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.
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| 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.
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| 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?
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| 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.
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| 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 |
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