Projection in Delta Green

One thing I love about Delta Green is the bond mechanic.  In purely mechanical terms, agents have bonds with loved ones, which can be used as ablative sanity armour - when you lose sanity, you can choose to project onto a bond, and reduce the sanity loss at the expense of reducing your connection with that person.

True Detective series 1 illustrates this pretty well.  At the start of the show, in 1995, Hart has a wife and children, while Cohle has nobody.  By 2012, Hart has all but destroyed his relationship with his family, but is still pretty much keeping it together, while Cohle, with no bonds to project onto, has gone entirely off the rails.

We've just finished playing the superb Delta Green adventure Viscid, and when I fumbled a sanity roll that I really didn't want to fumble, I decided it was time for a bit of bond projection.  I didn't have much time to think about the implications of it at the time, but after a bit of thought it's all making sense to me.

Minor spoilers for Viscid below.

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Emily had never stopped loving John.

Their marriage hadn't worked out; it had been a struggle even before the incident and impossible afterwards.  Divorce had been a relief.  But it turned out that without the pressure of being his wife, it was easy to be his friend.

She didn't think about her home life while working.  Even her regular work put her in contact with the worst of humanity, and then there were the special jobs.  Like this one, which had already claimed the lives of two of the team.

And then that...thing, that creature of flesh and slime that somehow still had enough brain to remember a name and enough mouth to call it out, came crawling into the house.  She'd kept it together before, out by the trailer, determined not to embarrass herself in front of Matt and Glenn.  But this time, knowing what - knowing who - this time she couldn't.  And as she ran she thought of John.

There was nothing to be afraid of, she told herself, even as she went stumbling out of the house and into the garden.  Just a man, scared and confused, looking for his wife.  Just like John had called out for her in the hospital.  And then Glenn was there to unpeel her fingers from the gas can that had somehow seemed so vital to hold onto, and once she knew that the creature was gone for good she started feeling a little better.

But the trouble was, now she'd made the association between that creature and John, she couldn't forget it.  Every time she saw him, every time she spoke to him, every time she so much as thought of him, it was there.  In her nightmares it was her name that the creature called out, and John's voice with which it spoke.

Emily still loved John.  But, she couldn't help wondering, for how much longer?

Running Delta Green: Nobody Suspects A Thing

It was the Crowne Plaza hotel at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport where the team next met up, where they were greeted, not by Agent Chung, but by Agent Pakrati.  He looked a lot happier to see them, and explained that they'd been brought in for this mission due to past experience and that it was going to require subtlety.

They were to investigate Bertram "Bert" Heaviside, an accountant whose strange dreams as relayed to his physician had caught the Program's attention.  They were to find out if the dreams meant what the Program suspected, but also to find out if there was more to this potential unnatural incursion than just one person.

They began, once again, with Avocado getting on his laptop to do some background digging.  He found a rather sparce facebook profile, with pictures of Bert and his wife, Wilhelmina, a.k.a. Bill, and their two children, Doug and Katy.  A slightly more fleshed out LinkedIn profile had details of his accountancy job at Wells Fargo.

After considering a number of potential plans, they decided to keep it simple, and do a 24 hour surveillance on Bert to see if he was going for midnight swims or anything.  They saw him leave the house at 7am to take the bus to work, then leave the office at 1am, walk down to the shore, buy a sandwich, and eat it while staring out at the water.  Avocado had a short chat with him, where he claimed to be looking for seals.

After lunch he went back to work, and from there back home.  He had, as far as they could tell, an entirely normal evening at home with his family, and then went to bed.  But at 1am he emerged again and walked back down to the shore.  There he stripped off and went for a swim.

Crusty considered stealing his clothes, then having him arrested for public nudity, but in the end they settled for bugging his clothes.  After he'd swum for about an hour, he got out, got dressed and went home.

They needed to know more, and with the whole family out at work or school during the day, that seemed like the best time for a visit.  Avocado got them into the building with minimal effort and they began searching.

Buzz went for the home office.  He found some of Bert's paintings - disturbing imagery with a distinctive octopus theme - and a small statuette of a cuttlefish eating a smaller cuttlefish, accompanied by a note:
"It's time.
-Mom."

