Delta Green Discussion and Ideas

>47367380 Here:
Yeah, pretty much.
Without a roll, they find the main clue, let's say a note saying "J, meet me in the library at 6, K"
A succesful roll would let them find a diary with a note "meet J @ Simson Library; 6pm" - this lets them narrow down the details - it could have been either of the two libraries on campus, but now they know which library it is. If time would be a critical factor, this means that they could work out travel time from the dorm to that location, and they'd be able to check security feeds to confirm J and K's entry times to that building.
A really good roll might give them something extra again - a booking receipt for a computer lab or research room or something, which again helps them narrow down their search. Now they know exactly where J and K where, and can look for further clues there.

Not OP, but that's an awesome idea. Thanks!

Bump for DG

>Okay, so what do you suggest? My players aren't toooo *chan friendly.
Use parts of the site and its "culture" as plot hooks.
Maybe the puppeteer is motivated by the artistic value of its crimes rather that causing suffering or by financial gain. The creature's own kind might be following his "thread", and making suggestions and critique what to do next.
The gods and aliens themselves might see humanity as a game. Their motivation might be to compete with one another with or without a set of rules, and relive the good old days of Babylon before DLCs and DRM were a thing.
Shapechangers might be motivated by their desire to impersonate a person perfectly, rather than to gain power. They will copy all idiosyncracies and abnormalities of the person they're impersonating. Shapechangers who use their abilities for power and espionage are frowned upon. They all meet several times per year to exchange gossip and shapeshifting skills.
Your game could have a nazi-alien cult centered around a page on the quote unquote dark web. The main ideologist for the cult isn't and was never a nazi, but an unemployed history major who wanted to see how far he could go. He doesn't use the internet anymore, after accidentally causing the aliens to come to Earth. There are several copycat ideologists all claiming to be him, in various parts of the world. The original has since married a black woman and gotten a job as a brewery manager.

I like it. Good premise, solid hook.

So what happens when they arrive on campus, is the student flagged in the system one of the trio? If they immediately move in is the trio together? What other complications are there that require investigation? Where are the trio hiding their torture dungeon and how are they keeping people from hearing the screams? Do the PCs have to contend with an official investigation into the disappearances being run by FBI NPCs?

>So what happens when they arrive on campus
It's a liberal arts college. They get told to go fuck themselves by ~90% of the student body.
>is the student flagged in the system one of the trio?
No, the flagged one is an anthropology student who has a social and academic rivalry with one of the members of the trio.
>If they immediately move in is the trio together?
No. They'll probably be able to move on two of them at most.
>What other complications are there that require investigation?
The college has a farm. Cattle mutilations or something. There's a drug problem. These will be smaller problems, but ones nonetheless. The cattle mutilations I think will turn out to be """""""ironic"""""""" satanism, not ayys, and the drug problem will have something to do with mi-go medicine.
>Where are the trio hiding their torture dungeon and how are they keeping people from hearing the screams?
They've done some dimensional/rift magic so that if you say certain words at a certain place and time, the dorm block becomes a tesseract, and follows 4d geometry rules. So the players have to figure out that they have to go two "rooms" in the same direction to reach the hidden dungeon. And by rooms I mean housing blocks.
>Do the PCs have to contend with an official investigation into the disappearances being run by FBI NPCs?
Yes. The FBI will resent the players but generally be cordial unless one of them goofs up or is part of a hated agency.

>Maybe the puppeteer is motivated by the artistic value of its crimes rather that causing suffering or by financial gain.
Yeah, I like that. I'm not sure if one of the players will pick up on the hook of so there's this message board it's new you should probably check it out.
Not quite sure if the rest are setting-applicable, but thanks nonetheless

Alright, so from the PCs initial perspective there's a student (tangentially related to the antagonists) flagged by the NSA as handling DG-verboten materials and FBI officially investigating a bunch of disappearances in the area. At the other end you've got a group of students kidnapping, drugging and transforming students for an otherworldly entity.

