Wicker Valley, episode 16: Things Fall Apart

Elizabeth had stayed on watch at the tree and was sending up lights as an alarm. We followed Agnes out. The fake me was out and about, scrying. Agnes had a little chat with her and sent her on her way. We were all sure by now that there was something buried under that tree.

Perhaps we could have dug it up a little more discreetly, had Alabaster not forgotten that Agnes could hear our thoughts. Perhaps it was inevitable that things would go badly. But Adam, being the only one shaped for digging (and willing to deal with the tree that he'd peed on earlier), dug up a box that those with good noses thought smelt of roses and rot. There were two hearts inside. That's when Agnes caught up with us and we had to make a hasty departure. I picked up Michael as I went, and only caught the tail end of the psychic screaming.

By now I was starting to think Agnes's pouch of power probably wasn't a literal pouch. It was also this place - the tree, the ley lines, everything.

By now Alabaster was pretty much convinced Agnes was as terrible as most of my family, and understandably so, but I was getting a different impression. We were far enough away for Agnes not to hear our thoughts, but not far enough that she couldn't speak into my mind. We are kin, after all, if rather distantly. She told me that Mary was still alive, just about, but that we had to leave for our own safety. She didn't want to hurt me. It sounds like she saw herself in me, just as I saw myself in her. And she needed help in hiding the magic in this place from our family.

At this point though, we were all a bit stuck on what that meant, or what we were supposed to do, or how we were even going to get back to 2023. So we decided to pay a visit to the only other person around who knew what was going on. The woman who looked like me.

She recognised me, even through my current crow shape, just as I recognised her despite being able to recognise that she was currently possessing Moira, the village elder's adopted daughter. That explained a few things. She told me she was my cousin. That made sense. She had to be pretty closely related to look that much like me, and I'd not seen much of her before I ran away, so hadn't immediately been able to tell exactly who she was.

She gave us her side of things, which she of course made sound pretty plausible. My family can do that. We had to get that box of hearts, we realised. But we shouldn't tell her anything about it, I insisted, which should have been easy enough given that we were communicating via telepathy and only Michael and to a lesser extent Elizabeth were capable of talking to her.

And then Elizabeth, who I'd been thinking I might have rather misjudged on our first meeting, decided to tell everything to my cousin. She didn't seem to think it was a problem, trusting one of my family. Did she not grasp what we are? Didn't the many times I've mentioned how Rusty tried to kill Michael, and he's still my favourite family member not suggest that perhaps she should be a bit cautious around the rest of them? But it was too late. My cousin had already gone, as the others pointed out, and we had to stop her before she got to Agnes.

We chased after her. She was fast, but Elizabeth and me had wings and could take a straighter route. Elizabeth set off some kind of flashbang, which slowed her down. I didn't have my usual magic, but I did have the ability to grow plants, and I brought up a barrier of thick bushes that stopped her in her tracks and seemed to knock her right out of the body she was occupying. The poor fae girl was a bit confused but at least that was one less thing to worry about.

We approached the house once more, ignoring Agnes's psychic yelling to go away, and Adam immediately got himself caught up in a net trap. The rest of us managed to be a little less conspicuous. I looked in through the window. Agnes and Mary were there, along with the box of hearts. Now what? Could we put their hearts back in, like when we put the eyeballs on Agnes's chest? I didn't want either of them to die.

We went in through the chimney. Of course there was no way to hide that we were there, even though we were all trying not to think too loudly. Agnes was more understanding than I expected, and I understood her too. We were worried about changing history, given that Mary was going to be dead pretty soon, and not in five years time like Agnes had said when we told her the date on the tombstone. But Agnes said that that had been a lie, and the real date now was the same year as on the stone.

And then Robin scampered over to the hearts, and asked if he could use the mending spell to try to put Mary's heart back together. I didn't expect it to work, and I don't think Agnes did either. But he placed his paws on the heart, and worked the magic, and a few moments later it started to beat stronger, and colour came back into Mary's face.

We stressed the importance of still getting that tombstone made, to avoid temporal paradoxes, and Agnes said that they would move away for a while. And now we knew about the source of Agnes's power, we could protect it. And that was that. We were back in the cafe with Rusty blowing dust all over us.

He asked if he'd found the pouch of power. The others were vague about it. I said nothing. Hiding things from Rusty isn't something I'm good at. But we were home, and knew what needed protecting - from Rusty, from my cousin, from the fae, from anyone else who wanted to mess with it.

I need to have some words with Elizabeth regarding my family, since nothing I've said so far about them seems to have got through to her and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if she started hitting on Rusty. But Alabaster has owned up that he does know what I am, and he seems pretty OK with it, which is one less thing to worry about. Meeting Agnes has clarified a few things for me. She ran away for love. I ran for other reasons. But I've been so focussed on what I didn't want to be, I've not thought enough about what I did want. That changes. Now.

