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 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) and BESTOW (2016, Ross Payton), and the short scenario 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.

* Link above is to the 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 I could quickly reskin the room.

 

BACKGROUND ON COBBLED-TOGETHER SCENARIO

This frankenstein mash-up of scenarios lures in characters with the pretext of burgling an art gallery, then dumps 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 entity 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 in the Shotgun Scenario contest) is a solid lead-in and conclusion, but those we can steal from other works.

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 try and take out the yellow-hoodied Director...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 an epic ending 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 for the scenario to really be enjoyable. 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, see?

 

Handout: a partial map of BESTOW to get the players on the right track. In-game this was made by a previous, increasingly disturbed victim of the labyrinth.

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 a previous character in our other DG group, who had gotten himself killed in a firefight in session 2. Earned me a shocked face from the player 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 ludicrously overkill antimatter bomb 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 memetical infection of the King in Yellow; that's what you find out by improvising in the moment.)
• A partial map of the BESTOW hypercube, made 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.

Delta Green #2 — Snake Oil

Part two of a series of reviews and notes on the scenarios I ran for my Delta Green group. This one is set in scenic Sasketchewan, just across the US-Canadian border with Montana. Snake Oil is another shotgun scenario (2021 contest, by David Guenther) introducing one of Delta Green's antagonist organisations. It's also the first scenario I made a table build for using Dwarven Forge, and this scenario caused one of my players to ask for a slightly lighter tone for future games!

Couldn't resist building the biolab out of Dwarven Forge miniature terrain. The glowing vats are plastic bottles with strips of coloured felt and an led inside. They blew out the camera I took this shot with, but in person it gave a great impression of horrible worms swimming in liquid.

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 Snake Oil:

Snake Oil

A mass grave in the Canadian wilds points at organ harvesting - or something darker. Do our northern friends a favor and investigate, eh?

Tier1 #Protomatter
COOKBOOK

Tier1 means this is available as an opening scenario and the #Protomatter tag refers to weird biotech experiments. COOKBOOK is the codeword hinting at the involvement of the UFO wranglers at Majestic-12 and the shady company March Industries.

REASONS FOR INCLUDING

Snake Oil does a great job showing what kind of experiments the Majestic-12 conspiracy is involved in to try and apply the knowledge they get from the Greys. In this case, we have a disgruntled scientist and her overachieving MSc student breeding alien worms. The healing slime secreted by those horrible beasts is certainly useful, but it is unfortunate that the horrible things prefer living human hosts instead of animals...

The scenario can easily be ported to other places.

HIGH POINTS

Snake Oil is a shotgun scenario introducing one of Delta Green's antagonist organisations. It consists of a bit of light investigation followed by a discovery of absolutely revolting Unnatural experiments. In this case, the in-your-face bio-experiments are a great contrast with the more nebulous evil of the previous scenario I played with my group, which was all about disovering that Those Nazi Sorcerers Are At It Again.

WEAK POINTS

Shotgun scenarios are short by design; with 1500 words max, there's enough space to sketch the antagonists and the shape of the investigation but not to detail anything. Same goes for the illegal lab space. Nothing you can't improvise on the spot; the notes give enough of an outline to wing the investigation if you're good with creating contacts or sketching a map on the fly.

WHAT I ADDED AND CHANGED

I ended up jotting down a few extra notes about the investigation part, and added a mobile Green Box, one of Delta Green's storehouses of the possible useful, probably illegal and definitely weird.

Since my Cell was going in under cover identities as FBI investigators, I added liaisons on the Canadian side; one Royal Canadian Mounty officer at the border patrol, and one Saskatoon police lieutenant investigating the disappearance of homeless people.

I also added a Majestic-12 operative under an assumed name, keeping tabs on his pet scientist and interrupting the break-in at the lab with a van full of special operatives to keep the pressure on my players. Had them introduce himself in the closing scene and drop one agent's real name into the conversation, which was a great way to trigger my players' paranoia.

HOW IT WENT DOWN

A nice short investigation, a steathy intrusion into a warehouse-turned-secret-biolab, players getting creeped out by the human experiments, and running from Majestic-12 spec ops while burning evidence. It won't be the last time.

