went into the loft, where Arthur immediately got bitten by a giant spider.

There were a lot of spiders up there, and they were big ones, with human eyes which did this thing where blinks were rippling around the attic in a kind of Mexican wave of awful. Eddie made an attempt to communicate with them, and got bitten. They didn't seem to understand either English or his polite gestures. So I pulled up a translation spell from my grimoire.

Hive minds are the absolute worst to communicate with. Voices slightly out of sync, coming from different directions - it's enough to give me a headache. I couldn't persuade them to leave, but I did get out of them that they had a queen, who was going to be out and about pretty soon, and also that we were going to be in big trouble if we didn't leave ourselves pretty quick. The others did not seem to need to be told that. I asked if they were fae, given the mention of a queen, but clearly not. They were yokai.

Outside, Eddie spotted something - an old man with a gourd shaped head, slipping away towards next door. But first we had to deal with Arthur's spider bite. Eddie and Michael had both been bitten but it didn't look too bad. Arthur looked bad. I tried laying on hands, but all I got was a bit of magical curse backlash. Which did at least tell me it was a curse.

Adam took Arthur and Eddie back to the junkyard to do some research, while Michael, Elizabeth and me followed the mysterious figure. Michael recognised it as a Nurarihyon, which he'd seen in an anime before. It had got into the neighbour's house, despite it being locked. Fortunately I could see enough through the window to teleport inside and let the others in.

We found it soon enough, leaving cracker crumbs all over the floor and heading upstairs to use all the toilet paper. I asked it if it was the kid's grandfather, just in case, but no, just another yokai. Michael distracted it, and Elizabeth and me made use of that for a magical banishing.

I tried to teleport us back to the junkyard, but must have thought of Adam at just the wrong moment, and we ended up in a heap in the back of Vanessa, which was a bit of a surprise for everyone, especially Adam.

We had the right books and gear for the kind of curse breaking magic that Arthur needed, but neither I nor Elizabeth were feeling at our best magically, so Arthur called his great aunt Gertie for some magical assistance. Gertie arrived in a chauffeur driven car, wearing a hat with a full size vulture on it, which I'm sure looked at me. I offered to assist, and frankly I nailed my part of it. Shame Gertie didn't. She got hit by even more backlash than me, getting flung across the room.

Gertie left, leaving instructions that Arthur needed to be kept close to running water. Adam made him up a camp bed in the oubliette, and I put on a disguise and teleported to the garden centre to 'borrow' a water feature. This tracked with what the research team had dug up. They had a name for the queen spider: Tsuchigumo. And being near running water was the only way we'd be able to kill it.

The next morning Arthur wasn't better, but wasn't significantly worse, so Elizabeth and me had another shot at the curse breaking. I'd really got the feel for it by now. Elizabeth found it a bit tougher, but with some help from the mystical library we managed to de-curse him enough that he was going to live long enough for us to have a shot at taking out the big spider, which was going to be the only total cure.

One thing was clear. We needed to talk to the kid again. He'd mentioned a book, and that was probably going to have all the answers we needed in it. So we went to his aunt and uncle's house again, to deliver the Switch which we'd completely failed to hand over during the previous day's excitement, and offer to take Kenji to the park for a bit. The utterly exhausted looking uncle answered the door. His wife was at work - apparently the hospital was busy with more coma cases. He was only too happy for us to take Kenji away for a bit.

Kenji wanted to play hide and seek, and I don't think we've ever had such a united chorus of "No!" before. I suggested the assault course on the adventure playground, in the hope of tiring him out a bit. Nobody was particularly keen to talk to him. How we managed to assemble six people with absolutely no skill in talking to children, I don't know. Anyway, I was forced to use my demon voice, and ended up overdoing it a bit, and now I'm Kenji's new best friend.

He told us about the book, which had belonged to his grandfather, and which he was 'given' in very much the same way as I 'borrowed' that water feature, after his death. He didn't know Japanese well enough to read it properly, but he was able to read the words out loud. So it was pretty clear that his grandfather had been a bit of an expert on yokai, and had used the book to summon them to play pranks and stuff, but Kenji had no idea what he was doing and had just opened a random portal and all sorts of awful things were coming through.

I tried to discourage him from doing things like that, saying it might be dangerous, which he argued with, saying that I wasn't dangerous. Which didn't seem to be something I should argue about, despite it being very much not true. Then he mentioned my armour, which surprised me, since I didn't think I was wearing it. I wasn't wearing it.

But we knew where the book was now, so we delivered Kenji back to his uncle who looked much better after a shower and a coffee. We reunited the kid with his Switch, and peace reigned once more.

Back at Kenji's house, Arthur used his scrying knife to take a look at the book and check for spiders. There were spiders. Spiders that looked back at him, and for a moment I thought it was all going to go a bit The Ring, but he covered the knife up quickly. I teleported in to the room, but when I looked under the bed, the book had gone. I teleported back out quick.

Another scry, and Arthur said the book was now in the under stairs cupboard, but there were a lot of spiders. This time we went in as a group, Adam bringing his shotgun, which wasn't the best idea as he accidentally shot the book and then had to explain to our police friend why he was getting reports of gunshots from Eddie's mum.

One very unpleasant spider fight later, we had the book, but we also had a massive hole in the wall where Tsuchigumo had left before we got there.

I got back in the van with Arthur, who was still feeling pretty rough, and we got to work on the book. Opening the portal was a simple matter of reading some words. Of course. Closing it was going to be a bit more involved, but we could do it. Meanwhile, the others were pursuing the spider, with instructions to call if they needed us to teleport in.

Wicker Valley, episode 30: Jack in the box

A few weeks passed peacefully in Wicker Valley. I was kept busy at the Wicker Stop, while fully expecting some kind of Christmas fairy to show up and make December very complicated, but no. We actually got through Christmas quite peacefully. No, it was January, just as I was getting to the last of the cranberry scones I'd been keeping frozen for the Whisper Sisters, when things started happening again.

Two people taken out of their house in comas, leaving a young child to be cared for by his aunt, not long after the kid's grandmother had died. Not much to go on, but it was Eddie's neighbours. He thought it was worth a look, and his instincts for this kind of thing seem pretty solid. Also Michael was acting a bit weird, which usually means something's up.

Anyway, we had two lines of inquiry - the house, and the child. It was a while since I'd done any breaking and entering, but we decided on visiting the child first. Eddie had an in with the aunt and uncle based on being neighbours, so I packed up a nice cake from the café and off we went.

It was soon apparent that while not technically demon spawn, the kid would have been right at home in my family. To be fair, his love of pranks were a little less insect themed than Rusty's, but I could see why his aunt was so stressed. Then the kid started dropping bombshells. An invisible hand buzzer, or possibly just an imaginary one that still worked. Something that came out of a jack in the box. A big spider. And something about a yolk eye, which I didn't understand but hoped Adam would.

We got around the breaking and entering by offering to pick up the kid's Nintendo Switch, which was still at his house, since Eddie would be going that way anyway, and borrowed the keys. We found the Switch easily enough, but looking for the jack in the box was trickier. Notably, the kid's room absolutely did not look like the room of the hellspawn in all but name we'd just encountered. He had to have a separate play area.

Then Adam found a demonic lantern face thing in the under stairs cupboard, and that's where things got complicated. There was a snake, and something about Michael drawing a picture of a spider with human eyes, and naturally there was the usual coin toss between attic and basement, this time settling on attic as there was no basement.

Anyway, we found the jack in the box, and apparently it's spelled 'Yokai'.