ConDucked 2023

A convention run by the same people as ConTingency and ConDensed but in August? Sign me up!

This time the venue was a boarding school, which naturally was empty for the summer. Game slots began on Thursday afternoon and continued until Sunday afternoon. This worked out well for me. My route there involved passing Silverstone, and attempting that drive on a Grand Prix Friday would likely have been unpleasant. Thursday was still OK though, and I arrived in a little over two hours.

Actually finding my way in was more of a challenge. The boarding house is a separate building to the main school and I initially found myself in the wrong building. Fortunately someone found me and gave me directions. It seems I wasn't only the only person to make that mistake.

Finally I was in the right place, and finding a room was just a matter of finding a single room that hadn't already been claimed. Somewhat unsettlingly, while the bedroom doors had locks, we weren't given any keys, and the rooms remained unlocked for the duration. My room's main light also didn't work. I could have moved rooms, but since I had my camping lantern in my bag, I decided that using that for the small amount of time I was in the room would be less effort than moving.

The first game slot was 2pm, but we also had a briefing and practice fire drill at 2pm, meaning that things kicked off a little later. I picked up my convention cup and complimentary duck, got a coffee and some amazing lemon drizzle cake, and prepared to game.

Game 1: Firefly: The Game

I decided to start things off gently. There were several board games on the schedule for the weekend, and Firefly had space and is one of my favourites. In the interests of simplicity, we went with the 'First time in the captain's chair' scenario, where we had to complete jobs for the two available job suppliers, save up $6000 and then get to Ezra to pay it to Niska.

While I haven't played the game in a while, it soon came back to me, and once I'd managed to buy a particularly effective engine upgrade I was feeling pretty confident. Naturally the game had other ideas. Just as I was nearing the end of a job to deliver seven passengers from one end of the verse to the other, I was boarded by reavers and all of them were killed, leaving me stuck at the wrong end of the verse without the payout I'd been counting on.

It wasn't long after that that another player got the win though, and by then it was time for dinner. A fun way to kick things off and a reminder of how much I love this excellently thematic board game.

Game 2: Cyberpunk Red

I was pretty excited to see Cyberpunk Red on the schedule, and even more so that it was being run in the setting of Cyberpunk 2077/Edgerunners.

Finding a suitable room was something of a challenge for this one. Gaming spaces were a compromise between how many groups were having to share, table availability, and not being near the loud transformer. We bounced between three different spaces before finally settling in the dining room.

I was torn between the solo, the medtech and the netrunner, but that decision was made easy for me when other people immediately picked the first two. I got Selene, a pink haired netrunner with a love of neon colours and a mono-wakazashi. Off we went to meet a fixer, in an artifical net dead zone, which immediately gave her withdrawal symptoms. Then we went on the trail of three missing Arasaka executives and the data they'd stolen.

It's a while since I last played Cyberpunk 2077, but the language came back to me pretty quickly, and pretty soon we were having to explain terms like braindance to people who hadn't played Cyberpunk before. It's an absolute delight to get back into Night City, especially in my favourite version of it. I had a wonderful time as we called contacts to trade info and favours, tracked down the missing people, and of course killed a lot of people, culminating in a big fight with 6th Street at an abandoned motel where I hacked an Arasaka spider tank and drove that around while the others went in after the target.

One thing Cyberpunk Red has kept from earlier versions is its d10 system, which results in crits and fumbles happen twice as often as in d20 games. Well, that's the theory. In practice, fumbles come up whenever it would be particularly embarrassing. To the point where at point Selene was watching the fight through the spider tank's cameras and used the tannoy to shout "Stop flirting!" to her team mate and the enemy body guard, who'd done nothing but dance around each other. It put me in mind of a similarly embarrassing fight from one of our home CP2020 games in which nobody on either side managed to hit anyone on the other side (while managing to accidentally hit our own teammates several times) and which ended when both sides were too embarrassed to continue.

Anyway, it was brilliant, and I'm feel inspired to get back to running cyberpunk games myself.

Game 3: Black Code

I decided to skip the Friday morning slot. I hadn't slept too well due to the emergency exit light in my room being extremely bright, the mattress being a little lumpy, and the toilet making noises, so after getting up significantly earlier than usual for breakfast I decided to take a nap.

In the afternoon I'd signed up for Heart, but nobody else had. Another game had only two players. So the two GMs decided that they'd combine groups, and suggested that we play Black Code instead. I enthusiastically agreed.

I picked up Aedon, the same character I'd played in my previous two games of Black Code, who I was getting quite attached to. Our mission was a prisoner transport, with a stop-off at the Temple so he could do a confession. Naturally we had to deal with a number of interruptions along the way, and Aedon ended up going through a lot of her healing supplies, mostly on herself.

