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We be festivaling. Then, the earth shakes and chaos rains. We feel a slight bit of power in the form of a tiny drop of ichor that goes suddenly enters our systems which gives us a feeling of heroism. At the same time, some birds show up and begin to proctor us to leap into action. They are a dove (which pushes James, Brad and Drew to act), a Raven (which is prodding Virgil… verbally), and a Falcon (that is goading Darius). About this time some normal size mosquitos grow to enormous size and set up on us and som nearby normals. YES, we were attacked by strikes, the customary first encounter of naked and afraid player characters. We’re not naked, yet, but we will be.
Anyway, over the course of the evening we will encounter a series of creatures that we must defeat to gain an inkling of our power, each fight including the delivery of an item for us to use courtesy of our bird hosts, and being followed by another slight surge of power and thus another fraction of our godly power.

I will not marry the bonuses gained to the encounter, but here are the basics, followed by the gained bonuses:

Over the course of the game the things we gained were: Hit points until we hit a total of 5+CON bonus; The ability to heal quickly and not die immediately from being reduced to zero HP, 1 Effort (which right now can be burned for an auto-success on a save); Unarmed improved strike (no penalty for barehanded vs weaponed person); Proficiency in armor and shields; dual weapon attack (if not using a shield); Now at +1 Basic Attack Bonus; A second act good for 1 strife or Talent or Sorcery school; 1st word as selected by the GM and its base power.

Now after the fighting the birds urge us to follow them by shouting “Questions! Questions!” at us. We follow them to a man at a rest stop area. He is Aleph (I think). He tells us we are the children of Gods but he can’t tell us which ones because those gods will want to tell us themselves. Meanwhile we are at war with the primordial Titans, and that the gods cannot come here because they are busy fighting them in the realm of the gods. We are charged with dealing with them here. Their spawn will appear, interrupting our lives, and also we will be charged with performing tasks. The birds will aid us at times. He is sent to deal with us as punishment, or rather he’s on earth as punishment and we are his current task. Seems he failed to alert the gods to something and so they’ve ripped off his wings and left him on earth.

It is recommended we stay together for defense purposes (and for GM ease of game management). We now have the opportunity to do self-motivated activities as long as we do them together.

GAME TWO - PRE-AMBLE TO A GAME

We didn’t go around the game. But so much is going on as side-trips in our world that we never quite got to the game proper. And that’s just how the GM likes it.

That night as we rest at Virgil’s ranch, we make some contact with our families, etc. Brad’s baby-momma hints at them seeing one another so they schedule something. Drew’s girlfriend is going to drive into town but she sounds “weird” on the phone. She keeps checking to see that things are OK, and needs a ton of confirmation this is true but won’t say why.

Over Waffles and/or Coffee with Aphr, our “guide”, we are told that he has a quest for us but it’s not something that needs done immediately, which is good because if it were then Brad wouldn’t have time to visit his daughter. So we take it under advisement. As we consider the possibilities, Drew speaks with his girlfriend “Bunny” who is even weirder than earlier. She’s in town and so he drives to the hospital where his bandmate is laid up and when meeting with him discovers that he has a bite from one of the people at the fair during the zombie attack. Brad’s death-vision tells him Ray (the NPC) will die in the next two days and that the bite is the cause. What’s more, he’ll ultimately discover he is under a curse! This is convenient since Brad’s newly purchased power was as a curse-eater. So he’ll be able to cleanse him once he has his effort back that he burned on diagnosing him.

Bunny meanwhile is all shades of paranoid and won’t say why. She also seems to be talking to herself ins whispers when no one else is around. So when she’s approached at her hotel room it turns out she has a curse of her own, but we don’t quite know that yet. When Drew wakes up in the morning in the hotel room he finds that she’s in the bathroom pleading with someone for mercy, and that someone turns out to are a hideous maggot-hided baby with terrible fleshy batwings. It says to Drew that he’s too late and then tries to bite him with a mouthful of razor sharp teeth. Drew punches him in the face with his newly purchased martial art and it flees by flying under the door and vanishing. Drew rushes her to the hospital where he alerts the others and because of her injuries they put her on a 5150 suicide hold (slashes across her arms). With Aphr’s help we get in to see her where Brad diagnoses her curse as being the worst possible kind that isn’t one along bloodlines… She sold her soul for Drew’s band’s fame and fortune! He can break the curse but will take hours and we have to check on Brad’s daughter.