The statuette was distinctly unpleasant to hold, but Buzz was unable to determine if there was anything unnatural about it.  He called in Bones for a look, who identified it as being around a hundred years old, and possibly related to an incident known as the Great Octopus Hoax, when many small statues like this were created and distributed under false pretenses.

Avocado remembered the biomarker testing kits from the trip to Alaska, put in a call to requisition some, and went looking for DNA samples.  The bedroom proved a good source, with a bin full of used condoms.  Apparently Bert and Bill had been busy.  He also managed to get hair from the rest of the family's hairbrushes.

Bones had a look in the children's bedroom.  The younger child, Katy, enjoyed drawing.  Her notebook has a lot of pictures of her family, but notably, the most recent picture of her father included a number of tentacles.

It was clearly time to talk to the family.  Having previously acquired appropriate law enforcement credentials, they made use of the local FBI field office for questioning.

Crusty, as the one person with actual social skills, did the questioning, with prompting from the others.  They learned that he enjoyed the swimming because it was good for his skin condition - some kind of eczema.  After some prompting he acknowledged that the strange streams, skin condition and so on had all started around the same time as the statue arrived.  He was pretty sure someone was playing a joke on him, because it said 'Mom' and his mother had died when he was sixteen.

Avocado's background dive said that checked out.  She'd drowned during a trans-Atlantic boat trip.  'Drowned'.

They talked to the rest of the family.  Bill seemed pretty oblivious to the whole thing.  Katy was aware there was something a bit odd about her dad having tentacles but she didn't mind because she still loved him.  Doug didn't know anything about his dad having tentacles, but did admit to having snuck into his dad's office to play with his cool statue.

It was looking bad.  And it looked worse once the results of the biomarker tests came back.  Bert and both his children tested positive.  It looked like it was running in the family.

They met up again with Agent Pakrati.  The statue had to be destroyed.  There was no way the family could be left where they were.  Agent Pakrati assured them there was a suitable facility well away from the ocean where they could be taken, thanked them for successfully securing the threat and congratulated them on a job well done.

With the mission complete, Avocado headed home to spend some time practicing at the gun range.  Bones requested assignment to the research facility where the family were being taken.  Not for any reason.  No reason he told any of the team, anyway.  Buzz continued his research into gates.  And Crusty decided to stay on the case, and see if he could find out exactly where that cuttlefish statue had come from.

Running Delta Green: Gathering the Magic

Time for another game of Delta Green, and this time I decided to try out another of Jake "ChiefMcCLane" Cook's scenarios: Gathering the Magic.

The team met up with Agent Chung again, who seemed about as pleased to see them as they were to see her, reminding them of how she'd had to cover up the murder of the professor in the haunted house.  She had a new assignment for them though.  A college student had bought a book from a honeytrap website run by the Program.  Their job was to find out if there was anything unnatural going on or if he was just a teenage edgelord trying to be cool.  They were supplied with a dummy book, a UPS uniform and a van.

Rather than head straight there, Avocado did some research.  They learned that their subject, Timothy Michaels, was a computer science student at Princeton, and appeared to be a mega nerd.  He lived with his parents rather than on campus.  His browser history consisted largely of visiting Reddit, where he was a member of /r/atheism, /r/mtg/ and other nerd things.  Nothing flagged up as suspicious in his background.  The only out of the ordinary thing was a recent hospital admission.

It was time to pay a visit.  Crusty, with his good HUMINT skills, was chosen to make the delivery, and managed to convince Timothy to come out to the van for a chat.  He was quite willing to talk, and explained that he had to take the book to the Magic: The Gathering tournament he was going to the following evening.  He seemed a bit confused about why, but mentioned that he'd been taken to the hospital for amnesia, although he was sure he was fine now.

Clearly Timothy was not a problem, but someone at the Magic tournament probably was.  Time to check out the Friendly Local Game Shop.

It was early evening when they arrived, and games were in full swing.  They were welcomed in by the owner, who enthusiastically showed them around.  Avocado took a particular interest in both the X-Wing miniatures and the very high quality security cameras.