Delta Green #1 — Operation Beauty of the White Ape / AZTEC FORWARD

Part one of a series of reviews and notes on the scenarios I ran for my Delta Green group. The players end up stopping a nazi occultist by burning down a bookstore, and discover the joys of Delta Green's Lethality mechanic.

 

The first scenario I ran with my group was a shotgun scenario called Because the Beauty of the White Ape Woman Must Not Perish from the Earth (Shotgun contest 2017, by Mellonbread). Because I cut the White Ape reference from the scenario, I needed a different name for it. Luckily my eye caught the excellent title Operation AZTEC FORWARD, another Shotgun that I had already decided I wouldn't be using in this campaign. But the name was awesome, so stolen it was.

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 Operation AZTEC FORWARD:

Operation AZTEC FORWARD

A break-in at museum saw a mummy and some nazi memorabilia stolen. Confirm whether there is an Unnatural plot behind it.
Tier1 #Karotechia #ColderWar
MERCURY RAPTOR

Tier1 means this is available as an opening scenario. The tags #Karotechia / #ColderWar open up two scenario chains: #Karotechia covers a remnant organisation of nazi occultists (look, I like my Indiana Jones and everybody likes punching these assholes). And #ColderWar includes adventures about clandestine government use of the Cthulhu Mythos, like in Charles Stross' most excellent novelette A Colder War. I've stolen quite some codewords from Stross' work!

MERCURY RAPTOR is Delta Green's codeword for a Winged Servitor / Byakhee, which I included in my expansion of this scenario. It's not like a Mythos sorcerer will stoop to calling an Uber when they need a getaway ride. (Yes, pun, intended.)

 

REASONS FOR INCLUDING

I added this scenario to my list of operations because it sets up Delta Green's ancient enemy, the Karotechia. This group of nazi occultists fled the Third Reich to continue their repulsive ways from Argentina. DG assumed they'd taken care of them, but no...

The adventure being set in NYC also gave me the opportunity to include Stephen Alzis: sorceror, underworld kingpin, allround suave motherfucker and possible Mask of Nyarlathotep. This NPC is from DG's previous edition, set in the 1990s. He's been killed him in the time skip to the current edition, but in my '90s campaign, I can have the Handler send the Cell to Alzis to ask permission to operate on his turf.

HIGH POINTS

The scenario does a good job going from the mundane —a break-in at a museum— to the weird —one of the burglars striding through walls— to a full-on outbreak of the Unnatural in the sorceror's hideout with twisted spells and a resurrected mummy. 

The sorceror also has a great collection of creepy knickknacks lying around his workshop, which sets up a good discussion within the Cell about what to do with all those Unnatural artefacts. Session one, and this group already decides to keep some Unnatural artefacts behind for their own use!

WEAK POINTS

The scenario bills itself as an investigation, but falls shy of giving the Handler enough info to run the search for the burglars.

On a personal note, I didn't like the inclusion of the White Ape mummy with the mind of a sorceror from the future, as is detailed in the original scenario text. That's too many steps of lore for me to ram down my players' throats in one or two scenes. If you want to open up a campaign with time-traveling wizards from Lovecraft's Empire of Tsan-Chan, definitely go for it.

WHAT I ADDED AND CHANGED

Added detail to the burglary and to the investigation portion of the scenario.

• The neonazi goons now all work at a car garage, which is where their van (a 'loaner' from a client) can be tracked to.
• I decided that halfway through their theft of the ancient mummy, one of the goons decided to help himself to a piece of random nazi memorabilia (a dagger with an embossed swastika). This riggered a safety gate that split up the four thieves, forcing the karotechia sorcerer to summon a Winged Servitor to escape. Canvassing the neighborhood would have given info on where the thing darkened the stars as it flew to the sorcerer's hideout.
• Recoverable camera footage shows the two remaining burglars walking into a security guard (a mr. Johanson - yeah, a callback to the Call of Cthulhu story by HP Lovecraft) and talking instead of squaring off, a sign that they had inside help. After a brief discussion they give him a superficial head wound, so he can claim he was overpowered. An extra avenue of investigation for the PCs.
• Added a flute out of bone to Summon Winged Servitor to the karotechian's arsenal. It requires 15 minutes of continuous play to summon what looks like an immense spider crawling out of a vantage point that is somehow behind the dome of the night sky.
• Changed the million-year-old mummy to a karotechia goon who survived the organisation's botched summoning of Azatoth at Neudabaum castle via being thrown into the deep past. The present-day survivors want to revive him to recover the instructions for the summoning ritual.

