First time running: Delta Green

I've previously played a couple of one-shots of Delta Green at Concrete Cow.  I find I enjoy Lovecraftian horror more when it's set in the present day than the classic 1920s setting, and combining it with The X-Files, one of the best TV shows of my teenage years, completely sold me on Delta Green.

Knowing what my group are like, I requested that they not make comedy characters, and they actually obliged.  Three of them have made characters based on actual people, two of which have their own wikipedia page, which has been the right kind of entertaining.  We have a CIA intelligence analyst who used to be assigned to a program investigating ESP, an engineer convinced he's built an alien spaceship, a security specialist and an archaeologist.  Already the security specialist has picked up the nickname 'Avocado' due to being decades younger than the rest of the party.

I ran them through 'Last Things Last', the adventure from the Need To Know document, as it looked like a nice introduction to the system.  Apart from some wobbles when I couldn't remember how criticals worked it all went pretty smoothly.  (I later located the relevant section of the GM screen.)  Asking for skill scores without rolling works well - necessary information could be put out there without depending on dice rolls.  A bit of a change for the players, who are used to rolling for everything, but we were starting to get the hang of it and it should get easier as we spend more time playing.  The adventure definitely helped me as a GM to make this happen.

Players were initially reluctant to use the leaning on bonds mechanic to reduce sanity loss, resulting in them spending a lot of time running away, but by the end of the first session we'd pretty much figured that one out.  I think I need to spend a little more time over the home scenes between missions and make sure the players are all clear on how that works.

Luck as a straight 50:50 was something I liked.  I used it when a PC wanted to find an archaic piece of technology, and decided success would mean he found one in an antique shop at a reasonable price.  Nice and easy for everyone to understand.


Combat was excellent.  Very smooth and uncomplicated.  The antagonist provided in the starter adventure is strong enough to be a real threat, but nothing a team of three agents with handguns (Avocado had run off at this point) couldn't handle.  The real threat here was the sanity loss - just as it should be.

I'm a little unclear on how some parts of the system work, particularly forming bonds with Delta Green, and how to deal with mental disorders (given that two players started with them and one gained another one in the first session this is quite important) but further reading the rules should sort that out.

The GM screen is very well put together.  I got the PDFs in the Bundle of Holding, so printed it out and constructed my own screen (see future post on that subject).  I referred to it quite a lot over the course of the game and it saved me a lot of searching through PDFs.  Being landscape rather than portrait, it's low enough for a short torsoed person like me to see over without any trouble, even though it did mean I had to construct my own screen rather than using one of the many generic screens available to buy online.

First impressions are that this game is a lot of fun to run.  With a bunch of adventures included in the bundle I bought, I've got enough to keep this going as long as we all want to play even without writing my own, but I also think I could have some fun writing my own adventures.  This is an excellent game and I can't wait for my hard copies to arrive.