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.