Delta Green #5 — Project Anthropocene / An Item of Mutual Interest

Part six of a series of reviews and notes on the scenarios I ran for my Delta Green group. Project Anthropocene (shotgun contest 2016, Ethan Cordray) turned into a four or five-session BEAST of a game, and ended the first season of my Delta Green campaign.

Of course I couldn't just run this shotgun scenario as-written; I added a relic WWII sub into the iceberg and replaced the ice spirits in the original scenario with a shoggoth in a box.

Surprisingly, only one character died outright. Another character swapped bodies (long live the Exchange Personalities ritual) with Australian billionaire Mike Rydger and decided to go enjoy a well-earned vacation. Somewhere with no creepy-crawlies. Two other agents only escaped the capsizing iceberg and rampaging shoggoth by means of an escape tunnel into the Dreamlands.

Look, you had to be there, ok?

The Sailing Vessel Anthropocene - styrofoam, a drybrush of cyan/blue and then a second drybrush of white on top. Wooden tooth picks and red paper for sails and barracks; black marker for the routes across the iceberg. The Project Anthropocene scenario does a great job giving enough detail to flesh out the place. But unveiling this piece of handicraft at the table really hammered home to my players how far up a creek they were. "Oh hell this thing is going to capsize on us." (It did.)

 

TEASER ON OPERATION MAP

My group has access to a Google Map with all operations that are available to their Cell. This is the text for Project Anthropocene:

Leaked footage from a climate publicity stunt has A-Cell very worried. Infiltrate and find out if this needs to go the way of the Titanic.

Tier3 #Protomatter

ANNING BLUE SKULL // ANNING BLACK

This is the first Tier 3 scenario we've played, meaning something with potentially far-reaching impact. In this case: the first active shoggoth on the planet (that Delta Green is aware of) in decades. #Protomatter hints at something biological, and ANNING BLUE SKULL / ANNING BLACK refer to Elder Things / Shoggoths, respectively. 

Thanks to writer Charles Stross for those last two keywords, from his novelette A Colder War. Let's hope paleontologist Mary Anning would have appreciated the homage.

REASONS FOR INCLUDING

The premise of Project Anthropocene is already amazing: deal with Australian Elon Musk sailing an iceberg full of unnatural crap to a publicity stunt at Sydney harbor. I didn't particularly like the original ice spirit antagonists though, so I swapped them for an old U-Boot carrying 'advanced Elder Thing machinery' trapped in the iceberg. Yes, it's a box with a shoggoth on a treadmill.

Obligatory Dwarven Forge build: conning tower and upper/lower deck of the U-188. I based it very, very roughly on blueprints you can find online. Mostly used to give players a sense of the layout, but came in handy when they needed to Exit Left, Pursued By Shoggoth. Poor sods.

Delta Green #4 — STOP REPO

Part five of a series of reviews and notes on the scenarios I ran for my Delta Green group. The scenario we ran is STOP REPO, in which the cell needs to clean up the Green Box of a recently deceased operative. The scenario was first published in the 2017 shotgun contest, then picked up for publication in the magazine The Unspeakable Oath.

After the previous scenario, two of the characters are under the microscope for running an op without proper Delta Green instruction. ("A trapped Mi-Go tricked us" goes over less well than you'd think.) The cell get a stern talking-to from their handler, and two of the the Agents get summoned to court over the disappearance of a high-powered lawyer during their last operation. Ah, the joy of working without a cover identity. It seems like the pair are going to jail for a long time. But one payphone call to the Marshal's new friend Stephen Alzis, and opposing counsel gets a phone call that turns their hair white, after which the case is dropped immediately. The rest of the group took careful notes on the shenanigans their fellows unleashed.

TEASER ON OPERATION MAP

My player group has access to a Google Map with all the operations that are available to their Cell. This is the intro they had for STOP REPO:

 

STOP REPO

A forgotten Green Box stash is being auctioned off. Get back anything that can't fall into civilian hands.

Tier2 #OddJobs

Tier2 is the kind of scenario you get after cutting your teeth at least a bit; #OddJobs are miscalleneous ops without a specific opposition or theme. The rest is pretty clear, no? I always agonise over how much information to put in these teasers. Has to be enough to whet the appetite, but not enough to spoil the scenario.

REASONS FOR INCLUDING

A good palate cleanser after the madness of the previous scenario. Also a nice op that DG could test these unruly operatives with.