Drawing Inspiration From The Natural World: Fungi

At A Weekend With Good Friends in March 2024 I took part in a panel discussion on drawing inspiration from the natural world. While I'm no biologist, I am absolutely fascinated by nature in all it's beauty, horror and downright weirdness, and often make use of it in scenarios.

Over the course of this panel I talked quite a lot about fungi, but still had plenty more that I could say. So...

A Few Favourite Fungi

Cordyceps

Photo by Andreas Kunze

This is Cordyceps militaris, the Scarlet Caterpillarclub. A pretty innocuous fungi on the face of it, but the fun stuff is happening underground. The spores of this fungus grow on an underground moth pupa, taking over the body of the caterpillar inside and filling it with mycelium.

Chances are though, if you've heard of cordyceps before, it's Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus. As the name suggests, rather than just attacking an immobile pupa, it goes for the live ants, infecting their brain and changing their behaviour to make them move to an area good for spore distribution. There the ant is forced to bit onto a leaf, where its mandibles lock in place. Only then is the ant allowed to die, as the fungus consumes it and produces its fruiting bodies. And there is a reason I only included a picture of the Scarlet Caterpillarclub in this article. Feel free to google your own nightmares.

Some types of cordyceps are edible, and they also play a part in traditional Chinese medicine. Googling them gets you articles about the many health benefits of cordyceps and how eating them will improve your life.

Nice try, cordyceps.

Stinkhorns

Photo by Jörg Hempel

On to something a bit more lighthearted. Stinkhorns, as their name implies, stink. Many of them also look a bit like penises, hence the Latin name of the pictured common stinkhorn, Phallus impudicus. The stinking serves a purpose. The slime on the top there is gleba, a goo containing spores. Much like a flower offering a sweet perfume to attract bees to spread their pollen, the stinkhorns use the smell of rotting meat to attract carrion eating flies who carry the gleba to new locations on their feet.

But those aren't my favourite stinkhorns. My favourite is Clathrus Archeri, commonly known as Devil's Fingers or the Octopus Stinkhorn.

Photo by Oilys

They first appear as strange white eggs. In time the red fingers start to become visible under the egg surface, until they burst out in strange shapes, covered in black slime. Of course they are stinkhorns, so that black slime is the stinking spore-filled gleba.

Stinkhorns come in all kinds of weird and wonderful shapes and forms! If you need inspiration for alien looking entities for your games, take a look at the incredible variety of stinkhorns.

Photo by Pseudopanax

Amethyst Deceiver

Fungi names are absolutely wonderful. Many of them sound like they came out of some kind of random word generator. Although when you look at a Laccaria amethystina, you can at least see where part of the name came from.

Photo by GaryGMason

Aside from the charming colour scheme though, what makes these mushrooms interesting is that under normal circumstances they are edible, but that changes if they grow in certain locations. Amethyst deceivers are a bioaccumulator of arsenic, meaning that if they grow on soil contaminated with arsenic, they become poisonous.

These mushrooms are a good reminder that conditions that seem hostile to life, often aren't. Fungi, bacteria and other microbes can exist in conditions that seem absolutely hostile to life, whether through heat, cold, pressure, or excessive quantities of arsenic.

Bleeding Tooth Fungus

But sometimes it's just fun to look at something really weird, and stinkhorns aren't the only bizarre looking fungi out there. The tooth fungi are named for the spiny protrusions that grow on the underside of their caps, but if you ever encounter Hydnellum peckii in the wild it probably won't be the teeth that get your attention.

Photo by Bernypisa

The bleeding tooth fungus, also known as strawberries and cream by people who've clearly encountered scarier strawberries than me, exudes a red liquid which contains an anticoagulant. Nobody knows how or why it does this.

It's not just a bloody face though. Like with all fungi, the fruiting body is only half the story. The bleeding tooth fungus is a mycorrhizal fungus, which means it forms a symbiotic relationship with plants. Its hyphae grow sheaths around the roots of trees, allowing it to exchange nutrients with the tree, benefitting both organisms.

Fungi In Media

There's a number of interesting works of fiction out there that make good use of fungi to bring the horror. Here's a few examples.

The Last Of Us

This video game and its TV adaptation show a terrifying future in which a mutated cordyceps fungus has infected humans, resulting in a zombie apocalypse. A BBC nature documentary provided the inspiration - you can't beat a David Attenborough show for inspiration from nature.

What Moves The Dead

In this novella, T. Kingfisher sets out to retell the story of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. The original story focuses heavily on decay, but T. Kingfisher is all too aware than in decay there is life, and fungi have a major part to play.

The X-Files

The X-Files has two episodes heavily based around fungi. Firewalker makes use of the cordyceps fungus in a manner that's far closer to the way it actually operates than the fungal zombies of The Last Of Us. And Field Trip gives us a hallucinogenic fungus that's notable not just for the hallucinations it induces, but also for the sheer size of the thing, as the creators remember that mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of the vast underground network of mycelium.

Fungi In Gaming

There's plenty going on with fungi to make use of in gaming.

First there's just the absolutely weird appearance of some of them. Need inspiration for a monster? An alien? Fungi have you covered.

Then there's the way they can affect your brain, whether that's with hallucinogenics like the liberty cap, or more directly like the zombie-ant fungus. They can change your perception of the world, or force you to act against your own nature. They are parasites that you can pick up through invisibly small spores and not even know you've got.

But let's go back to the stinkhorns. They're mimics. Lures. Imagine a fungus that gave off the scent of something delicious to humans - strawberries, perhaps - and then hid its spores in strawberry-like structures on its surface. How many of us could it infect?

Remember the extremophile nature of some fungi. Just because the PCs are in an inhospitable place like outer space, doesn't mean they aren't going to encounter life. And what might that life look like?

And finally, there's the symbiotic relationships of mycorrhizal fungi. It doesn't have to be a tree. What would it look like if a fungus formed a symbiotic relationship with an animal?

Conclusion

Fungi are fabulous. If you've only thought of them as food, poison or hallucinogens, get ready for a journey into these amazing organisms that are ready and waiting to appear in your games. Happy googling!

Photo by Jean Roulin

Wicker Valley, episode 29: Dancing with Djinns

My new ex-cultist friend, whose name was George, helped me get the remaining injured cultists out of the building. Michael was trying to interrogate one of them and not getting very far, possibly because the guy didn't actually know very much based on how little George was able to tell me. He clearly didn't know what he was getting into. He'd been promised having wishes fulfilled but hadn't exactly believed in all this magic stuff. Well, he did now.

Adam and Elizabeth showed up in Vanessa, and I couldn't have been happier to see them. Arthur, who was proving quite talented at magic, set up a ward to keep the scarabs inside, and Adam incinerated the scarabs while Elizabeth set up an ice wall to make sure the building didn't catch fire.

Michael and me had both been a bit shot during the fight, and while neither of us were looking too bad, we did spend a few minutes bandaging while the others did a bit of scrying with dead scarabs, something that really put me in mind of a prank my brother played on me once. Then it was back in Vanessa and Arthur's car, along with George, as we followed the trail to a shepherd's hut holiday home. Definitely the right place. It was covered in scarabs. Arthur did a quick divination and confirmed that the leader was inside and in the middle of some magic.

We left George in the van, and Adam started hosing down scarabs while the rest of us went round the back to the door. It was magically locked as well as normally locked. Michael's cricket bat took care of the regular lock and I was starting to get a handle on alternate timeline me's grimoire enough to make use of it for a quick unbinding on the magical defenses. That gave me the confidence to try something else new - I enchanted Eddie's gun to give it a bit more oomph if necessary. Arthur put a ward around the building to stop the leader from leaving, and in we went.