He told them it was D&D night, and when asked if it was only D&D, assured them that they had both kinds of roleplaying there - D&D and Pathfinder.  Yu-Gi-Oh was on Tuesdays, and Friday was the magic tournament.  Unfortunately he couldn't invite them to play as it was final and everything was already set.  Who was the favourite to win?  That would be David Kaley.

They left the shop and did some more research.  The shop owner checked out, having been running the place for ten years.  The tournament checked out too - an official Magic Grand Prix with a $35,000 prize and guest referees brought in specially.

David Kaley, on the other hand, was a fake.  Crusty and Avocado between them tracked down his real identity: Daniel Thompson.  Running a few checks they found a couple of tangentially related police reports, one about his father who was missing and one about a possible marijuana growhouse at his address that had never been followed up on.

They decided to pay Daniel a visit.  It was dark by the time they arrived, but they could still see that there was less snow on one side of the roof than the other.  Avocado had a sudden brainwave.

"That's not a growhouse.  That's a server farm."

Buzz got out his infra-red camera and noticed that while the outside of the house appeared to be in darkness, through the camera it was brightly lit up.  There had to be infra-red emitters all over the place, probably from security cameras with night vision.

Nobody answered the door when they knocked, and Avocado opened the door to a hideous sight - empty pizza boxes and takeaway cartons as far as the eye could see, an appalling stink of rotten food, and something moving in the layers of filth.  Bones threw up immediately.

Crusty did a sweep of the house, finding the remains of a dead body on the dining table, a server farm in the office, and a dead german shepherd in the bedroom.  No sign of Daniel.  A more systematic search located some eldritch looking carvings of interlocking circles on the dining table, and a gaming rig and a bucket of silver jewellery on the table in the bedroom.

Avocado investigated the technology, easily identifying a crypto-currency mining operation.  He shut down the security and took a look at the cameras.  Daniel had been here shortly before they arrived, watching an episode of Star Trek TOS and eating a pizza.  Looking further back through the archives he noticed something strange: Daniel appeared to have arrived at the house significantly more frequently than he'd left it.

There was something strange about one wall of the office.  A slight shimmer.  In the interests of science, Buzz got out a pencil and poked it.  The pencil went straight through.  Avocado tried with an endoscope, and saw that on the other side of the wall there appeared to be a library.

Everyone piled through.

They were in a room full of very old books, that looked like they weren't often disturbed.  However, they had been disturbed, and a dust-free patch showed where something had recently been removed.  There was no sign of Daniel, so they had a look at the card catalogue and concluded that the missing book was one called Livre D'Ivon.

Avocado checked his GPS to see where they were.  Two states away, in Northampton, Massachusets.  Buzz was very excited.  The time on their phones suggested that they had travelled pretty much instantly.  With an atomic clock he could determine exactly how fast they had travelled.

The portal they had come through could not be found, however, and they still hadn't got hold of Daniel.  They called Agent Chung to request a car so they could drive back to Princeton.  She was somewhat sarcastic, but did send someone to pick them up.  They quietly exited Smith College, doing their best to look inconspicious despite being four men currently disguised as nerds trying to sneak out of a women's college.

A librarian met them, and quickly explained that she would not be driving them back.  She was just dropping off the car for them.  She got out, leaving them the key, and they began the long drive back to Princeton.

It was past midnight when they got back, but rather than attempt to sleep (never an easy matter for Crusty) they decided to have another go at finding Daniel.  This time he was at home, deeply immersed in a game of Call of Duty.  Crusty gave him a punch in the face, and when he reached for a revolver that he had concealed in the piles of junk on the desk, he was immediately shot dead.

Crusty set into motion his next plan, which was to burn down the house, and began sprinkling petrol around the living room.  And then they heard a sound.  The sound of burning, even though they hadn't set a fire yet.

A living column of flame emerged from the office, and lashed out at Bones with flaming appendages.  It missed him, and Avocado grabbed a fire extinguisher to try to stop it, but failed to aim it correctly.  Everyone decided it was time to leave the house.

The petrol went up shortly afterwards and the place was rapidly completely ablaze.  However, there was still sign of movement in there.  The living flame was still present.  They called Agent Chung - could she dispatch a friendly fire engine?

