Delta Green

[plucky saffron]

https://shop.arcdream.com/pages/kickstarter-status addendum

If I had to guess, purely based on what I've seen on Detwiller's Patreon + what's available here, the next few books will probably be The Millenium (reprints of a lot of the content in Countdown), Final Passages (Labyrinth tie-in scenarios), Operational History (elaborates on a lot of stuff that's mentioned in the HG), and Incursions (reprints of previous edition scenarios such as Dead Letter, Holy War, The New Age, etc.)

Answering this; yeah, they're gonna be printing some of the more famous shotgun scenarios in a book. I swear there was a list of what was going to be included out there, but I can't find it right this instant, so I can only say that I remember Die Nachtbruder and Agent Purple's Green Box Blues were included. I think Metamorphosis and STOP REPO might also be in there just based on the fact that they're kinda popular (I think STOP REPO was printed in The Unspeakable Oath once), but again, not totally sure

[cosmic spindle]

Cool, thanks

[plucky saffron]

nodnod

I will also note that PISCES specifically is a book that's a huge ??? because, as I understand, it's entirely in the hands of Adam Scott Glancy who from an outside perspective seems to be kinda off in his own universe in this regard

[cosmic spindle]

Isn’t PICES recovering from having a good amount of their members having been Alien Brain Parasite Hosts?

[plucky saffron]

there was an interview with I think in the past two years or so where Detwiller was asked about PISCES and basically said "it's in Adam's hands"

[cosmic spindle]

Insects from Shaagi?

[plucky saffron]

ostensibly, yes

[cosmic spindle]

Actually recovering might be wrong since I dunno if the stuff I’ve read saying they ever really dealt with the issue

[plucky saffron]

we have some snippets of PISCES from all the way back in 2020, but that's pretty much all that we know AFAIK

I'm still holding out for Those Who Come After, which has had some stuff in the past year or so, but also seems to be a bit in limbo

[cosmic spindle]

What’s that gonna be about?

[plucky saffron]

Great Race of Yith, primarily

[cosmic spindle]

Ah, neat

[plucky saffron]

I'm hoping they can pull off some pretty fun stuff with time shenanigans like that but we'll see

[wild tapir]

The way DG handles the Yith is definitely one of the best retoolings of the Mythos I've seen

[plucky saffron]

I'll admit I'm a bit frustrated by the fact that so much of what's coming out soonish is reprints, especially because they're very direct reprints. I've thumbed through The Conspiracy and Convergence and it might not be the exact same as the previous edition writing, but content-wise, the differences are minimal

[cosmic spindle]

I can understand them wanting to get everything that’s in a bunch of different places all collected together, but also get the irritation at not having new stuff

[plucky saffron]

nodnod

[plucky saffron]

Oh, to actually answer the question of favorite shotgun scenarios: I have an edited version of BESTOW that I like running and Die Nachtbruder is fun if not super interactive. I have interest in (but have not run) STOP REPO, Bugs Bugs Bugs, Case Exfield Cakewalk, Operation WHITE HARE, Whereabouts Unknown, and Full Scale.

[cosmic spindle]

Forgot to ask, what’s the basic pitch on these?

[plucky saffron]

• BESTOW: ||Go into an art museum looking for a person of interest, get stuck in an infinitely looping hypercube of rooms with a puzzle. There's a map attached for GMs.||
• Die Nachtbruder: ||You've done this one, but for those in the audience; help a long-retired DG agent with an unspecified errand that mostly involves a long car ride and at least one questionable purchase.||
• STOP REPO: ||A recently deceased DG agent left some notes behind detailing his use of certain cars abandoned in an airport lot as Green Boxes. The airport in question is undergoing some changes and is auctioning off abandoned cars. Find the cars (probably already sold) and retrieve their contents.||
• Bugs Bugs Bugs: ||Check-in on a DG asset reveals he's missing. He was investigating a cult, but they got him first by using a glyph that makes certain people (seemingly random) appear as poorly-disguised insectoid monsters. The cult in question is worshipping a kind of assassin bug monster that can appear pretty perfectly human.||
• Case Exfield Cakewalk: ||PISCES wants you to snatch some things out of storage in a historic house-turned-museum. Plans for an easy heist are derailed by the nature of the artifacts as well as the sheer bad luck of running into a separate team of burglars who are present for mundane reasons.||
• Operation WHITE HARE: ||Young adult dies of a somewhat bizarre cause, attracting DG attention. There's a very minor "retrieve the object" mission with an experimental MAJESTIC artifact that feels extremely good to hold. Simple, but I like the artifact in question.||
• Whereabouts Unknown: ||Find a missing DG friendly. Interesting, but ultimately following clues to a dead end; the friendly has disappeared due to tampering with magic. I like the tone of it, but it would need adjustment I think.||
• Full Scale: ||Zombies created by drugs have started popping up in St. Petersburg. GRU SV-8 agents have to deal with it. Go to a stash house and do Resident Evil things.||

[cosmic spindle]

Ah, yeah, I thought Die Nachtbruder sounded familiar

STOP REPO sounds like a rather fun mess

[weary raft]

https://staggeredamusementmachine.itch.io/delta-green-scenario-workbook

[cosmic spindle]

This is very dumb, but been watching someone play Alan Wake for the first time, and my DG brainworms had me thinking about Agent Nightingale as being like a new DG agent who has no idea how to deal with what he now knows or how to stay properly under the radar lol

[weary raft]

What is the fbc for 200 alex

[cosmic spindle]

No that’s the funny thing, he’s not part of them lol (also they hadn’t been come up with yet)

[weary raft]

you say that but i think there's an allusion for the sherrif somewhere in the AW1 saga

[cosmic spindle]

I think that was added in an update

[queen tinsel]

straight up, greening it

[shadow inlet]

Deltagreen should investigate Gaster

[queen tinsel]

no

[shadow inlet]

But he’s stealing their Delta Brand!

[honest sky]

At the function, straight up « investigating it »

And by « it », well. let’s justr say

My delta greenis

[queen tinsel]

ok

@shadow inlet @cosmic spindle @coral pumice sorry for more pings, but rewrote the second sectionn to just be overall a bit clearer as a hook and intro, does this feel like it needs any reworking or cuts
The Agents find themselves re-united, sitting around a table during a preliminary hearing, facing Section Chief Myles of the FBI and Agent Patel of Transnational Issues from the CIA. Though the official reports seem valid enough at a glance to outsiders, with the usual censorship one would expect from such a document, it’s clear to the three-letter agencies that some kind of extensive tampering has gone through and removed any evidence of something. Neither Myles nor Patel have any clue what that something is. Their primary goals are to construct a plausible reconstruction of events for the public, and an actual story of events for their own understanding, regardless of how implausible that tale might be. This interview will be the opening scene to Part 2: Great Holes, and should serve as a tone setter for the oncoming bureaucratic labyrinth they will find themselves trapped in as they struggle to escape the J. Edgar Hoover building.

[cosmic spindle]

Yeah that seems good

Though, Agent is more of an FBI term and Section/Station Chief is more of a CIA term

[queen tinsel]

i mixed them up lmaooooo thajks for the reminder

[cosmic spindle]

I have no idea further than this, but thinking about how “What really happened to D.B. Cooper” could be a great starting point for a scenario

Either the search for him is how some people first get made aware of and brought into DG or you are some people already in and need to keep people from searching your section because Cooper accidentally fell into a part of the woods with Some Bad Shit going on

[plucky saffron]

I think “money that was paid to D. B. Cooper and will get you flagged if you spend it” is in my green box notes lol

[weary raft]

"who do you think DB cooper was?" the handler says, eyebrow raised.

[cosmic spindle]

Oh man that is a fun thing to put in a Green Box lmao

[plucky saffron]

I’ll have to repost some of my bangers

To my own credit, I have a certain knack for coming up with things that are kinda weird but not always super alarming to find in a Green Box

[cosmic spindle]

Gotten two of the scenario books over the past few months, and just recently got Iconoclasts

I’ll need to read over them more in depth to have real opinions, but some of the scenarios like y’all said are a bit hit and miss, but mostly they seem interesting

Iconoclasts seems really interesting, but also something where the Handler will need to be keeping a close eye on stuff behind the scenes to not lose track of the various spinning plates (both the stuff inherent to the scenario but also the stuff that the players will be getting up to with very high likelihood of owing favors to other intel agencies/factions and what is going on with any assets they cultivate)

And also probably a game where if playing in person getting a corkboard, string, and physical handouts might be a real benefit to the players lol

[plucky saffron]

as promised, some select items from Juno's personal green box entries:

• A cardboard box containing medical scrubs of various colors. Most are still in their original packaging.
• An oversized black Canada Goose puffer jacket. In the right sleeve there is a homemade “quick draw sleeve” made from a polio leg brace, a metal slide, and an adjustable vice. Unfortunately, the sliding mechanism is prone to catching, which makes the sleeve practically unusable for its intended purpose.
• A cardboard box containing an assortment of bargain bin VHS movies, all of which were released in 1999. Notable titles include “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai”, “The 13th Warrior”, “The General’s Daughter”, and “The Rage: Carrie 2.”
• A Creality Ender-3 3D printer. Sitting in a plastic sandwich bag taped to the print bed is a small red USB flash drive containing files for printing Glock 17 and Glock 19 magazines, magazine extensions, auto-sears, and collapsible stocks. An accompanying readme file, authored by “Flanders Home Defense”, thoroughly explains relevant American gun laws as well as how one should gather, print, and discard materials and equipment so as to minimize traceability.
• A cardboard moving box filled with thrift store clothing in men’s sizes M - XXL. Highlights include a commemorative Operation Desert Storm T-shirt with Bart Simpson in a tac vest strangling Saddam Hussein, a T-shirt with a dabbing unicorn and the text “NOT TODAY BRAIN TUMOR”, and a T-shirt featuring the Tarkus album cover art.
• A vintage saffron La-Z-Boy wooden rocking recliner. An obscenely large bag of roasted sunflower seeds, a white plastic bucket used as a spittoon, an opened twelve pack tray of Carabao Dang Energy Drink, a sealed Mason jar with biohazardous contents, and a AAA-battery powered LED headlamp with an elastic band all sit within arm’s reach of the chair.

