Describe your last RPG session in more than 5 words.

Cypher System Starter Set, solo.

I played the Creeping Goo fantasy adventure with two characters. The adventure has guidelines for a party of only two characters, so I used the pre-gen warrior and explorer.

I liked the pool resource management; I had to consider every action carefully. I also liked the player facing defensive rolls. Fixed damage reduced die rolls, which is great for solo.

It's a keeper for my solo collection.

uzirath said:

I enjoyed this writeup. FYI, the author's last name is Riggsby (with an "s"). I love his work.

Click to expand...

Fixed.

John Dallman said:

GURPS 4e occult WWII, neutral countries strand

To Canaries, via illusionary Bavaria.

Click to expand...

At the end of the last session, we had got the Duke & Duchess of Windsor aboard our Empire "C" flying boat and left Lisbon at about 7pm local time. Our assignment is to get them to the Bahamas, where the Duke has been appointed governor. An Empire boat does not have the range for a direct Atlantic crossing, by a long way, so we're planning to head south and cross the Atlantic via Ascension Island, although that's several hops away.

We were within range of England, but had orders not to take the Duke there. However, the enemy probably don't know that, so we departed Lisbon on a course for Cornwall, and turned south once we were thirty miles offshore. Then the compasses started drifting in inconsistent ways: the two magnetic ones in opposite directions, and the gyrocompass differently again. The star sights we'd taken before the turn weren't consistent with the magical location ritual we'd done just afterwards, After some confusion, we settled on using the Absolute Direction advantages two of the characters enjoy, plus the light of a waxing gibbous moon, and working our way down the coast of Morocco. Another magical location said we were a hundred miles north of Munich, which wasn't possible unless we'd been teleported - we couldn't have flown there in the time, and teleportation would have been a much bigger trick than messing with compasses - and we could see the sea below us.

We reached the Canaries about 02:00, landed safely with our own lights, and moored for the night. The Duke & Duchess had slept through all the worrying, aided by our steward's "special" hot chocolate. Then it was just a question of getting them to a hotel in the morning, taking 24 hours to rest, refuel and do maintenance, and buying a new statuette in the Catholic gift shop.

Ah, yes, the statuette. When the navigation had been got under control, our steward had carefully searched the Duke & Duchess' luggage and found a statuette of Our Lady of Lourdes, which really didn't seem in character for the Duchess. It was magical and reading its history revealed that someone had done a ritual on it some weeks ago, that had something to do with location. It had been given to the Duchess by a Frenchwoman, possibly the maid she'd had to leave behind in France. We knew it didn't prevent locating the Duke & Duchess magically, because we'd done that ourselves, and they didn't seem to have got lost on their journey through France and Spain, but that was a lot easier than the navigation we'd been doing.

Since we really don't want it on board while we're looking for Ascension Island, and dropping it into the harbour in Las Palmas seemed like an unfriendly act to a neutral country, the plan is to drop it into deep water off the coast of West Africa on the next leg of the flight.

Who are your characters?

Golden Bee said:

Who are your characters?

Click to expand...

A seriously talented English female ATA pilot, Jackie Bishop. A slightly less talented Norwegian pilot and engineer with shamanic abilities, Svend Nordmann. A Scottish RAF reserve officer who's a navigation specialist and ritual magician, Iain Ferguson. An English/Norwegian engineer and navigator, Frank Worsley. An English administrator who doesn't want to talk about his magical patron, Mr Sutton. A White Russian assassin who is an exceptionally capable steward, "Smith".

Golden Bee said:

AIR DEVILS OF THE SOUTH SEAS by Matt Riggsby

Click to expand...

Shanghai Bullets by Robin D. Laws
Shanghai is a thin slice of heaven on a thick slice of hell.

This adventure could be called "JP Diamond's bad idea theater.”

Summoned to the “Paris of the East” by a paranoid padre, the investigation was going perfectly well… until the players went to the Black Lotus nightclub.

There, Lily Tsiao took the stage and completely enraptured 2/3 of the party, with Giulia and JP smitten… and Aldous bored. Unfortunately, Lily was dating the second-in-command of the Green Gang. She was a flirt though, and neither the Italian stuntwoman nor the Louisiana detective could keep their mind far from her siren songs.

The mistakes didn't end there. The players skipped investigating one of the crime scenes, opting only to talk to a witness. And while they were digging up a grave in the Yellow Mountains, a communication error led to the group absolutely walloping a gang of peasant-bandits.

Back in town, JP decamped to the horse track… And soon he and Lily were neck and neck. Given the choice to leave Shanghai or die, he decided to go it alone, confronting a suspect one on one. And then lost the powerful artifact the group had recovered. Which led to the detective fleeing a demon-parasite across shanty rooftops, only escaping when the roof collapsed.

