Dagonbane

This game was a home brewed mashup of Dragonbane and Cthulhu by Gaslight, and was a whole lot of squamous fun. Our cast of characters bore an uncanny resemblance to the cast of Carry on Screaming with the addition of Sherlock Holmes for good measure. I was playing Valeria Watt, so I put on my best Fenella Fielding husky voice and prepared to get smoking.

We were invited to a rather fine steak house to meet Miss Erwin Caulfield, an heiress with a problem. Her grandfather, the family patriarch, had died recently and she suspected that her half brother Sutton was trying to steal her inheritance. We were promised a handsome reward of fifty pounds if we could retrieve the will and associated documents from the safe in the Manor House of Strangers Keep before they could be tampered with. 

After making the most of our free food and drink, we set off in the Christmas Day snow, pausing only to bribe the policemen on the gate with a crate of whiskey and the ample charms of Clare "Busty" Danes. The trek through the grounds was surprisingly arduous as the winter chill started to bite, and we started to suspect that we were being watched by the gargoyles along the way as well as being spooked by a bank of snow.

We reached the courtyard, where we saw a little match girl shivering in the snow. As we approached, she threw back her head with an unearthly scream to reveal a set of needle sharp teeth. More match girls (or whatever these inhuman creatures were) appeared, and a desperate battle ensued with gunfire and the judicious use of Valeria's magic to keep them at bay until the original fiend was despatched.

We then found Sutton's carriage with a disturbing display of broken rat bones in eldritch patterns. He had evidently arrived before us, so we had best hurry. In the interests of crude humour, we elected to use the rear entrance (fnarr, fnarr) and found ourselves in a freezing cold kitchen with signs of a struggle - someone had evidently tried to claw their way out of the window!

Upstairs to the study, where we found the safe hidden behind a portrait of a stern looking December Caulfield, but the papers had already been taken. A search revealed some journals with a disturbing series of references to tunnels beneath the manor and evidence of a dark family secret, along with a receipt for some dynamite purchased by Sutton.

As if on cue, the manor was rocked by a sudden explosion - to be continued!