Well the enchanted gun seemed to work out well for Eddie, who managed to both intimidate and slow the guy down considerably with a shot to the leg. Between that and Michael's cricket bat, they did separate him from the bottle and his magic book, and while he tried to teleport away, Arthur's ward meant he ended up slamming into the wall of the hut and getting knocked out.

Eddie relieved him of his collection of magic seeing in the dark stones, and we took everything back to the junkyard to put in the oubliette. We weren't done yet though. We still had a djinn to trap. I got to work reading the book. It was in some strange text that Google Lens told me was Semitic. That's the problem with Google Lens. It's handy for me, but does make it far too easy for regular people to stumble onto arcane secrets best left alone. Anyway, I found what we needed:

• At least three people to do an arcane chant.
• One person to dance with the djinn.
• A pair of flaming torches for the dancer to wave.
• Quite a lot of silver.
• A large mammal to sacrifice. A camel was suggested. We decided on a cow as significantly easier to obtain in Wicker Valley, and also we could eat it afterwards.

Eddie got on the cow issue, calling some friends to help out. Adam dug up the necessary material for flaming torches and silver and Michael slipped off somewhere, presumably to practice his dance moves. Then it was back into the van once more, and we drove to the warehouse, as that seemed like the place best set up for dealing with things without causing trouble elsewhere.

Then things went wrong when we got out of the van and a sudden wind picked up most of us and dumped us back at the junkyard, as apparently djinns are really petty. And when I say 'dumped' I mean some way up in the air so we all crashed into the ground. Elizabeth and me got to work magically repairing Arthur and Eddie until George showed up again to drive us there a second time. This time things went a little less dramatically and we all got inside.

Elizabeth, Arthur and me started the chant, Michael danced with the torches, Eddie and Adam stayed close at hand to deal with problems and apply the silver to the bottle when needed, and George handled the cow. Not the smoothest magical ritual we've ever done, and we almost caught fire a few times, but we got there. Michael ended up with tiny flames burning in his eyes, which I thought looked lovely, although other people seemed to find it unsettling. I'll have to find him some of my old dark glasses from before I got a proper handle on my human form.

Then we just had to clean up. The bottle went into the oubliette. George went on his way, and I asked him to keep in touch, since knowing a friendly antiques dealer could very well be useful. I butchered the cow, perhaps not very expertly as my training was in dismemberment, not so much this kind of thing, but it should keep us in burgers for quite a long time. We fired up the barbecue back at the junkyard, and while Adam seemed oddly less keen to be the grillmaster than usual, we all got a good meal.

Then we all sat down for a proper talk, the first chance we'd had since this all kicked off. Eddie talked about some of the strange experiences he'd had as a child. Michael told Eddie and Arthur about our time travel adventures, and Elizabeth told the story of how she became a witch. A lich. She's totally a lich. And I talked about growing up in a family of demons.

I think we're going to make a good team.

Wicker Valley, episode 28: Teamwork

We gathered at the junkyard again. There was a bit of trouble with the police after our antics to retrieve the lid of the djinn bottle, so Adam and Elizabeth went off to deal with that while the rest of us hit the books to try to work out what to do next. Michael suggested using the bottle lid as a focus to try to find the rest of the bottle, so I got out the map and candles.

Not the best scry I've ever done. I think all the time travel was causing me confusion between the way part of me thinks it should be done and all the things I wrote in my grimoire from a different timeline. Long story short, I knew roughly what area to look in, but I was going to need a new map. At least nothing caught fire this time.

Toby the definitely-not-a-gargoyle put in an appearance, and he was looking in a bad way. Apparently I was supposed to be training Michael in something. I asked for some guidance about exactly what I was supposed to be training him in, but didn't get much of a response. Hopefully he'll come back with some answers. In the mean time I offered him a hug because he really did look a mess. I didn't know creatures made of stone could get black eyes.

Meanwhile Eddie was showing off some serious research ability. He figured out we were dealing with a fire djinn, that our best option for hurting it was with holy things, and that djinns had a nasty habit of granting wishes in the worst possible way. A check of the police scanner (after a check to see if we actually had a police scanner) showed strange goings-on involving a swarm of insects at a farm not too far from the area I'd picked up from the bottle lid. We were definitely going to have to check that out.

First we needed transport though. Adam had taken Vanessa the bat-van. Arthur had a car, but it was still parked at the Wicker Stop. Of course I had a way of getting to it, but not exactly a subtle one. But Eddie and Arthur had both just seen me do a scrying ritual, so what was the point of pretending to be normal? I put my arms around Arthur, and teleported us both to the Wicker Stop. The swirl of wings was back to being leathery, not feathery. Maybe that was just a glitch and I hit a seagull mid-teleport last time?

Anyway, Arthur had to sit down for a moment after his first teleport, but soon had us back to the junkyard. Michael had been through Adam's costume cupboard, a thing he has now, and found a bunch of backpack style supersoakers labelled with little crosses. I don't know what happened to cause this timeline's Adam to have that much holy water on standby, but it was probably going to be very useful here.

We tooled up. Overalls as a bit of protection from bugs and general dirt, which had the added bonus of making us look a bit like the ghostbusters. Although Halloween was some time ago now, so perhaps wandering around in costumes would look a little weird? What time of year was it anyway? With all the time travel, I'd completely lost track. I was happy enough with my regular weapons, and Michael was sticking with his cricket bat for this one, but the other two brought out guns! Arthur had a sniper rifle and Eddie had a 9mm? How on earth had they managed that? I'd had to go on a course just to get my shotgun license. Not that I was complaining. With Adam and Elizabeth still tied up dealing with the police we were down quite a lot of firepower.

We got back in Arthur's car and drove out to the farm where things were happening. Ranger Tom was there, and was clearly pleased to see us, which was quite a relief. The farmer was furious though, so I went to have a chat with him using my best soothing voice to calm him down. While I defused the situation the others went to check out a mysterious cloud of smoke. When they got back, Michael looked OK but the others were a bit green. They'd found a homeless person who'd wished that he had wheels. It hadn't gone well for him, and he'd died when his new engine stopped firing. From what we were hearing from the police, he wasn't the only one in a bad way.

We were going to have to stop this before anyone else got hurt. Eddie, again proving himself absolutely invaluable, figured out straight away where the cloud of scarabs were heading. Arthur drove us to the old warehouse district where we'd previously dealt with the tooth monsters. Scarabs were crowding on the roof, and I teleported myself and Eddie up there to have a look around and see if we could deal with them. I saw nothing, as I was far too distracted by scarabs trying to bite me.

Arthur got himself set up with his rifle, and the rest of us snuck in around the back. Cultists. Not really surprising, as Michael had a strong hunch that's what we were going to find. Michael managed to surprise one of them and knock him out. Unfortunately I don't think Arthur has had proper training with his rifle yet, as his first shot hit me. Fortunately I'd already armoured up by then, so it was time to pop the claws and get down to business.

Absolute chaos, with people hiding, and a sudden cloud of black powder which Michael went running into, and more missed shots. I'd managed to rake one of the cultists pretty badly, but then I remembered the conversation we'd had right before we went in. Top priority was finding the djinn bottle. So I spoke to the cultist I'd just clawed, putting every bit of temptation I could muster into my voice, and told him if he wanted to live, he should help me find the bottle.