A team of fire fighters showed up shortly afterwards and the blaze was quenched.  There was no sign of the living flame.

Back home, Crusty decided he really did need to get some therapy this time, but Bones and Buzz had both been intrigued by the things they had seen and decided to do some research, Bones into ifrits once he realised what he'd seen in the house, and Buzz into how Daniel had created the gate.  He found answers in a very interesting book.

Avocado, looking for a bit of normality for once, went home, met up with his business partner, and actually did some work.

Running Delta Green: Black Winter, part 2

The crab man was dead, and in an aquarium it wasn't too hard to dispose of the remains.  There was still time for a bit of science though.  Bones examined the remains, and noted that the creature's legs were quite spindly compared to the rest of it, and might be more prone to damage.  He also attempted to determine sex, but concluded that he really didn't know the sexual dimorphism of mutant crab people.  The creature was reclassified from crab man to crab person.  There was something disturbingly human about the creature's form, however, and searching the remains located an amalgam filling lodged in its mouth.

They still had the two sleeping men in their foamy cocoons.  Avocado suggested attaching one of the radio trackers the aquarium used on seals to one of them and sending him out to sea to see what happened, but Hernandez wasn't entirely happy with what he saw as basically human sacrifice, and in the end they decided to take them both to the medical centre.

The first one woke up easily enough, thrashed about briefly, and raved about a dark watery void and the thing waiting in the ocean.  Bones got samples off both of them to run through the testing kits.  The second woke up in a similar state, but once they had both calmed down a bit, Avocado was able to get some information out of them.  Both were overweight, and had put more weight on recently.  Neither of them had eaten anything out of the ordinary recently, but both said it had seemed like a good idea to eat a lot.

It was starting to get light, and the medical centre staff were arriving.  Bones took the opportunity to get his arm seen to, making up an excuse for the wound.  None of the team had had any sleep.  Once they were away from the medical centre, Crusty handed out meth.

Crusty wanted to pay another visit to the dam.  Hernandez drove him back upstream, and he talked to the chief engineer, and learned it was going to take at least a month before they were going to get the dam in anything resembling working order and the turbines back on.

Bones checked the completed tests on Steve and Jeff.  Both negative for whatever it was the test was for.  He also serruptitiously tested himself, given how badly the crab man had wounded him.

Avocado had a theory.  Something was causing people to eat more to fatten them up for use as food.  The three people who'd been attacked rather than disappearing had all been rather more athletic than the typical resident of Bear Point.  He decided to have another talk with them.

The two women chatted happily enough.  They mentioned that they sometimes got accused of being lesbians because they chose to share a house.  They weren't, but they weren't going to let homophobia stop them living together.  James mentioned that people thought he was a bit weird for living on the edge of town and had tried to persuade him to move to the centre, but he liked it out there, and his house was one of the few that wasn't flooded, so who was laughing now?

Hernandez dropped off Crusty with the others, but not long afterwards radioed them to let them know a shipping container of supplies had come in, and he thought it might have a false back because it seemed to be smaller on the inside.  This must be the equipment that Agent Pakrati had promised them.

Buzz's knowledge of physics and engineering confirmed that there was a false back, and where the door release mechanism was likely to be.  Avocado soon had it open and they passed around the weapons inside.  Struggling to use a shotgun since the previous night's injury, Bones took the submachine gun, while Crusty took ownership of the grenade launcher.

They needed a plan.  The idea that the crab person they'd killed was the only one seemed too good to be true.  Hernandez was unhappy with some of the initial plans, which tended towards the 'nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure' end of the scale, but finally they came up with something.  The turbines were out of action, and the town was depending on diesel generators for power.  New supplies had just come in on the container, and the diesel was being held at the airport for distribution.  If they could destroy the diesel dump, they could simultaneously cut off power to the town, making it easier to force an evactuation, and also cause an environmental disaster that probably wouldn't go well for the crab people.

Actually destroying the diesel dump proved something of a challenge.  Hernandez suggested getting one of the army engineers from the dam to help, but they didn't want anyone else knowing what was really going on.  In the end they waited until nightfall and then deployed Buzz, who had some past experience with artillery, and Crusty, who didn't want to relinquish control of the grenade launcher.  There were a few practices with tear gas grenades before switching to explosives.  It took a few attempts, but at last the town's entire diesel supply was spreading across the bay while a cloud of tear gas blew towards town.