Since I last played Black Code I've finally got round to reading the book, and it was very useful to have a reminder of how it feels to play. The biggest challenge when I start running cyberpunk games again is going to be picking a system.

Game 4: Kult: Divinity Lost

Another outing for Disco Inferno. I was a little nervous about this one, as my group was going to be all the same people I'd just been playing Black Code with, plus one other friend, and I was feeling a lot of pressure to deliver. It's been one of my more stressful scenarios to run, not least because the content tends to push it in directions I sometimes find uncomfortable. Also I was going to be running it with five people this time, and normally my limit is four.

Of course I was quickly reminded of how much the player group makes the game. They threw themselves into my take on the 1979 disco scene with enthusiasm, and I felt much better after this run than I did after the last one. This scenario's getting retired pretty soon as I have more in the pipeline (plus older ones that I enjoy running more) but it's very nice to have a good run of it to look back on.

Kult scenarios don't tend to have good endings, but this group got what I'd call the least bad one.

I'm hoping to get the same group back again for some games at ConTingency (minus the one other friend, who's already played them) as they're so much fun to play with.

Game 5: Heart

I slept much better on Friday night, having figured out the comfy part of the mattress and how to use a hankerchief to shade me from the green exit light. Even so I wasn't sure if I was going to play in the morning slot until I saw that the game of Heart that didn't happen on Friday was going to happen on Saturday morning.

I've heard of Heart before but never had a chance to play, and I was keen to see what it was like. Weird. It was weird. A fantasy setting with steampunk elements but so much more weirdness than that. My character exemplified that. Dr Shelby was a deep apiarist. Once she'd been a mad scientist, thrown out of the city for a bit too much experimenting on her own colleagues. Down in the Heart she'd run into some magic bees, who colonised her body. I found myself switching between saying 'I' and 'We' when talking in character, as exactly who was more dominant in that moment shifted.

"What weapons do you have?" "Bees."

We had a mission to track down a missing train and rescue the passengers, which proved complicated and involved a fight with a giant spider, as well as a fair amount of tinkering with magical devices and a short trip through the land of the dead with the help of another PC, a partially dead gnoll. There we found a man who'd been run over by a train and was in several pieces, and was a bit upset about not being able to move. I put him back together with some wax and extruded bone and a few spare bees, and Snags the gnoll brought him back from the land of the dead with us. We were rather pleased with Daemon the Zombee.

I liked the system for Heart, with no hitpoints as such but a system of escalating stress building to unpleasant fallout. Also my bees could be used to help other people with mind stress, providing they didn't mind some minor side effects.

"You may experience drowsiness and a desire for more bees."

Game 6: Call of Cthulhu

Adventus Regis is the first part of Ripples from Carcosa, a set of three scenarios set in different time periods but linked together in a rather unusual campaign. This part was set in ancient Rome, and involved a group of people going on holiday in a Roman resort town.

I picked up Tula, a slave from Britannia who was basically a tour guide, saving up her tips from resort guests to buy her freedom. A nice way of doing the character, as it gave me additional motivation to stick with the group even after things were going extremely badly.

I enjoyed this scenario, and might consider running it myself some times, but I would definitely include content warnings. It includes some harm to animals that I know some people would not be OK with, and some of us were close to tapping out at that point. A good reminder of why safety tools exist.

Game 7: Cyberpunk Red

Friday night's GM was back with another Cyberpunk 2077 game. I picked up Selene again, which gave me the opportunity for a little continuity from the previous game, even though the rest of the group was different. This time we were all hanging out in the Afterlife, looking for work. Having totally failed the facedown roll to actually get into the club, I'd had a short conversation with the bouncer about how I'd hacked an Arasaka spider tank and caused a lot of trouble for 6th Street, which lead to the first fight of the session when some 6th Street gang members ambushed us when we were about to leave. I say ambushed...when there's a solo in the party, ambushes often go rather differently.

We were trying to recover a cyberware implant that would allow us to enter a building where the data we needed to steal was, and after a certain amount of messing about, managed to get hold of the man it was inside. But then came the serious issue of getting it out of him, and with no medtech with us this time, we made a horrible mess, made even worse by the fact we were doing it while being pursued by Trauma Team. When TT caught up with us, their operative found himself offended on a professional level by how bad it was.

Then he rolled a 1 and killed the guy.

Once we shook off Trauma Team, we finally took the remains to a ripperdoc, and discovered that we'd been looking in entirely the wrong part of his head. Of course.

By the end of the session, Selene was using a cryochamber containing her creepy uncle and a woman who looked exactly like her as a coffee table. I regret only the the GM lives far enough away that we can't make this a regular campaign.