Now the problem with Brad’s daughter was that when he had lunch with her and her mother he was informed of her “Eating disorder”. Apparently she’s suffering from a need to only eat out of the trash! She doesn’t want clean, properly prepared food, she only craves decaying dreck. With his curse sense in full gear we go to her house one night and he (with the help of our Dove assistant) gets her to come out so he can see that she’s got a curse from some corruption demon. We take her to a park so he can exorcise her.

While there with the curse-eating in process, another child shows up and demands we turn over Vicki (the kid) to her. Oh, and this hideous child making demands is missing her eyes! She attacks James and fails to hurt him much at first, but she has no problem getting Drew and eventually drops him. Brad has to keep exorcising, so James keeps at it and after taking a few corruptions (destroying most or all of our clothing) because that’s what she does…entropy… he puts her down. We’ve got a day to complete the cleansing but only need a few more minutes and the kid is clean. However, he now has to return her after taking her without a warning. He’s hauled in by the cops but is contrite and the mom doesn’t press charges but NEVER wants to see him again, even though he cured the kid.

Aphr helps us get Bunny out of the booby-hatch. We take her to another park, knowing that something awful is coming, and perform a similar service. Just as this is about to start, the demon-baby shows up and this time it’s 3-on-1. It does go down with the help of a silver dagger that was brought to us by our dove-retriever and punches from the two martial artists, then she’s cleansed as well.

But now we have the girl and she’s in Drew’s custody, so we have to talk the doctor who let her out into looking after her for a couple days while we go to our latest problem… James’s mom face-timed with I’m after he suspected there was a problem and she had adopted a new puppy that, of course, is not actually a puppy. He can see that it’s some hideous little demon. So we head that way with help off Aphr, our new chauffeur. She’s in FLORIDA, so we drive all the way down there non-stop (he doesn’t need to sleep or eat, though he needs an endless supply of coffee). Once there, we find that she is indeed in the thrall of a sort of possession, having taken on the animal behaviors of her new demon-pet. So we immediately fly into action with the punching, stabbing, etc. Dog destroyed, mom saved. She remembers having a new dog but seems to think it ran away and doesn’t remember much else. We did our best to clean up while she was unconscious.

We head back north. We’re headed to a new contact, a peer of Aphr, named Felonious. They don’t seem to want to talk to one another though, so we meet with the guy and he’s a rich businessman/demon. Yes, horns and goat legs are both present, though the others around us don’t seem to notice this aberration. Rather than giving us the main mission though he asks us about a side-mission “favor”. He wants us to help with a friend and her addiction problems but can’t give us details. The fact that this friend is in a band and you’re with Drew, semi-god of music, means of course he volunteers the team to meet with her.

Her name is Fifi, and her band, Razor Kids, are a punk group playing at a nearby club. We get in with Felonious’s help and meet with her though she’s resists help because of how horrible these guys are. Seems they’ve taken her best friend, a guy named Eddie, who is a local journalist, probably to keep her from getting clean, since she voiced to him a desire to get clean of whatever addiction she has. Brad can tell it’s a magical addiction. They don’t have a base of operations so we decide to check out the club itself. During that time one of the band members tries to pick a fight with Drew, who narrowly avoids it. James less so. One gets in his face and he gets right back in that guys. “Harry” it seems is one of us! When they start to throw down this guy exhibits an ability to change his eyes to blood red and unhinge his jaw to try and bite James. James not only survives but takes him down and since like us he doesn’t bleed to death, we can grab him and drag him out the door.

Getting him away from there we set to interrogations and what works best is when Brad eats his curse, turning him from an undying blood drinking goblin back into his old human self. Emphasis on the “old”. He’s actually now a 50-something punk with no powers now. He cops to having helped their benefactor, “Mr. French”, into abducting Eddie, the journalist and keeping him in the warehouse next to the club.

So we get there and use his keys to let ourselves in. We discover in the basement that there is a room with a cage and a captive. Also, Mr. French shows up! Mr French summons a swarm of bats to hurt us, which they do a little bit at a time. He also tries to compel Drew to obey him which he doesn’t. Brad starts off the damage-fest by cutting him with the silver dagger for noticeable damage, then after a bunch of misses Drew lands a bunch of shots, but after Drew goes down for the second time tonight, James lands a fiery punch that does straight-damage, leaving Mr French as a pile of ash. But the most fun in this fight twas that Brad can command the dead and this guy was undead, so he kept ordering him to do things and he had to save or burn effort every turn in order to keep fighting us, right up until his flaming demise.

With no supply of magic blood to provide the band, they will age back up as well, and Fifi will be free of her addiction.