Scribble these down at one end of a sheet of paper then circle them and put the scenario end points at the other end. In the intervening space come up with a swarm of interconnected nodes to get from one end to another, on average each node should connect to three others and each connection should have a couple of clues that can be used to make it. Then stick a couple of extra clues in the margins that can be used to connect any of the nodes on the fly if the game stalls, like fingerprints and DNA that take time to match or records that require a second part to be useful.

>the drug problem will have something to do with mi-go medicine
Probably best not to cross the streams too much, a little mythos goes a long way and using too much of it in a single scenario can make it seem like it's lurking behind every hedgerow. There's plenty of mundane horror in drug abuse that'll enhance the contrast.

Thank you so much!

I'm interested in running a legacy campaign of sorts, starting all the way back in WWII, all the way up through the present day. Each decade would play differently, such as the 40's being more combat focused due to WWII, while the 50's could be more noir-esque, focusing more on the investigations/mystery.

Overall, the idea is for it to be a mix of mini-campaigns that each woyld be a part of an overarching story about the organization and its attempts to hold off the encroaching doom of entropy/Carcosa. There would be one shots or shotgun scenarios thrown in to shake it up, with the main story only becoming more apparent through characters who may reappear decades later (provided they're not dead, but even death may not be permanent in a DG game), or previous investigations being reopened years later.

Mostly, I have always enjoyed seeing characters change, as well as seeing the consequences of the players' actions. I think such a format would at the very least encourage this sort of world building.

I have GM'd only a couple of times, so I know this might be a bit too ambitious. I was wondering if anyone had tried such a campaign, and if so what advice they might have.

Damn that sounds real nice. I just found out about the reprint finally coming out so I was hoping to use the quickstart to play a sesh with friends after we finish our 5e campaign, see what they think of it.

That's more or less the exact situation I'm in. Our rather goofy but nonetheless fun 5e campaign ended, and I volunteered to DM. The thing is, I asked the devs through facebook whether the Handler's Handbook would be coming out this summer and they said probably not. But I'm still hype.

I have not, but I think you should take a look at GUMSHOE and other related systems. You'd probably have to put in a LOT of effort w/r/t making each era feel fresh and distinct. Good luck.

Nice. One of the players also wants to play Deadlands, so I'm just trying to make the best of our weekly 1.5-2hr sessions to try and finish it up before July. The nice thing is that it seems a fairly light system.

I don't know anything about Deadlands apart from the merest basics but it looks like quite a fun system.

I have an idea for a fun "game" to play ITT- describe a supernatural or "strange" item- a book, a weapon, an artefact- but keep it more on the mundane side.
Example:
>This is a bottle that used to hold 2 litres of mountain dew. On a post-it note are instructions, saying that if fed with a cup of blood for each use, it will detect any toxin in it for two hours, by glowing brightly. Can also be used as a light source.

bomp

For those who don't now, LN, CN and CE are all SCP related. Not too sure about CG.

palinola.com/projects/lab/greenbox/

I am aware of that. I just wanted to have fun.

chaotic good is DG related, but they are mostly in the UK, that's where the mind parasites are usually in.

Pisces?

PISCES is the UK equivalent of DG, Shans are the alien mind parasites.
The Army of the third eye is a group of vigilantes who realized that Shans exists and try to free other people from that.

>The Army of the third eye is a group of vigilantes who realized that Shans exists and try to free other people from that
So they and PISCES fight a lot?

not really. The Army is just too small and they don't have a really pull. What they usually do is more on the side of harrasment, They never breached the Aerospace industry of the shans for example.
But the shans/pisces killed the original leader of the army at one assault/trap so there is that.

If I'm remembering right, they're the larval form of some alien that's alergic to sunlight. They've infiltrated Magestic, and they're being fought against with what is basically doing an IRA terrorist campaign.

not majestic but PISCES, but apart from that you are right. They are basically the IRA equivalent in this MYthos setting

Here's a case for some PISCES investigation:

bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-36332528

A homeless woman's body was discovered washed up on the shore of an island off the cost of Essex, England. The island belongs to the Ministry of Defence, but it operated by a private defence contractor.