I might have overdone it a bit. I seemed to have a new best friend. But that's exactly what we needed right then. He gave me his magic stone that let him see in the dark and I followed Michael into the black cloud to try to retrieve the bottle. With what I can only call some really excellent teamwork, we took down the leader, dispersed the dark cloud, scared off the remaining cultists, and then realised that we hadn't actually found the djinn yet, the leader had teleported away with the bottle, and we were still surrounded by very angry scarabs.

Revelation 2024

Normally I drive up to Garricons on a Friday afternoon and then have dinner when I get there. This time the traffic was so bad that I decided I didn't want to wait, and stopped off at a services to have dinner while I waited for the traffic to clear a bit. By some chance I'd managed to find a Burger King where there'd been some kind of catastrophic drinks failure, meaning the only drinks they had available were black coffee and Capri-Sun. One of those journeys.

I did still make it to the Garrison at a reasonable time, and was able to have a bit of a rest before heading to the bar when other people started arriving, but then it was time for bed at a sensible time ready for the games ahead.

Game 1: Matrons of Mystery

Another exciting opportunity to play my own game! I decide to take a break from Rosemary and Pierre this time and come up with a new matron. Brenda Kerr is an outdoorsy type who enjoys birdwatching. Her husband Derrick was a dentist, who left her for a younger woman. She's very proud of their two children though, Molly the footballer and Peter the doctor.

Brenda and her friends had a lovely meal in a stately home (Brenda wore her dress fleece) and a good night's sleep, but were awoken in the morning by the shocking news that the solicitor who was about to read the will in the morning had been murdered, and the famous painting, Stable Boy With Huge Stallion had been stolen! And so began a comedy of errors as the four of us annoyed everyone in sight, tampered with evidence and got covered in tea. For a while it seemed like we were never going to solve this murder! But finally we managed to uncover a few clues, with the help of Dr Peter doing a bit of extra medical examination, and finally the culprit was revealed.

But the killer had escaped! And so began an epic chase scene involving a bicycle, a moped, a horse, a Reliant Robin, and after matron Peggy had called her TV producer child, a news helicopter which we used to finally take down the killer.

An absolute delight.

Game 2: City of Mist

Despite my best efforts I've played very little City of Mist, but for once luck was on my side and I got into a game. A selection of pre-gens were on offer, including Detective Enkidu who I played the other time I played City of Mist. This time though I picked up Post-Mortem, a lab-created member of the walking dead and skilled assassin. And the three of us began looking into some strange disappearances at a hotel in the tourist district, resulting in some very creative use of a super soaker.

City of Mist is a bit of a weird system, combining regular PBTA moves with Fate tags, but it works pretty smoothly. Some of the move names I find a little unhelpful, as my interpretation of them doesn't entirely match up with what they actually do, so I have to keep reading the descriptions to remind myself. That's something that will come with practice though. So I just need to get more practice. Noir superheroes is a genre I enjoy, and I'd really like to play more of this.

Game 3: Kult

I went for my improvised Kult game, The Heist, for the evening slot, and off we went to steal an occult book from a billionaire's yacht, in what was probably the most gonzo outing this particular scenario has ever had. Although given who was playing, I'm not entirely surprised.

This one can be hard work to run, with the constant referring to the tarot cards, but it's pretty damn rewarding when it does all come together. I'm considering publishing this one. While most of my Kult scenarios involved enough work that I don't want to give them away for free (the only option as for IP reasons there's no Kult community content license), this one is a single page plus character sheets, and I think that might be worth sharing.

Game 4: Monster of the Week

Two years after my first Monster of the Week game at Revelation 2022, I brought along my own scenario, Who Ate All The Pies? and had two of the same players in the game. The team soon learned that trouble was afoot in Piesville, Louisiana, and they were going to have to sort it out fast if they were going to be able to enjoy the town fair and its annual pie eating contest to its full extent.

Thanks to transport delays we were a bit late getting started, and with character creation taking longer than usual, I was a bit worried about timing for this one. But it worked out in the end - we spent a little less time on inter-character banter and investigating the full motivations at play, but the key plot points were all played out.

Once again I've realised that the scenario I've written down isn't exactly the scenario I run, so while I'd like to publish this one (possibly along with a few other MOTW scenarios) I need to first update it to match the actually scenario.

Game 5: Trophy Dark

My second game of Trophy Dark. We set off into the forest in search of a book, in the hope that retrieving it would get our souls back from a demon. That didn't happen. What did happen was a surprise conga line of murder, one character turned into a tree, and much to my surprise, my own character actually getting out alive. I'm still not sure how that happened, although I doubt life got any better for her after that.

A good game to end the convention on. Relatively short, not too much thinking with the randomly generated characters, and no expectation of survival resulting in proper drive-it-like-you-stole-it playing. 

Reflections

As I noted during a break in the final session, the one down side with increased gender diversity at conventions is having to share the toilets. It really is nice to find myself at a table where not only am I not the only woman, but women actually outnumber men. As a hobby, we're getting there.

Revelation remains a gem of a convention. Even with all the games being PBTA or FITD (or at least adjacent) you never know what you're going to get. I had five radically different games and I enjoyed them all.

Wicker Valley, episode 27: Back to the Present

We left the persuasion to Michael. He was the best at it, and I was getting terrified of turning completely into a spider. And he did it, and with some effort we all came back to the present day.

I was back in the Wicker Stop, in the basket room, in the middle of teaching a class. Could have been worse. Weaving felt very natural at that point, and I kept on top of any urge to eat flies. I got through the class without doing anything weird, and then it was time to figure out what state the world was in now.

I no longer owned the Wicker Stop, although I did seem to be a manager now, so that wasn't too bad. And Michael was still working there, although he seemed to just be bussing tables now, and there was a new guy, Eddie. I'd seen his face around town maybe a couple of times, and Michael seemed to know him.

Adam showed up on the team Whatsapp group saying that he had an apprentice now, to which the only thing I could say was 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. We arranged to all meet up for coffee the next morning and catch up. It had been a long day.

Eddie brought us our coffees in the morning. Adam had brought his apprentice Arthur along with him. With both of them hanging around it was hard to properly talk about anything, although I did suggest that next time my brother suggested going on 'holiday' we should all say no. We did manage to establish that Adam was somehow still working for the Foundation, hence the sudden arrival of Arthur, and that life had turned out rather differently for Robin, who'd disappeared when he left the oubliette and was now on some kind of motorcycle tour of Britain. Michael was back living in his old place with his housemates and no longer had a car. Elizabeth...she was still Elizabeth.

Then the Whisper Sisters walked in.

Michael hugged them, and it was all I could do not to join in. I had to settle for making sure they were well supplied with coffee and scones. I never thought I'd be so happy to see them.

No time for getting properly settled back in though, as there was trouble out at the motorway services. We piled into Vanessa, which was getting increasingly crowded with six of us in there, as it was becoming rapidly apparent that Eddie in this timeline knew a lot more about goings on in Wicker Valley. At least Arthur seemed a bit more impressed with the interior of Vanessa than he had done with us. I guess we're not quite the professional outfit he was expecting from the Foundation.

I ordered KFC on the way, because if we were going to visit the services we might as well enjoy ourselves. While I picked up popcorn chicken for everyone, the local police officer escorted some of the group in to see the body. Between that, the CCTV, and Adam's extensive knowledge of such things, it seemed pretty certain we were dealing with a djinn. Not that I could pay any attention to that though, as something was wrong with Michael.

He'd had another one of his visions, and needed to get back to town urgently to check on his brother. Urgent in an 'ask me to teleport him there' kind of way. I think Elizabeth was telling Eddie and Arthur something about the hotel as we got out of the van, but I could deal with her weird shipping later. Michael needed me. And much to my relief, I got us both into his mum's back garden without anything going amiss.