The premise: an older DG agent has suddenly passed away, which means that the Green Box (clandestine storage) they were maintaining in the long-term parking at Boston airport needs urgent love and care. Seems there's also a clean-up of the old junk in the parking, which means a lot of cars are getting auctioned that might have unnatural materials hidden in the back seat.

The scenario keeps the reason that the previous Green Box guardian died completely ambiguous, which was an excellent loose thread to have the characteres worry about. Did he skip town? Die of natural causes? Or something worse?

HIGH POINTS

Having to convince frat boys, three-job single moms and crazy car collectors that yes, the junker they have their eyes on will need to be inspected by highway patrol / health and safety / airport security before leaving the premises.

WEAK POINTS

None? Honestly, this scenario is great and you should run it for your group.

 

WHAT I ADDED AND CHANGED

• a schedule of when which NPC would buy what car (and what Unnatural or illegal contents were in the trunk)
• two Tcho-Tcho gang members looking to get back the brick of drugs that their friendly neighbor stored for them in one of his junk cars
• a black helicopter with a Majestic-12 team to harass the half of the cell who were doing a nightly break-in at the auction lot. As one of the players (whose character was miles away) said: "tick-tock bitch!"

 

HOW IT WENT DOWN

One high point was a chase across a gated community in golf carts and a sandwich delivery van. Another was two low-level Tcho-Tcho gangsters following the group via blatantly unnatural means, while being insufferably stupid thugs. Loved to add cut scenes to the pair, it both added tension and some much-needed levity.

Finally, one of the players payed off his debt to beloved wacko sorceror Stephen Alzis. In return for giving Alzis an artefact from the Green Box, the character asked for one favor for themselves, and a healthy trustfund for his daughter.

Alzis, who I've been playing as an insufferable fop, to his off-screen accountant: "Michael, is a trust fund something for poor people? Would 87 million dollars do, or is that too small an amount?"

Only after closing the deal did the player wonder out loud whether it had been a good idea to hand over this weird pack of cards to a powerful sorcerer. But hey, what could possibly go wrong?

Delta Green #3 — Promises / Minimalism

Part four of a series of reviews and notes on the scenarios I ran for my Delta Green group. The third scenario with my main group was again a mash-up. I used two existing scenarios as framing devices for something I wrote myself. Ever wondered how to turn a Mi-Go into a biological quantum computer and use it to win at stock trading? Read on...

I'm a longtime reader and fan of Throne of Salt, an old-school D&D blogger who also ventures into Call of Cthulhu themery. His...scene? scenario snapshot?...Minimalism is a masterpiece of scene-setting, with maximum vibes in minimal wordage. I just had to try and run it. I added a lead-in using the opening of the shotgun scenario Promises (Jon Hook, shotgun contest 2018). I also wrote a weird location of my own to stitch the two together:

Overview of the various platforms floating in the dark subdimension of the Buffer, an extradimensional space I added to this scenario. A cargo elevator takes people from place to place.

Rickety catwalks between metal platforms in the buffer. Handcrafted cargo elevator dangling from rails that should be somewhere above in the darkness. The controls to move the elevator in the XYZ coordinates are on one platform, all the interesting phenomena are on others, forcing the players to split up.

Engineering space in the void of the Buffer, with entropy eating away at the (what should be metal) structure.

TEASER ON OPERATION MAP

My group has access to a Google Map with all operations that are available to their Cell. This is the text for Promises / Minimalism:

 

Promises / Minimalism

Report to the court house in Leavenworth to hear about transporting an inmate who - after 30 years - is ready to reveal where he hid the heads of his victims.

Tier2 #Protomatter #TomeRot

PLUTO KOBOLD // COOKBOOK

Tier2 means a slightly more impactful scenario than the Tier1's we've seen so far. #Protomatter is again weird biotech; #TomeRot is a new tag, for the seductive ways in which the Mythos tempts you to use it. PLUTO KOBOLD is Delta Green's codeword for the Mi-Go, and COOKBOOK we already know as a link to Majestic-12.

REASONS FOR INCLUDING

Minimalism is an adrenaline rush in 163 words. When I read it, I'm immediately trying to imagine how the group got there (see below), or what the changing lights in the sky behind them mean (on first reading I thought "enraged Mi-Go", then worked back to figure out what made it so angry).

Promises has a great and awful hook: someone murdered their little sister and her family, including the state senator husband, and disappeared their heads. They then get caught and incarcerated, spending 30 years in a hole until they're willing to talk to, of all people, Delta Green. I find the pay-off at the end of Promises incredibly weak though, so I ditched that and figured out a way to transition to Minimalism.

