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 mixed in a link to the Karotechia's original Antarctic operation in the '40s and replaced the ice spirits with a shoggoth in a box.

Surprisingly, only one character died outright. One other had his own body killed (long live the Exchange Personalities ritual) to celebrate his new body - that of Australian billionaire Mike Rydger! Two other agents only escaped the capsizing iceberg and rampaging shoggoth by means of a ghoul tunnel into the Dreamlands.

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. Project Anthropocene does a great job sketching the place, but unveiling this piece of handicraft at the table really hammered home to my players how far up a creek they were.

 

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 #Karotechia #Protomatter

ANNING BLUE SKULL // ANNING BLACK // THULE

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. #Karotechia / THULE stands for a nazi occultist organisation, #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. I'm sure 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 to a publicity stunt at Sydney harbor. I didn't particularly like the original ice spirit antagonists though, so I swapped them for a a nazi U-Boot carrying Unnatural machinery trapped in the iceberg, inspired by the document An Item Of Mutual Interest on the Delta Green website.

HIGH POINTS

Where to start? Going undercover on a sailing iceberg! No way off this tub! Explosives for 'controlled calving'! A nazi sub with Elder Thing engravings and a Thule Generator (aka shoggoth on a treadmill)! The naval guided missile cruiser Lake Erie "here to lend assistence", staffed almost completely with Karotechia operatives!

WEAK POINTS IN ORIGINAL SCENARIO

As written, Antropocene features an only vaguely detailed antagonist that will do nothing if the players don't meaningfully disturb the ice. The scenario also hints you should close the scenario with some hectic action scenes, but gives no guidance on how to run those.

An Item of Mutual Interest isn't a scenario proper, but a log detailing horrific events in the past; it needs a (small) amount of work to turn it into a dangerous situation for a scenario. The story already does a great job hinting at the Karotechia operation in Point 103 and how submarines were supplying it.

Conning tower and upper/lower deck of the U-188. I based it very, very roughly on blueprints you can find online.

WHAT I ADDED AND CHANGED

Replaced: ice-shaping spirits entities in the iceberg, with a nazi U-Boot carrying a shoggoth in a box (a wireless energy generator running on human sacrifice).

Added: direct collaboration between Outlaw Delta Green and a secretive organisation within the US Navy. This group is ostensibly still following Admiral Byrd's orders to scour the Antarctic for the nazis' secret Point 103, but secretly taken over by the very Karotechia they're supposed to hunt.

Added the Karotechia plan to use the Delta Green Cell to distract the crew of the Anthropocene, while a team of SEALS lead by one of their sorcerers sneaks in to clear out the U-188 and find the navigational charts leading to Point 103. Of course this goes horribly wrong and the SEAL team gets snacked upon by the trapped Shoggoth.

Finally having fed again after 500+ million years, the Shoggoth gets back in its treadmill and starts pushing out free electricity to all the machinery on the iceberg. This sudden free, wireless energy is highly interesting to billionaire Mike Rydger, who flies in his top physicist and his top lawyer to lock down a world-changing new technology - if only they can find the source of this free energy!

Into this mix come the Delta Green Cell in their guise as a hired video documentary crew, trying to find out what the hell is wrong on this shrinking icecube.

I added Agent Nancy as an undercover agent (disguised as a helicopter engineer) to give the cell an ally on board.

HOW IT WENT DOWN

Because I had to introduce the whole angle of Neuschwabenland and Nazis in the antarctic, my intro was way too long; it took most of the first session. This was (I hope!) still interesting because the Cell was very worried about government agencies finding out about their true identities and their involvement in all kinds of illegal activities for Delta Green. The trip out to the iceberg and first exploration of the site was a great slow burn: the Weird slowly ramped up over time until an action-filled climax.

One player had to run a replacement character after their original PC got left heavily sedated at base camp; I gave them the surviving nazi sorcerer, with instructions to get home to the Lake Erie at all cost. This lead to good-hearted PvP, one sorcerer sucked into the court of Azatoth by their hastily-summoned Winged Servitor (AGAIN - see scenario 1 in this series), and the rest of the Cell evacuating via search and rescue helicopter to the Lake Erie, where they are promptly incarcerated by the Karotechia.

The Cell escaped via the double agent that their handler managed to get on board: one Agent Nancy, who the players have been hearing 'is good people' the entire campaign and finally get to meet.

Nancy disguised themselves as a helicopter technician and was able to lead the surviving characters into the Dreamlands via the ship's morgue. The agents will take a year of subjective time and six years of real-world time to get out again, ending up in 2002. That gives me a nice time skip to the modernish incarnation of Delta Green from the new edition. We'll create new characters for this second season of the campaign — the old batch was starting to look a bit ragged after five scenarios!

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 (Elendil, 2017 shotgun contest), in which the cell needs to clean up the Green Box of a recently deceased operative. The scenario was 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 US Marshal and forensics specialist 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.