Game 8: Thirsty Sword Lesbians

Back into the GM's chair for another trip to Sherwood Forest with Robyn Hood and her Merry Maids. The three players picked Robyn Hood, Briar Tuck and Alanna Dale as their characters, and selected the archery contest and prisoner rescue as their plot combination. And off they went, coming up with strange plans for getting into the castle, attracting the attention of NPCs, going on strange detours, and finally engaging in a massive sword fight that involving swinging on chandeliers, wrapping people up in tapestries, an inplausible number of wardrobe malfunctions, and which ultimately came down to Robyn facing off agains the Sheriff of Nottingham himself.

What I hadn't realised at the start is that one player had never played a PBTA game before. Fortunately with all the instructions on the playbooks, this is a pretty easy one to pick up, with the only thing that really stands out being the use of strings. I broke out the box of tiny skulls for this one, as I like being able to hand people an object when they gain a string on an NPC.

A thoroughly enjoyable bit of swashbuckling. I think this one can do a few more conventions before I retire it. And after that...pirates?

And that was the end. There was one more slot on Sunday afternoon, but the games that interested me were all full and I knew I had a long drive home ahead of me. So I stuck around until after lunch, said some goodbyes, and went on my way.

Reflections

It was great. Despite my niggles with the room, it was a nice little en suite room with a decent shower and plenty of room for my stuff. It also came with full board, which I heard someone describe as 'school dinners, but good school dinners', which summed it up pretty well. Nothing special, but every meal tasted good. While not as convenient as ConDensed practically on my doorstep, the slightly longer event made the drive worthwhile.

My one regret is that I couldn't spend more time with one friend, who couldn't be there for the whole event, but at least we did get one game together. And I'm managing to learn some people's names and faces - if only because I ended up seeing a lot of the same faces in the various games I was in, thanks to overlapping tastes. And that means new friends.

With ConDensed a bit up in the air at the moment due to venue issues, I'm very happy that we had this new convention, impressed that we raised over £1100 for charity, and I hope we'll be doing this for years to come.

Wicker Valley, episode 15: Animal Adventures

Looking around the place told us we hadn't gone far geographically. One tree in particular looked out of place, and we soon recognised it as being in the middle of the new construction site. Adam peed on it. Dog instincts, apparently, but just once, just once, it would be nice to get through a mystery without Robin or Adam peeing on anything. Elizabeth seemed to think that that was just what men are like, but Michael's never peed on anything while I was around.

We needed a plan, but first, something was up with Michael. At first I thought he was just struggling to deal with having significantly more limbs than usual, but it turns out he was having a vision. The witch hunter in a tavern, talking to a woman, who was going to pay him but was unhappy about him finishing the job.

Robin had become overcome by the need to tidy the witch's cottage and was hard at work, while Alabaster was just doing regular cat stuff: sitting around, looking pretty and ignoring everyone. The rest of us got to work. The easiest way to find Agnes's pouch was to ask her where it was, which would be a lot easier if she was alive. So off we went to the gnome village.

Getting in to the village was easy enough. Elizabeth and me could fly, Michael was small enough to crawl through gaps or be carried, and Adam could just do dog stuff and get let in through the gates. The tavern was more of a challenge. I looked through the windows, and did manage to find the witch hunter's room, but he wasn't in it. Michael had a look downstairs. He wasn't there either.

We kept searching. Adam managed to meet a friendly cook around the back of the village elder's house, and not long afterwards the witch hunter and the woman from Michael's vision emerged from the house. He went to the tavern. She went elsewhere. Michael lost her in the crowd, but I spotted the house she went into and while the other two went to the tavern, we went for a closer look.

It was me. Or at least, it was someone who looked exactly like me, scrying over a map and using the same words I was taught as a child. It was such a shock I fell off the windowsill. Who was she? I was expecting a fae. And it was Agnes who was my relative, not this other woman. And even then, why would she look exactly like me? Michael seemed in a bit of a state as well, as far as I could tell from his spidery little face.

We needed Agnes, and that meant we needed eyeballs. Back to the tavern, where Adam and Elizabeth confirmed that he was now in his room. I had an idea. If we dropped some burning twigs down the chimney to light the fire, then stopped up the chimney, we could incapacitate him with smoke. Easier said than done. Magic is trickier when you're a bird. Fortunately Elizabeth was there to help out, as was Alabaster who'd finally come to take a look at things. After a number of failed attempts, and almost setting my own feet on fire, they lent me enough power to get the fire lit. They blocked up the chimney with wings and fur. Adam lay outside the bedroom door to keep it closed and stop the smoke escaping that way. And soon the witch hunter was unconscious.

Michael and me went in. I pecked out his eyeballs, and Michael spun a little silk bag to carry them in. And we fled, along with Adam, causing chaos on the way out and almost losing the eyeballs, except Michael had figured out his web spinners by then and grabbed them with a silk line. And then we were out.

Back at Agnes's cottage the place was spotless. I put the eyeballs on her chest and soon she revived. At which point things got even more complicated as we had to try to explain about being from several hundred years in the future, and that her familiars were all still fine and we had their memories as well as ours. She didn't like the idea of any of our family getting hold of the pouch and honestly I could understand that.