GAME THREE - THE WATER GOD

Following the events of last game having just finished taking out the vampire and its thralls, we take a night's rest and then look into the task that we were originally sent to Felonious to do. As you may recall there's some sort of "serial killer" that started at the time of the Ted Kennedy/Mary-Jo Kopeckne incident (back in the day referred to by the location at which it happened: "Chappaquiddick"). It seems Mary Jo may not be dead in the strictest definition so we are sent to speak with her. Well, she may not be dead but she is definitely horrifying. When we meet with her under the infamous bridge, she's some sort of spirit of vengeance. She imbues enough fear that Drew and Bradley both run away from the scene and back to the cark. Darius flees a lesser distance, and Brad sticks around but seems to develop a couple problems: First off, he doesn't remember what happened or what she said to him and secondly, he now has some sort of mild insanity in which he thinks he can speak to the water spirits through any water nearby.

We have to go back down there and try again else the plot is not furthered. Brad and Drew won't. Darius listens from nearby but won't go see her. James goes back, manages to keep his shit together, and Mary-Jo relays some sort of screed about the activities of essentially the being that made her into what she is. Seems sacrifices are brought to this water spirit who then keeps some, such as MJ, and disposes of others, once a year.

Well, it's a group of titans of industry responsible for this. They make themselves rich through the sacrifice of young women, to the surprise of none. We can get into the home of one such guy because Felonious has connections. He gets us into a party where we shmooze and look for clues, of which there are plenty, indicating this is some sort of voodoo cult to a water spirit. During the party, James deals with someone at the restroom, Brad meets a girl whom he promptly rebuffs, and Drew and Darius (the latter of whom is masquerading as a blind man) encounter a group of thugs who decide to attempt a beatdown while we are isolated, to which we say "not today" and promptly kick their asses. By then there's a panic as they find the body of the girl Bradley was talking to is now cut open in the bathroom.

Everyone vacates, PCs and Partygoers, but we've got names and other clues that point to a famous mansion referred to as the Water Mansion. We will go there after hours and let ourselves in.

On these premises we start by fighting a foursome of oversized aquatic beasties, such as an electric eel, sea turtle, etc. And once beyond that we have to fight something amorphous (Jelly fish?) and then a room-sized occupus. Overall we acquit ourselves pretty well, but we get banged up each time and our healing is from Bradley giving us 1pt a scene worth of recovery first aid. We find the mansion owner who is in terror that either we or his benefactor will kill him. He's a minion of the water spirit who he says is out at the dock along with the next victim, a young woman who is imprisoned on a yacht. Before we can go help we do however have to deal with some sort of water elemental (twice) the springs from the bath tub.

Once outside walk the dock and it's not long before she, whom they call (I should have written it down.. I think the name was...) Peggy Bluelake(?) springs forward and we do combat. Now there's all sorts of flamboyance going on as Darius springs off a yacht and tries to drop an elbow from the top rope, Drew tries to punch her (and misses many, many times), and James tries to fire-hand her, while Bradley makes for land, as we're having to do this in water otherwise. She does drop because some of us can actually hit things, in this case, Darius.
I believe the mansion owner ran off. We leave the mansion with a win and various small boons as a result of both the experience in the mission and also a birthright handed us by our guide.

GAME FOUR - PYRAMID OF PAIN

Brad (Alan), James (Paul), Darius (Joe), Drew (Darren)

Following our victory over the water goddess Peggy Bluewater, Aphyr recommends a week off. So we have some down time where we do some minor dallying (checking on relatives, memorizing spells, etc.) Then we're supposed to meet up with Aphyr in Atlanta.

So in the meantime we rent a car. Then, while driving through the Lincoln Tunnel we are attacked by gremlins who were hiding in the car under the seats. When the car crashes, Drew runs due to a failed fear check, but the others manage to rally and take them out. But it didn involve Darius seeing through the illusion that there are a dozen and identifying four of them, and having to fight at disadvantage because of them causing darkness. They all get squished. We scale the wall up to the walkway and jet out of there ahead of the cops.

We get to Atlanta via bus and have a couple days down. During this, Drew gets the group to go out and party. We survive, with hangovers.

Aphyr's new mission is direct from the gods! They want us to go and retrieve something from a burial mound. It will be dangerous. We must also get permission to enter the mound as it falls under the jurisdiction of another "guide", named Woodman. Turns out Woodman, once we get to him, is a ginormous sentient tree. We are pleasant enough to him and he agrees to open the burial mound, but he has been guarding it forever and complies only because of the reasoning we asserted (Gods want stuff). He will open the mound the next day at dusk. We go there to take the tour, as best we can because apparently it's a tourist attraction.

