Delta Green, a few games in

I've run a bunch of games for my home group, and a bunch of games at conventions, and running Delta Green for the current iteration of the home group is absolutely playing on hard mode.

I've run three scenarios now: Last Things Last, from the Need to Know PDF, and Reverberations and Music from a Darkened Room from A Night at the Opera.  These are excellent scenarios and I would thoroughly recommend all three of them to someone new to running Delta Green.  But with a caveat: know your players.

Reverberations was not a good fit for my group.  I've mentioned before they tend to be a bit wacky, and this scenario really requires a more considered approach.  A bunch of key points got missed, and there was very little actual horror occurring.

Based on this I decided to skip the second scenario in the book (Viscid) and go straight on to the third.  I wanted something more like Last Things Last, with clear goals to achieve.  I also asked one of the players (my husband) to make some notes, so that they would have something to refer back to if attention spans started to flag.  Music from a Darkened Room is basically a haunted house adventure, and I was a lot more confident in my ability to make this one work.

And it largely did work.  A few wobbles, and enough of a mess left behind to keep DG busy for some time cleaning up, but I'm happy with how this one went overall.  I'm offering it as a one-shot at the FLGS at the end of March, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes with a different group.

I call this playing on hard mode because I don't normally run published adventures for the home group.  I might start out with one for a session or two, but as soon as that's finished I run entirely my own original material tailored to the PCs.  However, for games like Scion, Victoriana and The Dresden Files I have an extremely thorough grounding in the source material.  Delta Green's blend of Cthulhu mythos and conspiracy theories is new ground for me.  New and exciting ground, but I just don't know it well enough to start building on it yet.

So rather than writing stories tailored to the PCs, I'm having to find scenarios that suit them.  Three adventures in I think I've got a better grasp of what that actually means.  And I've got just under a week to work out what to run next.