this doesn't cover a lot of the ones that are more obviously concerning, partly due to character limits, but also because "a pair of Hi-Point 9mm carbines hidden in a cut-open mattress" just does not quite have the same character as the piles of thrifted "chaff" meant to hide the stuff that's actually relevant/useful to DG agents lol

also the average (often former) green box caretaker is definitely a grizzled boomer of some variety which must be represented in the color of the contents lol

[sudden igloo]

The VHS are a nice touch, evergreen really

Honestly one of the masterstrokes of Delta Green's writing was the first sourcebook starting with Fairfield ranting about teaching sex in schools and MTV and how his kids don't respect him. Fantastic tone setting

If any Outlaw uses Facebook, they post minion memes

[cosmic spindle]

It is rather neat how most of the leadership of both halves of DG are dirtbags, basically ruined by it, or both

[sudden igloo]

Nobody leaves the job alive

[wild tapir]

I'm planning on running PX Poker Night as a Halloween one shot for my Runequest group this year, then maybe starting a larger campaign after that. Does anyone have any experience running it? Any tips or pitfalls to watch out for?

[plucky saffron]

I've run it once and had two issues.
First, I spent too much time on trying to establish NPCs, the general norm of life on-base, and the slow burn before the big blackout. This is probably a user error, but it's worth noting as advice to, yknow, not do that.

Second, the module does not provide strong incentives for PCs to stay on the base, or particularly strong impediments against leaving. It's not like a usual DG module where solving unnatural problems is the PCs' express job, and the AFB as-written is isolated but not so isolated that you couldn't theoretically just walk off the base towards the nearest small town. The written solution to what happens if they do that is that they eventually get ||scooped up by the MAJESTIC clean-up||, but that just brings them to the end of the scenario without really interacting with anything.

I'm not totally sure how you'd fix this. My first thought is to relocate the AFB somewhere that provides a more obvious impediment to just walking out the front gate. Maybe out in the desert, or situated somewhere in remote Alaska (although the latter doesn't make sense for a plane graveyard specifically).

[cosmic spindle]

I was actually about to read through PX Poker Night lol

[plucky saffron]

I also changed up what ||SONNET|| is/does, but that's purely a matter of my artistic preference. Instead of ||crashing a Grey spaceship||, it's an ||experimental portal device||. It has the same gameplay effects, it just swaps the ||Greys|| for a ||dimensional shambler (nicknamed in my game notes as "Doughboy"||

some choice descriptive bits of the man in question for me to throw out during the game

[cosmic spindle]

Love that first one

[cosmic spindle]

Also, read Iconoclasts, definitely seems like more of a sandbox but still a very interesting one

I’m a bit surprised that there wasn’t any info on French intelligence agencies, since the French were reasonably heavily involved

[wild tapir]

That strikes me as an authorial blindspot, since information about and references to French (and European in general) intelligence agencies is pretty thin in the English language culture sphere even among aficionados of that sort of thing

[wild tapir]

That second one is less likely to be an issue for my players because they generally like to stay on task, but it does make me curious about setting the incident during a storm (either thunder or snow) to make it a little harder to just get out as a viable option they have to justify against taking themselves. I was worried about the former thing myself, my players can get into roleplaying chit chat a little bit too much if they have the opportunity so just skipping closer to straight into the events of the incident and making the other AFB personnel a little more off the shelf character wise for readability seems like a good call

[cosmic spindle]

Might be good (having read it now) to just do some light vignettes of the day leading up and only have players take full control at the poker game?

[cosmic spindle]

Does anyone know of any good actual plays (I think that’s the term) of Iconoclasts? I’m kinda interested to see/hear how people play and run it

Also, I feel like I’d I were to run it at least one modification I’d do is to make a DGSE intel contact, since France as I mentioned was pretty involved in the Coalition against ISIL and also damn does the DGSE get up to Some Shit as well as having what seems to be quite a bit of SIGINT, HUMINT, and operational history under its belt

[coral pumice]

the DGSE when there is an un-blown-up environmental activist ship in New Zealand

[cosmic spindle]

I was actually gonna mention the Rainbow Warrior as an example of the shit they’ve done lmao

But on more “normal” spook shit they have a hell of a intel and operational history which makes me feel like they’d be interesting and useful to put into a Iconoclasts campaign

[coral pumice]

(stupid IL joke) what did trump mean by this

[plucky saffron]

Thinking about this again, wondering about a change in setting to Poker Flats Research Range, a sounding rocket launch facility in Alaska

[cosmic spindle]

||Am I wrong in thinking the San damage rate for when it really gets going would probably be too much to survive trying to just walk out, or am I misremembering?||

[plucky saffron]

I’m not 100% sure but that admittedly doesn’t solve the problem of keeping them there to begin with

[cosmic spindle]

I think you could probably just say something like|| “you feel your mind slipping fast enough you don’t think you could make it”|| in that case alongside reminding them how far they are from anything, but I don’t think relocating the base would be that much of an issue either, as long as it’s still a shithole no one wants to be at and no one really cares all that much about

Could just as easily maybe make it a super remote Alaskan island intel listening post, make it a dead end spot for DIA, CIA, or other military SIGINT people

Or just a refueling point

[plucky saffron]

New thing from Caleb Stokes that’s not gonna be published. It’s a faction kinda like the ones in Labyrinth, the 411 is that ||someone stumbled into a partial understanding of DG + the unnatural via family ties, interpreted what was available through a leftist lens, and has started their own counter-conspiracy against both DG and the unnatural (which comprises all of four people pushed far left by experiencing The System™️)||

As you might imagine, your Handler is not overly fond of these people, so you’re sent to investigate and then somehow resolve the inevitable clash of interests. The setup is very much meant to poke at the political assumptions/priorities of the agents as (more or less) members of the US intelligence apparatus

Per the man’s own admission, it’s a bit of a nightmare to run because of all the moving pieces, and it very much looks that way from a first reading. It has also successfully punched through the screen and made me feel distressed so uh. Another day another banger

||one of the conspiracy members is a trans woman whose description is pretty close to some irl friends of mine and maneuvering the conspiracy such that nobody gets hurt seems very difficult|| (no cw I think? just kinda personally compromising)

[sudden igloo]

That sounds really compelling, kinda surprised something like that hasn't been written about already

[cosmic spindle]

Seems pretty interesting, is this on his patreon?

Or, paid site, whatever it is? I know he has something like that

[plucky saffron]

Patreon, yep

He did a 6(?) session run of it

[weary raft]

is that dead draft?

[plucky saffron]

Yup! Or, well, it is a dead draft

The thing itself is called INTERSECT

[weary raft]

INTERSECT

[plucky saffron]

mhm

[weary raft]

yeah jinx

i got people to send this to

[cosmic spindle]

So is a dead draft just something he kinda gives up working on further for whatever reason?

[plucky saffron]

as I understand, yeah

he’s got his explanation there (I’m not at my PC atm and can’t be bothered to log in on mobile) but I think it was an issue of scope creep

which like, there are a lot of moving parts

[weary raft]

ah don't worry

i know enough freaks who'll go wild for it anyhow

[plucky saffron]

oh yeah no I’m tempted

[cosmic spindle]

Happens to the best of us, it’s an understandable issue

I’m sitting over here thinking of how I should really write up a DGSE agency contact for Iconoclasts, and also that you know, what if the players ||fail in stopping the convoy from leaving at the end of the mission||, clearly this means that means there should be ||a sequel scenario set in Raqqa||

And man, the idea they plant of the Mosul SWAT guy being the potential seed for an Iraqi/Middle Eastern Delta Green equivalent is really cool

I hope if they do any scenarios set in or around Iraq that they consider having him pop up as a sorta “canon” character

[void sparrow]

How will the budget and staffing cuts at the US‘ federal agencies affect the conspiracy? (Shower thought)

Feels like another hit to American society‘s safety net if horrors from beyond cannot be fought effectively. You can‘t embezzle funds to that end if there are no funds.

[cosmic spindle]

They kinda bring up some of this stuff in relation to 2016, where the instability has caused problems. however I’d point out that stuff like creating a massive slush fund for DHS would mean that in the reality where DG is real they’d be happy as a clam diverting some of those funds

Also they lay out that Delta Green is where several of the pallets of unmarked cash that was misplaced or “misplaced” during the initial stages of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq ended up

So, they have some rainy day funds set aside

[void sparrow]

The USA are such a fun country to think about. I wish it was real.

Thanks for the reply, Hellbrute! Quite interesting.

[plucky saffron]

Intersect has a mention of how setting it in 2025 gives the titular group better odds of attracting ex-military types, actually

[void sparrow]

What's Intersect?

[plucky saffron]

Also, not quite the same thing, but God’s Teeth talks a little bit about how the pandemic affects the agents IIRC

[plucky saffron]

New Patreon thing from one of the creators. Not gonna be published officially it looks like. If you scroll up a little bit you’ll find more details there

[plucky saffron]

this is also covered in Intersect lol

$6.6 billion Pentagon dollars just… missing

[cosmic spindle]

Pentagon still can’t pass an audit!