Then wading through the water came an angry, slightly oily, crab person.  Slightly different to the one they'd seen before, with extra legs, huge pincers for hands, and a long tail with a barbed end.  Everyone piled back into the Zodiac, and at Crusty's instruction, Hernandez drove it straight at the creature.  Avocado and Buzz fired at it, and then the boat smashed into it, bouncing off and throwing everyone around.  As Bones fired, the creature snapped its pincers at him, but missed.

Crusty threw a grenade that merely exploded a small column of water.  Avocado and Buzz kept firing their shotguns.  Bones sprayed bullets from the submachine gun.  The creature reached out with its pincers again, this time grabbing hold of Bones and jabbing him with its barbed tail.

But Crusty's grenade finally landed exactly where he wanted it.  The explosion right underneath the crab person's body ripped it apart.  Bones was dropped into the freezing water, the shock almost knocking him unconscious, but he managed to hold it together long enough for Hernandez to grab him and haul him back into the boat.

They went straight back to the medical centre to get Bones treated for hypothermia.  They had decided to blame the fuel explosion and gas cloud on a terrorist attack, and Crusty took up the task of convincing the town that the only option at this point was to evacuate on the supply ship.  A tough job, faced with stubborn Alaskans, but combined with the fact they were about to lose power, the environmental disaster meaning they were also going to struggle for food, and Alice at the aquarium being absolutely determined to get her sea otters to safety, they were eventually persuaded and the evacuation began.

The town was duly abandoned, and the agents were able to make their way back to Anchorage, and from there back home.  Bones tipped off Delta Green about the three positive tests.  He said nothing about the wound he'd taken on his torso that looked very similar to the ones on the three attack victims.  Or about the second test he'd administered on himself.  The one that came back positive.

Running Delta Green: Black Winter

The scenarios collected in A Night at the Opera are individually and collectively amazing, but what I really need is something a bit more tailored to my group.  That means both something we can all get our heads round and something which suits the style of this particular group of PCs, which could be summed up as 'prefer shotguns to subtlety'.  So I asked the internet for advice; specifically the Good Friends of Jackson Elias discord, where I got a recommendation: Black Winter by Jake "ChiefMcCLane" Cook.

Here's how it went down.

Our team consists of four agents:
'Crusty', a former CIA intelligence analyst of Native American ancestry who was previously posted to the Stargate project.
'Buzz', a conspiracy theorist who claims to have worked on alien spaceships.
'Bones', a historian and anthropologist who's encountered some weird things.
'Avocado', a physical security expert and computer scientist who got called into the wrong crime scene.

Previously the team have worked with a single handler, who calls herself Agent Chung.  Right now she's not too fond of them.  While their last mission did result in complete success regarding locating and stopping the unnatural incursion, the amount of mess left behind was significant.  Having to cover up the brutal murder of a beloved university professor has kept her busy for quite some time.  So when an urgent mission came up in Alaska that called for agents with old school tradecraft skills, she was quite happy to let someone else deal with them for a change.

Via the usual subterfuge, the players found themselves flying into Anchorage, where they were met by Agent Pakrati.  He gave them a briefing, a selection of somewhat random objects, including a radio transmitter and some unspecified organic material testing kits, then packed them into a Cessna and sent them on their way.

Their destination was the town of Bear Point, normally a town funded by tourism and fishing, but currently under four foot of water due to a burst dam and a damaged sea wall.  Their cover as FEMA consultants got them access to pretty much everything they needed.  They located the DG friendly - Hernandez - pretty quickly, and kept him around pretty much constantly, his access to a Zodiac and ability to drive it making him invaluable in the flooded town.

They decided to start by following up on the recent attacks.  They talked briefly with the victims, and took samples from each of them for testing, then went to visit the scenes of the attacks, where they obtained more suspicious material for testing.  Hernandez told them a little about how he'd come into contact with Delta Green - trying to rescue his friend from drowning and ending up in a fight with some kind of fish man.  Just as they were leaving the second scene, however, they realised they were being watched.