Then Mary showed up, and Agnes was quite relieved that we'd managed to get her alive again before that as it would have been a very nasty shock. Then there was another nasty shock when we mentioned that Mary was going to be dead in the future, which didn't seem very surprising to me, but apparently was to Agnes. So Mary had to leave the house while we talked more about that.

Adam asked me the most ridiculous question he's ever asked me: did my family often go to the bad? We don't go to the bad, we start out at the bad! I've had to make an active choice to be a nice person. Didn't he remember when we first met and he tried to kill me?

Anyway, I hope we didn't cause a temporal paradox but what I really wanted was to know about the woman who looked like me. Agnes thought she was a fae, which made sense, but she probably wasn't a doppelganger. So what on earth was she?

Wicker Valley, episode 14: Witches

We planned to meet up the next day at the Wicker Stop after Michael and me finished our shifts, and then go to the library. I'd had a text from Alabaster, who I suspected was magically hungover again, to tell me that some strange woman with very long hair had been hanging around in the churchyard and had been spotted by Deacon Jones. I'd also got a message back from Rusty with some information on the family tree, the family's interest in the place, and the fact that the fae courts also had an interest in what was going on here, and I suspected these two things might be connected.

But before we could meet up and talk properly, there was a new visitor to the cafe. A woman with very long hair. I heard her ordering some ridiculous skinny latte from Michael, then actually asking if we had kale something-or-other! Like I'd allow kale in my kitchen! Michael managed to sell her on the carrot cake, since it technically contains vegetables.

Then she started hitting on him! At which point I had to go over and make my presence felt, because if I'm going to unnerve people just by being around them I may as well make use of it. I don't remember exactly what she said to me, but I think I might have told her that if she hurt him I would rip her guts out.

Damn Rusty. He always did see right through me.

After a bit of dancing round the subject while she pretended to be a writer and looking for the vicar, we finally established that her name was Elizabeth, she was in fact aware of weird bollocks, and was here for a reason. She was connected to one of the fae courts, and was looking for doppelgangers, who are a harbinger of death but not actually the cause of said death. And the reason for the doppelgangers' presence is something to do with a chosen one.

We needed a private chat. None of us were particularly keen on telling Elizabeth that Michael was the one the doppelganger had appeared as while being dead. But much as I hated to say it, having looked into her head, I was pretty sure she was telling us the truth and at least to some extent we could trust her. If not with everything, then at least to help out with the current situation.

And while we had some privacy, I had something else to tell them about Agnes. Or rather, about the multiple people called Agnes, since it's the name my family traditionally gives the girls who are meant to become the family matriarch. There was the Agnes who'd lived back in the 17th Century, who'd run away from the family for love of a witch, but had been periodically sighted since then. Then there was Aunty Agnes, who frankly I'm terrified of and who nobody wanted showing up around here. And then there was the youngest Agnes. Me.

I thought when I left home and changed my name, I'd got away from my family legacy, but it's looking increasingly like something was always calling me to Wicker Valley.

We rejoined Elizabeth, who'd actually spotted the doppelganger hanging around outside the cafe. She needed to get up close to it, so asked us to go outside to distract it. Which we did. I took the opportunity to take a look inside its head as well. Which might have been a mistake. Normally when I do that I get trains of thought almost like actual trains of words running through someone's head. With the doppelganger, there were no words, only pictures. And all of them were of Michael. Michael getting hurt. Michael getting stabbed. Michael with a red dot laser sight trained on his forehead. Over and over Michael on the point of death.

I burst into tears and threw my arms around him. Which meant that when Adam dragged us both to the ground and the shot echoed in our ears, Michael only had a slight graze rather than a hole right through his head.

Robin tried to get back into Vanessa to get his rifle, but another shot missed him by inches and took out the wing mirror instead. A wall of ice suddenly appeared between us and the shooter, and the next two shots knocked chunks off it. Elizabeth, presumably. She certainly looked like a witch. Although this wasn't really the time to be telling her to get some sunglasses and stop dressing so conspicuously.

Another shot that took out Vanessa's back windows stopped Adam getting to the van. I knew what I had to do. I watched for the flash of the rifle shot, and reached deep inside myself for the primal magic within. I awoke the tree branches around the sniper to bind him in place. It wouldn't last long, I could feel already, but it was long enough for everyone to pile into the van and take off to the junkyard.

All I wanted to do was comfort Michael. Telling him that I'd just seen him die repeatedly probably didn't help.

Back at the junkyard, Adam talked to his police contact, while I checked my messages again. More from Rusty. I'd never known him to be this helpful before. That alone told me how serious things were. He was pretty sure he could help us learn more about Agnes, but it would need all of us to meet up somewhere we felt safe.