HIGH POINTS

HIGH-OCTANE OPENING in medias res, which immediately supplied the high-energy chase scene I needed to both open and end the scenario on.

One of the characters is afraid (wisely so...) of getting burned because he's taking part in the operation under his true identity. In Leavenworth he spots a person he already saw on his first mission for Delta Green: Stephen Alzis, millionaire philantropist playboy elder god, who is interested in the agent's troubles and offers to help. Alzis scribbles down his phone number and says he'll be in touch. This ends in the player trading Unnatural artefacts to Alzis for help at the end of this scenario, and sets up his demise in a session or three.

 

WEAK POINTS

Obviously in 163 words, Minimalism isn't a full-fledged scenario. I ended up writing a road trip and inventing a mini-cult of collaborators with the headhunting murderer.

I think the pay-off of Promises is a bit weak, but it has a great hook and framing device. Road trip with a convicted murderer? You poor sods.

 

WHAT I ADDED AND CHANGED

Added a hook for one of my players, who runs a US Marshal; they get called by a buzzing voice requesting their presence at Leavenworth to escort a convicted murderer to the never-before-found site of his victims' bodies. The group's forensics specialist gets the same treatment. It's worth noting that the characters have been very careful keeping their true identities a secret, so this already signals exciting trouble.

Added a lawyer for the convict, to go on the field trip with the Cell, and verify that the terms of the plea deal are honored. Just another NPC they can't easily shake and have to bamboozle.

Added backstory for the murderer: as a former Majestic-12 technician who together with three partners in crime had managed to capture an injured Mi-Go. The murderer then figured out from texts collected by Majestic-12 how to bind and control the Mi-Go. It only took a couple of undead heads, preferably with a blood tie. Going mad from the effort, the technician then blacked out and woke up a few towns over, got picked up by law enforcement and incarcerated.

Meanwhile, the murderer's allies install the Mi-Go-turned-biocomputer inside The Buffer, an extradimensional space Majestic-12 knows how to access with hypergeometry. The access point is a shipping container constantly shuffled around the railway network. Enter on one side, exit via the doors on the other side into the vast darkness of The Buffer. Here multiple platforms hang in the black, reachable via rickety, pitted metal walkways and a screeching cargo elevator on multiple rails.

The captured Mi-Go is hidden deep below the cluster of support and infrastructure buildings, and has been quietly getting control of the computer system that keeps it captive. Enough to scour the world for enemies of Majestic-12, synthesize a voice pattern to convince the original murderer it's time to renew the bindings with fresh victims, and rope in Delta Green.

HOW IT WENT DOWN

Absolute chaos, shootouts at a container yard, 150MPH chase scenes pursued by enraged Mi-Go, sweettalking laywers, paradimensional byways, an extending lobster gun, making deals with the devil, and that bone-deep feeling of exhausted contentness that comes with entertaining each others with high-energy nonsense for hours on end. Good stuff, happy players.

Delta Green #A — Case Exfield Cakewalk / BESTOW

Part three of a series of reviews and notes on the scenarios I ran for my Delta Green group.

I ran this scenario as a proper oneshot with my 'second group', a bunch of my partner's former colleagues. We get together for a day of RPGing a few times a year, playing different systems each time; this time I wanted to introduce them to Delta Green.

My scenario is a mash-up of two shotgun scenarios called Case Exfield Cakewalk (Agent Obtuse, 2020) and BESTOW (2016, Ross Payton), and the short scenario Night Floors*. You can run each of these on their own merits, but the beauty of these short scenarios is how easily you can mix them together.

* Link above is to the PDF of an older, stand-alone version; for a mindbending update, check it out as the intro chapter of the Impossible Landscapes campaign.

TEASER ON OPERATION MAP

My group has access to a Google Map with all operations that are available to their Cell. This is the text for Case Exfield Cakewalk / BESTOW:

Case Exfield Cakewalk / BESTOW

A simple heist to recover a lost DG cache turned strange when Agent Firkin didn't report back. In you go on a search, rescue and retrieval.
Tier 1 #Anomalous #Memetic
PLAYWRIGHT // STATIC PROTOCOL

Tier1 means this is available as an opening scenario. #Anomalous refers to general unnatural phenomena; #Memetic indicates mind- or memory-altering effects. PLAYWRIGHT is my codeword for possible King in Yellow involvement, and STATIC PROTOCOL is what gets invoked on your ass if Delta Green suspects you of being infected with the madness of that notorious theatre play.