Or, hasn’t even tried, I forgot which

[winged blade]

Iirc there was a paywalled post earlier this year on the DG website called "we're all outlaws now" or something along those lines, presumably regarding how the Program reacts to the spree of funding cuts from DOGE and all that

[cosmic spindle]

Aside from Last Things Last, what do y’all like as a “intro” scenario for new Delta Green players?

Either introducing the characters to the conspiracy or having them already in it

[plucky saffron]

I’ve started using a repainted version of BESTOW. I may try and edit Poker Night to fit my taste as well

I also often use Sentinels of Twilight/FULMINATE but in retrospect perhaps that one isn’t the best

seeing as one of the key problems is ||”this seven year old is an unnatural vector”||

[cosmic spindle]

Depending on how you run it and who you work for it could just end with ||the kid being taken away in a black helicopter and leaving what happens next up to the imagination||

So like, less directly bad stuff

I will say PX Poker Night does seem like a good one, and easily edited to all sorts of out of the way, middle of nowhere, dead end government postings

[plucky saffron]

Mhm. I’ve said it before but thinking about putting it in Alaska so walking out isn’t just a massively inconvenient gamble but a death wish

also maybe changing up what ||SONNET|| does to match some of the stuff in ||Jack Frost with Ithaqua||

[cosmic spindle]

Personally I’m fine with there being all sorts of different weird artifacts/objects that are completely unrelated

Though if you wanna do that to link them that’s totally understandable

[wild tapir]

I had good success running a slightly modified version of Kali Ghati as a sort of prequel for my first DG group. The big changes were moving it back to the early 00s so that it was congruent timeline wise and more importantly removing the DG element, except for hints in Ellis' files, making the players into members of the FOB garrison. It works pretty similarly to Poker Night, in that it familiarizes the players with a military/bureaucratic environment, is ultimately very deadly, and does the Lovecraftian reveal in the last bits of investigation

It's got some light investigative stuff going on at the beginning as well, though it doesn't really set the tone for DG ops stateside

[plucky saffron]

It’s less a desire to link them and more that I don’t like what SONNET does in the base version, so that’s free reign to do other things with it

and I like some of Jack Frost’s weird descriptors of ||how Ithaqua incursions appear on scientific instruments||

[subtle jetty]

It’s a bit longer but I actually really like The Pipeline from CoC as an intro scenario that has the team starting out ignorant of the Unnatural

[cosmic spindle]

Personally I do like it, basically fucking with something they only have 50% of an idea of what it does with the ||Mi-go ship being the primary test subject, the base staff the secondary, and the people doing the test the tertiary test subjects||, it’s test subjects all the way down

[cosmic spindle]

Not aware of that one, what’s the elevator pitch?

[subtle jetty]

Players are a team sent by Exxon to check on a remote pumping station in Canada that suddenly stopped responding. The team is a mix of technical assistance in case it’s a mechanical failure as well as security, as the company has received threats from an eco-terrorist group previously.

||It turns out Exxon found an old temple to Ithaqua while digging and tried to cover it up, thinking it was just some old ruins that would prevent oil extraction. The eco-terrorist group has members of a cult in it that jump at the chance to use the temple and the rituals therein to further their goals. The player’s plane goes down and they have to figure out how to make it to the punping station and how to survive the cultists, who have transformed into Urayull, yeti like creatures who massacred the pumping station and are now enacting a ritual to swallow a good portion of Canada in a blizzard. ||

I mostly love this one for the setting, I am a sucker for the Arctic as a setting. The environment is just as deadly as the Unnatural and the players ||have to choose between being protagonists and trying to stop the ritual or just trying to survive. ||

[cosmic spindle]

Okay that’s actually super sick ngl

Is that in a collection or available on its own?

Only a bit of tweaking would be needed to make that more DG-y (which makes sense, DG is in CoC’s bloodline)

[cosmic spindle]

Anyone got any thoughts on the Control Groups collection?

[plucky saffron]

I've thumbed through it. Sick Again is one of my favorite ops (you were partway through this one, once upon a time) but I think Night Visions is one of the worst. I am unsure about BLACKSAT and Wormwood Arena, they float in that weird nebulous middle of "I would probably never run this but I'm also kinda picky"

[plucky saffron]

I guess I should also note that BLACKSAT is one of those DG missions where I'd at least consider running it in FIST instead

[cosmic spindle]

What’s the issue with Night Visions?

Also, in Sick Again, just because I’ve always been curious, would my character’s plan to ||try and do an early intervention against the whatever it was that was causing the infection via putting themselves in the MRI have worked or just ripped my guy apart?||

||Or done a secret third thing?||

[plucky saffron]

Kali Ghati but there's even more focus on dubious depictions of Afghans

[cosmic spindle]

Ah, not great

[plucky saffron]

I don't totally recall who would've been going in, but the answer is pretty much always "it depends"

Sick Again spoilers ||It can cure it (I can't totally recall if it's guaranteed), but whoever goes in suffers adverse effects from the infection responding to the MRI. How adverse depends on how soon you catch the problem; if they're far enough along, they die anyway||

||and they lose a 1d4 roll's worth of a random stat even at the earliest stage||

[cosmic spindle]

||Ah, sounds like I might have made it but lost stats then, oof||

[plucky saffron]

it's a rough one, yeah

but it's a cool concept under the hood! it's unfortunate we never finished it or even quite got to the big reveal

[wild tapir]

It's also just ultimately a crazy deathtrap, not unlike Kali Ghati, but it feels both less earned and less avoidable.

A lot of the Control Group ops are, or at least seem to me, to be designed to kill the majority of the PCs involved. More so than a typical DG op, at least

Which makes sense, because they're all sort of framed as being prologues or backstories for player characters that would then be in a normal Delta Green campaign

[cosmic spindle]

Unrelated, but looked at the merch tab on Arc Dream, and man, I really don’t need a Delta Green mug or patch or lapel pin (though the lapel pin is very nicely understated, gotta say) but man do I want them

Also they have a Barbie movie themed shirt

[cosmic spindle]

Have any of you played God’s Hunt? I think I remember seeing some of y’all talk about liking some of the scenarios in there. Is it generally standalone from God’s Teeth?

[plucky saffron]

Yep, though there’s a through line in that many of the people responsible for the inciting incursions are ||rescues from the Cornucopia House||

You don’t necessarily meet or deal with them in the scenario, however. In God’s Law, they’re ||already dead before the op starts||

[cosmic spindle]

Do you like the collection?

[plucky saffron]

I would say so. I don’t totally get how one of the operations works, but I’m willing to chalk that up to a user error

but otherwise I think they’re at least on the upper end of the scale; God’s Eye is probably my favorite scenario and I would at least consider God’s Law and God’s Breath

[lime perch]

haven't played them yet, probably will if I ever run Delta Green
-Eye is a fun weird mystery
-Breath I'm a little mixed on but is pretty solid DG fare
-Law is good, not much else I can think of
-Light is really cool but also seems really sprawling in a way that might be a pain in the ass to run

[winged blade]

God's Light fucks but absolutely seems like the most complicated one to run

[cosmic spindle]

Y’all gotta read this, I think May might actually have done something spooky (and inspired a potentially great shotgun scenario through it)

[queen tinsel]

btw @cosmic spindle im extremely looking forward to playing IL because my family moved to new York when they came to the states so i will 100% be giving everyone regionalist and deeply annoying accents for

trying to solve the deep mystery but then my stupid night floor contacts starts talking about some "boolanjery crossaunt with that stupid fucking sign on it"

[plucky saffron]

Caleb Stokes has a pretty good knack for writing stuff where it's like "ah but you see, the real horror is [relatively mundane thing]" and for better or for worse, I am a big fan

[cosmic spindle]

This related to IL or another scenario?

Or just generally?

[plucky saffron]

mostly talking about God's Hunt since he was on all of those. I think God's Teeth is the same way but it's been a while so I'm fuzzy on all of the particulars. INTERSECT and Too Friendlies are also like this

[cosmic spindle]

I don’t know those last two

[plucky saffron]

INTERSECT is the one we were talking about maybe a week ago, Too Friendlies was sometime last year

Too Friendlies had an interesting start because the prologue isn't using DG as a system; it was using one of the games from something called "The Romance Trilogy"

they are in fact games about romance

[cosmic spindle]

…huh

[plucky saffron]

bring two people together and then see if you can tear them apart, because Too Friendlies' horror is about ||the interplay between verbal and non-/pre-verbal aspects of communication||

[cosmic spindle]

For whatever reason, that had me thinking of the very interesting horror film Pontypool

If you’ve not seen it, it’s interesting

Definitely has issues, but does some neat stuff

[plucky saffron]

Not terribly far off! In Too Friendlies, there's essentially a ||parasite that preserves the language content of speech but changes tone, body language, etc. to ready the infected subject for communication with Nyarlathotep (I think)||

in gameplay, this (kinda) requires gaslighting the shit out of your players, but I can see it being fun still

I say, not being one of the players

there's a writeup for it on his Patreon

[plucky saffron]

I'd been working on something of my own with a vaguely similar premise for a while, but I never could quite work out all the kinks. The gist was that a professor was tasked with translating a tablet in a heretofore unidentified language and, in the process of doing so, was "infected" by an alien ur-language

which not only effectively gave him aphasia, but changed his perception of reality to match his new language. what if Sapir-Whorf was real and evil

the trick of course was finding a good way to infect the players

[cosmic spindle]

The only way off the top of my head I can think is forcing San checks when players use “infected” words but that seems way too punishing, especially if they don’t catch on quick

[plucky saffron]

that’s a thought, but then there’s the question of how to make them use the infected words

[cosmic spindle]

Oh I more mean either have it be something for the players, i.e. out of character discussion can trigger it so could be somewhat common game words, or could be something they need to use related to the investigation

Like “bas relief” or “inscription”

I dunno, just spitballing

Or even the guy’s name maybe

Or the name he gives the tablet

Sorta a “words/names have power” thing

[void sparrow]

@plucky saffron Do you know of any good UFO-related DG scenarios? One of my flatmates has started to believe in UFOs. Since Incannot convince him it’s bullshit, I‘d like to have some fun with it.

