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?