TEASER ON OPERATION MAP

My 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.

I know Delta Green is supposed to be all mopey theatre of the mind immersion, and we do plenty of that. But I've found a nice little diorama helps set the scene and lighten the mood; can't go full-darkness all the time.

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 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 retire? Die of natural causes? Die of 9mm retirement?

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

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 gangbangers looking to get back the Compound Liao that their friendly neighbor stored for them
• 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!"

"I gun the VW Jetta's engine and drive through the chain link fence. Can I the Majestic-12 specops on the way?"
Gods I love my players.

Just to spice things up, I added the following items to the Green Box:

• a duffel bag full of drugs and rolls of cash
• a weapons stash
• the Deck of Many Things (Harrow Deck from Pathfinder, actually) in the grip of a mummified Grey (liberally interpreted to work with DG instead of D&D)
• a magnetic bottle apparatus from 30 years into the future, containing enough antimatter to level Boston (I introduced this particular item to my other group in Case Exfield Cakewalk / BESTOW, but for some reason they didn't want to take it along. No problem, I'll just recycle it for my main group!)

 

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 by means of a bloodhound: a rando office worker snagged off the street and doped to the gills with the time-viewing drug Compound Liao.

Finally, one of the players payed off his debt to Stephen Alzis by giving him the Deck of Many Things. After drawing a bunch of cards of course! This mutated him into an 8-foot fireproof ogre and led him to decide that perhaps it was time for a career change out of view of Delta Green. In return for the Deck, 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 little?"

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 happen?

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 scenario 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. As an in-medias-res opening it lacks a set-up of course, so I added that in via "three days earlier" based on 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 gives me an adrenaline rush every time I read its 163 words. I'm immediately trying to imagine how the group got there (see below), what the changing lights in the sky behind them mean (on first reading I thought "enraged Mi-Go", then tracked back to figure out what made it so angry), what to feed the lobster gun (depleted uranium or tungsten shavings, duh).

Promises has such a great hook: someone murdered their little sister and her family, including the state senator husband, and disappeared their heads. They then get caught and incarcerated and spend 30 years keeping quiet until they're willing to talk to Delta Green. The pay-off at the end of Promises I find incredibly weak, but I don't need that pay-off if I can transition into Minimalism!

HIGH POINTS

HIGH-OCTANE OPENING, which immediately supplied the high-energy chase scene I needed to deliver to my players to wrap up the scenario.

One of the characters is afraid (wisely so...) of getting burned because he's 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 and head-taker? Awesome!

 

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 site of his victims' bodies. Next up for the same treatment is the group's forensics specialist. It's worth noting that the characters have been very careful keeping their true identities a secret.

Added a lawyer for the convict, to go with the cell on the mission and verify that the terms of the plea deal are honored.

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 use a continuous computer-driven chant from his victims' undead heads to bind and control the Mi-Go. Going mad from the effort, he then blacks out and wakes up a few towns over, gets picked up by law enforcement and incarcerated.

Meanwhile, 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 entropic darkness of The Buffer. Here multiple platforms hang in the black, reachable via rickety, pitted metal walkways and a screeching cargo container.

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 aggressive laywers, paradimensional byways, an extending lobster gun firing depleted uranium 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.

 

If you read through all that weirdness, here's an alternative Dwarven Forge build for the Buffer, with some scatter from other minis. I made this version to show off in the Dwarven Forge discord community and as a technical challenge: how to suspend platforms without any components touching the bottom plate. Plates ('terrain trays') are neoprene over metal, so you can use heavily magnetised pieces like the Burrows set as supports. Works surprisingly well.

 

 

 

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 uni 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) / BESTOW (2016, Ross Payton) and the short official scenario called 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.

* 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 like skulls or weeds I could quickly reskin the room.

 

BACKGROUND ON COBBLED-TOGETHER MONSTROSITY

What this frankenstein mash-up of scenarios ends up doing is luring characters in with the pretext of burgling an art gallery, then dumping 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 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 on Shotguns) is a solid lead-in and conclusion, but those we can steal from other scenarios.

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 shoot the yellow-hoodied Director in the head...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 a world-changer 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. 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-real, see?

 

Partial map of BESTOW, made by a previous, increasingly disturbed victim.

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 my wife's first DG character in our other DG group, who had gotten himself killed in a firefight with neonazis. Earned me a shocked face 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 2 megaton antimatter warhead 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 memetics of the King in Yellow; that's what you find out improvising in the moment.)
• A partial map of the BESTOW hypercube 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.

 

Card with 'safety notes' for the magnetic bottle with 5 grams of antimatter:
LHC-Upgrade
Project KUGELBLITZ
Mk 4.137 H containment unit
Do not expose to:
- extreme shocks / 10 g/s
- extreme heat or cold <200 K, >350 K
- strong radiation >1 Gy/hr
- strong magnetic fields >1 T

E=mc^2 IS NOT YOUR FRIEND