[wild tapir]

PX Poker Night is probably the best, and it deliberately subverts the UFO mythology it plays into by ||partly revealing that the little grey aliens are actually just puppets of the much more inhuman fungal-crustacean Mi-Go and that the inside of a shiny silver UFO is actually covered in magic runes and made of something between meat and clay||

[plucky saffron]

PX Poker Night, Convergence, one or two shotgun scenarios I’d have to dig up

UXO is one but it’s ||a false positive||

[wild tapir]

There are also a few DG scenarios that probably could appear to be related to UFOs initially for someone hoping to see that, and if the GM wants to lead them on a little, but then turn out to be something totally different

Operation Fulminate could easily initially be played as if it's moving towards an alien reveal

[cosmic spindle]

The OG scenario Convergence (literally the first one they made) is about a UFO hotspot town

It’s very, very X-Files (if they had a much bigger effects budget)

[cosmic spindle]

@plucky saffron Got Control Groups and God’s Hunt as my last big “I have money again” splurge, and started flicking through them. First off, you were absolutely right about the Afghanistan one in Control Groups, that’s a really bad one just in content but also being kinda bullshit in its gameplay, but also my cursory look over Sick Again has me very much understanding why you like it so much, polar opposite to the one I just mentioned in that the gameplay is very interesting and the concept is super cool

Also, kinda funny looking behind the curtain that when we were playing it I did figure out ||a legitimate way to cure myself but that it was the one with the worst possible outcome other than just trying to shove a fork in a wall socket to cure yourself||

I was indeed on to something! Unfortunately there were better options I haven’t keyed in on lmao

[plucky saffron]

Admittedly, I’m not sure how you’d piece together that other one exactly

[cosmic spindle]

Yeah, I’ll read through it closer to see if there are some details you can get in the diagnostic info that points to ||some sort of interaction with synapse messaging/electrical transmission stuff||, if not it seems like something that should be included to give the players a bit of a chance

Also, while I know that all the scenarios in that book are meant to be pretty lethal, the ||checking for infection every minute|| seems a bit harsh, do you ||increase the time scale on that|| when you run it?

[plucky saffron]

I don’t have the book available to me to double check that and it’s been a little bit, but if that’s accurate, I was almost certainly using a different time scale, yeah

I’m not sure how you’d even do that

Or, well, it would be pretty tedious

[cosmic spindle]

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking

[cosmic spindle]

Having actually fully read Sick Again, there are a few ways for the players to figure out the potential treatments, specifically ||if they go near the power substation being near the high voltage will ease the symptoms if they have any, a research task will eventually show the critters to be effected by electricity, an autopsy of Thartha will show that her cells when targeted by the critters will discharge a small shock to kill them, and the patient dying in the MRI shows some kind of electrical/magnetic effect (this is what put me on the concept when playing)||. So, kinda obtuse or requires a while to figure out, but there is definitely some stuff to help players figure it out

Also, while it’s definitely a potential death trap for the players, BLACKSAT does seem conceptually very interesting and tense to run

[cosmic spindle]

Anyone looked at porting the Call of Cthulhu luck rules to Delta Green? It’s one thing I’ve always felt is something that I really liked in CoC but felt a little disappointed wasn’t in DG, since the flat 50/50 lick rolls feel a little anticlimactic a lot of the time. I like how in CoC you can spend your luck to add to a roll which then can become a real issue when a luck roll come around and now you only have like, 15 luck

Like, it doesn’t seem that hard to port in, I just would slightly worry about how it might have unintended consequences somehow

[winged blade]

i looked into it a bit when i was starting my IL game, because the first session had a lot of failed Search rolls, but i ended up settling on just porting over the Pushing rules from 7th edition instead(and also decided that the stuff they were rolling Search for was instead a 40% auto-pass, with successful rolls giving more clues)

[cosmic spindle]

Yeah I do also kinda miss pushing the roll, that’s another nice system

[subtle jetty]

I used them for my home game, the players wanted to be able to grow attached to their Agents and it definitely allowed them to take a few extra critical rolls when it mattered.

I’d avoid it for a oneshot, but I really liked it for an extended campaign.

[cosmic spindle]

The CoC luck rules or the pushing rules?

[subtle jetty]

The luck rules, apologies

[queen tinsel]

my impossible landscape group has three pistols for all five people we are not surviving the static team

[cosmic spindle]

Better hope they learn the concepts of suppressing fire and bounding retreats

Also I recently finished reading Impossible Landscapes, and it’s a hell of a book both for the campaign itself but also how the book is laid out

I do wish there was a bit more meat to the last section before the very end, but that’s something you can fiddle with

[cosmic spindle]

And also if they don’t survive ||you can always really play up the surreality of them all waking up to a wake-up call or room service knock at the door in the Hotel Broadalbin||

[queen tinsel]

They're mostly intel and scientists

so they're 90% cooked but they don't know it yet because they're still in 1994

[cosmic spindle]

The nice thing about suppressing fire is you just need to point in their general direction

Wait how are they still in the prologue and at the Static Teams?

[queen tinsel]

theyre not, just that i foresee any potential combat threat being an issue

because literally only two group members have any form of training

which admittedly, i consider deeply funny and plan to cultivate because im a bad person

[cosmic spindle]

Ah, well in that case they could always get a bit in the intervening years

[queen tinsel]

theyre not even in the prologue theyre in my devious evil ante-prologue

[cosmic spindle]

And again, just maybe remind them that sometimes all you need to do is put some lead down range to let you make a getaway if you’re a non-fighting type

[queen tinsel]

which consists of their entire life getting fucked by accidentally becoming involved with DG

[cosmic spindle]

Basically these are the guys PDWs are made for lol

Also did you ever do anything with that shotgun scenario idea?

[queen tinsel]

wqorking on it but yes i did just havent finished

got over taken by grad school apps

[cosmic spindle]

Not super related but I do like including music in in-person games, generally more wallpaper soundtrack stuff to set mood. However, I also like doing kinda end-of-session needle drops like the end of a TV episode leading into the credits or as a mood teaser for stuff in the next session

And since I’ve been thinking of running DG a lot recently, I have a few on my mind, both ones for a general “it’s delta green baby” thing and also more particularly for stuff for Impossible Landscapes, both for potential end of session wrappers or for actual in-session overarching use (in impossible landscapes particularly to have the feeling of a song following the Agents)

Anyways, just thought I’d share a few of them for fun.
For a general thing feeling like it has end-of-episode DG vibes I have this, potentially a little on the nose but it’s still good: https://youtu.be/z2xsbmBn09g

But for Impossible Landscapes particularly I have this for kinda an end of the first chapter wrap up: https://youtu.be/ifFBUqqHfLg
And this for the overarching “following the agents, not explicitly creepy but creepy in context and when you have it keep cropping up” kinda of thing: https://youtu.be/XMqIWPSh7I8

For the first one kinda intended idea would be to drop it while describing a pull-out helicopter shot of the (||probably burning because that’s what players almost always do||) Macalister Building

The second would more be a motif haunting the agents starting at the park, continuing from the ||backpack radio||, and from there popping up where seems appropriate, such as an Agent inexplicably tuning to it on their car radio even though the station shouldn’t be playing the genre

[queen tinsel]

ive been using the album Symbol by Susumu Yokota

since its heavily sampled romantic music

and im using the original romantic tracks

so the idea is that the "wrong" version of the tracks grow more prominent as the campaign continues

[cosmic spindle]

That’s neat

[queen tinsel]

theres one song in particular im using for the golden boy and dancers

https://youtu.be/AypyH5Wy93c

[cosmic spindle]

I’m always kinda careful about using stuff with lyrics or even having it too loud since I subscribe to the kinda “wallpaper” theory of soundtracking games, since there will be so much talking over it usually, so I only like to bring out stuff with words at particular moments where they can kinda breath

Generally I more just do soundtrack stuff

[queen tinsel]

oh none of these have any lyrics

[cosmic spindle]

Oh this was more just me talking generally about my practice on using music in-game

Also that’s an interesting piece especially since I know I’ve heard a lot of the elements used in it

[void sparrow]

If the Greys abduct people, modified humans could yield some plot ideas. I‘m reminded of the modified humans and other species in X-COM 2.

[sudden igloo]

Greys turning humans into weird "soft" versions. They never get angry, or upset, they're always in a good mood, do not make them consider their existence or it'll trigger a fail-safe and they'll dissolve into acidic goo

[cosmic spindle]

Convergence actually kinda sorta has some stuff related to this

[cosmic spindle]

Also, I am kinda looking forward to them putting out that collection of classic DG scenarios, but I don’t think they have a schedule for any of their upcoming stuff

I saw they hired on someone specifically to manage their production timeline though, so here’s hoping that gets stuff streamlined

[plucky saffron]

No schedule AFAIK, but they do release stuff from Operational History semi-regularly

[cosmic spindle]

Operational History?

[plucky saffron]

A new thing, sort of collating and expanding on stuff that gets variously brief mentions in the HG with hooks and such

So, stuff on the Innsmouth raid and following raids in the Philippines + Nicaragua, then the Dyer expedition to Antarctica and subsequent things there, ops done against the Karotechia, etc.

