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!