 

HOW IT WENT DOWN

Adding a more detailed investigation in the museum and across NYC gave this scenario a slow-burn opening that exploded into action; one agent falls to a burst of Lethality during a break-in at the karotechia safehouse. Unprompted by me or any knowledge of Delta Green, the newly-minted Q Cell decided to get rid of all the horrible evidence by burning down the bookstore housing their Karotechia rivals. Fire as the great equalizer will become one of the main themes for Q Cell.

Delta Green: the Molotov Tapes

 "That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die."

The blog is back! Or at least briefly getting up out of its tomb, with much bleary-eyed blinking at the stars and wondering why it overate on Deep Ones last geological era.

I wanted to write a short series of blogs about my group's current run of Delta Green scenarios, the modern-day version of Call of Cthulhu. I've been plundering official and fan-written materials, splicing stories together and having a blast with the pyromaniac nutters in my player group. These blogs will not be session reports, but write-ups of the scenarios that we played and how I modified the original setup to fit my table.

Episodes

The Q-Cell Tapes:

• Delta Green #1 — Operation Beauty of the White Ape / AZTEC FORWARD
• Delta Green #2 — Snake Oil
• Delta Green #3 — Promises / Minimalism
• Delta Green #4 — STOP REPO
• Delta Green #5 — Project Anthropocene / An Item of Mutual Interest  
  

Oneshots:

• Delta Green #A — Case Exfield Cakewalk / BESTOW

A HORROR GAME OF GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY

So what is Delta Green? Delta Green started as a scenario / expansion for the Call of Cthulhu rpg, set in the modern day. Like it says on the promotional flyer I made for my players:

If the intelligence community was a family, DELTA GREEN would be the weird auntie nobody talked about.

The one they kicked out for seeing too much and doing what needed doing.

Now you get to choose. Close your eyes after what you saw, or join the conspiracy? Welcome to DELTA GREEN.

Players take on the role of government officials — feds, cops, military or otherwise — who have come into contact with the Unnatural: things that man was not meant to know, but keeps fiddling with regardless. Recruited by a shadowy taskforce called the Program or the Group, characters try to wrangle official and clandestine resources to keep back the dark at a shattering personal cost.

Also: molotov cocktails.

I got into DG through the many excellent podcasts and actual plays out there —list below— and wanted to try out a looser game structure with my group after my previous story-driven Vampire:the Dark Ages campaign bombed. A DG oneshot or two as a palate cleanser seemed to be just the thing. We had a good Session Zero to discuss themes, decided to place the game in the mid-90s, and created the characters of Q Cell. 

RESOURCES

One cool thing about the DG community is the many fan-made scenarios and other materials. I might even prefer the short Shotgun Scenarios (an annual contest for <1500 words scenarios, just enough to get you going) over the longer operations. Shotguns can be completed in 1-3 sessions, you can easily add to them, modify or splice them together, and there are literally hundreds out there.

Of course I couldn't just pick and run a simple oneshot. After going through the many official and fan-published work, I had 49 possible scenarios ready to go!

I sorted this pile into themes and tiers and put them all on a Google Map with some abstracts and spy thriller codewords.

Before each new game, players pick the scenario they want me to run. New missions open after they complete intro stories, and I weave them together by sprinkling in links to past and future ops.

• Complete operation map — based on this excellent example maintained by the Night at the Opera N@TO community
• Questionnaire to bring the characters to life — we ran through these together so that people could riff off of each other. Based on this example found on the N@TO discord
• Need to Know - Delta Green's official quickstart guide, with the excellent starter scenario Last Things Last
• Project Fairfield - collection of lore and scenarios, including the Shotgun Scenarios I've been pulling from
• N@TO contests - collection of materials by the denizens of the Night at the Opera community