[cosmic spindle]

Ah I see

[plucky saffron]

I’ve kinda become of the opinion that modern day ops are the best because they’re the most relevant (and by extension most impactful), so I’m not particularly interested, but I can see the value of it

[cosmic spindle]

I think more period piece stuff is interesting but I am also a historian so, take that as you will

But I definitely get what you mean

[void sparrow]

Sorry if this is more #av-club territory but I've just watched Reptile (2023) and it's a great thriller about conspiracies and trust.

[plucky saffron]

I’m certainly not gonna police you from it lol

I just watched Jacob Geller’s newest video (about empty rooms) and it’s giving me some Thoughts™

[plucky saffron]

speak of the devil

unfortunately, still a lot of ???s

Wolves and Rejection have had early PDF versions for a little bit, Operational History is apparently being split into multiple books, Whisper Labyrinth is a collection of (I think) pre-existing short fiction about things that pop up in Impossible Landscapes, and Incursions is the collection version of some already written scenarios

[wheat flame]

PX poker night VTT is huge

[sudden igloo]

PISCES still in development.....

[plucky saffron]

deeply unsurprising lol

even among the many plates being spun here, I have had the distinct impression that PISCES is like. extra ??? worthy in terms of development

I remember hearing an interview with Detwiller maybe… two or three years ago where, when asked about it, he said it’s fully in either Adam Scott Glancy or John Scott Tynes’ hands and he isn’t really involved there

That said, in fairness, I think Detwiller had a Patreon post about having just a generally rough year (more so than the already unpleasant baseline) in 2025, so fingers crossed things pick up

[sudden igloo]

Ah, that is fair enough and honestly I wouldn't envy anyone trying to write a book about the current state of the UK + Mythos Gribbliness, we're in a real state of flux

[cosmic spindle]

Well hey, it’s at least nice to get an idea on what’s going on

[cosmic spindle]

I will say I’m pretty interested in Incursions just because it’s nice to have collections of stuff all in one package

Also, bern meaning to ask, is there a list of the books/authors that Delta Green takes from aside from Lovecraft and Campbell? I know there’s definitely several things I don’t recognize or only vaguely know of from contemporary pulp stuff like that alien that makes zombies from people it pokes with its spikes or the Evil Bad Vibes thing(loligor I think is it’s name without digging out the handlers guide?)

[void sparrow]

Lloigor, I think. ||Thartha|| calls them "Yoygor" or similar, as that spelling might be pronounced in Spanish.

[plucky saffron]

I don't know about a list in the HG itself, but aside from the two you mentioned, there's also Clark Ashton Smith (Tsathoggua), Ramsey Campbell (G'laaki + Y'golonac + the Shan), August Derleth (Cthugha + Ithaqua + the tcho-tcho), Colin Wilson (the lloigor; also the guy himself sucks big time), and Robert W. Chambers (obviously)

kind of on the outskirts you get Hazel Heald (was involved w/ the creation of Tsathoggua somehow iirc), Zealia Bishop (collaborator on The Curse of Yig), and Robert E. Howard (Cimmeria is mentioned briefly in the HG because one of the characters in The Shadow Out of Time is from there), and Robert Bloch (invented De Vermis Mysteriis)

oh, I'm an idiot, you mentioned Campbell already

nevertheless

[coral pumice]

also read Tynes (Broadalbin most notably) and Stross (esp. A Colder War)

[cosmic spindle]

I’ve already read Stross, the Laundry Files is a good bit of fun, and I’m unfortunately unsurprised to hear that another pulp author of the era isn’t a good guy lmao

And I’ve been meaning to read the DG related fiction

[plucky saffron]

I had been following a blog that dealt with more in-depth critique / analysis of Lovecraft’s own work (and variously similar pieces) that was honestly more elucidating than anything else I feel like I’ve picked up recently

I’ll have to track that back down

[cosmic spindle]

This did remind me I should read my copy of KiY again, been a very long time since I did

Also I’d meant Chambers when I’d said Campbell lol

I’d not read any Cambell but I might be interested in looking into him, especially since he apparently was an early supporter of Clive Barker’s book career

[plucky saffron]

the blog in question https://tasker.land/

I know that at least one of the more prolific DG fan creators drew some inspiration from Laird Barron

something I'd like to pick up on (though I'm a bit skeptical if I will given that I've gotten busier lately) is a concept I dimly remember seeing that touches on neo-Nazis fucking around in the Dreamlands

mark your punch card for "Juno fangirls about Caleb Stokes again", but I think about the stuff he did with the Dreamlands in his Insolent Impulse Patreon recordings a lot

[void sparrow]

Good stuff! Thanks for sharing.

In other news, I am readnig through A Night at the Opera´s "Viscid" and I am most impressed. It's a fun scenario on its own but it kinda sets up a whole campaign if players choose to pursue it (and their characters survive).

[void sparrow]

The concept of a greenbox makes me want to play LARP with geocaching.

[plucky saffron]

Maybe! Could be fun

[cosmic spindle]

What do y’all think is a good first scenario for people totally new and generally unfamiliar with DG, aside from Last Things Last?

[wild tapir]

PX Poker Night is really good, imo, the players don't start as agents and it does a fun baif and switch with the ||Grey's and the Mi-Go what the inside of a flying saucer is like|| so it can be a cool intro to the universe and the stakes usually involved but it's also not really set up to lead into a longer campaign (and is reasonably deadly) and there is some awkward time management stuff the module leaves to the GM to figure out.

Operation Fulminate from the Handler Guide is also quite good and is pretty left field as far as enemies go so it can throw people expecting both X-files and standard Lovecraft for a loop, and it's all well contained and the timeline is easy to follow for a GM, but it can also be quite lethal and difficult to get a "good" ending out of unless the players are quite creative. That isn't necessarily a bad thing in a first time DG scenario but I know some people might be put off. There are also some big necessary CW flags around child abuse/endangerment, though most DG modules have CW of some kind.

I've seen more people mention Extremophilia as a starting scenario too. It sort of throws people into the deep end lore and stakes wise but it's also really just quite good overall and gives the players a good sweep of what can go on in a less contained DG scenario.

[cosmic spindle]

I was kinda considering PX Poker Night, yeah

Or Fulminate

I don’t have Extremophiles but it is one that conceptually seems interesting

[wild tapir]

I am particularly partial to Poker Night, though it does make some demands of the GM because there are big stretches of the timeline where it's left up to you to figure out what's going on

In the game I ran I compressed it to a single day rather than two

[cosmic spindle]

It seemed like it was supposed to just be stuff early in the day and then the evening if I remember when I read it?

But yeah there definitely is some figuring out what the other people on-base are doing “off screen” that’s required

[void sparrow]

Is Extremophilia the one with the batteries? If so, I‘m putting elements into my Pathfinder game since that’s what I‘m running. I‘m having a dragon ||eat toxic metals and changing into a different type of dragon over time. ||

Gotta adapt

[cosmic spindle]

||It’s the fungus amungus in Montana/Wyoming||

[wild tapir]

Wait yeah now I feel like I'm taking SAN damage imagining some kind of introductory prelude the day before Sonnet arrives but that clearly isn't in the module, maybe I actually dreamed that

[cosmic spindle]

You might have included it or been recommended to to give people a chance to play out their “normal” day for roleplay?

[wild tapir]

But yeah this more so, they provide you with the san effects on the other base personnel but leave it up to you to actually insert them into the events

[cosmic spindle]

Or just confused the recommendation to have people do normal stuff during the day with it being a separate day

[wild tapir]

I think the latter is what happened, in all likelihood, but that's not a recommendation I would give since it really works best as a one shot

[cosmic spindle]

Iirc it gives you guidance on what most of them would be doing and where they’d be, so aside from some of them with less clear motivations to go places which I presume you’d have pop up where it’s narratively fun, you’d just have the others be near where they’re supposed to be based on their thing?

Like, “game is slowing a little/players deliberating too much, have ||the gate guard show up raving with his M16||”

[weary raft]

So i was looking at a Call of Cthulhu module i was interested in converting to Delta Green or something similar perhaps

and it's written by Tynes

so that explains why i thought it'd be a good fit

"Dream Factory" from Mortal Coils

[plucky saffron]

huh! never heard of it, I'll have to take a look

I was recently reading some blog posts about something called Strange Aeons (not the YouTuber) with a lot of like, really good pulp-y ideas for CoC games

not what I'd want for DG, but there's a lot of interesting concepts you could cannibalize, I'll have to link it later

full of references to actually existing weirdness

I'll have to pick through some of what's there for, like

I've had this concept (shamelessly cribbed from a different blog lmao) about like. Nazis (modern day, not historical) mucking around in the Dreamlands

something about how a lot of what modern day fascists and their like "want" is variously either an immaterial pretense for nihilism, or is hearkening back to a completely fictional past, and how that might intersect with what's effectively a collective subconscious

[weary raft]

||```
DREAM FACTORY (by John Tynes, 37 pages)

Synopsis: A hot young new starlet in Hollywood has disappeared. The players get to find her. Alexander Solonitsyn, the primary villain, has created a magical camera which can suck up the life forces of a person to create films that have incredible emotional impact. His latest revision on the camera allows him to actually pull someone into the film, removing them from the real world and adding such power to the movie being watched that people come away from it swearing that it's the greatest thing ever filmed. When the starlet, Laura Angel, disappears, Solonitsyn is sent away by the studio PR agents to keep him from taking any sort of bad press. Solonitsyn's cronies offer quite enough information for the investigators to discover the nefarious activities going on in the roaring twenties' tinseltown, though.