The woman's cause of death is unknown because of the condition of the body. However she was found wearing a mask of electrical tape; it's unknown if it was put on before or after death.

The island's name is FOULNESS.

...

want to run M-EPIC campaign so hard. Especially as the last massive DG campaign I had ended with the characters fleeing to Canada, and death and betrayal on the way there.

So Shans have infected PISCES and the Army are all remove alien mindworm?

I had some cute ideas for objects found in a Green Box

>A row of coathooks nailed to one wall. Hung on it are a pair of black leather jackets. If the breast pocket of the first is cut out, someone will find a tattoo of a heart with a banner reading Brenda Forever. 1D4 San loss, 1d6 if the agent was wearing it during the removal. The second appears completely mundane. There's a small wallet containing 50$, relatively waterlogged.
>A stack of familiar children's books. They are different in a few ways from the original copies- the protagonists have been replaced with agents' childhood crushes, drawn to be recognisable in the illustrator's style. For three pages in the middle, the old favourite story breaks off into detailed descriptions of tearful sex and brutal murder-in the authors' idiosyncratic style. There is one for each agent. Atop them is an envelope containing a card, written in crayon and in a child's handwriting “thenk yew grammy for the nice prezzent”

There's a published campaign 'Escape from Innsmouth' (which parts of the 'Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth' video game were based off of) that follows the raid that went on to form Delta Green. I've been planning on running it as a flashback scenario based on one of my almost modern day PCs going to debrief an aging clerk mothballed in a rest home somewhere, like the short story 'Once More, From The Top' in Dark Theaters. Something like that might fit pretty well into what you're planning and if you decide to go with the flashback route the destruction of Delta Green archives by cryptologist Daniel Fries in 1955 provides a pretty good impetus for sending agents to try to recover information from old employees and agents.

I don't get the first, and for the second I'm not fond of items that seems to exist purely to fuck with the agents.

The first are jackets made from human skin.
The latter I think comes down to taste. Why do you dislike such items?

Human skin leather jackets.

Because it's too targeted. If the books adapt to anyone, that's ok, but they also need to do something besides fuck with people, or have a reason for doing so...

If they purely exist to mess with the players, there's no connection to the rest of the world, there's no real reason for them to be in a green box, there's no reason for the agents to keep them or investigate. It's just "More creepy shit, chuck it in the bin".

I'm especially uninterested in "creepy kid" stuff, it's so overdone and just feels lazy. YMMV, of course. In the same way, spiders don't particularly scare me or interest me, but one of my players gets shudders from the mere mention, yet is compelled to investigate to root out anything spider related.

I totally see where you're coming from. I guess they could change from person to person. I don't know. I'm still new to all this. Perhaps there is a small teddy hidden on every page-this will be reference to a later biggish bad

You smell a bit like Reddit, boy.

you could say that PISCES basically run by the Shans. And they are in other government stuff too although for a lesser extent.
The Army wants to kill every Shan and they have a fucking great intel on them because when a Shan infest a person they share the memories not just the bodies. So every Army member know a lot about the Shans and what they do.
Trick is, so far the Army members are only people who were infested and then freed from younger Shans that were already born on Earth, the elder Shans have way more intel which they keep from the younger ones and the little they share is covered in religious dogmas and shit.
Oh yeah, the Shans are hardcore Azathot followers.
Fun fact: because of these memories and stuff every Army members lost a lot of sanity, basically the Army is made up of insane people.

>People think hardcore bondage, pony porn and /b/ are scary
I don't know if you're too new or if I've been here too long.

could be both. But then again people here hardly raise an eyebrow to the tilefucker, to the rape factory, how hard it is to crawl up someone anus and we know how many spiders can fit inside a drow vagina. And we all it fun.

inb4...

Whatever 'culture' your PCs frequent don't be afraid to throw into it or current/IRL events.

The DG game i've been doing on and off is based on the current election with each candidate working for a mythos group, one of which the PCs are aware of (Serpent Men) and have sort of allied with due to them not being aliens and wanting humanity/earth to survive. Yes /pol/ and /x/, The Reptilians exist and they are the only thing standing between us and total enslavement.