Very basic Dwarven Forge build of the rooms in BESTOW; each has six exits (north-east-south-west and up-down) and connects to 6 of the 8 rooms in the hypercube. By flying in little props I could quickly reskin the room.

 

BACKGROUND ON COBBLED-TOGETHER SCENARIO

This frankenstein mash-up of scenarios lures in characters with the pretext of burgling an art gallery, then dumps them into a hyperdimensional maze. The agents then find out this place is tainted with (and tainting them with!) a strange and infectious story where all the world is a stage.

My rationale was that the opening of the BESTOW hypercube into the Exfield art gallery was caused by the King in Yellow entity trying to get a foothold in our reality. The BESTOW scenario has agents get a text with the hint to the route they have to walk; I ruled this was delivered through the influence of the KiY. If they walk the hypercube in the B-E-S-T-O-W direction, they end up in Carcosa and get infected with the Yellow Sign; if they return W-O-T-S-E-B, they take that infection back to their own world.

Alternate build for the BESTOW room. Visually more interesting than the previous one, but too medieval for my taste.

COMPONENT SCENARIOS

Case Exfield Cakewalk is a standalone scenario for Delta Green's British estranged cousins at PISCES. You hear about a lost cache of your organisation's documents from the WWII era and need to break into an art gallery to recover them, tangling with a bunch of burglars on the way.

I liked the concept well enough, but the haunted house-nature felt a bit too much like a repeat of an earlier game I played with this group. So I just used the hook of needing to burglar an art gallery, transplanted the place from the UK to Virginia as a colonial-style plantation mansion, gutted the building and stuffed in...

BESTOW is the first time I've ever seen a working, playable hypercube scenario in a tabletop RPG. Hypercubes are one of those tropes for weird puzzle dungeons; Ross Payton's version is a cut above the rest, easy to wrap your head around and easy to run at the table, so you can follow and narrate your group's path through an extradimensional maze. What BESTOW does not have space for (due to the 1500-word limit in the Shotgun Scenario contest) is a solid lead-in and conclusion, but those we can steal from other works.

Night Floors is an older scenario that was reworked as the opening chapter of Dennis Detwiller's haunting Impossible Landscapes campaign. A real tour the force of alienation and helplessness, it's both a fresh, modern take and a faithful dedication to the King in Yellow part of the Mythos. It's also far too bleak for me to inflict on my players. But I can lift enough of the art-themed fin-de-siècle scenery to dress up the romp through BESTOW.

REASONS FOR INCLUDING

The King in Yellow is an 'infectious thought pattern' threat, so hard to get right at the table and have your players feel like something is worming itself into their thoughts. I'd been shuffling BESTOW and Night Floors around on my operations map, not quite feeling them solo, when it clicked that I could just combine them and have the excitement of exploring the weird hypercube be the actual way the infection manages to grab you.

On a side note, I love memetic themes. My favorite SCP stories, the ones that give me actual nightmares, are the ones about the Antimemetics division, dealing with the loss of memory and self. Like so:

• https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-055
• https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/introductory-antimemetics
• https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

HIGH POINTS

The puzzle part of BESTOW —how do these rooms link together and how do we use the hints we're given to complete the path to the exit— was a great fit for the two escape room fans in this group. They immediately latched on to that aspect, dooming themselves by finding the way to Carcosa.

Slowly ramping up the puppetry motif (from Night Floors / Impossible Landscapes) was a great way to show that the world the characters were in wasn't real; that something else was taking control of their lives. NPCs who turned out to be life-sized puppets, finding theatre dialog for the exact discussions PCs had had with NPCs, and masks of the (N)PCs faces. It caused one character to take their seat in the vast audience of the King in Yellow production, as another snuck backstage to try and take out the yellow-hoodied Director...then put on that same hoodie and take their place behind the vast marionette control panel that is the world. I wouldn't run such an epic ending in an ongoing campaign, but in a oneshot you can go big!

WEAK POINTS

Not a weak point as much as something to be aware of: the predestination theme, where whatever your agent does, they'll end up getting absorbed in the King in Yellow, means you need the right players in the right mood for the scenario to really be enjoyable. Don't force this on a combat bunny who hates the loss of control; pick the theatre kid in your group, dangle a few of the milder events in front of them and then offer a way to get 'back-stage' and 'see it all'. They'll rush in while the rest of the cell beats a hasty retreat.