Something was different though. I was used to the swirl of my wings each time I teleported, but my wings were different. Instead of being leathery, they were feathery.

By the time I'd got myself sorted out after that surprise, Michael had confirmed that his brother was fine, but he was still worried. So I built a ward around the house. Not a great one, given that I was short of time and feeling downright weird about the feathers, but I did manage to make it resistant to djinn, fairies and demons, while leaving my usual backdoor in case I needed to get in or out.

Then it was back to business. Causing distractions while retrieving bits of djinn bottle.

Games for Beginners

My manager at work is considering RPGs as a possible activity for an upcoming team building day, and naturally as the team's resident RPG nerd, I've been asked to think about organising this. Which means I need to pick a game to run. Something beginner friendly, as none of these people have ever played an RPG before. I asked BlueSky and a couple of Discords for advice, and here's what came up:

D&D 5e

Pros: It's the default RPG experience. It's got brand recognition and a handy starter set, and it's not all that complicated at first level. If they've seen the recent Honor Among Thieves movie, or played Baldur's Gate 3, that's an extra bit of cultural relevance that might help grab them. If they enjoy it there's tons of material and other players out there, and it should have good VTT support if they want online games.

Cons: I'm not a big fan (team Pathfinder here) so I'd have to buy the starter set and then learn how to run it, which I would feel a bit resentful about. Plus it is complicated, compared to most of the other games I play, even at first level.

Matrons of Mystery

Pros: Not everyone is into fantasy, but most people have watched some kind of cosy British crime drama. It's a familiar modern day setting. People absolutely love playing little old ladies solving murders. The game system is pretty simple, and there's no character death to worry about, plus I wrote the thing and know it inside out.

Cons: Only about half my team are originally from Britain. I don't know how popular 'little old ladies solving murders' is as a genre in India, and the game really hinges on everyone knowing exactly how to act in this genre and improvising around it. Plus there's a few people who really don't like the Carved from Brindlewood mystery system and there's no way around that.

(Brindlewood Bay was also suggested, for much the same reasons, but I think Matrons of Mystery is better for beginners as it's well suited to one-shots without having to cut out a chunk of the game and it sticks closer to the cosy mystery genre.)

Dragonbane

Pros: It's the classic dungeon crawl experience you get from D&D, but with the complexity scaled down. You still get to have fun with maps and polyhedral dice and minis. If they've got some idea what an RPG looks like from Stranger Things, this is still on the same page. There's a handy quickstart with pregens and an adventure.

Cons: Again, I don't own it (although the quickstart is free and that's probably enough for a one-shot) and combat might be a little more deadly than D&D, meaning I'd need some backup characters.

Liminal

Pros: A modern day setting that's familiar to everyone. Grounded in folklore, which some people will pick up on, but which you don't need to know to play the game. Easy mechanics. Plus I know it really well and have my own adventures to run.

Cons: Urban fantasy is a less familiar genre than regular fantasy. Unless it turns out my team are all super into Rivers of London or The Dresden Files, this one might be a little harder to explain.

Alien

Pros: It's based on a popular film series and there's a fair chance most people will be familiar with it. The rules are straightforward, and I have my own scenarios I can run.

Cons: It's horror, specifically body horror, and that's really not some people's jam. I'd rather not have to give content warnings for a first ever game. That crit table is brutal.

Escape from Dino Island

Pros: Again, based on a popular film series which most people will have some familiarity with. Straightforward rules, very low prep on my part, and should be easy to get up and running. Built for one-shots.

Cons: Can end up going through characters rather fast, due to the injury rules. Needs plenty of spare characters. Also, being a prepless system it does call for more improv from the players than most.

Call of Cthulhu

Pros: Another classic gaming experience, and with a real world setting that doesn't require any knowledge of the entities involved. Percentile system makes it easy to understand your chances, and reasonably simple from the player side of things.

Cons: While I do own it, thanks to the recent Humble Bundle, I've never actually run it. While it is fairly simple from the players' end, it doesn't look simple due to the ridiculous number of skills. It's horror, and while there are plenty of scenarios that aren't likely to go anywhere particularly iffy, it's still not everyone's thing and character death is highly likely. Plus, as I said, many of my team are Indian and I don't like the idea of them looking up the Investigator's Handbook and encountering that particularly poorly chosen book cover.

Monster of the Week

Pros: Another modern day setting, with easy mechanics, and based on popular TV shows. Well designed playbooks to get people up to speed quickly. Loads of pre-written adventures so easy prep for me as well. Easier to keep the horror aspects on the down low than the more explicitly horror games above.

Cons: I know as much about the popularity of Buffy and Supernatural in India as I do about the popularity of Miss Marple. This is another one that really requires knowing the genre.

Conclusions

Currently Dragonbane is looking like my best option. It's the kind of game people think of when they think about RPGs, without being as complicated as my favourite Pathfinder 2e, and means I can break out some minis and polyhedral dice. I will be consulting the players though, to see if there's anything they're particularly interested in. 

If the idea proves popular with the team I may also need to recruit an additional GM, which will also influence what gets run, as D&D or Call of Cthulhu GMs are probably going to be the easiest to find.

ConTingency 2024

After a rather snap decision to go to ConTingency in 2023, this time I was more organised. And was also planning on bringing eight friends. As it turned out, two of them had to drop out at the last minute, which was very sad, but certainly made it easier to fit all of us into two three-bedroom holiday homes.

I arrived on Monday with my husband, giving us a couple of days to get settled in before everything kicked off properly on Wednesday. I'd been assigned the same lodge that I was in with CJ the previous year, which meant I already knew the place's niggles. Which did not stop me from getting stuck in the toilet twice.

Wednesday

Pathfinder - Sundered Waves

I don't normally play Pathfinder at conventions as it's usually Pathfinder Society which I'm not interested in joining, but there was a one-shot with pre-gens on offer - Sundered Waves - and it was about pirates, so I decided I'd give it a go.

I picked up Kaako Ashfeather, a Tengu rogue. I'd not played a rogue before in PF2, and thought it would probably be a little easier to deal with, especially as we were going in at level 5. This was not entirely correct, as the character sheets for some reason gave you all the feat names, but none of the feat descriptions. Undaunted, I pulled out my phone, loaded up Pathbuilder, and copied Kaako into it. With her feats now easily at hand, I prepared to sneak attack.

There were a couple of people in the group who I don't think had ever played PF2. One of them picked up the human fighter, probably the safest choice for a newcomer, but the other had to figure out cleric magic, without the aid of an app. Fortunately it's quite a short adventure, so even with a bit of time spent figuring out character abilities at the start, there was plenty of time for the adventure.

Looking back on the adventure it was a really nice five room dungeon type affair, with interesting fights, puzzles to solve, and plenty of flavour. Definitely the kind of thing I'd consider running as a one-shot - although I'd sort out those character sheets in advance.

Era: The Empowered - Career Day

There's not actually a rule that everyone has to play one Era game at ConTingency, but I did want to play at least one game with my husband, and since he'd enjoyed Era: The Empowered at Condensed, I thought I'd give it a go.

We were...not exactly the best group of superheroes out there. I'm not sure if this game is supposed to be a serious superhero game, but that's certainly not what we were playing. But given that our scenario involved having to go to a high school to do a career day, it made sense that we were perhaps not the brightest and best that the Empowered agency had to offer. Highjinks ensued.