We are low on cash so Drew goes busking and gets us some cash. During that evening out we meet a few people: Jute (the coot) an old-tyme 49er/drunk caricature, who we buy alcohol for and find out a few details about the mound and that others come to town regularly. Jute seems to think there's gold in them thar mounds. We also run into our tour guide, from whom we find out that the big mound is no longer spelunked because of water having filled much of it, which is uncharacteristic. We buy supplies in order to account for going underwater to a limited degree.

Did I mention the pig? We were warned there's a beast that roams the forest. And from the fact that it's last name is "porker" (I forget the first name), we properly surmise it will be a pig. But no one expected a Volkswagen-sized boar. We destroy it without much problem. We'd hang around and make bacon but we know we have a time crunch as this place will shut down in a day and Woodman will seal us in.

So we advance on the mound and find that a cult has arrived there ahead of us. I forgot to mention the protestors. When we were in town there were natives protesting the excavation of the burial mounds. Seems some of those folks are here performing a legitimately magical ceremony! A fight breaks out. Most get disabled, I think one got killed. We find the entrance and go in.

James doesn't need to breath, so he goes under, finds where to go to, and we follow in using the rope to follow him.

The mound is an Indy-Jones style trap dungeon. We (mostly James and Darius) begin to wrack up injuries from...

A pit trap
A gas trap in which the gas catches fire after filling the corridor
A water-filled corridor with a gap in the middle. When Darius jumps across he discovers there's an Ooze on the other side covering the other side entrance. Every time we hit it we split it until eventually it's too small to split and those ones die.
There's a room full of dead people. Fortunately, we have an expert in dead people. Brad takes control of them. He then employs them in the next room...

There's another room full of dead people with an undead priest who commands them to attack. The two armies of undead fight while we go after the dead priest. We defeat him eventually but only with some of our best tricks pulled out courtesy of our recently granted ability to perform miracles, such as James flying, and Darius making us invisible so we can get in close with less damage from undead armies.

At the conclusion we are at the indoor mezo-american pyramid that the priest had occupied and powers tell us the object we seek, the HAND OF GLORY, is located in its base. There we find a sarcophagus with a beautifully appointed relief of an Aztec Priestess, and two smaller boxes, one of which holds the item we seek.

As we are contemplating the situation, a man in a suit shows up. He applauds our ability to get to the center of the tootsie-pop and wants [something]. We make a bargain with the suit guy to avoid a fight; he doesn't explain what he was after, but he accepts the other box, which through magic was determined to not be the box with the hand of glory.

GAME FIVE - HERO ROADTRIP

GAME SIX - SHIRLEY's TEA HOUSE and AUNT JERE'S CAVERN

I think we had a game where everyone had at least one solid moment of usefulness, which is nice. We’ve got a quest in many steps. First up, take the box full of unknown darkness to see Frank Belltower at Shirley’s Place in Memphis. Problem is we’re trouble-magnets of course.

So we procure another car (Something done by Darius the dragon who can manage a purchase of some kind for an effort) and set out. Drew can drive non-stop because of the word of Journeying, but everyone else needs to eat and sleep, so we do stop occasionally. But we don’t have to stop in order to find trouble.

We’re in a diner when some shadow figures are spotted in the corners of the place as they descend upon the locals and come after us. Brad properly detects that they would have trouble outside in the sunlight, but the problem is that this abandons the locals alone with these things. So we fight, and James calls a brigade of bikers to come help who descend upon the place helping us cause more collateral damage. We win, naturally, with only one casualty, a woman who dies of a heart attack.

Our next problem is on the road, as a storm whips up and we can tell something is going on. A pair of enormous birds descend on us shooting lighting, but James makes us immune to electricity which helps us until they turn that off. We’re getting out butts kicked and with his last effort Drew uses a gift to frighten them away, giving us the opportunity to run for cover.

We head off-road to the trees where we can have cover. The storm is particularly troublesome to James as the titan (whose face we glimpse in the clouds) is in control of the same elements as he, and thus James gets no real rest. We decide all we can do is go out and confront him. When we get out there into the field to let him know we are there, the titan comes for us and a battle ensues, and naturally we are triumphant. I can’t remember lots of details. We get a new gift. Everyone takes an extra effort except Drew who makes a selection that comes in handy in the next fight.

