Unspeakable! activity detected! Deploy DELTA GREEN cell

theunspeakableoath.com/home/2016/08/unspeakable-episode-25-delta-green-at-gen-con-2016/

bump

INTRODUCTION. Hosted by Shane Ivey with Dennis Detwiller, Adam Scott Glancy, Kenneth Hite, and Greg Stolze. Cruelly laughing at characters’ misfortunes, or the catharsis of tragedy. Agent’s Handbook and Need to Know are shipping now. In the pipe: The Fall of Delta Green; Control Group, an introductory scenario collection; Impossible Landscapes, a campaign about the King in Yellow; Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, formerly Case Officer’s Handbook, in PDF probably late 2016; PISCES; Deep State; PDF adventures — “Kali Ghati,” “The Star Chamber,” and “Lover in the Ice” available now; “VISCID,” “Observer Effect,” “Wormwood Arena,” “Iconoclasts,” and “Redacted Files” in the works.

THE FALL OF DELTA GREEN AND THE MYTHOS IN DELTA GREEN. Night’s Black Agents as the happy-go-lucky option. Options for tracking the increasing difficulties of the Sixties and for alternate modes of play. New interpretations of Cthulhu Mythos threats.

DELTA GREEN: THE ROLE-PLAYING GAME. Why we renamed the book. It’s current to 2016. Lessons learned from the Kickstarter. Being shaky about delivery dates. Being conservative with funding goals. No tchotchkes. Oh yeah, we won Ennie Awards this year! Silver for Supplement and Gold for Free Product. Magic and psychic powers in DG.

THE UNNATURAL IN THE MODERN WORLD. The Faking Hoaxer. Lovecraft wrote contemporary technothriller fiction. Embracing communications and exposure as a source of horror and suspense. Human science is not a threat to alien intelligences. Fairness in scenarios. The limits of understanding.

UPDATING THE DELTA GREEN ORGANIZATION. Different pressures for different play styles.

IS THE SUPERNATURAL STILL FRIGHTENING? Building a horrifying scenario around great or relatively small threats. Using confidence against the players.

PHENOMEN-X AND THE PX PENUMBRA. Demonstrating how the world interprets “proof” of the Unnatural.

BONDS. Be Marty, not Rust. Using Bonds as Sanity Armor.

>Be Marty, not Rust.
Without Rust, Marty wouldn't have done shit.

...

...

I was there for that panel, it was pretty good. Fingers crossed the FULMINATE recording wasn't too fucked up and sees the light of day on their AP stream.

So, here's an idea for a DG scenario I've had, Veeky Forums, want to hear what you think.

[Operation FISHERMAN]

On March 2nd, at 14:02 hours, retrieved security camera footage shows Abdul Lateef Doud (32, second-generation Pakistani-American) enter the Slice of Heaven diner on East Lombard Street, Baltimore. Doud sits at the counter, wiping sweat from his brow, and orders coffee and a chef's "hungry man" special from the waitress.

At 14:10, Doud explodes. Baltimore police call the Feds, thinking suicide bomber. An explosives expert files a confused report claiming an inability to locate any sort of explosive used in the bomb - it seems that Doud BURST rather than exploded, since all the 'bomb shrapnel' appears to actually have been teeth and bone - which is when someone in the Program takes notice and a cell is assembled.

Doud was receiving off-the-books medical treatment for liver cancer, as he was unable to afford the full expenses of legitimate medicine. His doctor - in fact not a practising physician but a medical researcher by the name of Madeline Greer - was giving him back-alley blood transfusions. Greer has been giving people the same bag of blood for their medical treatment, as it never runs out...

The "blood" is in fact proto-Shoggoth, a sample that made its way to Baltimore from the Dyer expedition to the Mountains of Madness. The sample's unusual regenerative properties were noted by a biologist, who took it to study. In the 1950's, it made its way to Baltimore where it was used as the basis for a medium for storing cells (the recipe at the time involving placental blood and spinal fluid). When it immortalised the cervical cancer of Henrietta Lacks, it revolutionised modern medicine - but the original sample was thought lost. Until Greer inherited it in her grandfather's estate.