Era as a system is the kind of thing that gets out of the way. I didn't find it to actively support a specific playstyle, which makes sense since it seems to be a generic system used for multiple settings and genres, but the rules didn't get in the way of doing cool stuff. I'd definitely play it again. Ideally I'd play it again with exactly the same group of people. They were all so much fun!

Thursday

Kult: Divinity Lost - Gated

One of the benefits of a five day convention is that I feel a lot more enthusiastic about pitching a two session game, as I don't feel like I'm taking up as much of people's time. My own scenario Gated normally takes two sessions to run, so I decided to give it a go.

I had a table assigned in the lounge, but decided to move it to the lodge. Kult goes better with suitable atmosphere, which is easier to achieve without other people close by, and it was also convenient, given that two of my own group were in the game.

I'd done a proper write-up of this scenario, for someone else who played it in the past and wanted to try running it, so I printed out my nicely formatted version rather than relying on my old rather messy notes. This was particularly useful as a test to see whether I'd actually put all the bits that need to be in the document into the document. The answer is no. Fortunately I could work around that by remembering the missing bits, but I do need to give this one another once over.

The game itself was great. I had an excellent group of players, who all leaned into their characters as the mystery unfolded. The convention was a really good opportunity to schedule something that is otherwise very difficult to schedule, and run one of my favourite scenarios.

Unnamed forest folk horror thing

One of my group had a new thing to try out, so a few of us gathered to tell a GMless story of how we went into a forest and bad things happened. As a work in progress it had some details to iron out, which we were able to highlight by getting confused at various points, but overall we had a fantastic time telling a story together. By the end I was already missing my character's fictional dog, the only entity in the game which actually got a name. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes in future.

Friday

Matrons of Mystery - The Corpse in the Crypt

I got to play my own game! I thought about creating a new Matron, but ultimately decided to stick with Rosemary Braithwaite. I tend to end up changing her a little each time, as I can never remember all the details, so this time her contact was her niece who works in the art shop, but of course Pierre the giant bunny was there on his lead, wearing his little blue jacket.

We were investigating a murder on the site of an archaeological dig being filmed for a TV show. Rather than just giving us the suspect names, the GM had looked up photos of a bunch of TV stars in their younger days to portray the various characters, which I thought really helped capture the spirit of Sunday night British TV - especially the very young Tony Robinson as the presenter of the TV show.

The only negative here was that with six Matrons plus GM and a very large table, I was so far away from some of the players they could barely hear me. Fortunately when we got onto the 'Put it all together' stage of the game, we were all up on our feet, moving ourselves and the clues around as we collectively assembled our theory. In true Poirot style we gathered everyone together in the drawing room and made our accusation, which turned out to be entirely correct. Another successful case for Rosemary and Pierre!

Kult: Divinity Lost - Disco Inferno

It was Friday night, and that meant Disco Inferno, a scenario which also takes place on a Friday night. I claimed the lodge again for this, and again had two of my own group happy to not have to go far for a game.

Being in the lodge meant I could also do a better job with atmosphere. I set my Disco Inferno youtube playlist to play on my phone and set up the disco lights, and soon everyone was bopping along to Donna Summer and Sylvester.

After one unusually bad run of this scenario I'd been a bit wary of it. But it went much better when I ran it at ConDucked so I decided it was worth one more shot. And I'm really glad I did, if only for one delightful moment when three out of four characters were in the toilets, two of them having sex with other club goers and one of them playing the violin. And then having to describe what happened next, which fortunately also happened to be taking place in the toilets.

This run was everything that I wanted Disco Inferno to be, and I'll also be writing this one up properly so one of the players can run it. It's going back in the box for a while now as I'm working on new material, so I'm very happy to be leaving it on such a high note.

Saturday

Liminal - The Crown of Winter

Back in the GM seat for a game of Liminal. Rather than the newer material which I've been rather thoroughly playtesting recently, I decided to go back to one of my older scenarios, The Crown of Winter, partly because it was the middle of winter and it felt thematically appropriate, and partly because I'd be able to run it directly from the Liminal Casebook.

We were assigned one of the giant tables in the main hall, but fortunately a much smaller table was available nearby. There was still noise around us, but we were close enough that I could make myself heard.

I have a specific set of pre-gens that I wrote for this scenario, but I wrote them back in 2020 so decided to give them a bit of an overhaul. While the backgrounds remained largely the same, a few abilities got swapped around, and some new limitations were added. Minor tweaks, but enough that I was happier with the end result.

It was really nice to get back to this older scenario and see what it was like to run from the book. While the layout in the casebook isn't quite how I do things in my own notes (I like to have the NPC stat blocks at the end rather than the beginning) it was otherwise very nicely done, and having had it properly edited was a definite improvement. Props to everyone involved.

There was some joking right before the game that I should roll a d6 and use that to determine which RPG called Liminal I should use to run this game of Liminal. I of course pointed out that I couldn't do that. Because I only own copies of two of the RPGs called Liminal. (Seriously, if you're planning on publishing a new RPG, take a few minutes to google your title! This one's been done.)

Call of Cthulhu - Shared House

Sometimes you barely need a mythos threat to make a Call of Cthulhu scenario horrifying, at least when CJ Romer is the GM. We were a group of students moving into a shared house in Brichester, which we all immediately took as an excuse to embody the very worst aspects of both student life and 1987.

I played the law student, who showed up in her own Citroen 2CV, wearing a lavender power suit with massive shoulder pads and with a blonde poodle perm. Unlike some of her housemates, she actually had a pretty exciting first couple of days at university, and while by the end of the scenario she did have to find a new place to live, she and her new pet mouse were both pretty happy with how things were going.

Cyberpunk Red

I specifically requested Cyberpunk Red for Saturday night, as I knew my husband was free and we'd have another chance to play a game together. Along with two more familiar faces and one new person, we dived into a mission to poison avocadoes on a container ship. Literally dived. We used a submarine.

I've now played Selene the netrunner enough times that the GM said he might have to start giving her XP. My husband picked up the solo he'd played at ConDensed and we once again argued about the 6th street gang and whether they were true American patriots or a bunch of complete arseholes who kept trying to kill me.

The avocado poisoning went off reasonably smoothly, but we also found a weapons cache on the ship. We could have stolen them...but we could also sell the information that they were there, and then get paid to steal them. Why mess around fencing stolen goods when you could have someone else do the work and still get paid twice?

Sunday

Kult: Divinity Lost - The Murder Shack

I originally only pitched three games, but I had Sunday morning free and felt like doing something else, so pitched a game of The Murder Shack, a Call of Cthulhu scenario from the Blasphemous Tome. It's not a game that needs full CoC character sheets really, and even for Kult purposes I have it slimmed down to stats and one disadvantage, which ends up as far more of a roleplay prompt than anything mechanical most of the time anyway. I had two familiar faces (the same as the previous night's Cyberpunk) and one new person.

I ran this in the bar, but really should have arranged for a lodge. Kult needs atmosphere, more than most games, and the bar just didn't have it. All the same, The Murder Shack is such a fun scenario that it still went well, even if it did end with a remarkably low number of murders having occurred.

Casting the Runes - An Unwelcome Spectre - The Mysterious Haunting of the Bell Hotel, Thetford, Norfolk

Another game with CJ, and while I still don't care for Gumshoe, I knew CJ's somewhat Wodehousian take on Jamesian horror would be a good time, and two of my group also joined this game.

We were investigating a haunting at a hotel in Thetford, on behalf of a friend whose husband had seen a ghost there, and as a result had become religious, and thus acceptable to her family, and therefore no longer fun. We did indeed debunk the haunting, although given the vast amount of other stuff we found in the process, I'm not sure if it did any good.