I shared his offer with the others. Michael was understandably wary of meeting Rusty again, given how their first meeting went. All I could offer was that Rusty had promised not to kill anyone this time.

Much to my surprise, everyone was willing to go along with it. Adam even suggested that we meet him there in the junkyard, but it was pointed out that he had a ward specifically to keep things like Rusty out. We finally decided on a cafe - not the Wicker Stop, as the last thing I wanted was my workplace ending up tainted with whatever Rusty was up to, but one on the other side of town - and I sent him directions. I also texted Alabaster. If we were going to have to deal with Rusty, I wanted as many people on my side as possible.

Rusty was already there when we arrived, in a quiet booth. Of course seeing him in his human form made it clear to Michael who it was who'd been ordering jam buns in the Wicker Stop. But there was no time to worry about that. Rusty told us we needed to find Agnes' pouch of power. And he had a way for us to do that. Then he looked at me, told me he was sorry in a way I suspect nobody else could hear, and blew a cloud of powder across us all.

The next thing I knew, I was a crow, perched on a branch outside a little stone cottage out in the woods, knowing with absolute certainly that I was a witch's familiar, the witch was dead, and that my fellow familiars and I were going to have to hunt down the witch hunter and steal his eyes.

Fellow familiars. Yes. There was Adam, now a dog, and Alabaster, unsurprisingly a cat. Robin was a rat and Elizabeth was an owl. And Michael was a spider.

I felt particularly qualified for the job of eyeball removal. But I still remembered that I needed to find Agnes' pouch of power. And Rusty had sent us here to find it.

Wicker Valley, episode 13: Seeing Double

I sent Alabaster a message to invite him to join us at the junkyard. As I suspected, magic hangover, although it clearly hadn't put him off at all and he now wanted to do everything with magic. It was somehow both annoying and encouraging, seeing him embrace his weirder self. He's still insisting his powers come from God, which certainly isn't the case for me, but I think he might be a good influence on me.

We caught him up on the two situations: Michael's vision, and the demonic summoning totem housing estate. There were some wild ideas about staging a fake stabbing for Michael so that the vision would be correct but it would be fake blood. But I didn't think there was anything else we could do about that other than keeping Michael away from kitchen knives, and we needed to focus on the much larger demon problem.

The library was clearly the best place to start hunting, but it was past closing time. After a prolonged explanation of why breaking into a church that was potentially housing a dangerous artefact in the hands of a derranged vicar was not the same as breaking into a perfectly normal library with a librarian we all liked, we finally agreed to go in the morning. That night we would pay a visit to the cemetary and see if we could find Agnes' grave.

We piled into Vanessa the Batvan, and Adam drove us to the cemetary. He had some wild ideas about each of us carrying a piece of rope and pretending that we'd lost a dog if anyone asked us why we were there, but as I pointed out (backed up by Alabaster) it would be a lot simpler for me to just give them a convincing explanation that didn't involve any fake dogs. I liked the aesthetics of the moonlit graveyard and was pretty sure I could make it work.

Adam had some suggestions for how to efficiently search the place, which Alabaster got halfway through before running off and tripping over a headstone. I stayed with Michael, uncomfortably aware how close we were getting to twelve hours after his vision. We didn't find Agnes's grave. What we did find was a headstone for someone called Mary, with an inscription about holding onto her heart forever or something, with the name Agnes. Oh, and a date some time in the late 18th century, back when Wicker Valley was nothing more than a few farmhouses and a church.

Then Michael found a body. Specifically, his body, with the same red hair and borrowed biker jacket, and with a stab wound in the chest. Which made me feel a lot better, now Michael's vision had an explanation that didn't involve him being stabbed, but obviously freaked Michael out a lot.

While I was checking that it really was a duplicate of Michael, and going through the pockets to see if I could find any ID, Adam and Robin took off running. When they got bad, Robin said that he'd seen a third Michael, but Adam, who had caught up with the fleeing figure, had seen a duplicate of himself.

Doppelgangers. We had doppelgangers.

I wanted to know more, specifically about the biology of these creatures since we had a dead one in front of us. I asked Adam if he had some nitrile gloves I could borrow, but while he was fetching them from the van, Alabaster started talking about harvesting organs as spell components, and Michael understandably freaked out even more. He ran off after Adam, and the body in front of us suddenly disappeared.

At least that told us something. The mimicry might not be entirely voluntary. They might just be mimicking the nearest person.

With one of them vanished and the other one having got away from Adam and Robin, there wasn't much else we could do though, and the mystery of Agnes was getting deeper. We decided on a visit to the church - or rather, Alabaster did and we all agreed we would go with him to help search the parish records. Or keep an eye on him. On the way I sent Rusty an email. I had a hunch our family tree would have something interesting in it.

Alabaster still had the key to the church but decided to magic the door open anyway, just because he could. He tried to hide the resulting nosebleed but I know a magical backlash when I see one. Still, we were in.

