DELTA GREEN: Last Things Last one-shot

So for these sorts of games it seems pretty important to get the horror element right. Any advice to new GMs?

>The year is 1930

>Adrian Wernicke is a brilliant pharmacist in rural Tennessee

>He is known in certain circles as a provider of drugs which induce abnormal physical development in children. Poor families will discreetly approach him to purchase his remedies, wishing to secure their children’s futures as carnival sideshow attractions in these trying economic times.

>Wernicke himself suffers from an affliction brought on by one of his concoctions: the ossification of the skin and internal organs, sold to turn the patient into a “stone man”. He is convinced that the drug is being clandestinely inserted into his food by the ghost of his wife, whose body floats in a methanol filled zinc tub in the master bedroom of his house, now converted to his laboratory. The external damage caused by his condition is localized to areas which he can easily conceal under clothing, but perceptive observers may notice that he avoids bending his spine whenever possible, squatting to reach objects on the floor and turning his entire body rather than simply his head.

>His notes, if read over thoroughly, give a clue as to how yet more wondrous transformations may be induced. Although he has yet to find a family interested in these more extreme offers, he may have sold some of his newest formulas under false pretenses.

You can wait forever, pal. There is no Case Officer's Handbook coming.

Because they renamed it DELTA GREEN The Roleplaying Game. The latest statement carefully indicates PDF release between Halloween and Valentine's Day.

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maybe watch/listen some vids or podcasts

I know Real Public Roleplay Radio likes COC/DG

>podcasts
There's the official DG podcast: Unspeakable!
They mostly talk to designers and highlight releases, There's some fiction. Right now they don't record a lot because they have to phenomenally successful Kickstarters to fulfill.

For general Keeper lore and specific CoC7 details as well as some other horror games there's always The Good Friends of Jackson Elias. They're all designers for CoC and invite other game authors sometimes.

For your nosleep fix there's Lore.

Constantly do sacrificial rituals in the middle of the forest. I dont really know how wiccans act but lets just say what ever force they follow the more sacrifices=more power

The sheer number of Wiccans across America

Well for starters alot of the followers are young teenage girls to much red tape not to mention the sheer number of sects and splinter groups across the country means you either run into the real witches or some girl posting on a forum

physical book when?

Yeah. That's the obvious first impression, but DG tells the story that is less obvious.

Okay, let's find a power to worship. If they meet in forests it's obviously Shubby. Although not all have to worship her, and that doesn't have to be the source of their power. Maybe their power is what enabled them to contact The Black Goat.

They've always been there, so why are they suddenly an issue to take care of? What change makes them relevant? The Internet? Eco terrorism? Climate change? Colony Collapse Disorder? GMOs?

When it has been printed?

They released a new AP actually! It's run by Dennis Detwiller and the players are Ross Payton from the RPPR podcast, Shane Ivey from Arc Dream, and two Kickstarter backers (I'm one of them but I'll never say which ooone).

There's a giant sitting behind you!

They've said "some time between Valentines Day and Halloween" if I recall correctly.

At the Gencon panel they said it was mostly written - Detwiller has just finished the magic section and is now primarily focussed on the art side of things?

Oh gosh, better roll some shitty damage to plink it to death.

They also stated very clearly that it will be done whe it's done. They are well aware that this is their grand opus and they'd rather release quality than meet a deadline.

The vague release date is for the PDF. It will then go to the printer, probably in Asia, and when they're done with a batch they ship it all at once, then there's customs... It will be a while.

The ships with the CoC7 books were photographed in port, fans were so impatient. They had reason, the Kickstarter's financing failed horribly.

They're CAUSING colony collapse disorder in the local apiaries; the bees aren't just dying, they're DISAPPEARING. Hives turn up empty, totally lacking of both bees and honey. This is because the Wiccans are attempting to beckon forth something from above; they are creating the Hive for it to inhabit, gathering honey for it to eat..

Okay, here's something to think about.

In "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", Dr. Willet inadvertently unleashes.. something, by reading aloud the incantation in Curwen's basement. We'll call what he summons "118" for that was the number on the jar that contained its ashes.

When Willet faints, 118 leaves him a note instructing him on how to dispose of Curwen's body permanently before setting out to blow the shit out of the rest of Curwen's necromany conspiracy - in Prague and Romania.

Then what? Let's be.. charitable and assume that 118 (whose precise identity is never given) is an ancient and deceased sorceror that Curwen was summoning to interrogate for arcane knowledge (as was Curwen's MO). You've got a sorceror wandering around a world he's got zero context for (given that the note he writes to Willet is in Latin, he's probably at least a thousand).

What happened to 118? Is he still around in the modern day? How can we work him into a DG game?

What is "it" though? Special type of queen bee who took control of a sect of wiccans or maybe something more sinister that is using wiccans to control the bees

He's probably handling a bunch of cells.