As an example of how you can cater to your players, my /pol/tard PCs spent almost half an hour laughing their asses off when they found out that the mystery team hitting everyone indiscriminately was funded by Ron Paul and the team commander was a rogue DG agent, Ben 'The Migo Mutilator' Garrison.

More ideas please

Damn I miss Delta Green. I lost all my PDFs in a hard drive crash...

Could I still use DG if I didn't want to run a mythos heavy game?

There's no reason you can't, what did you have in mind?

Kinda a hodgepodge of things, with influences from Supernatural, Dresden Files, SCP among a few named ones
The players investigate "sightings" and things, and put these things down with brutal force

It's doable but you'd probably be better served picking up a game that focuses less on the 'horror of looking at nasty things and going mad because 'that shit ain't right'' aspect unless you're married to the mechanics. At the very least you'd have to examine what you want from the sanity mechanic or whether you want it at all.

Is Delta Green solely about investigating Cthulhu mythos creatures or involved in investigating the mythos?

Looks pretty solid, OP. If you don't mind, I'm gonna borrow the idea for my Delta Green campaign.

Setting-wise, yes. System-wise, the baggage it carries isn't excessive. You could quite easily just ignore the Cthulhu mythos aspects and throw in a bunch of other stuff.

the thing is Delta Green, especially the new system is heavily geared to the as little rolls as possible, and doing investigation stuff, heavy roleplay and if it happens short and brutal fights, mostly brutal to the players so they want to avoid it.
If you want "put things down with brutal force" as a main element of the campaign it might be not the best system for it, that is if you want shooting scenes like in Expendables or any other action movie.
In Delta Green when you have to do things by force you prepare a lot and try to put as much distance between you and your target as possible because there is a good chance that your target might not be even hurt by bullets, or at all and can do to you nasty things just by looking at you or by simply existing.

Anybody has the new Delta Green screen? Thanks in advance!

I'm an administrator for the vidya gaems club at my college, so I harvested my players from there- or rather, one of the people in the club ran a 5e campaign that I played in- and I volunteered to run the next game. None of them are /v/irgins or anything like that, but many of them are aware or at least comfortable with tumblr. So I'm making the apparent villain a genuinely nice person with they/them pronouns, but the mounting evidence indicates that they're the one dissappearing people. I will meme a tiny bit. Make reference to internet things. Make reference to jokes from the 5e campaign. Hell, I might even hide a clue on a tumblr page and have the players go look through it.

My girlfriend just ran Convergence with her new group. The PCs decided, since Mi-Go just take minimal damage from impaling weapons (using 6th Ed rules) , they would use martial arts against them.Well they died but still..One managed to tear one Mi-Go appart with their bare hands (pic related).

Is this awesome or retarted ? I haven´t decided yet

*retarded of course..jeez.

Anyone else listning to RPPR´s Delta Green campaign ? I think it´s pretty awesome so far.

Teeth of God? Fucking love it. I love the GM's use of imagery and foreshadowing, working in animal and teeth imagery well before hand so that it all seems super-creepy in retrospect.

Also, love how the trigger warnings trigger people who hate trigger warnings. ("I just got thirty more comments on this episode!")

I think Caleb is a really good GM. His other scenarios like Lover in the Ice and Bryson Springs are all very well done.

Know Evil was a pretty awesome first effort as a GM too.

Basically all of No Security is DG canon now, since Lover In The Ice got published. (Read the shit in the Green Box)

How do you effectively establish atmosphere?

There are a number of techniques you can use, ranging from environmental (i.e. literally messing with the environment to lower the lights, get low tense music playing etc) to narrative.

Now, "atmosphere" is one of those words that means very little by itself, so you really want too be a bit more specific about what KIND of atmosphere you want to establish. Given we're talking DG, you're looking at atmospheres of, say, conspiracy, slow-burn horror and good old government bureaucracy.