Escape from Dino Island

There was no official slot on Sunday evening, but having had a chat with a friend who played my Thirsty Sword Lesbians game at ConDucked, I offered to run an extra game. He provided the lodge and one other player. I found two more, both from my Thursday Kult game, and off we went.

I had all the materials printed out, including the island map, and had brought one extra thing: a box of small plastic dinosaurs. This was great fun. If I needed a specific dinosaur to appear, there was generally something suitable in the box to put on the map. If I needed a dinosaur generally I could grab one at random.

Dinos in action

 A hunter, a survivor, a paleontologist and a kid made their way around the island looking for an escape route that didn't involved walking right through the middle of a herd of angry carnivores, meeting all kinds of dinosaurs and other strange things along the way, before finally finding themselves unexpectedly on the Yucatan peninsula right before the asteroid hit. A suitably cinematic ending, to both the game and the convention.

Reflections

I'm really glad I was able to introduce a few new people to this lovely convention. I really hope this will be an annual thing from now on. I managed to pace myself reasonably well so I wasn't exhausted by the end, and found time for going swimming and a walk along the beach. I picked up some books I really wanted in the bring and buy, while also offloading half the stuff we'd brought to sell. My group are lovely people and it was wonderful to spend time with them in addition to all the new friends I'm discovering at ConTingency. In short, I had a brilliant time

Wicker Valley, episode 26: Preventing A War

We regrouped at the junk yard for a sit down and a coffee, and to check on the current state of the various factions now the ward was down. Michael had a chat with the fae via his communication stone, and managed to convince them not to invade just now. Adam called James at the Foundation, with similar results. We had some breathing room, but not much.

I found myself checking for large open areas outside of town, just in case there did end up having to be a massive battle, in the hope that they could at least not have it on the Wicker Valley high street. Elizabeth said something about a scene in a movie, and I thought she meant the Battle of Five Armies from The Hobbit, but apparently it was something from Twilight. I wouldn't know. Some things are too much even for a demon.

After some careful consideration, and making sure that Robin was OK and well supplied with biscuits, we concluded that it would be a good idea if Agnes and Elsa were to retire to the south of France. A lot of people wanted Agnes dead, and for all we'd been through recently, I don't think any of us wanted that. She's still my aunt, after all.

So we met up with Mary for a nice friendly chat and to talk about what was going to happen next. We had some answers now. Mary was figuring out all the things she'd forgotten because of Agnes draining her, and it was now pretty clear that she was the one who'd called for a chosen one, resulting in the current state of Michael and me.

Mary had a less France-based suggestion though. One that would resolve our current problems, most of which were a result of Agnes' abnormally long lifespan. She could send us back into the past again, to undo repairing her heart.

We really didn't like that. Yet another death didn't sit right, especially one that we could - and did - prevent. But we had another idea. How about if instead of killing her, we did something to protect her from Agnes' magic, so that both of them would live out their natural lifespans?

It's amazing, just how big rats look when you're a spider, even when you're quite a big spider. It took me a while to get all my legs sorted out too, and as for producing silk, that was just downright weird. Still, we had a job to do, and that started with finding our way through a house full of magic doors based on a map that one of us had stored in their memory, since we couldn't bring anything back.

After some rather embarrassing efforts at silk production, or butt string as we all ended up calling it, we got out into the garden. Elizabeth located the herbs we needed, and having finally got my spinnarets under control, I wove them together into a charm. Then we had to find Mary, and convince her of what was going on, who we were, and so forth, which was all rather complicated, although simplified considerably when it turned out Mary could use magic to speak to rats.

It was looking like it might work. Just so long as we all managed to hold onto our own minds. I was getting dangerously close to fully embracing spiderhood.

Character Creation Challenge 7: MÖRK BORG

After the stress of vintage D&D, I wanted something a bit simpler. So off to Scvmbirther for a MÖRK BORG character....

Name: Merkari

Class: Occult Herbmaster

HP:2/2

Omens:1 (d2)

You are Merkari

Raised in calm isolation in the Sarkash dark.

Born of the mushroom, raised in the glade, watched by the eye of the moon in a silverblack pool.

Shrewd and Nihilistic. Lost three toes, limps. Obsessively collects small sharp stones.

Occult Herbmaster

Portable Laboratory

You carry a portable laboratory and continually search for frequently expended ingredients. Daily you have the materials to create two randomly determined decoctions and can brew a total of d4 doses. If unused they lose vitality after 24 hours.

List of Decoctions

1. Red Poison Toughness DR12 or -d10 HP.
2. Ezumiel's Vapor Pass a DR14 test or severe hallucinations for d4 hours.
3. Southern Frog Stew Vomit for d4 hours, pass a DR14 test or you can do nothing else.
4. Elixir Vitalis Heals d6 HP and stops infection. Can be habit-forming.
5. Spider-Owl Soup See in darkness, climb on walls for 30 minutes.
6. Fernor’s Philtre Translucent oil, must be dabbed right into the eye. Heals infection and gives +2 on Presence tests for d4 hours.
7. Hyphos’ Enervating Snuff Berserk! Two attacks per round but defend with DR14. Lasts one fight. Must be snorted, causes sneezing.
8. Black Poison Toughness DR14 or -d6 HP and blinded for one hour.

Abilities

• Strength+1
• Agility-1
• Presence±0
• Toughness±0

Equipment

• Waterskin and 1 day's worth of food
• Staff d4 damage
• Leather armor -d2 damage, tier 1
• Sackcloth bag, and 12 small sharp stones
• Rope, 30 feet
• Shield (-1 HP damage or have the shield break to ignore one attack)
• 106 silver

No interesting animals on this one, sadly. I have fond memories of Captain Beaky the Wonder Hawk and he wasn't even part of my character's equipment. But this one's pretty well equipped and the random decoctions look fun. Let's have a go. Dice say we're getting Ezumiel's Vapor and Black Poison. Merkari is ready to mess people up.

 

I think I could have a lot of fun with Merkari and their collection of sharp rocks. I used my new sharp dice to roll those decoctions, so I find them pretty relatable.

Character Creation Challenge 6: Liminal Horror

Liminal Horror is a game of modern cosmic horror, and is nothing to do with the Liminal RPG. Let's roll some dice.

Alex Carter

Background: Garbage Collector

STR 10

DEX 12

CTRL 10

5 HP

Gear: Smartphone, cut resistant gloves (+1 Armor), hi-vis vest, reach extender, safety glasses, $600

Aesthetic: Grunge minimalist

First encounter with the unknown: You read something not meant for mortal minds.

Ideology: Morality is black and white.

Appearance: small, with an elongated face and blunt speech patterns.

Personality: cautious, but vengeful, and disowned by her family.

Significant person: her cousin Mike, the one family member who still talks to her.

Contact: Mike's husband, a software engineer.

Looks like Alex had a pretty rough life up until this point, what with her parents throwing her out, and given that this is a horror game, it's probably about to get even worse. I wonder what that strange book she rescued from the garbage truck was?

Character Creation Challenge 5: Basic D&D

I picked up an old D&D set in an antique shop back in 2001 or so. I think it's what people called Moldvay, since his name is in it. I used the d6 that came in the box to roll the stats.