Have you read The Fuller Memorandum?

My first guess is an aspect of Shub-Niggurath (queen bee as a fertility/matriarchal figure? "The Queen of Wax"?) but we could take it different ways. Perhaps someone who's very much associated with tongues has a sweet tooth?

Nah I like it but the queen would use the females to make? I dunno human bee mutants? Im kinda lost in this part since some user brought in the whole bee thing I thought it was just gonna stop the wiccans from raising an army of nature golems

Wiccans have a plan. And finally they've got the means. They summon Shub Niggurath and collect all the bees for a sinister endgame to save the planet from mankind.

They don't want to get rid of everybody. A few hundred thousand on every continent are no problem as long as they understand that pouring asphalt or draining toxins in not acceptable behavior. And who better to enforce such a code than Dark Young?

Well, we don't know that 118 is necessarily active in the modern day - we can infer he's not immortal from the fact that, well, Curwen was using his CORPSE and given that he dismantles Curwen's conspiracy of immortal necromancers it seems reasonable to also infer that he would be opposed to carrying on where they left off to artificially prolong his own life.

I think you're right that he would make sense to be a patron to investigators and others who go up against Mythos forces though. Perhaps he is integral to the FOUNDING and early years of the conspiracy, but is no longer around? Convinces Hoover to go full ham on Innsmouth, for instance?

"He guys let's shoot wiccans" is kind of flat and one-note and doesn't have much of a horror or contemporary edge. It could happen anywhen, anywhere and "nature golems" don't really line up well with the Mythos.. Working in BUGS of any sort inherently is going to unsettle people so that's a ripe vein to mine for horrific imagery; working in colony collapse works because it's apocalyptic and also very relevant to the modern era.

Here's an idea; some of the Wiccans have taken the bees and hives into their own bodies. They're wormed through with beewax hexagons, their voices buzz with monotonous unity, even when disguised nothing can hide the sickly sweet smell coming from them.

So we got reason

Now how would we go about stopping this? Infiltrating some random darkweb forum for wiccans or maybe sending a team to investigate backwood highschools or just pull a classic bust some heads and interrupt some wiccan dance in the middle of the forest.

Or better yet we pull some wicker man shit and just find out the main culprits are wiccans on a secluded island off the coast of Maryland. Delta Green operatives in unknown and possibly possessed land.

Well fuck I guess I sort of do plan out Delta Green games as a sort of FEAR game with most of the time me suggesting we fuck shit up.

Which if I do recall fucks up more things than fixes

Not quite the same thing; in the Fuller Memorandum, it's revealed that a character is an immortal monster instead of a human. In Charles Dexter Ward, a big plot point is that Curwen and his necromancer buddies were buying ancient mummies to ressurect and torture arcane secrets from them. 118 was one of those ressurected mummies. (Probably. Whatever state he was in, Curwen reduced him to his essential salts before Willet accidentally ressurected him).

Now, maybe being a ressurected salt mummy is really good for longevity and he will still be alive and kicking in the modern day - but he's still basically just an immortal human wizard, rather than the character YOU'RE referring to, who is a Cthulhu that likes drinking tea.

The important part is that it breaks the characters. They must be morally compromised in the worst possible way.

How about a defector? Someone who was in with the top circles of the conspiracy but got out. Now they're after them and entrusting themself to DG is all they can do. Less need for explanations and there's momentum already in it.

Well, the "burn it all down" usually comes at the end of the investigation - you've got to get to the horrible truth before you grab the flamethrower. So we need to thrash out some of that truth and horror, right?

Hmm, how does this come to the attention of the conspiracy? What justifies deploying the limited resource of agents to investigate Backwoods Bullshit?

Perhaps a string of people are being found stung to death in a certain county, their system flooded with bee venom?

Perhaps traffic cam footage shows a woman being hit by a car and seeming to split in half, covering the car in honey instead of blood?

That's what you think. But HPL enjoyed the unreliability of narrators immensely.

Fair - I admit I'm inferring a lot based on what's in the story, but I think it's reasonable that 118 isn't, say, a Great Old One since Curwen was able to control him and being loosed upon the world doesn't fuck things up in the rest of the shared stories.

Nah, Teapot is a little imp.

There's a similar case in Targets of Opportunity.

I don't have the book on me atm but if I recall one of the research honchos for M-EPIC is keeping a crusty old resurrected sorceror in a woodland cabin and stringing him along with the possibility of freedom from his crumbling body in return for occult knowledge.

A string of serial murders all victims were beekeepers with even having a smoker shoved down there throat while another drowned in honey.

Oh you listened? What did you think?

I didn't listen attentively. I have to listen to it a couple more times to really get it all. So far it seems fun. A bit straightforward maybe. But for a con round that is always an issue.