Essentially it becomes a time bomb to track down all the people Greer has treated using Shoggoth-tainted blood before they become meat-bombs like Doud or worse.

Thoughts?

So who has their Agent's Handbook? I'm (kind of) regretting not going for the 'full' game. Guess I'll be dropping more money.

Does the proto-Shoggoth look like actual blood or does Greer have to keep the sample hidden from whoever she gives transfusions to?

I've only paged through the pdf a bit but from what I've heard the Agent's Handbook only contains information that would be relevant to players. If you want more in depth setting information you're gonna have to shell out for the Case Officer's Handbook which is next on the list of physical books they're releasing but doesn't have a date yet.

The proto-Shoggoth is mixed with blood so that it keeps making "more blood" so it LOOKS like just an IV bag of blood that maybe always swirls, like it never settles or is fully "at rest".

People who receive doses from it start getting, well, shoggoth-y. Meat-bomb is just how it came out in Doud - he appeared to have been recovering very well from cancer and had a substantially improved appetite and was regaining a lot of lost weight, but in fact he was just fuelling the shoggoth growth going on under the skin. The detonation was not actually FATAL to Doud because he was so shoggoth-y at that point and the investigators are going to have to keep the evidence baggies separate because they're going to keep trying to crawl back together..

Another specimen is going to have gotten into a student at a local liberal arts college, who was paying tuition doing medical testing literally everywhere they could (because clinical trials fucking pay bank for not a lot of work) and just didn't know that Greer was on the level because, you know, liberal arts. He's going to end up partially assimilating with several other dancers at a basement party which becomes the "big boss fight" of the encounter, a yawning sea of screaming meat.

How do they figure out Greer has the IV bag?

>He's going to end up partially assimilating with several other dancers at a basement party which becomes the "big boss fight" of the encounter, a yawning sea of screaming meat.
Fucking sweet. But how do the agents figure all of this out? How do they find Greer since I'm assuming all of her work is done off-record? Does Doud have a wife that knew he was seeing a shady doctor?

Either way once you get all of this figured out you have to write it up all nice and post it so everybody else can run it, this is shotgun scenario contest material.

That's a nice idea. But I think you can have better alternative to people becoming shoggoths. Maybe the "blood" seeks its own kind, so it can reassemble into a single being again. So if agents let more blood bombings happen, there's gonna be a full-grown shoggoth somewhere in the sewers. Perhaps you can hint at it by having police reports mention that there was almost no blood at the explosion scene or something like that.

Bonus points if a yearly blood donation marathon is going to start soon after (to set a deadline for PCs) and for naming a module "A Study in Red".

Yes, I like pulpy stuff.

I like it, the far-reaching ramifications of the proto-shoggoth having been used throughout modern medicine could jump start something longer or at the very least really hit home if one of the PCs has a bonds undergoing treatment for something relevant.

Bump for interest.

I like the reference and tie-in to actual science through Henrietta Lacks. Gives it a bit more of a grounded and consistent feel, making it easier to buy into the plot as a whole. The rest of the plot is pretty good, but that honestly just made me smile and elevated it an amount.

I love it.

However, to keep things interesting, sometimes the shoggoth people don't explode, they become hostile shoggoths THEN explode. thus the PCs have some combat to engage in. If the blood drive comes to pass and the blood is all infected with shoggothy goodness, the party gets a couple days to wait before suddenly the whole goddamn city is leveled by a big shoggoth shuffling horror

If we grant the Magic Bag, sweet, tender Maddie Greer becomes the weak link in this plot. Second weakest is the existential threat of a handful of 'bursting' cancerous poorfags. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not seeing any Eldritch, and a lot of Page Six spontaneous combustion fluff pieces in this scenario.

I figure it's good for a first session hook, but you clearly have to segue into "what's next" before its weaknesses become apparent.

So - what's next?

more the idea that they become shoggoths and the bursting is more meant to be an attempt at reforming into a screaming flesh beast. And that people who dont burst right away might crawl down into the sewers to become full shoggoths down there, with the waste from surface dwelling bursters crawling downwords and trying to form into a city wiping shoggoth down below.

...