Name: Opal Proudfoot

STR 13 - +1 to hit, damage and opening doors
INT 12  - Reads and writes native languages
WIS 13 - +1 on magic saving throws
DEX 16 - +2 on "to hit" rolls, -2 bonus on AC, +1 initiative
CON 11 - No adjustment to hit points
CHA 9 - No adjustment to reactions, 4 max retainers, 7 retainer morale

(lowered INT to improve DEX, +10% XP for having 13+ in both STR and DEX)

Class: Halfling

Hit points: 6

Special abilities:
+1 bonus with missile weapons
-2 AC when attacked by creatures larger than man sized.
+1 initiative
10% chance of being detected when hiding in woods or underbrush
1/3 chance they will not be seen in normal light if the character finds cover and remains quiet and still

Saving throws:
Death ray or poison: 10
Magic wands: 11
Paralysis or Turn to Stone: 12
Dragon Breath: 13
Rods, Staves or Spells: 14

Alignment: Neutral

Money: 0gp

Equipment:
Chain mail armour
Shortbow
Quiver with 20 arrows
Short sword
Backpack
Flask of oil
Lantern
Iron rations

No, I'm not going to work all the armour class wossnames. You can't make me. Do your own maths, nerds.

Character Creation Challenge 4: Matrons of Mystery

I'm going to do my own character for my own game because why not?

Personal Details

Name: Rosemary Braithwaite
Village: Lyme Bay
Personal Style: Hippy/Bohemian
Hobby: Rabbit Keeping
Past Career: Hotel Manager
Past Relationship: Husband George, deceased, hotel chef
Children/family: None.
Contacts: Lizzie at the farm shop that sells rabbit food.

Investigation Styles

Physical +0
Logical +1
Intuitive -1
Gregarious +2

Rosemary had a happy marriage to her husband George, working together at a south coast hotel. When George died she moved to Lyme Bay to retire. She has no children, but has instead devoted herself to rabbit keeping. Her favourite is a brown Flemish Giant called Pierre, who she often takes for walks on a lead. She's struck up a close friendship with Lizzie at the farm shop, after using her management skills to help her make the case for getting a pay rise at work. Lizzie knows all the local farmers and has inside info on all animal related matters. She also thinks Pierre is absolutely adorable.

Character Creation Challenge 3: Don't Rest Your Head

Don't Rest Your Head is a game about insomniacs who have failed to sleep for so long that they have become Awake. They can see reality. And reality can see them. Yes, it's a horror game.

Jenny Walsh

What's Been Keeping You Awake?

The cold. My parents threw me out in the middle of winter and I've got nowhere to go. It's so cold that I'm afraid if I fall asleep I'll freeze to death. So I haven't slept.

What Just Happened To You?

I saw something in the snow, and it wasn't human. I was sitting on a park bench, resting for a minute, and saw it go up to the next bench. There was someone sitting there, and it sort of wrapped itself around them, and then they were gone. That's when I started running.

What's On The Surface?

Average height, short blonde hair which I haven't been able to brush recently, hidden under a bobble hat, wrapped up in a ton of layers with a big coat on top. I tend to try to make myself look small and inconspicuous.

What Lies Beneath?

Rage. It's like I've spent my entire life bottling up rage, but being too afraid to let it out.

What's Your Path?

 I need to figure out who I really am, now I'm outside of the box my parents tried to force me into.

Choose Responses

Fight 2, Flight 1

Determine Talents

Exhaustion talent: breaking things. When I let out the rage, nothing stands in my way.

Madness talent: shrinking. I can make myself so small that I can fit through any space and go unnoticed anywhere.

Character Creation Challenge 2: Monster of the Week

I play Monster of the Week on Tuesdays at the moment, so let's have one of those.

Sandra Bellows

Playbook: The Spooky

Look: Woman, burning eyes, nerdy clothing.

Charm +2
Cool +0
Sharp -1
Tough -1
Weird +2

Moves

Premonitions: At the start of each mystery, roll +Weird. On a 10+, you get a detailed vision of something bad that is yet to happen. You take +1 forward to prevent it coming true, and mark experience if you stop it. On a 7-9+ you get clouded images of something bad that is yet to happen: mark experience if you stop it. On a miss, you get a vision of something bad happening to you and the Keeper holds 3, to be spent one-for-one as penalties to rolls you make.

The Sight: You can see the invisible, especially spirits and magical influences. You may communicate with (maybe even make deals with) the spirits you see, and they give you more opportunities to spot clues when you investigate a mystery.

The Big Whammy: You can use your powers to kick some ass: roll +Weird instead of +Tough. The attack has 2-harm close obvious ignore-armour. On a miss, you’ll get a magical backlash.

Gear

Shotgun (3-harm close messy)
Big knife (1-harm hand)

The Dark Side

Hallucinations
Pain
Paranoia

Personal

Archaeology's not supposed to be a dangerous profession, despite what happens in certain movies that I'm sure I don't have to name, and for most of my career, my life has been free of giant boulders, Nazis, and suchlike. Most of it.

The dig site was the remains of an old manor house. It had burned down some time in the 16th Century, but the foundations got uncovered during road building, so in we went. There was a whole sub basement still pretty much intact. Incredible stuff! The funny thing is, I don't actually remember what it was I saw in there. I just remember the trip to hospital after they pulled me out of there. I'm not sure I want to remember.

So now I can see things that are invisible, which would be great if I couldn't also see things that just plain aren't there. I can see glimpses of the future, which has given me raging paranoia. And I can hurt people with magic, although there seems to be one of those cosmic balance things going on any time I do.

I've got a whole new profession now. Monster hunting.

Character Creation Challenge 1: CY_BORG

The goal of the Character Creation Challenge is to create 31 new characters in the month of January. I don't know if I'll actually do them all (not least because I'm away at ConTingency for several days in the middle of it) but I'm going to pull random books off my shelf and create characters when I have time.

So I'm kicking it off with CY_BORG, where character creation means going to PUNKMAKER and seeing what I get:

YOU ARE DUZI

@math_duzi_571655

A gutterscum Burned Hacker; holomorphed face, fiddles with jewelry, and geeking out over explosives. You desire change. On a deep dive of the Cyber Cosmos, you’ve found a terrible truth: Nanobacteria is seeping into the Net. What does that even mean? Who’s covering it up?

You have a 39,000¤ debt to a death cult run by a board member from a powerful corp.

 

Strength ±0

Agility -3

Presence ±0

Toughness ±0

Knowledge +2

HP 6/6

Glitches 2 (d2)

 

BURNED HACKER

You were one of the sharpest deckers in Cy. No one could use tech or warp the world with an App like you could. You don’t know what went wrong. You messed up. Maybe you were tricked; maybe you got sloppy.You glimpsed a terrible truth, and now you’re burnt. No collective, no fallback, nothing.

MerzApp
Assaults every sense with noise. Test Toughness DR16 or be blind, deaf and unable to act for d3 rounds.

 

GEAR

• 100¤
• Custom cyberdeck covered in glue, with 6 slots
• Coupon for 10% off 4 doses of your favourite drug
• Crowbar, d4 damage
• Small but jailbroken Robo-K9 (5 HP, bite d4, only obeys you)
• Monosword, d8 damage
• StyleGuard, -d2 damage (Looks just like clothes!)

APPS

• MerzApp
  Assaults every sense with noise. Test Toughness DR16 or be blind, deaf and unable to act for d3 rounds.
• CTechAttak
  d3 nearby cybered targets lose a total of 4d10 HP.

That bit about discovering nanobacteria seeping into the net sounds like the reason Duzi got burned. Somewhat ironically, the debt to the death cult is probably something to do with Duzi still being alive. They've fallen foul of some very dangerous people, which required a complete change of identity. The death cult are very good at making people disappear, and people don't tend to ask a lot of questions afterwards, which is just what Duzi needed. Of course they now live in fear of missing a payment. Nobody wants to have their life repossessed.