When we make it to Shirley’s Place it has a new name: Shirley’s Tea House. We shrug and go in. We are welcomed before we even touch the door. Seems they’ve changed to an Asian theme. We are given a table and some tea and sake, but as we sit there inexplicably, people from our lives show up and more-or-less enchant us into breaking away from the table and going off to their own personal “happiness” where they can be siphoned of their emotions. All except Drew, whose new gift makes him immune to emotion affecting powers, and so as he makes his save anyway and can see that the geishas are in fact hideous leprous bloated crones, he extends his power to cover the others, and Frank, the guy we came to see, and the gig is up… We stomp the hell-bitches, with quite a fervor, for having been manipulated in such a way. We get another gift. And Frank tells us how to open the box.

Leg two of the quest: Head to Oklahoma City to meet with the Aunt Jere, a woman who can take the box off our hands.

During these journeys there are two other encounters and while I remember their order to each other, I can’t remember where they fall in this giant trek...

First was a stop at a gas station to refuel when two holes open in the ground and one pulls Drew in and the other misses dragging in Darius. Spider creatures (Described as the spider creature from an actual Gilligan’s Island episode…google it) populate those holes in the form of some smaller minions and two bigger ones. They ensnare Drew and eventually Darius, and Drew gets out of his with a miracle and Darius eventually breaks out a couple times. Brad uses his insect powers to take control of the smaller spiders and he and their bigger spiders have a tug-of-war for their will. We slaughter a bunch of them, and what’s left help us run off the two bigger ones as they flee in self-preservation, definitely overmatched.

The second gas station encounter I’m certain was on this leg of the voyage and involves a swarm of rats that wind up infecting some of us with rabies. Funny that a terrestrial disease ends up being more effective than some of the magical powers. Problem here is the rats are a vast mob, and so when they face the mob of bikers summoned by James and the mob of skeletons summoned by Brad, they are much bigger but I believe this is the fight where the breath weapon came in, as Darius managed to do tons of damage.

We are at a motel and James’ new minions are Ninjas. Said ninjas alert us that a fire is coming, and indeed there is a massive wave of fire heading our way, termed by the GM as a “Swarm of fire”. Darius and James try to fly up away from the fire, Brad can go through the ground if he needs to, and Drew uses a gift to create a stalemate (and do damage when the power turns off). When we’ve stomped out the first it’s not over… It’s now a roiling mass of ooze, which we then have to damage further. We defeat that, but wait, there’s more! What remains after that is a massive wolf-like creature composed entirely of…something….what the hell was it? Thousands of something undead? Memory fails me. This is eventually another victory, but at the cost of the motel.

We hit the hospital where Drew uses his gift to convince the doctor to give us rabies meds, and his acting to convince the other lobby dwellers that we have priority over them by collapsing.

When we reach Aunt Jere, she’s at a roadside attraction that has seen better days. It’s a display of “native cave paintings” (that are obvious frauds) and an underground waterfall. We pay extra to get to meet Aunt Jere. She is a prophet who accepts the box, then uses it and the instructions on how to open it to unseal it and channel a prophecy for us…

I don’t think this is word-for word, I just scribbled what I could: When the day comes and the world is shrouded in shadows, the newcomers will bring forth a new nation of health. Also I have written down a name but can’t remember the significance: Mikobashi.
The theme that runs through the experiences so far is the elements. We had air, fire, wood, darkness. We still have water yet to come.

I don’t recall another encounter after this but there may have been. We covered a lot of ground. Next stop is Amarillo, to get the secret of the hand. We’ve gained 3 Gifts this session.

GAME SEVEN -

Our next stop on the Gods-Must-Be-Crazy-2024 tour is going to be Amarillo, TX, where we intend to find out the secret of the Hand of Glory at someplace called Gaki Gardens. But as tends to be the haps, even though Drew manages to use his powers to get the group around the random encounters, we still have some regularly scheduled madness. And at this point Darius is not there to help as Joe is away at his baseball draft. So it’s the 3 of us.

Chaos begins with our vehicle and the associated entourage (of cycle-bums summoned by James) fall into a large hole that suddenly appears beneath the vehicle we are traveling in. While we survive the fall, it’s dark and deep. But we’re with the semi-god of the underworld (Brad) who imbues us with the ability to see in the dark (for a while). We find a direction, go, and our first encounter is when three women made of stone appear—one in front, one behind, and one set into the wall which only Brad can see because of his special underground vision. He makes us all immune to earth attacks, as is his purview, saving us lots of damage from incoming rocks, and Drew knocks all three off on successive rounds because his sonic attacks shatter rock! Good start. We collect the eyes of the creatures which are actually pricy diamonds.