While the others searched record, I tried to ignore the horrible itching from being yet again in a church, and checked my replies. Rusty had some questions, and insisted that I didn't want to get involved with Agnes. I agreed, but told him there was a chance Agnes was trying to get involved with us.

They did find something in the records. Mary from the gravestone. Mary, with a surname starting with Ma and the rest scratched out. I was pretty sure I knew what that would turn out to be. And she was survived by Agnes. We were getting closer. But not close enough. At least the others were all on board with the idea that Agnes might be a shade more immortal than your average aunty.

Wicker Valley, episode 12: Family Matters

We gathered in the Wicker Stop the next morning. Alabaster wasn't there - I suspected a magic hangover - but Robin was back. He'd had to pay a visit to his old 'company' to convince the higher ups that the members who'd lost some 'product' in a failed delivery weren't making it up when they claimed to have been attacked by a werewolf. I don't know why he's so cagey about his past. Adam used to work for the Foundation, after all, and I'm...who I am. A biker gang doesn't seem too bad in comparison.

We were just started to talk about werewolves when something weird happened to Michael. One moment he was gliding around the cafe on his rollerskates like normal and the next he'd frozen and gone crashing into a wall. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with him, but I took him back to the basket room all the same. He'd had a vision, it sounded like, where he'd been stabbed with a kitchen knife. One of his mum's, probably.

Robin then suddenly transformed into...well, a wolf man, I guess? He had a whole new nose and ears. Which certainly answered some of the questions I'd had about him recently. He said he could smell two of Michael. Hah, I thought. If Alabaster was here he'd immediately want to do some magic to reveal hidden creatures. Which wasn't actually a bad idea, now I came to think about it. I silently thanked the absent Alabaster and sent Adam to the kitchen to get the salt and a bag of flour.

Through the combination of magic and flour, I brought the second Michael into view. Except it wasn't a second Michael. It was our Michael, but displaced in time. By about, oh, twelve hours or so. Which meant...

Well, it meant I didn't plan on letting Michael out of my sight, or near any kitchen knives, for at least the next twelve hours, and Robin went off to find a spare motorcycle jacket for him to give him a bit of protection. We still had our shift to finish at the cafe but we planned to meet up again at the junkyard afterwards.

Except I'd just handed over to the next shift and taken off my apron when I spotted a very familiar face sitting at a cafe table. And actually ordering jam buns from Michael. I stood staring at him until Michael interrupted me to tell me the new customer said the buns were great, just like the ones his sister used to make.

I waited until Michael was out of the way, then went and slid into the seat opposite. He had some nerve coming here, I told him, but he wasn't interested. I tried to steer him off talking about Michael, brushing it off as nothing more than coworkers. I don't know if he bought it. We always did see right through each other.

Thankfully he moved on to his actual reason for being here. The amount of weird bollocks, as Adam now has me calling it, in town was getting the family's attention. I assured him that the coin and associated entity had been dealt with, and I was trying to keep things quiet, but he pointed out that the construction site on the edge of town was having occult symbols built right into it. And if that carried on we could have aunties showing up right in town.

I can't remember if I thanked him for the tip, although I probably should have done. He's an arsehole, but having him show up in town is a whole different matter to the rest of the family. At least he's still partly human.

Back at the junkyard, Adam had something to show us. I was wondering how we were going to get around after the state the combination of stone dogs, battery acid and magic had left his van in, but he revealed a brand new van! And when I say brand new, I mean entirely constructed out of scrap. I don't think there was a single unused part on the thing. But it looked pretty cool, and had plenty of room and space for weapon storage. There was some debate about the name. The Mystery Machine was a popular choice, although given the way he keeps referring to me and Robin as Batman and Robin I was surprised it wasn't the Batmobile. Vanessa was also considered for a while.

I think we might have settled on the Batvan. We'll see how it goes.

I didn't tell the others about my visitor, but did tell them that we needed to revisit the construction site and see exactly what was going on there, also pointing out that it would likely be free of kitchen knives. Michael looked great in the motorcycle jacket but I was too stressed to properly appreciate it. So we piled into the Batvan and drove to the site.

Things were moving fast now the moss hag was gone. A bunch of houses were already built or close to being built, and getting in undetected was going to be a bigger challenge. There were people there though, being walked around by staff, which gave me an idea. I asked Adam if he had any hi vis jackets and hard hats in the van. He didn't, but knew exactly where to find some at the junkyard. So a short time later, in we went, with Robin playing the sales rep, Michael and me as the young couple thinking about buying their first home, and Adam as the uncle who would be financing it.

Between the site plan and a look at the place, it was pretty clear that there were indeed family symbols being built into this place. The main road layout was in the shape of the summoning totem we'd encountered before. Which meant this entire estate could be one massive summoning circle.