Spoilers for the Module

ooooh... || The cult of which Solonitsyn is a member will be detailed in the next Delta Green release, Countdown. ||

[wild tapir]

Oh I've been tooling around with a very similar concept for a while too, with the modern corrupt version of SV-8 playing in the background role to make it a full on conspiracy too. The big upshot is that they (the American neo-Nazi's/right wing neo-pagans/ancient DNA haplo-fanatics) think that by getting in contact with "Odin" (Nodens) and going to "Valhalla" (the Dreamlands construct Cimmeria) they're going to become Proto-Indo-Eurpean ubermensch, but they're being manipulated by a semi-rogue SV-8 agent who wants to bring the Dreamland construct of Cimmeria into overlap with the physical world, because he's convinced that everyone regressing into being berserks living tooth and claw collecting heads and wearing necklaces of ears is the only way for humanity to survive in a Mythos world. I'm sort of half trying to make a point about the whole Delta Green "mythos terminator" thing some players seem drawn towards, vis a vis yes becoming a Nodens cultist and trying to become the new Conan does actually make you more effective against the mythos but also leads you down a socially self-destructive spiral where eventually you alienate your entire family and then attack the guy at the DMV with an axe

[cosmic spindle]

Read through Operation Jack Frost, and it seems potentially difficult to run but pretty interesting

[subtle jetty]

Very. That feels like a lot of DG modules, especially as someone coming from learning how to DM from elfgames.

Really forces a different perspective which is fun.

[cosmic spindle]

Some are definitely a lot easier to run, but Jack Frost has a lot of moving parts

[weary raft]

https://pelgranepress.com/2026/02/25/achievements-and-echo-effects-in-the-fall-of-delta-green/

[queen tinsel]

@cosmic spindle @weary raft notes from my group

the elephant.

[cosmic spindle]

I kinda love seeing player notes because sometimes they make sense, a lot the the time they are utterly incoherent and look like
“Garbageman, in on it? Investigate further.
Knitted hat.
New ostriches?”

[queen tinsel]

• the king in yellow
• todd howard
• MAJESTIC 12
• david moved in after abby
• thin haired man?
• sad sad art

[weary raft]

How did they get Majestic 12?

[queen tinsel]

one of them is a conspiracy nut

and they think that marcus is concerned about majestic 12

[cosmic spindle]

Honestly I never thought about how to work with an Agent who was in-character into conspiracies or the player is and knows about the stuff that DG lore is playing off of. Like, a guy talking about MJ-12 not aware in or out of character that in the setting MJ-12 is real and you are opposed to them.

Like, do you consider noting if they say enough stuff to get an ominous phone call from A-Cell/The Director about not digging into things above their clearance?

It’s just a very funny possibility of playing into the classic “conspiracy theorist accidentally right/almost right but enough to be dangerous” trope

[cosmic spindle]

Because like, in ‘95 Marcus would be nervous about MJ-12

[queen tinsel]

when they mentioned it he immediately said "i need to go" and abandoned them in the park lmao

[torn jasper]

I hate to be the one to break it to you kid, but we're all heavily versed in esoteric wisdom and lore delta green recruits that already are aware of conspiracy theories

[queen tinsel]

unfortunately agent Ira went missing in 2002 and was never located. he was formally pardoned in 2018 by president trump for undisclosed charges.

[weary raft]

I thought one of the big things with DG was "Trump can never find out about this"

[void sparrow]

"They were going to make Stalin immortal? Sounds like those guys were pretty smart. Why don’t we do something like that, huh?"

[weary raft]

"I can make a deal with something to do what i want? Well i make great deals folks, the best deals, the most beaaauuuutiful deals. I saw Cthulhu's house, i call him Hulu. Mr Hulu. And i tell you folks he has the most goooorgeous house in ALLL of sleeping Ry'leah"

[queen tinsel]

he may just have done some regular low level embezzlement

quote: "i dont believe DG had nothing to do with the film but ill accept their reasoning cause ive seen what happened to the other guys"

[frozen escarp]

IIRC no president has been informed of the existence of the Program since, I think the Nixon adminstration

[plucky saffron]

doubled checked, apparently MJ-12 stopped briefing the president at all starting at Clinton

IIRC the reason why GRU SV-8 are now slightly more evil is because the new people briefed Putin on the matter, though

[queen tinsel]

Lusu here's one of my players current theories: "I think Abby got lost in the night floors... And became a clown at the masquerade. And we're seeing like seven different mysteries throughout time instead of just hers"
to which my other players said
"That seems plausible"
and
"I think that's a bit silly"

[weary raft]

Amazing

Perfect.

[queen tinsel]

Same player also theorised they never could have found Abby to which the others said "I think we still have a chance"

how it feels to watch someone solve the mystery session 1 and then keep investigating anyway

[weary raft]

https://tenor.com/Onwb.gif

[coral pumice]

this player is going to kill the rest of the players at the end of the game

source: i have been the player that solved it hour one and then experienced multiple sessions of investigating before because everyone thought the idea was silly

[queen tinsel]

Unfortunately she has fallen into the hands of the king in yellow and has a personal vendetta against the clown so it may be so over

At this rate I think she's probably gonna join the masquerade

Predictions for my agents
FBI agent: joins the ball
epa agent: slimed by DG after surviving
green beret: folded into the play and trapped in the loop
Boston: lost to carcosa

[torn jasper]

i could tech the king in yellow

im built different

[plucky saffron]

"vendetta against the clown" could be a prog rock track I think

that could be King Crimson

[winged blade]

King Crimson's sickly brother, King Xanthous

[queen tinsel]

white mask, overalls

scratchy voice
yellow stars and juggling balls
see the circus come to town
VENDETTA AGAINST THE CLOWN

[plucky saffron]

true!!!

[queen tinsel]

I should make this a song for them in game just to freak them out

Especially because only one of them thinks the clown exists

[cosmic spindle]

God this is why I love hearing about people running scenarios, since you always start from the same general place with the written stuff, and then the players take it and just go nuts with it

Like that’s one of the honestly kinda magical things about scenarios in TTRPGs tbh, you start at the same place and generally follow the same path but there is so much room for player expression and some groups will really latch onto some stuff but others will completely bypass it

And I think that’s cool, you shouldn’t feel like you have to jam every little part of a scenario in just because it’s in the book, you can focus on what they think is neat (and/or what they spiral down a crazed rabbithole about)

[queen tinsel]

i throw leads at them like darts and then let them ruin their own lives

That's how they play mothership too

[cosmic spindle]

Honestly a great way to play a scenario like IL especially, since you will almost never cover everything in a reasonable way, so just let the players show you what they’re interested in

Helps you to tailor stuff and helps them stay engaged

[plucky saffron]

I've run God's Eye for probably about four different groups and I think maybe one of them actually stopped the proverbial time bomb

Or at least understood it

Maybe two? I know I've had two runs that wound up ending in kinda Sicario/No Country for Old Men TPK gunfights

[cosmic spindle]

That’s pretty cool

[sudden igloo]

I think we solved but not sure we understood it? I do remember blowing some guy away when he drew on us

[queen tinsel]

My mothership group is probably either doing group suicide or replaced by droids

at this rate

theyrr playing gradient descent

Possibly they're doing. Both of those

[plucky saffron]

I'm pretty sure you guys did end up finding both ||the sicarios and the actual occultist directing them||, even if you didn't necessarily understand the full scope of the problem

(which is, admittedly, probably for the best)

[queen tinsel]

the funniest part btw is that none of my group has played DG before

And only one of them has seen the X files or read the king in yellow

[cosmic spindle]

Oh noooooo

I love it

[queen tinsel]

But he's also the one who insists there's probably a normal explanation for this and that the king is just fucking with them

[cosmic spindle]

They are so dead tho

[sudden igloo]

Yeah, we definitely ||handed the occultist over to DG, he said some mystic stuff but my agent was just like "hey man whatever"||

[queen tinsel]

meanwhile the newbie who has never been exposed to this is the one who solved the mystery day 1 but is still trying to fix it

[cosmic spindle]

“Oh boy, the higher ups are calling us for a meeting, I’m sure this is totally above board and normal”

[queen tinsel]

there is a VERY strong chance they get lured to the mall but survive miraculously

I expect at least one of them to die soon enough

And another to get swallowed by the king

[plucky saffron]

I forget the exact ramblings I had (they're partially ad-libbed); I should get a bit more kabbalistic with it if I ever take another stab at it

assuming the next group doesn't also get gunned down

[cosmic spindle]

Tbh IL is a game where it doesn’t feel cheap to fudge stuff so the players make it to the end

[sudden igloo]

How to win all gunfights: roll a crit and blow their head off

[queen tinsel]

Oh I don't mean fudging it

[cosmic spindle]

As long as you make it very weird and obvious that’s something fucky is happening

[queen tinsel]

I mean two of them are ex specops

[cosmic spindle]

No no, I’m talking more generally

[queen tinsel]

and one of them has OCD about wearing their Kevlar

I expect DG to slime the epa agent though he made the mistake of investigating a Song Beyond Travel

he went on Reddit to ask about it and the next day the OP deleted their account and DG returned his call to say that nothing weird happened when they checked it out

[plucky saffron]

(big spoilers for God's Eye) the guy in question doesn't really understand that he's ||summoning himself to Yog-Sothoth specifically|| and so he kinda understands it through a lens of like. thinking he's ||trying to go back to Heaven or get back in touch with God because he's a Cornucopia House survivor||

[sudden igloo]

Ohhhhhh

Yeah I can see a more kabbalistic view of it for sure, ||trying to escape the qlippoth of language that's cut him off from God||

[plucky saffron]

it's a very neat little background thing that your players almost certain have no way of figuring out unless they're in God's Teeth

[plucky saffron]

yeah! kinda!