Or single out the spec op with the personal arsenal. See the rest of the group sweat as their personal rambo starts thinking they're in a play and nothing is real, see?

 

Handout: a partial map of BESTOW to get the players on the right track. In-game this was made by a previous, increasingly disturbed victim of the labyrinth.

WHAT I ADDED AND CHANGED

I mean, this whole thing is a nightmare of mixed themes and scenarios. I added the following:

• A handler who was very clearly a previous character in our other DG group, who had gotten himself killed in a firefight in session 2. Earned me a shocked face from the player as the penny dropped that yes, her character was back -- how?! Stealing her dead character was the first occurence of the loss-of-control theme in the scenario, now that I think about it.
• A Green Box with a bunch of handy/weird equipment, including a ludicrously overkill antimatter bomb from at least 30 years into the future. The group ended up not taking this one along. (I have no idea what it would have done against the hypergeometry of BESTOW or the memetical infection of the King in Yellow; that's what you find out by improvising in the moment.)
• A partial map of the BESTOW hypercube, made by the previous DG agent who'd been sucked in. This helped the group understand the shape of the place, and it suckered them into trying to complete the full picture.

Delta Green #2 — Snake Oil

Part two of a series of reviews and notes on the scenarios I ran for my Delta Green group. This one is set in scenic Sasketchewan, just across the US-Canadian border with Montana. Snake Oil is another shotgun scenario (2021 contest, by David Guenther) introducing one of Delta Green's antagonist organisations. It's also the first scenario I made a table build for using Dwarven Forge, and this scenario caused one of my players to ask for a slightly lighter tone for future games!

Couldn't resist building the biolab out of Dwarven Forge miniature terrain. The glowing vats are plastic bottles with strips of coloured felt and an led inside. They blew out the camera I took this shot with, but in person it gave a great impression of horrible worms swimming in liquid.

TEASER ON OPERATION MAP

My group has access to a Google Map with all operations that are available to their Cell. This is the text for Snake Oil:

Snake Oil

A mass grave in the Canadian wilds points at organ harvesting - or something darker. Do our northern friends a favor and investigate, eh?

Tier1 #Protomatter
COOKBOOK

Tier1 means this is available as an opening scenario and the #Protomatter tag refers to weird biotech experiments. COOKBOOK is the codeword hinting at the involvement of the UFO wranglers at Majestic-12 and the shady company March Industries.

REASONS FOR INCLUDING

Snake Oil does a great job showing what kind of experiments the Majestic-12 conspiracy is involved in to try and apply the knowledge they get from the Greys. In this case, we have a disgruntled scientist and her overachieving MSc student breeding alien worms. The healing slime secreted by those horrible beasts is certainly useful, but it is unfortunate that the horrible things prefer living human hosts instead of animals...

The scenario can easily be ported to other places.

HIGH POINTS

Snake Oil is a shotgun scenario introducing one of Delta Green's antagonist organisations. It consists of a bit of light investigation followed by a discovery of absolutely revolting Unnatural experiments. In this case, the in-your-face bio-experiments are a great contrast with the more nebulous evil of the previous scenario I played with my group, which was all about disovering that Those Nazi Sorcerers Are At It Again.

WEAK POINTS

Shotgun scenarios are short by design; with 1500 words max, there's enough space to sketch the antagonists and the shape of the investigation but not to detail anything. Same goes for the illegal lab space. Nothing you can't improvise on the spot; the notes give enough of an outline to wing the investigation if you're good with creating contacts or sketching a map on the fly.

WHAT I ADDED AND CHANGED

I ended up jotting down a few extra notes about the investigation part, and added a mobile Green Box, one of Delta Green's storehouses of the possible useful, probably illegal and definitely weird.

Since my Cell was going in under cover identities as FBI investigators, I added liaisons on the Canadian side; one Royal Canadian Mounty officer at the border patrol, and one Saskatoon police lieutenant investigating the disappearance of homeless people.

I also added a Majestic-12 operative under an assumed name, keeping tabs on his pet scientist and interrupting the break-in at the lab with a van full of special operatives to keep the pressure on my players. Had them introduce himself in the closing scene and drop one agent's real name into the conversation, which was a great way to trigger my players' paranoia.

HOW IT WENT DOWN

A nice short investigation, a steathy intrusion into a warehouse-turned-secret-biolab, players getting creeped out by the human experiments, and running from Majestic-12 spec ops while burning evidence. It won't be the last time.