We caught up with one of the real reps and asked for a talk. Marketing people always want to tell you stories about brands and logos and stuff, so I figured this would be no different, especially with the aid of the voice of temptation. And so we got the story of how the land had belonged to an old woman called Agnes, who had sold it on the condition that the roads were laid out in this way.

Michael called Gillian, who told him about Aunty Agnes, who wasn't really an aunty, but had known her mum. And suddenly the pieces started to fit together in my mind. Aunties. Had an Aunty Agnes been mentioned in the cafe? I wasn't sure, and it's not like I have a comprehensive knowledge of my family members, but Gillian's mum had owned a bunch of books with our family crest on and she had to have got them from somewhere after all. Was this all a cunning ploy on the part of one of my aunts to get herself summoned? I had a horrifying image of exactly what could end up manifesting in the middle of the housing estate.

At least there were some vaguely concrete things we could do. Find out as much as possible about Aunty Agnes, find out exactly what was in the contract regarding the estate, and then - and this was going to be the difficult part - change the plans.

A Weekend With Good Friends 2023

I've been part of every A Weekend With Good Friends convention, but covid significantly reduced my participation in the previous event. This time I was back in full health and ready to do as much stuff as I could fit in. Which on this occasion included a number of panel discussions. We've not had them at previous AWWGF events, but it's been a popular request. The guests were a mix of industry professionals, authors, podcasters and GMs, including me.

Game 1: Relics of House Dragonfly

I've been seeing Exuviae: Relics of House Dragonfly at various conventions for a while now, but never actually played it. I decided it was time to change that. This was a slightly different variation on the game, using a D6 system instead of the original game's playing cards, which was certainly easier to manage in an online game.

The premise is that it's the 1940s, and you live in a bayside city that's controlled by an insect cult, and you've decided to do something about it. Character creation was a simple matter of figuring out what kind of person you are, how you found out about the cult, and why you want to stop them, plus the significantly more difficult matter of choosing a name. So a nightclub singer, an up and coming actress and a cryptographer set out to investigate the cult, found some horrible things, and very nearly rescued my character's best friend, only for a bad dice roll to ensure that only the cryptographer got out alive.

One unusual feature of this game is that instead of voice chat we played in text. Having played MUSH games for some time before I ever played tabletop, this was a familiar style of RP for me, but also one that I'd not done for over fifteen years. It was a fun reminder of how we did things in the days before ubiquitous internet voice chat. According to the GM it's taking off again in the FKR movement. All the same, while it was fun for a one-off, I don't think I'll be making a habit of it.

This is another game I own but don't remember buying, meaning I almost certainly picked it up in a charity bundle on DTRPG. If you also bought those bundles I strongly recommend checking this one out. It's ideal for low prep intrigue, and could probably be very easily reskinned for something other than an insect cult. I hope to give it a shot myself some time.

Games 2-4 were all me GMing things I've talked about before so let's skip over those and go straight to...

Game 5: Delta Green

An original scenario, "The Violence of Pure Reason", written by one of the GM's home group. This was truly excellent. I like when the mythos gets tied in with real world phenomena, in this case a notorious information hazard which hinted at what we would eventually encounter. We selected from a number of pre-gens, which meant that none of us had the occult skill, which seemed like a hindrance to the characters but ultimately we were able to find other ways to the information we needed.

None of which particularly helped when we did encounter an unnatural entity, while thoroughly unequipped to deal with it. Final death count: 2/4.

Games-wise, I think this was the highlight of the convention. Everything I want from a Delta Green one-shot. Properly creepy, lots of scope for investigation, freedom to follow up different leads while still getting where we needed to be.

Game 6: Quietus

Game 6 should have been a game of Call of Cthulhu, but with the GM too ill to run it I was happy to spot a free space in my second choice of game. Quietus is a game of melancholy horror, inspired by films like The Babadook, so I had a fair idea what I was in for, even without having played it before.

We began with character creation, which starts off with a simple question: what have you lost? There was one other player, and we decided to tie our stories together, so we decided Richard and Violet had been coworkers at a financial business of some kind. He'd been caught embezzling from the business to pay his child's healthcare bills, which caused the company to fold and she'd lost her home because she was living in a company flat. Then we needed an isolated location, for which we went for the traditional cabin in the woods, and a thing that had gone wrong, which was Violet's car breaking down.

We were already having a great time and that was just character creation. We took a short break when that finished so the GM could figure out how things were going to go from there.

Badly. They went badly. It started with spilt oatmeal and ended with us setting the entire cabin on fire. Ultimately we did manage to accumulate enough hope to escape the horror, but in the end we both went for very downbeat endings for our characters. They'd not been doing well prior to the events in the woods. Perhaps embracing the horror was the only thing that they could do?

And that was a wrap. Another great weekend where I got to try new games and spend time with some great people. Plus there were the panels! But that's a subject for a different post.