How would you guys pull off a weird veitnam war setting?

May 10th 1969, the A Shau Valley near Hue, it's been quiet... too quiet... the air is thick with the expectation of an attack from Charlie in response to operation Apache Snow. You and the remains of your squad from the 101st Airborne are out on deep recon, trying to get back to your base at Hill 937: 'Hamburger Hill'. You come across two abandoned vills. Scouting the area you find something that changes your world. Makes you think that Charlie may be the least of your worries...

Arent one of he hunter groups in Hunter:The Vigil hippies?

Not really a Supernatural type.
But mission in my DTD game is going to consist of Saving one Private Ryan from a viet-tau interment camp on a barely disguised Vietnam lookalike on planetary scale.

They will be assisted by a ghostly marine only known as Camouflage, who they will not know was spooky ghost until after they are done.

Any one dumb song/movie references I could add to this mess?

An ancient Chinese warlord necromancer, you say?

youtube.com/watch?v=-xiAbDkXDgg

Delta Green set in the 60's and 70's, back when it was legitimate but reaching the end of its life.

I would also recommend looking into the Korean War, which is the less widely known Asian war of the Cold War. Vietnam got huge press coverage, Korea is practically forgotten despite being such a huger influence on global geopolitics.

There's an entire sourcebook getting the Ken Hite treatment; Fall of Delta Green is going to be a DG crossover for Trail, if I recall.

How did Delta Green get disbanded exactly?

Unclear. It seems to have something to do with a catastrophic incursion into Cambodia. Assume the end of the conflict was a direct consequence of this one operation. Also assume it royally fucked up a bunch of other plans the Army, Air Force, or CIA may have had for Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. Whatever happened, it was so bad that the fallout took down the official DG organization, forcing the remaining cells to take the fight underground.

So, DG's main MO is repurposing the military industrial complex to carry out their dirty work and futzing the paperwork so oh man no it was totally legit you guys, right?

So, in the late 60's early 70's, the figure out there's a cult going on in Laos worshipping Tsathoggua (IIRC) and they're bunkered up deep in a jungle temple, doing cult things etc. So they use their connections to rustle up some marines, run a black op and take them out. Except shit gets fucked, most of the marines die and the black op isn't secret no more and it looks like the US government just illegally invaded the country. Worse, they did it days before the US was already PLANNING to invade and they just tipped their hand to the enemy. This forces the legit US agencies to rush their planned invasion, which the enemy has also being scrambling to respond to, and the whole thing is a clusterfuck as the 'legit' history books show.

When the dust settles, DG is so discredited by the whole thing that their entire budget and government mandate is handed over to Majestic 12, who up until that point had mostly been the guys tasked with looking after Roswell and the Greys.

>a DG crossover for Trail
It's going to be DELTA GREEN with Gumshoe mechanics, not DG:1970 for Night's Black Agents, that much was made very clear at Gencon. And it makes sense. The other way around would be terrible.

Like this the nubs can use Gumshoe and nobody cares how well that works while the veteran handlers can just use the fluff and ignore the tunnel mechanics entirely.

BTW, does anyone under 40 know what Pixelbitching means?

I googled it. I know what it is (just not by that name - pixelhunting is what I learned it as.) What's the relevance to the discussion at hand?

It was used in the DG Eyes Only panel to describe the mythical issue that plot progress cannot hinge from successful skill checks which is Gumshoe's entire justification for existence.

Well shit son, how many ideas do you want?

>MACV-SOG on a search and destroy patrol encounter cannibalistic tribesmen who worship a very physical and very unpleasant Old One
>Soviets supply NVA with anomalous weapons (like semi-controlled shoggoths, a la A Colder War)
>tunnel rats report VC underground complex deep in the jungle gives way to altogether more ancient tunnel system, and the original occupants are still around
>secret squirrel groups still operating in Laos/Vietnam in the mid to late '70s report deployment of unidentified chemical agents, killing hundreds in suitably horrific manners to be worth investigating

And a couple (alleged) real-world incidents:
>Da Nang, 1969, three Marines standing guard report seeing a winged being resembling a naked woman, with black skin and an eerie green glow
>special forces units occasionally claimed to see orangutan-like primates they called "rock apes" on long-range patrols
And I distinctly recall seeing an alleged story of a firefight between US forces and occupants of an apparent UFO craft somewhere, but I'm having trouble finding it.

Experimental agent orange is turning both US soldiers and VCs into mutated creatures

Oh, here's another good one
>a Deep One colony in the South China Sea orchestrated the Gulf of Tonkin incident, to provoke a war between the Mythos-neutral US and the Communist Bloc, who have been researching/building weapons based on Elder Thing remnants and such

Nazis who still have occultist ties join the French Foreign legion and decide to continue demonic rituals in Cambodia with new research into witch doctor rituals from tribals.

So officially Delta Green was still pretty new if they were started up during the Roswell incident.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wandering_Soul_(Vietnam_War)

As they say, the truth is often stranger than fiction

DG rises and falls. Currently it's on the rise.

It starts in 1928 as Project COVENANT, the multi-agency task force occupying, dismantling and studying Innsmouth. Then it's a Delta Green clearance of some black ops during WW2. Stuff goes back in '70, then the 'cowboy years' (illegal conspiracy, no formal support) lasts until 2001 when the feud between MJ12 and DG comes to head and the agencies are basically merged following a coup d'etat detailed in Through A Glass Darkly. Since then it's been formalised back into the government infrastructure, with a strong tie into military intelligence and counter terror.

>Through A Glass Darkly
Anyone got a download for it?

>(alleged) real-world incidents:
Anyone have more of these? I heard thirdhand that our SF used suitcase nukes pretty often on dams and bridges behind enemy lines, and also that the Navy was testing grenades that didn't do anything except make people glow for a few minutes.

