Playing Delta Green

Last night I played a playtest of a new Delta Green adventure, Black Thumb.  Some thoughts:

Roll20

I've never used Roll20 before.  It seems to have the basics down - the screen where you can drop pictures, draw things, have a battle map, etc. all seems excellent, and the built in dice roller is great too.

Less great is the AV.  We all logged in with our headsets, and in every case except mine, cameras.  I could see and hear only one person.  I was not the only one having problems.  We rapidly gave up and switched to Google Hangouts for the AV, while still using Roll20 for everything else.

So my preference for online play remains Discord with a dice roller bot, unless you actually need a battle board.

Delta Green

I absolutely love Delta Green.  I grew up watching The X-Files, and while Delta Green's alien threat isn't quite the same, it brings me the same kind of joy.

I've only played it as one-offs, but would like to do a longer campaign some time.  While its stats and skills system is nothing unusual, what really interests me is the bonds, and how you can lean on them to hold off insanity.  The gradual damage you do to your relationships to try to keep your mind together is one of the most interesting parts of the game to me, and not one that you can do much with in a one-shot.

Not that that's made the one-shots any less fun.  Delta Green remains my favourite Lovecraftian horror game.  It takes the brilliant Call of Cthulhu and adds in a whole extra layer of conspiracies with a different style of characters.

The Game

There's nothing like basing your scenario on something real to make it particularly uncomfortable.  Serial killers and the Highway of Tears in Canada made for a great set-up, especially with a GM with a fascination with serial killers who knows how to make them feel authentic.

(I also have an interest in serial killers, but my reading has been almost exclusively on British ones, who tend to be a bit different to American ones.  Interesting stuff to compare.)

Not much else I can say without massive spoilers, but I did enjoy the way things built up to a climax, and the moments of humour especially earlier on before the real horror took hold.  And I particularly liked the moment when [redacted] and the answers to a bunch of questions suddenly slotted into place, but at a moment when my character was absolutely unable to deal with any of that.

I lost seventeen sanity points over the course of the adventure, which I consider a win.

A Monday night well spent, and many thanks to Bud's RPG review for taking a chance on a random Twitter person he'd never met.