A great way to establish good "game-feel" or whatever you want to call atmosphere is by making some handouts. Governments love paperwork and terms, conspiracies fall apart when you look through their financials and it's a great way to drip in references to horrific events. You can also use redacted bars to really help sell the themes of government, conspiracy and horrific bullshit going on.

So like, make up letters and notes and files? I think I have access to a typewriter so I could indeed make older records. I've not really seen too much gov't paperwork and don't quite know how it sounds. I could even open with a mission briefing with A-cell. Use a voice modifier recording. Something like

Good evening Kestrel
You are cordially invited to a night at the Opera. Collect your tickets at [ADDRESS] on [DATE/TIME]. Don't be late, and wear something fancy!

And then hand out a mission briefing.

The typewriter would be great if you can get it going. If you have some of the first DG books they have plenty of documents in there that you can just model your stuff of, or have a look online for declassified government records, there are more being added every year.

Having a slightly archaic format for the doucment, such as the typewriter, also helps sell the Lovecraftian/Gothic angle of the narrative, which is layered accounts of the horror, stories within the stories.

Also, get a black marker for redacting the typed docs.

Okay. What sort of documents do you think would be relatively straightforward to make?
Crime reports, for one, possibly. Do you think I, as an undergrad in college, could write to my local police dept and ask them about how they do that sort of thing and not get told to fuck off?
Then again, I don't really think I could redact much from the relevant reports.
Alternatively, I could have the one survivor have given a report to the FBI, who heavily redacted it...
Sorry, I'm not thinking too clearly

Have a look at court records for criminal cases; those are often made available to the public and would include things like witness statements, confessions, police reports.

Thankyou user-kun

On the flip side fighting becomes extremely effective against other humans if your players set it up to give them the advantage.

Oh hey a Delta Green thread.

How do you guys go about making your scenarios? There are a lot of good Delta Green scenarios, but even then, you'll end up having to make a lot to follow any of the cool plot lines. I use a flow chart maker online to keep track of all the stuff in my missions, but even then it can be quite a bit of work.

I don't know quite yet, but I'll probably use your method or one similar.

Bump?

This has been helpful.

Bump with free stuff from the KS

So, I've been working on an idea for a DG campaign that revolves around frame narratives - stories within the story - ala The Final Revelation from Trail of Cthulhu.

The idea is that in the wake of the Canadian wildfire, a group of deputies, rangers and civilian volunteers are piecing through what's left of the local wilderness to chart the devastation and total cost of the fire to the small town of Logger's Rest when they find a hatch. The hatch leads to an underground facility operated by DG that slipped through the cracks during the legitimising in the early 2000's, and contains research documents, operation files, after-action reports etc going back years. All come back to the town in one way or another (which is why the facility was built here) and the investigators are drawn into the conspiracy as they learn more about the horrible history of Logger's Rest. So basically the idea is that each document represents a one-shot with pre-gen characters at different points in history, and they can be played in any order.

What I'd like help with is ideas for investigations that can somehow be connected to, or lead back to in one way or another, a small town near the US/Canada border.

So far I have:

>FBI profilers in the 1980's tracking a Mythos-connected serial killer discover he is the latest in a pattern of similar killers, all of whom has passed through Logger's Rest at some point
>60's era agents tasked with infiltrating student groups to ferret out Communism and other subversive ideologies, cross paths with a charismatic cult leader who was born in the town
>Gulf War 1 military operation to recover a captured soldier from Logger's Rest discover the facility in which he is being held has fallen into a massive pit, despite not being in a geologically unsound region. Delving into the tunnels in the hopes of discovering survivors brings the soldiers into contact with the Mythos.

Thoughts?

>not having made friends with ghouls
admittedly there was a long story there, but it worked out, and if I wind up running another DG campaign, the guy they report to will be from that old campaign, and he has resources.

How do Hounds of Tindalos work? The idea is intriguing but right now I feel like there's too much hand-waving involved in using them.

>Making friends with ghouls
Someone's getting disappeared.