Never heard either of those, but what I remember of the UFO firefight story is an American team in the Mekong Valley region spotted what looked like a silver disc-shaped craft in the jungle, and move in to investigate. They then see a group of tall, yellowish beings with a vaguely apelike appearance...standing over what appears to be a number of butchered human bodies. So they open fire on the "aliens" with M16s, Grease Guns and BARs, all of which produce approximately fuckall effect on target. So of course they run like hell back to the boat and evac the hell out of there, pursued the whole way.

There's plenty of other Cold War incidents that lend themselves wonderfully to this kind of shit too, if you're willing to look beyond Vietnam.

youtube.com/watch?v=au9ubVT0ifw
A Vietnam where stuff like this echoing through the forest every night wasn't a CIA ploy but the actual ghosts of the dead.

You can find some weird shit in the Jungle. Isn't the new King Kong movie related to Vietnam? Pretty much do ideas like that, creatures that are supposed to be extinct being alive in the thick jungle.

If there is no sound in space, how the fuck am I hearing you?

Which is itself a disaster because Majestic 12 are at the beck and call of the Mi-Go, except they don't even know it. The Mi-Go have been doling out crumbs of information to them through meat puppets controlled psychically by Mi-Go who never reveal themselves. They've given small morsels of information, along with a few actively stupid bits of magic/alchemy to test and divert humanity along paths they consider "safe" and non threatening to them. Between that and the spaceships they've mocked up, humanity is nicely occupied with a red herring that might be solvable, if inefficient, or it might just be dangerously stupid to even mess with.

They also like that the U.S. government is more or less at their beck and call, because of being in awe of them and also being somewhat satisfied with the benefits of the "deals" made. Some of what was revealed IS useful. Some of it. Some of it will also kill you or do things worse than death. Some of it is useful, but requires unpleasant processes. Which is handy because they can evaluate how just how stupid/greedy/callous people are willing to be pursuing it, and whether they bite on the "schmuck bait" recipes from the "cookbook".

Another thing you could do through the cold war is "Yet another Tcho-Tcho issue". Vietnam and Cambodia would make perfect sense, but you could have Agents tangle with them in a lot of places in Asia, and other pulpish "Yellow Peril" "really actually evil" Asian enemies. Although, if you get mixed up with Leng bullshit it gets beyond that. The High Priest at the famed Monastery there is definitely not human, for instance, even if it does wear a robe and veil it's face".

You should really spoiler that shit.

Probably, I think I forgot that players come here too, or that there are possibly even more players than GM's.

Judging by how well GM topic fare I'd venture that Veeky Forums is about 90% people who not ever GMed.

I'd start with some action. The characters are fresh from Fort Benning flown into Tân Sơn Nhất International and loaded on the back of an M-35 truck for hours on backwater roads. Play a loud engine noise and let them introduce each other. Then have the convoy run into ninjas with Kalashnikovs. Play out an ambush.

Use a catastrophic tactical situation to highlight all the sexy warfare the characters will never get to use again. Call in F-4s with napalm canisters. Describe the ensuing chaos in gruesome detail. Then have the sky fill with helicopters dropping off wave after wave of infantry while gunships hose down the brush up the road just in case. Have radios crackle with ENEMY SPOTTED. FIRE MISSION. GRID DESIGNATOR... while helicopters land. Describe the sound of artillery screaming down on the next village before the air mobile infantry sets out into the jungle, leaving the characters and their little supply convoy alone in a desolate inferno.

Pack everyone back in the remaining trucks and head to base. This is their home in country. They get assigned a bed and latrine duty, meet the NPCs in command and run through a few tutorials and slice of life really quickly. The most important part is the scale. They'll get to see a map of the region with the situation on the ground: farming villages, jungle, rivers, a few fire bases, patrol routes, and enemy contacts in the last 3 months. Then they're shipped of to one of those fire bases by helicopter and get handed responsibility.

This is where the story proper begins.
>NPCs
Lieutenant
Sergeant
Bully
Co conspirator
Victim
Veteran
Clown
South Vietnamese Officer
Local kid
Local beauty
Local farmer

>Locations
Barracks
Mass
Armory
Latrine
Perimeter
Village
Road
River
Everything else is variations of jungle and tracked using maps.

>Tasks
Keep watch
Man firing angle in the perimeter
Secure the rear of a patrol
Search that hut for Charlie

I would probably start the campaign as a purely military campaign. Once in a while, I'd put some occult stuff (crazy montagnard shaman, scared fortuneteller, weird totems found in the jungle...) to awake the players interest.

The beginning would probably be like the Vietcong video game or Platoon. Then it would go to Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, before definitely sliding into Shellshock 2: Blood Trails.

Soviets send in Baba Yaga or Rasputin in. Basically anything Russia did in Weird War 2, and might have been able to steal from the Germans should be slipped in as a slightly more refined version.

Vietnam was a welcome opportunity for the US to test and show off the latest in military technology. Air mobile infantry, carrier launched supersonic fighter/bomber planes, night operations, chemical warfare, and force projection to the other side of the globe all enable impressive new ways to kill people.

But the East wasn't sleeping. Publicly Russia and China could not get involved without risking nuclear escalation. Unofficially the Vietcong was a branch of the Chinese military, with weapons and equipment, training, and command personnel supplied wholesale. But this is not where the support ended.

Much like the US, the communist block saw the conflict as an opportunity to test new combat systems. But these were not tanks, planes, and rockets. More asynchronous strategies had been developed, based on research begun in the desperate days of WW2, utilizing powers that were poorly understood and remain so.

youtube.com/watch?v=BOmNzVGJBlg

YOU GOT GOOKS ON ONE SIDE

SPOOKS ON THE OTHER