cheerfulOne of my Friday night gamers, Nick, decided to run Hollow Earth Expedition as a birthday present to me. You can read about the first session of the game by following the link. As noted in that entry, we finished the session by finding a cryptic clue.
After freeing Kate Barr and Adam Handley, we followed up on the clue (a large emerald with a carving on it), and after having it examined by a gem expert and a linguist of ancient languages, learned that the emerald had been mined in the depths of Africa, and the symbol on it was the carving of a bear-like totem associated with an obscure African tribe, the Makimbo. I got into a bit of a scrap with Samuel Jacobs, a rival photojournalist, who wanted the story from Kate about her fiancé, but had to have my butt saved by Thomas Redfield, the big game hunter, who "discouraged" Samuel from asking them any more questions. Took some serious bruises to my chest and face (hey, he sucker punched me, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!). *sigh* Really should have taken the Brawl skill or some such...
The group decided that a trip to Africa was in order, so Thomas, Wanda Rotherdam, and I went off to see if we could get some funding in addition to our own funds, while the others pursued a couple of leads. Kate and Adam were ambushed by a couple of African thug-like types, who had an easy time of it with them, and managed to take the emerald thing off them. For a while, Kate thought Adam was dead, but it turned out that he had merely been paralyzed from the venom in the blowgun dart. Fortunately, I had made a rubbing of the symbol on the emerald earlier, so at least we had something to work with. The funding came through, as my newspaper felt it was worth following the trail to Africa, as I convinced them that it might lead us to William Johnson after all.
We managed to take a tramp steamer, the Kenyan Queen, from New York bound for Africa, and the trip was relatively uneventful. Had a few encounters aboard ship, but nothing that was related to the ongoing plot - at least not that I could see at any rate. There were a couple of suspicious types aboard the ship, but we found ourselves rather occupied with other thoughts and the like, anticipating what might happen once we reached our destination. That was where we wrapped up the session for the night.
I'm rather enjoying myself playing in HEX, and Nick seems to have an interesting storyline/plot ongoing here, so I'm looking forward to his running the game again on Friday evening.
In the meantime, I've got a few other things to take care of this morning before the Sunday gaming group gets here. That's all for now.