Next up is a “Rock Weird”, an earth-elementaly creature of liquid rock. Not as smooth a fight this time but it does go down in a sonic blast, despite its ability to draw on the nearby rock pool to regenerate.

By now we’re feeling pretty good…until we run into the third encounter of the day, down many points of effort and a few hit points. This time it’s a rock snake, “only” about 6’ in length but with a human head. Problem with this guy is that his mere presence drains CON and his bites damage and drain CON. So we’re sinking fast. And after destroying our first four enemies, suddenly Drew can’t hit anything! Eventually the GM points out that we could flee, which is true. Drew enacts a gift that keeps the group ahead of the foe as they break the surface and exit to daylight where the creature will not follow.

We gain a gift point (Last of this level). We set up at a motel and take a break as Joe is in route and so we get food to kill time. When he arrives we continue heading to the Gardens, which are pretty empty. James’ new army are Men-in-Black. One of Darius’ new gifts is essentially endless money, so we use that to get new vehicles and clothes and roll up to Gaki in style.

The place is empty but for two cars. It’s a nicely appointed garden center that is missing its people. Insect-speaker Brad talks to a bee and discovers that it’s a bad place for humans, that they go to the middle and encounter trouble. Well, trouble’s what we’re here for so of course we’ll head that way. But Darius’ ability to see through illusions allows him to see that the bee is not a bee, it's in fact a spirit. When this is discovered the spirit and two others transform into some sort of vampiric creatures we’ll just call human-stirges because stirges are our eternal enemies in RPGs. One of them takes down Drew but eventually the rest of the team smash them, especially Darius who can smack them for full damage on every hit at will.

With Drew and Brad injured we still opt to move on, mostly through surveillance. The other insects inform Brad that they weren’t talking to him because they were afraid of the spirits and that “monsters” live at the center of the grounds. We try to spy on that area but Brad loses a few bees and ants in the process with essentially only intelligence returned on this situation being that something there is taking out his minions at will.

Brad tries to get a better peek using his powers and almost ends up being turned to stone, which is the M.O. of this creature and so we know it’s medusa and that she has two sisters there. We look at our powers and eventually it is decided that Darius can neutralize perception based powers and so he makes us immune for the scene to their stoning effect. We move in and take them on head-to-snakehead, and win without too much badness. But we do face something that’s a bigger pain in the ass in the next room. Seems there’s not one chest—there’s three. We know something is up and Darius can see that two of the chests are creatures in disguise. When we start openly discussing what we need to do, the beasts attack. Anyone who attacks them hand-to-hand ends up stuck to them, so Darius sticks to them, giving one easy attacks for LOTS Of damage, taking him down. The other would get James except he can’t be grappled.

It takes a while to destroy them and in the process many men-in-black and many of Brad’s skeletal army end up stuck to them.

When we hit the road again we end up being hit by a massive flash flood! A couple water elementals of massive size smack and drown us a while, taking down Brad. It occurs to me that James was the only one who didn’t go down this game. Anyway, we pummel the mountains with our magic attacks, but when those drop we still have its source to deal with, which is a massive toad! It leaps from far and lands just feet away. Even an attempt by James to get almost 200 yards away doesn’t keep it safe from an epic long tongue that lashes out. It does a huge amount of damage to Darius, leaving us running low on options. Drew uses a gift to scare the living crap out of toad sending it 10 miles away in a single leap, and allowing us to escape.

GAME EIGHT - Meet the Parents

First some backtracking story-wise. Seems when we won last game there was a letter which was a communication between our main adverasry Caine (Last name I can't recall) who is warning our last foes at the Gardens about our coming, and boasting about the growth of it's sister in the dark egg of mikobashi. I might be misremembering some of those details, but what's new? So there's some kind of egg we have to deal with which hadn't come up until now. It's at Doomtown, a facility in Nevada based on the old nuclear testing grounds fake popup towns.

We are on our way to Mr. Mamma's in Arizona to turn over the hand of glory (which of course we did not end up doing). Free from random encounters per usual, we run into our first bit o' scheduled chaos in the form of an enormous overhead dragon circling in the sky and looking for us. So as two of us spread out and the other two try to cast mortal magics in order to deal with the mist around us. This is a tactical error as now the dragon gets to attack with a cone of cold breath. Darius goes dragon-form and takes flight and engages. We take some distant shots, with Brad landing one or two, and the dragon and Darius exchange blows until he narrowly wins the battle and dragon blood rains down on the crowd below. We gain 1pt of domion (our first that wasn't built into our artifact).