It seemed to me most of the flavor came from the players. I really wanted to hear some advanced handling and was a bit underwhelmed by the narration.

Around the time the car crashed(?) I lost track of things. Then I didn't get why the ranger lady was sos suspicious. And were there several identical children?

Anyway, definitely getting back to it. So far pretty great.

Dennis is a very physical DM - lot of miming and expressions and "It's about THIS big" - which doesn't come across on audio.

There were multiple Brandons.

Are you saying that Shub Niggurath is hitlerally Lowtax?

wut?

>Real Public Roleplay Radio
Are you trying to say RPPR?

That's messed up but needs a bit more weird to really get the Conspiracy interested I think. Maybe the guys have something carved into their body?

It sounds to me like the handiwork of another cell, really.

Well at least he didn't take a page out of Tynes' book
johntynes.com/revland2000/rl_mofo.html

Yeah. I like the "honey splatter" idea - the mundane world happens to coincide with cult activities in an awful way that reveals the inhuman nature of one of the cultists. (It also has biblical connotations from the riddle of Samson.) Dead body with beehives through the intestines and liver, split in half at the waist, dripping honey instead of blood.

So, how bleak do you like for Delta Green? I hear a lot of gunporn, MARINES HOO-AH SHOOT THAT ALIEN but at the same time like half the design team is bleak AF in how they set up the world.

When you DG, do you go Innsmouth Raid or Artifact Zero?

Very bleak.

And not in a creature way. That too, but mostly action is for tension relief and used as a goody.

But it isn't just bleak, it's downright cruel. It makes agents sacrifice their families to keep from going insane so they can finish the job.

I prefer it pretty bleak, but I get how thats not for everyone. Taking players from D&D to DG/CoC is always fun to watch as a DM. It's like everyone is a level 1 wizard fighting a horde of housecats.

If players are being given whatever kind of guns they want/ask for that should be a sign that the guns will not help them. You can't shoot your way out of everything, if you can there should be a great cost to doing so, or there has been a great cost to get to that point.

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Fight long and fight hard and you can stop the day from ending today, or this week, or even this month.

From time to time you will win an unambiguous victory with your hard suffering and sacrifice. That one genuine victory a month gives you a reason not to put the gun in your mouth the other eight times that month that you don't know whether or not you really helped, and the time that you outright lose.

Nobody plays Delta Green to feel good. They play Delta Green to feel desperate, to have to struggle for everything, and so the one time in ten you actually win is a feeling unlike anything else. Because you are playing a Mythos game whose traditional power levels are a whackjob with a revolver, and here and now you get to be a trained soldier handed an assault rifle, body armour and a blackhawk helicopter - and the GM has that smile.

MY favourite DG module is the wonderful Cold Dead Hand. The whole premise of DG is handing the players ever bigger guns knowing it won't help, and here is a scenario where you start with fifty fully-armed veteran Spetznaz soldiers, two armoured assault vehicles, a helicopter gunship, and two tactical nuclear bombs - and the GM is STILL smiling creepily.

Oh you win in DELTA GREEN.

It's just that after a while you have to start wondering whether that's a good thing to begin with.

>CRAWL INTO THAT DARK HOLE AND KILL THE EVIL THING INSIDE!

>..uh, no?

>AND TAKE THIS MACHINE GUN!

>Okay

No problem.

Also: every time a bullet hits it it splatters the infection everywhere, it heal really fast, REALLY fast, and the RPG you stole from the Army base turned out to be a training round without payload so now you're standing in the paints and solvents aisle of Home Depot and are trying to guess how much ANFO the grenade could probably carry...

>this
After a while, winning just becomes surviving. When half the companies illicit assets are tied up in a globe-trotting 727-200, which undergoes partial rapid unscheduled disassembly of the cabin in-flight, 10 miles west of the Azores at 20,000 feet. You count winning as getting the plane back on the ground without that... thing on-board.

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bump

never ever

what if bees weren't dying globally at an alarming rate

what if there was something else

Bumping with content.

Anyone want to help me with a scenario idea I'm writing up? All I've got so far is a creature that might pop up when things go wrong, and a very vague outline of a setting but no real characters or motivations yet.

The idea for the setting is around a research facility with a particle collider (I'll probably base it off a real institute in the states somewhere), maybe related to a university. So far I have no compelling reason why DG was called to investigate it though. There will be a scientist there who is doing research into potential energy sources and particle physics and the implications of their research "drives them mad" (going to try make it a bit deeper than that).
I also thought to add complication by having another government agency invested in the work (perhaps they funded the research).