[queen tinsel]

I think one person in my group has caught on to the king in yellow infecting them but still thinks they have free will

[plucky saffron]

it's neat that ||he doesn't understand the difference between his past communion with Bast, the thing that he's trying to summon, and the capital G God||; it helps sell the idea that the things you're dealing with are obscure

[queen tinsel]

Juno, question as a more experienced DG person: how would you recommend handling the buildup to Dorchester house so I don't immediately play the night floors hand

[plucky saffron]

I have never run Impossible Landscapes, so that's kind of a tricky question

I'll crack open my copy when I get home later and see if anything particular comes to mind

Where are the players now exactly?

[coral pumice]

it's very easy not to night floors too soon
just have visiting hours posted that end well before sundown

[queen tinsel]

Just starting the investigation in part 2

[queen tinsel]

My players are nosy buggers that don't read it's more I want them to Not even Realise there's night floors occurring

[cosmic spindle]

Mainly trying to get the players to not stay the night immediately

Set appointments early in the day so it’s less likely they’ll stay past sundown

Ah darn should I be spoileringthis?

[queen tinsel]

I know how to keep them away from the place but I also kind of want to lead them physically away from Dorchester cause I'm worried they'll try and summon Baal then realise it's timmy

They are in fact insane enough to summon demons in and out of character

[cosmic spindle]

Well there’s the investigations of the staff

There’s the whole thing with Semagina and her family house

[queen tinsel]

ill see if I can convince them the night floors are there instead, they're probably going to think the floors are back

I'll dangle the clown for the vendetta

[cosmic spindle]

I mean you can also just not make it sound like it’s the floors again before they’re in them, keep ‘em wondering if it’s a curveball

Oh! ||Barbas, make barbas a biiiiig potential avenue of investigation||

So yeah there’s a few different things to keep ‘em from ||immediately trying to stay overnight in the Dorchester||

[coral pumice]

samagina house is awesome

i killed half the group at the samagina house

(three person group. two died but one got better)

[cosmic spindle]

Oh and Encounter Group

[queen tinsel]

It's The Day Floors,

[coral pumice]

encounter group is also a great time

[queen tinsel]

ENCOUNTER GROUP

they have an encounter group costume in their green box

next to hygromanteia

it's perfect

the perfect trap

[cosmic spindle]

So yeah obviously your players might just immediately decide they want to ||break in at night or stay past sundown|| and you kinda can’t stop em in a way that’s fun without serious thinking, but there definitely are several leads to dangle to get them looking elsewhere

[queen tinsel]

i think with the clown and encounter group i can lure them

And they remember the paintings of the samigina house because that's what originally got them stuck in the night floors

They went to get dinner when they brought up the paintings and decided to go back and check if Abby made them, made the unwise decision of doing so near sundown

[cosmic spindle]

||I think Barbas is a great first thing tbh, since they will absolutely be meeting him and he’s made of red flags, especially depending how you play him and how on the ball the team is||

[queen tinsel]

I'll try and mention he seems familiar

How can I bring agent Marcus back...

[queen tinsel]

||they saw part of him in night floors||

ok really funny idea for marcus actually

They called for backup when they fled macallistar

he might have gone in and never come back out until now

[cosmic spindle]

I more mean ||all the stuff with the invites, all his weird shit like his paper undershirt thing, if they look into the phone, and his whole vibe can be something to get them to latch onto him||

[queen tinsel]

Yeyyeye
its all good leads to give them

[cosmic spindle]

However like I said earlier you never fully know what players will do, and sometimes they just bull straight through to the end

[queen tinsel]

The main reason I want him back is because they don't take him seriously

which makes him a great source of truthful info

[queen tinsel]

btw here's how I'm giving them the ritual

There's pages and pages of this

and they're all marked up and give at best a vague description

[jovial barn]

Trying to help a friend with setting up a resident evil inspired ttrpg campaign and he was curious if Drlta Green might be a good idea to consider running as a system for the game. He doesnt have discord and wanted me to ask on his behalf here.

[sudden igloo]

Uhhh, I guess it depends if he wants go more Action or Horror, Delta Green is much more geared towards horror. Not really suitable for a Resident evil 4, maybe more for 1 and 2 or 7

[plucky saffron]

My first instinct would be Breathless (billed as a survival horror TTRPG) or maybe Outgunned for some of the more action-y entries. Though I haven't, like, actually looked at Outgunned personally, just heard lots of good things

[weary raft]

Which resident evil

I have Opinions about this

[plucky saffron]

You could definitely do a more slow-paced investigative thing that's Resident Evil-ish, though. The scenario ||Dead Letter|| basically already kinda is this

[jovial barn]

I asked my friend and he was leaning more towards 1 or 2, maybe Code Veronica, but not reallt 4, 7, or 8 as per him.

"More Raccoon City setting than something las plagas or mold related" was what he just said.

[weary raft]

Oh i got a shortlist of reccs then

Gimme a hot seco d

i'll pull you out into #tabletop-discussion if that's fine with you

[jovial barn]

I know my friend also has a sweet spot for 5 and 6 and so wouldn't be surprised if he takes something from those.

[jovial barn]

Sure

[queen tinsel]

IL spoilers
@coral pumice @acoustic forge @weary raft

[coral pumice]

amazing

[queen tinsel]

Follow up to this

Copy of hygromanteia i made for them

Complete with incoherent rambles

@coral pumice observe unfiltered yellowslop

[weary raft]

oh man i love a handcrafted handout

[queen tinsel]

it includes every sigil and name description and so, so many barbas comments

and doodles of the demons

the best part is this is the only resource for the ritual im giving them

[coral pumice]

make them read the whole preliminary invocation

[weary raft]

My god

[coral pumice]

i did for my players

its a ton of fun

same psychological effect as going bloody mary bloody mary bloody mary in a dark bathroom

[queen tinsel]

i am

by god i am

[weary raft]

You're a cruel GM huh

how you finding it otherwise? enjoying?

[queen tinsel]

i torture mm y players as a sign of affection

[queen tinsel]

it's so fucking peak

if your group is into it its transcendent

[weary raft]

you ever see the tie in someone made for True Detective?

inb4 you told me bout that

[queen tinsel]

I have no idea

[weary raft]

https://www.reddit.com/r/DeltaGreenRPG/comments/sryy6g/sign_of_the_judgment_a_true_detective_scenario/

[queen tinsel]

my group likes being tortured in RPGs so its fine

they don't mind getting brutally killed

[weary raft]

Lmao

[queen tinsel]

arguably this is more merciful than our other campaign. Which is mothership

[weary raft]

Gradient Descent?

[queen tinsel]

yep

in that one I am explicitly torturing them like bugs just to see what happens

my campaigns seem to circle around to the cruel and all knowing god a lot

[weary raft]

GAMEMASTERING WILL MAKE ME GOD

[queen tinsel]

hey man you gotta check this out we get tortured in a game for six hours and then go climb boulders yeah haha it's pretty cool. I developed PTSD and DID last week in the game but I'm still trusted with a gun haha.

[weary raft]

Six Hours then Bouldering?!

Masochist.

[queen tinsel]

they did all of night floors in one sitting

which was also their first day ever playing DG

[weary raft]

What troopers.

[coral pumice]

did they end up destroying the macallister

[queen tinsel]

they did!

they burned it down

[coral pumice]

very good

[queen tinsel]

So I'm thinking they'll see it again in carcosa

[queen tinsel]

My players like it. I love my players

[weary raft]

How many you running for?

i'm somewhat jealous

one time a player just didn't show up for session

didn't say anything, didn't have any reason

[queen tinsel]

Three

[weary raft]

Decent number

[coral pumice]

that happened to me like 8 times in my il game

[queen tinsel]

currently I think that at most a single player will escape

One of them is definitely experiencing a revelation and the other is sadly, probably going to be killed by something or other

he happens to be the one that always splits up from the group

He also was mean to agent Vega and pretended to be a psych ward Dr when they met

so he's highkey gonna get domed

conflict resolution strategy: introduce yourself as the person who always lies
Don't tell the truth

[queen tinsel]

@weary raft @cosmic spindle handed the copy of hygromanteia i made off to my player and they paged through, said "if I decode this, will I piece it together?" Looked at a note and said "is the secret in my bottle?"

https://tenor.com/view/i-could've-sworn-there-was-a-gif-of-this-whatever-squid-game-squid-game-edit-squid-game-edit-meme-i'm-so-scared-gif-12360771953743496060

[weary raft]

ahahah

[queen tinsel]

We played ONE session

ONE

Pleaseeeeee slow down 😭 😭

Said agent currently believes ||that Abby wright became a clown and was lost on the night floors, but if they manage to get to the masquerade they'll find her||

So if you've ever thought your players couldn't figure out IL don't worry

[coral pumice]

mine couldn't

[queen tinsel]

What did they think happened

[coral pumice]

they didn't really think that much
i had one guy who was committed to figuring it out and was doing alright at it

[honest sky]

Two genders of DG PCs:

cork board and string maniac

I dunno let’s get in there and shoot it

same average life expectancy

[coral pumice]

no no you need to be a Man of Action and always send a friendly npc or possibly another player in before you

[queen tinsel]

@coral pumice @steel seal @weary raft @cosmic spindle have you seen the yellow sign?