We were on foot. But now we get somewhere that we can get vehicles and wind up losing those quickly when giants rain down on us! Four giants drop from the skies and superhero-land on our vehicles demolishing them. These are Oni, complete with tusks, and we beat them pretty well, but not without injury. And they drop another point of dominion.

When we meet Leon at Mr. Mammas, he seems to think that the egg needs dealt with, but we also need to do our new duty: We are there to be "security" for our "parents", who are the war council meeting at the Wynn in Vegas. As we are choosing our options, we are beset by bikers inthe form of a large mob, with a few "special" leader bikers, and then in the midst of this, one of the patrons transforms as if possessed into a being not unlike a "gray" (alien) with big slicy-dicy hands that it uses to crush the booth we're at, dice up the remains of Brad's skeletons (which are technically "remains") and try to assassinate Leon, at which he succeeds, but nobody dies in Bra'd presenece unless he wills it. With our mobs and their mobs whittling each other down, we focus on the big bad guy, and because it's engaged with Drew, it decides to mimic him, making it hard to tell who is who. Drew withdraws in order to leave the choice of targets clear, and therefore he is the real hero. Okay, and maybe the guys who actully killed him. We are not officially level 1, and we gain another hP bringing us to 9+CON.

We go to the Wynn and look around, but not ready to meet the parents. No rooms available due to convention business. We don't get much chance to recon, so we set out on our other duty: To destroy the Egg of Mikobashi (or undoubtedly fight whatever emerges from it).

So doomtown has an elevator that goes a half mile below the surface. Upon the elevator door opening deep beelow, we are beset by Crow-headed ninjas who are using war fans to slice and dice everyone a the same time, and who can fray US! There's an ugly fight where we take a bunch of damage. This is not easy. We win but the kerfuffle awakens the thing in the giant egg that is suspended above us! It emerges as baby Mothra! It does things like spew radioactive silk over Brad's skeletons, and as we cut it up it's throwing radioactive blood all over the place, but we are saved from the radiation by one of Brad's powers. This fight is ugly as well, but it helps that Darius is auto-hitting it. Darius goes down, but because we levelled he now has the ability again to "divine fury" and bring himself back for a round during which he does his last smackdown on it and we are saved. Then he collapses. So we haul him back upstairs and use the radioactivity showers to clean up. Unfortunately we have to send Brad back down for our badges that Leon gave us that identify us to the people at the Wynn.

I glossed over a few things and I don't want to go back and re-insert them. We got into Doomtown because it is protected by soldiers, and James speaks soldier and willed them to let us through, and out again, and back to get our badges, and back out again. And at one point, when the Mothra Kaiju was fleeing down through a tunnel, we had to pursue using a Journeying miracle, so Drew wasn't completely useless. We've gained a 3rd point of dominion this game alone.

At the Wynn we are recognized as security by our badges and the young (and nosy) security liason, Karma, tries to find out information about the "secret convention". We play dumb...which is easy for obvious reasons. So we get to a board room and meet Earth's board of directors...

All are introduced, the gods imbibe, with only Drew opting to fake-drink, which is a point called out by Zeus. Seems there's a compeition between the gods for who is the better offspring, for which James is winning and Drew is finishing dead last. Everyone breaks off for one-on-ones with their dad, which some use to find out information about our situation and Drew uses to work out his missing dad trauma. Seems our responsibility is to protect them and the entire facility against anything that might interefere with the functioning and safety of the war council.

We get a second point of built-in artifact Dominion point. That means we now have 2 Artfiact Dominion and 3 Free range dominion. So we can make right now if we had time--but probalbly don't in the rules set, a) Something with a Lesser Gift that costs Effort for 2 points, b) Something with a a lesser gift that doesn't cost effort or is constant for 4pts, c) something with a greater gift that costs effort and is not constant for 4pts. Anything beyond that is outside our current cost, without having to exchange Dominion points to each other.

GAME NINE - The A.I. Game

Mark took a week off in some respects. Oh, sure, he was running the game, but was it HIS game truly? For a portion of this game he turned over the reigns to Chat GPT.