Of course, Diamond was cunning when put against the wall. He told the Greens he knew one of the Red’s assassins was squatting nearby, (coincidentally the one with the artifact). After that, his sentence was commuted to "stay away from my girlfriend forever and we won't kill you.”

Lala noted the gangsters would store the artifact in the nightclub where they first saw Miss Tsiao. So they made friends with another performer (longtime frenemy Bebe Broussard) and decided to pretend to be her backup band. Which they did amazingly at. Too bad they used their newfound attention as a distraction to steal the artifact, leaving Bebe holding the bag, again.

Then, it was time to call in every favor possible to get them, their luggage, their vehicles, and the artifact to their vault in Cairo. Was a shame to abandon Lily, but maybe they could write…

John Dallman said:

We're going to let him recover a bit, look at the site to see if there is any trace of his comrades, and then take him back to the city to get bits regenerated. The School of Ancient Knowledge will want to talk to him a lot.

Click to expand...

John Dallman said:

Explaining 2,500 years of history.

Click to expand...

No trace of his comrades. We've made it about half-way back to the city and explained a lot of what has happened while he was petrified, in broad outline.

Some scheduling conflicts have delayed things a bit over the last month, but last night's session left off right as the PCs in my PF2e Abomination Vaults campaign entered the room to finally face the BBEG. We won't be playing next week due to the holidays and people traveling, but excited to finally draw an 18 month campaign to a close the week after. I'm also a bit nervous that the last encounter will fall flat, but we'll see! As this was my first PF2e AP, I'll likely start a thread in the PF forum with my overall thoughts on the campaign and how it worked and didn't work for us. We're going to finish it and continue on to a level 11-20 AP (Stolen Fate) so definitely more of the AP and system worked than didn't work for us!

The party's plans were complicated after the ancient lighthouse they had been exploring was set aflame in the night. Exploring it some days later they discovered that the tower had apparently been burned clean, presumably by local owl worshipping cultists enraged by the party's killing the monstrous "Death Owls" within. The shrine below appeared undamaged, though the smugglers who had a landing and storage spot in a nearby sea cave were gone. Several dead owl cultists, torn and bitten were scattered around the entrance of the shrine however.

Entering the shrine after making appropriate offers to its patron the Drowned Emperor (Imperial Saint of nautical disaster) the party moved quickly through the shrine, but was interrupted by a group of owl cultists entering behind them. The angry hoots and cryptic pronouncements did not scare the party who using a pair of intimidating spells managed to cow the bird worshippers into fleeing. Enemy driven off the party moved deeper into the shrine to negotiate with it's guardians who they had previously agreed to kill the Death Owls for. The pair of ancient sea-dead were dismissive of the party's claims to a reward, but when the dead's honor was questioned they gave the party some jewelry and told them they could loot a body in the shrine that wore a magical glass cutlass. Taking their rewards and returning to base, the band then met with a representative of the smugglers, also unhappy at the party's shenanigans in the lighthouse ... the cult not only burnt the tower, but also the goods that the smuggler crew had hidden within. The party was able to negotiate a deal with the pirates where they gave them 2,000 GP and a fancy spy glass as a friendship pledge and agreed to work with them in the future.

Taking three bricks of black lotus (a dangerous narcotic) that they had previously bought from the smugglers the party returned to an ancient library within the abandoned monastery of Mt. Sainte Bec. They used the drug to "fumigate" several book shelves for pests at the behest of the spectral librarian and then spent several hours in a narcotic stupor. Finally returning to their base camp ashore the party completed their expedition with no losses, the gain of a magic sword, and no combat.

Essentially both of the groups I played with were being unreliable at the same time, and I wasn't willing to put up with all the problems with them I'd been ignoring. I'd run out of patience DMing my real life group because they would sit like bumps on a log waiting for someone else to make a decision, so I thought taking a break and making of them run a game would fix things. It didn't. There was a lot that happened but the last straw was when the DM told us he was moving and then didn't respond to anyone (about the game, he would still respond to other things) for 4 months. The other players responded with characteristic decisiveness, after 2 months one player finally said they were "beginning to worry" about the game.
At the same time a college friend had started a game over discord, but we never even got to play this because every week when the call started he would just start crying and hang up. We went through this for about a month before he finally admitted he never learned how the system (Dresden Files FAE) worked. The other players decided we'd like to give it a shot with or without him, so I offered to run. When no one showed up the next week I told them I was out, then decided to quit my real life group as well. That one was a bit awkward since my room mate did not quit, so the game was still at our apartment.