I started with the idea for the monster and worked backwards from there as I was having a mind blank at the time. This is what I have for it:

An extra-dimensional creature brought into this world by a nuclear physics experiment. It has a nebulous, flickering form. Your mind translates its image into a beast-like shape, but it looks like nothing on this world and it moves with an agile and unearthly gait. It’s hard to look at, it radiates energy and looking directly at it for a period of time causes dark spots in your vision and headaches.
It doesn’t regard humans as a threat, and at first ignores them until they get its attention. It is able to control the radiation of energy, and as it does this the air around it hums with crackles with the sound of static. It can use this with precision to stimulate nerves and muscle, and even electric impulses in the brain. Due to being formed by a particle collision experiment it isn’t stable and flickers in and out of reality, becoming semi-incorporeal. This causes it to sometimes ignore physical objects.
Since it is a creature of pure energy, things that effect radiation or electricity will have an effect on it. A faraday cage could potentially trap it, or it might become weakened from contact with elemental carbon like graphite (or even possibly charcoal in a really contrived circumstance), or maybe it could be weakened by contact with water or a grounding source.

bomp

Cold Dead Hand sounds cool. Do you (or anyone else) know where I might be able to get the pdf?

Creatures are easy, start with a moral conflict instead.

Making a creature scary is not about power (pun!) but about foreshadowing. You don't have to plan for combat against it, you have to consider which traces it might leave for the agents to find.

It's always a good idea to involve innocents in some way, just to put them in the line of fire when the agents start to panic. And lab assistants don't rank very high on the scale of soul crushing things to fail to protect.

Accelerators don't make energy. They are mostly used to generate coherent gamma and x- ray lasers for looking inside tiny processes like chemical reactions. Very large ones are also used to smash particle streams into another and measure some of the resulting funny stuff. Research on energy creation revolves around Tokamaks and ICF. Mistakes like that are fine if the players never catch it, but it ruins suspension of disbelief and thereby immersion if they do.

Thank you for letting me know about my misunderstanding of particle accelerators, I genuinely had no idea. The lack of moral conflict is a roadblock I have run into since I started with designing a monster, as I haven't been able to write characters and motivations that justify it. I'm tempted to scrap it and save it for later.

Just keep the core idea in a drawer and bring it back when it fits. Inspiration is funny that way. Do what feels right.

Any idea of recomendations of movies to set the mood for some delta green.

Some kind of military/horror.

the objective

There's a lot in DG, from Conspiracy Theory to Stranger Things, ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Abyss, X-Files, Threshold, Utopia...

Really it's more of a TV genre now that I think about it. It doesn't really conclude well, or rather it always keeps lingering even after a conclusion.

Page 8 to 56 in this one.

That's the silo one. right? With the time limit?

Yeah.

Outpost from 2008 is underrated. The best part is everybody dies. Didn't even know there were sequels until today.

holy shit user, where can I find more like that?

They do have irregular issues. There's a bunch of them. Their podcast is first class as well.

If you mean ideas look for Shotgun Scenarios.

If you mean that particular military type of horror look at Kali Ghati and the CoC scenario Charlie Don't Surf.

anything more of GRU-SV8?

CONTAINS SPOILERS!
theunspeakableoath.com/home/2013/11/unspeakable-bonus-the-kishenko-broadcast-from-cold-dead-hand-mild-spoiler-alert/

It's out of print, but Countdown had a chapter on it.

mediafire.com/folder/h9qjka0i4e75t/Call_Of_Cthulhu#h9qjka0i4e75t

Look in 6th Edition

Does anyone have an ebook copy of Through the Glass, Darkly?

TYVM mate

thanks

yeah I know, I have the pdf and read it. That's why I have a hardon for GRU-SV8

I'm going to run the "Secret Shopper" shotgun scenario with my group to see if Delta Green is for us. If it is, then I'll do Convergence or something similar.
At the moment, I'm making a playlist of Suitable Music. Right now there's
>Utopia Season 2 soundtrack (I'd use season 1 but spoilers)
>Coconuts S/T
>HANL
What else is suitable?

I'm going to include an arc BBEG whose boys on the ground are not!Arby and not!Lee. They're going to be in the background, if the players look for "strangers". Probably gassing mad homeless men. Maybe the party will meet them in the Green box a couple miles out of town.

Also advice pls in general for first-time-running. I know I need handouts. I was thinking of having the players keep their characters' Actual Names secret, along with their sanity, and to refer to them only as their codenames. What other Fun techniques can I use to maximize the good times?

anyone have anything fun idea about the DeMonte Clan?

Bump for interest

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Much fun!

Posting some usefull images

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Get good at describing things and take notes from podcasts like RPPR and Unspeakable.

Also make sure your players are down for a horror game or there is a very high chance that they will participate poorly.

Kill List. It's not overtly supernatural but it fits the tone perfectly and one scene in particular is identical to the thing that happens in most DG games when the players finally decide to throw subtlety out the window entirely.