The news reporter failed to give a particularly good explanation of why he was following them around, but they did manage to learn that he was failing to get anything from the army engineers up  at the broken dam.  They decided to pay a visit.

Part way through the two hour journey up to the dam, the test kits began to return results.  Positive, for whatever it was they were testing for.  In accordance with their instructions, Avocado activated the radio transmitter.

They were unable to get much useful information out of the staff at the damn, but did manage to get a look at the blueprints.  Buzz, an experienced engineer, was able to identify the cause of the breach.  An explosion in the storage area.  Some new parts had been delivered recently, but that was routine parts for maintaining the turbines.  It looked like sabotage was involved.

Next stop was the Inuit village museum, where they had a look round and admired the remarkable size of the taxidermy crab on display, but ultimately concluded they should go back to the town.  By now it was getting dark.  The aquarium seemed like a good place to go next, and as an emergency shelter they could spend the night there too.

They were greeted by zookeeper Alice, who was very happy to have them there, and keen to tell them about how great sea otters were, even if they were acting a bit weird at the moment.  Attempting to get out and leave was quite normal behaviour for the octopuses, but rather more unusual for the seals and sea otters.

They bedded down for the night - or at least, Buzz, Bones and Avocado did.  Crusty wasn't a good sleeper, and it seemed Hernandez wasn't either.  Not that the others got restful nights, however, with all three of them dreaming about drowning, and Buzz awakened convinced that there was something terrible in the sea and it was coming for them.

Word quickly arrived that there had been another disappearance, in addition to the three they were already aware of.  The reporter.

Hernandez drove them to his house, where they found Deputy Chesterfield already present and conducting an investigation.  She explained her theory that a serial killer was using the flood as cover for these sick crimes.  However, spotting a door handle that had been oddly crushed, almost as if it had been held in the grip of a giant crab pincer, the team weren't so sure.

There was nothing for it.  They were going to have to tool up and go hunting crab people.  They drove around until they found a sporting goods shop that wasn't completely underwater and bought some shotguns.  They also picked up some explosives (for fishing, according to the shopkeeper) and some night vision goggles.

First Avocado wanted to do a test, to see exactly where it was that the aquarium creatures were trying to get to.  He convinced Alice to loan them an octopus.  His name was Philip, and he apparently enjoyed taking photographs.  He was also keen to escape, but experimentation proved that all he really wanted was to get to the sea.

It seemed like the crab attacks were happening at night, and the fewer people there were around the better, they decided, and spent the rest of the day convincing people to get as far away from the harbour as possible.

Once darkness fell they took up positions by the aquarium.  After a while they spotted something floating on the water, which on closer inspection turned out to be two people, both asleep, and wrapped in some kind of slimy material which matched something they'd found in the reporter's house.  They took the people into the aquarium, and Bones and Crusty resumed their watch.

And there it was.  A monstrous crab man, spindly legged and pincered, climbing out of the water.  Shots were fired immediately.  Crusty's went wide, but Bones' hit it square in the chest.  It attacked, seriously injuring Bones with its massive pincer, but as the others joined the attack, the hail of shot reduced it to crab meat.

And there we had to leave it.  We'll pick up again next week for more crab and shotgun action.

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.

Home Made GM Screen

The Bundle of Holding that I bought for Delta Green included, amongst other things, PDFs of the GM screen.  I thought about buying a universal GM screen, of the kind you can slot pages into, but soon realised pretty much every one on sale was portrait, while the Delta Green screen is landscape.

I found one on DriveThruRPG, but with international postage costing as much as the screen itself, I wanted a cheaper option.  So I went DIY.

If you want to make a screen like this, you will need in addition to scissors and tape:

Thin card suitable for printing

Plastic ring binder envelopes

Some corrugated cardboard

• Print out the GM screen pages onto the card.
• Cut out pieces of cardboard the same size as the printed card.
• Insert into ring binder envelopes, making sure the open ends are not at the ends of the screen.
• Tape the envelopes together, ensuring the open ends are still open on one side.

Since I already had all these things, this effectively cost no money besides a bit of printer ink. It might not be the prettiest screen out there but it does the job.

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.

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.