We are in Vegas, setting up our security for the Wynn to keep the locals and our parents safe from invading forces. During our duties there is a rumbling and we narrow it down to the bottom level of the parking garage. Upon arrival we find a hole in the wall, a trail of slime, and a hapless security guard wandering into it to investigate. Brad tries to scare him off while invisible and even lifts him off the ground but ultimately he was just struck over the head and dragged off to the stairwell to not be in our way. We go in and find there is an alien-style hatchery full of eggs, but also a bunch of shells from something that had hatched already. 'Tis worms who move on us but fortunately we have Darius who can swat mobs with a flick of his wrist. He gets us through both waves. Then their parent shows up, and it's like that mothra-style creature we fought earlier and is likely its kid. We do manaage to defeat it without too much harm.

We are given tickets by the hotel manager, Karma, to attend a performance of a Cirque Du Soleil knock-off, and we go and enjoy it (expecting mayhem) but instead we just watch a performance. One thing though... it seems to be about a "hero's journey" which culmintes him going into a cave. There are omens involving a black feather, and a strange symbol we don't recognize that looks like an obtuse corporate logo. There's a strange weight to the whole thing. We wait for the other shoe to drop. Backstage we actually find a black feather, but no clue as to where it came from. Are the gods trying to tell us something about history? About the future? It turns out to be the future...

Next day we are having breakfast when some of us spy on the television the very symbol we saw in the play appears on a car that was in an accident. We run off to the scene and while there we find just a car accident, until one of us spies a black feather, and then another, in a line until we find a cave and we get the eerie sense that this is what the play foretold. We go down in there and find radiation levels are excessive. Also, 8 giant toads attack us. We play a little frog baseball, knock them around a while, and not long after they go down here comes their parental figure who is far bigger! Our fights with things like this tend to follow a pattern: James swings and sometimes hits, and sometimes remembers his counter-attack. Brad summons skeletons who often are outmatched by the badguys but who still help act to delay and potentialy weaken the enemy. Drew attacks and mostly misses but does some occasional freebie fray-die damage. And Darius utterly destroys our foes. When this one goes down, once it's dead (which is not easy since it keeps bringing itself back from the brink) we find a cloak nearby made of black feathers, but no sign of an owner.

Our bird guide tells us to visit Leon. Leon (the devil/contact) tells us our parents need to see us. We see if he knows anything about the cloak and he just tells us that he doesn't want anything to do with it but we should hide it and keep it from others who might covet it. We decide regardless we'll ask our dads about it. We go back to the hotel, rest, and at breakfas the next day Karma shows up. She sets off just enough bells that we try some investigating. Drew goes off out of sight and uses one of his powers to try and figure out who the people are that she most loves and is connected to and comes back with none. This could be because there are none, or because she's resisted my power, or she spent an effort to auto resist my power. Either way--she special. When we meet our parents today they don't seem to be aware she was anything special; she's essentially "beneath notice" to that point. But that info comes after our next segment.

Seems our dads want to send us each on a heroic quest. Most of us are up for it immediately, but all four agree to it regardless and suddenly we are in four different locations adventuring in parallel.

It's the A.I. portion of the program. Mark asked ChatGPT to manufacture a heoic quest for each of us, made minor modifications to tailor it, and unleashed it on us. For the most part it went well. I should say for most uf is it went well...

Mark lays out the individual stories and how each of us are doing something on behalf of our dads to correct an ongoing wrong or stop an evil. For example, Set is polluting the Nile and weakening Sobek's (Darius's dad's) realm, and he has to defeat the agents of Set. We start off with a PUZZLE. Mark hands out a maze, gives us a time limit, and we flip them over math quiz style and have at it with a time limit. All four come in under time. We were up against Toshi who was our baseline and who had done the maze previously to set the bar. Task #2 involved fighting some minions of our foe (half as many since we completed our maze on time). This is fine, though Drew's inability to hit the foes means he takes a lot of damage before the next round. Part 3 involves fighting a high priest of the opposing god. All are victorious... except Drew, whose task was to keep errant vassals of Eros from bringing misery to the world, and while yes, he started off two effort down and came into that round fairly injured, but the mistake of his owner (ME) was trying to solve this in any means other than smacking them around (How do you stop misery by causing misery?), so by the time he started fighting the fight was lost.

At the conclusion we return to the board room where three celebrate and one collapses in shame.

All four gain a fourth Fact which supports some kind of talent. Drew still gets a fact, but his will be "tinged" with darkness in some regard for his failure. (This game we also got another +1 BAB to reach a total of +2, +1 HP, and our saves went down to base 13--most of us were still base 15 and apparently we were supposed to be lowerring them).

RECAPS

GAME ONE - IN THE BEGINNING...