Speaking of Ghouls I've actually been thinking about adapting this story for a game. How would you guys do it? Direct adaptation or make the PCs story a spin off of some sort? Maybe things don't go so well for G Cell and the PCs have to pick up the pieces and clean things up.

They're basically just a risk to time travelers who 'went too far'... or I suppose those in close proximity to said time travelers.

In order to attack it seems they need a local acute angle to manifest from but I've no idea the range that's supposed to require. I suppose one way to avoid them would just be to go live in the woods away from manufactured objects for a good while (hard to find proper angled surfaces there.)

Given their tendency to pursue time travelers across vast distances I'd assume one could attempt to deploy them against some time traveling foe (the Great Race of Yith comes to mind.) But to do that you'd need some way to lure them without appearing like a target yourself.

>Find all street signs
>Odd, I'm not familiar with that caution symbol

Hounds come very close to being a really good horror game monster. Basically if you travel through time or use a device that let's you look back through time there is a chance that you'll see a Hound and it will start tracking you. I forget the exact math behind it but if you peer back 30 million years or something and a Hound takes notice you have 30 days until the Hound successfully tracks you through time and space and kills you.

The big issue with them is that they don't really have any weaknesses. Once a Hound takes notice you're on a countdown until you're dead and that's really all there is to it. This makes them a cool and interesting creature to have kill an NPC but to put them against the players is kind of cheap I think. Like I know it's cosmic horror and everything but to have a PC get killed by something where the first encounter is very easy to write off as a minor creepy event that most likely won't be looked into much further without some GM prodding just doesn't sit right with me.

As I said though, they can be a very cool way to get rid of an NPC that has run his course. Imagine the PCs visit one of their contacts, maybe someone they've recently delivered a mysterious artifact to for whatever reason, and he is very uncharacteristically nervous and through the course of the meeting they start noticing that all of the sharp angles in his house have been deliberately filed down or smoothed out. If they question him about it he is very intent on avoiding the question out of fear that the PCs will make the same mistake he did. After a certain amount of time the NPC is found dead in his home and when the PCs get sent to check it out they find a single section of wall that the NPC neglected to smooth out.

There are ways to evade a Hound. You just won't like them.

Option 1: Flee across time. This requires considerable prep work. Results may vary - the Hounds will still pursue you, but it takes them slightly longer.

Option 2: Find or create an exact duplicate of yourself. From growing a simulacrum in a vat and imprinting a rapidly failing copy of your mind into it, or by snatching one from an alternate reality, or by dreaming yourself so vividly that two wake where one slept... all are options.

3: There are ten thousand rituals, charms, and spells that you can use to deflect or delay the Hounds. One or two of them might even work. Good luck. Maybe if you can track down a survivor...

have you read targets of opportunity? because you can find the whole background of that in the book and even more. I already plan to run a game like that for my players, things set after those happenings but before Katrina hits, so they can be knee deep in in sewage and corpses on the street

does that true for project rainbow too? I mean it's not time travel technically....

...

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What's the capstone for the series?

I don't believe Project Rainbow carries that risk, since everything happened within the last hundred years it's pretty minor when Hounds really get you for travelling hundreds of thousands or millions of years back or forward.
Then again, if you're running a game and it'd be fitting to have the Hounds show up, go for it.

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different ghoul colony, the one in the midwest, which was made up for the campaign.

Not all the ghouls are evil. The one in New Orleans is, but the one in New York is pretty decent, well the older ones are at least. The midwest ones were better feed than the New York ones, but not decadent and organized like the New Orleans ones. They basically wanted to be given dead bodies and otherwise left alone.

It was a mutually beneficial relationship. They even helped us out when there was an attack at the wedding in the dreamlands.

I actually REALLY like the idea of using an old DG archive as the framing device for a campaign built out of a collection of different decades-spanning one-shots.

Make sure that as you're DMing, you describe everything that's going on in a dry, stilted past-tense as if you were reading what happened directly from the files in question.

This, I feel, is important. You should find a way to sprinkle clues throughout each setpiece and link all the happenings across the decades to a grand finale that takes place in the present.