[cosmic spindle]

Well I have now, ya jerk /j

But seriously nice collage

[queen tinsel]

Im gonna use it as a handout for my group

The most il part of this is that the magazine is from 1969 but the event is for 2026

Look at the area code for Boston btw

[coral pumice]

heh

[queen tinsel]

Average poster for encounter group

[weary raft]

The image isn't loading so no

Yippee

[queen tinsel]

I showed it to my players and one screamed. I love my group

[weary raft]

you might be running a cool game

[sudden igloo]

Goddd I want to run IL someday, it's just too juicy and I am kinda of obsessed with the King in Yellow as is

I sometimes daydream of getting a whole costume together for ||the Masquerade||

Say that I need to go get something from downstairs, costume change, play some eeire drums and ||arrive as the King||

[queen tinsel]

I'm posting up copies of it around my university to hopefully jump scare my players

[weary raft]

oh my god that's evil

possibly actually

[queen tinsel]

I'm also not telling them I'm doing this

[weary raft]

okay. Okay. Okay.

But

[queen tinsel]

when the IL game is so good the GM hires gangstalkers

[weary raft]

Have you considered sending them letters

[queen tinsel]

working out a way to spoof text messages to them from 616 area code

[weary raft]

Watch a tv show with them and splice in the yellow sign in weird places

[queen tinsel]

wait actually i could probably post them letters with no return address

Through the simple trick or hand mailing it

[coral pumice]

technically a crime if you do it to a real mailbox

[queen tinsel]

They dont have real mailboxes so I think I should be fine?

I could also ask their roommate to give it to them for me

[coral pumice]

if you're doing it at a college just going to the dorm and being like "hey can you put these in the mailboxes" is easy

true get their roommates in on it

[queen tinsel]

They don't live in dorms

[coral pumice]

dang

okay hear me out

enlist their roommates to put it on the table or pin it up inside their apartments while you're running the session

[cosmic spindle]

May, you’re going to drive someone insane for real, holy shit

[cosmic spindle]

Are you not allowed to drop a letter or note in a mailbox personally?

[queen tinsel]

nahhh it's fine I'm the only one in the group with acute mental illness

[cosmic spindle]

So far

[queen tinsel]

this is our last major campaign as a group so I want to make it something special

[cosmic spindle]

But seriously I was not aware of your level of game, incredible

[queen tinsel]

normally I wouldn't go to this level of above and beyond but it is IL and I am an arts student so I figured what the hell

My players are also really into it which helps

[cosmic spindle]

No no this is absolutely the time to do it

I’m just happy you share my love of handouts

It’s just not the same to post a image on a digital tabletop, ya know?

[coral pumice]

i guess you are if you paid for the stamp but if you haven't it is technically a crime with a punishment of an entirely uncapped fine

[acoustic forge]

handouts... I wish I could play in person

[queen tinsel]

I fucking love handouts

I give my players notebooks for mothership and encourage them to use them

[cosmic spindle]

Huh, really?

[queen tinsel]

I draw out little doodles and maps for them

[cosmic spindle]

Oh yeah player notebooks are also great

[queen tinsel]

this is where my classic mothership note comes from

Which reads

1. Check dick
2. Bite off fingers
3. Kill self

[coral pumice]

Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits any mailable matter such as statements of accounts, circulars, sale bills, or other like matter, on which no postage has been paid, in any letter box established, approved, or accepted by the Postal Service for the receipt or delivery of mail matter on any mail route with intent to avoid payment of lawful postage thereon, shall for each such offense be fined under this title.
18 usc ss 1725

[cosmic spindle]

Don’t let your dreams be dreams, bully force kidnap politely convince people to play IRL with you

[queen tinsel]

It's their replicant catching method

[cosmic spindle]

Wait is this only for business mail and not personal?

[queen tinsel]

Hellbrute you saw the note sheet right

From session 1

[coral pumice]

slightly ambiguous! i read it generally, the USPS really wants you to use stamps

[cosmic spindle]

Yeah I did, made a joke about incoherent player notes

[coral pumice]

mostly i think it's funny

[cosmic spindle]

Oh yeah

And relevant to this channel, one of many reasons a US Postal Inspector can make a great Delta Green agent. There’s a lot of stuff that’s touched by the mail and thus under their potential jurisdiction

[coral pumice]

and nobody knows the laws about it! you can bullshit effectively

[cosmic spindle]

It was very fun that Glass Cannon’s playthrough of IL had one of the players decide to be a postal inspector

[cosmic spindle]

And the people who know about the track record of the USPIS would be likely more intimidated

“Oh shit oh fuck they’re onto us, I knew we should have checked to see if glowing statues was on the banned items list at the post office”

[coral pumice]

my favorite delta green character i have ever played is this crusty SOB who isn't legally alive, has more Occult skill than common sense, is completely devoid of social niceties, and once did surgery on a guy the group was attemping to bag in under five minutes in a new york back alley

[queen tinsel]

I think my funniest agent is the green beret who got into a single fight and immediately retired to Maine to be a park ranger

[cosmic spindle]

You know, fair

[coral pumice]

john Remarkably High SAN doctor

[queen tinsel]

• OORAH
• pistol whips one woman
• violence is never the answer

[cosmic spindle]

You fool, the marines say Oorah, the army says Hoo-ah

This isn’t a joke, it’s different in the different branches, but Marines are the people who do it the most and are the biggest on doing it “correct”

The navy is just “Hurrah” which while being appropriate to naval history is kinda lame

[cosmic spindle]

Brilliant doctor who is fine with seeing horrors but is unbearable to be around is honestly appropriate to so many surgeons

[coral pumice]

he was very funny
dragged a newbie agent onto a stakeout with him, got annoyed by the kid yapping and went "Hey. Do you know what the Quiet Game is?"

figured out an op hour 1, one of the other players said it was dumb, we spent three sessions on it while i went on a joyride around the AO trying to get to relevant witnesses before they retrocausally committed suicide

[weary raft]

Another Avenue just got to me. You know you can get telegrams delivered 😛

[honest sky]

Navy says « hoo-yah » except for Seabees who are afaik the only ones across the board to actually use the stereotypical « hoorah »

Chair force says « hua »

[cosmic spindle]

Random thought that I had to share: I think that if I ever have players in a situation where they have cause to go to ||the Headquarters of the Program||, either for a very nerve wracking debrief or the most ominous “good job, son, I’ve got my eye on you” ever, I’m going to have it be in the AT&T Long Lines Building, both because it seems like a place they might set up shop considering its history, but also because it’s a building that is cool and spooky/ominous as hell

Also I just love that building, it really is a hell of a piece of architecture

I can totally understand someone who might think it’s ugly or whatnot but goddamn

[weary raft]

That's the inspiration for oldest house i'd bet.

[queen tinsel]

i believe it is canonically the oldest house

From what I remember

[queen tinsel]

also this is what I did for my KiY module that I'm still working on with the FBI building
It's the perfect place to have hallways that have nothing in them and a parking garage that seems like it would kill you

This is a place where fake people definitely exist

[cosmic spindle]

It’s not (since the Oldest House is not able to be seen by average people and it doesn’t look exactly the same), but it’s definitely an architectural inspiration

[cosmic spindle]

Amused but unsurprised to hear Adam Scott Glancy on a podcast saying “The end of that movie [The Abyss] was bullshit, unlike, what was it, Underwater? Yeah, that was the shit” (paraphrasing but only slightly)

(He does go out of his way to be clear he’s mostly just joking about The Abyss)

[plucky saffron]

reading reviews of Mothership articles has struck me with a concept; DG game about retrieving fallen agents / cleaning up a mess gone wrong and the trick somehow lies in identifying the correct bodies

(obviously necessitating some kind of situation that has gone so bad that strictly visual ID may not really be possible)

[cosmic spindle]

Ooh, that’s neat

[coral pumice]

we sent five agents in to this remote site and the next morning six mangled bodies turned up on the steps of the nearest FBI field office wearing a jumbled mix of the agents' clothes and gear

[cosmic spindle]

Yeah, seems like it has to be something where one of the bodies is Unnatural (one of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn’t belong…) and you have to separate it out from the rest to do something to neutralize the threat, but you can’t do it to all of them for [reason]

So like, kinda maybe like Mortuary Assistant, if you know that game, but presumably you also can’t let the situation be discovered

[coral pumice]

the Unnatural one is not all dead, there's a raging thunderstorm outside, and it's at least 24 hours before a rhino team shows up

[cosmic spindle]

Yeah, this seems like the makings of a good shotgun scenario

Maybe you need to figure out what happened because the order of deaths matters for the ritual or discovering something important?

[coral pumice]

ooh, the next team is going in regardless but if you know what happened you can give them a better chance

and the extra body is there to muddy the water as much as possible and also stand upright in the shadows of dark rooms

[cosmic spindle]

Nah knowing DG you are the next team

[coral pumice]

i was thinking this was like a

backline mooks scenario

[cosmic spindle]

Ah fair

[coral pumice]

with DG calling up the real heavy hitter tac guys to go in

[cosmic spindle]

Some times they do have guys on cleanup detail

I feel like the obvious reasons for the initial idea of “they’re all unidentifiable” is either gotta be a terrible fire or explosion, or there’s been some weird hypergeometry shit where they’ve been melded or details of them have swapped around on bodies

Like the hair texture or colors have been swapped, clothes, facial features, previous injuries, etc

[coral pumice]

i was just thinking, like, flensed

[cosmic spindle]

Hmm, yeah that’s an option

But you could potentially get details from height or sex?

[coral pumice]

or the bonus body looks exactly like one of the other ones but which one it is constantly changes

[cosmic spindle]

Though I guess you could do that with mine too, and you gotta find a way to make it possible if identifying them is the goal

[coral pumice]

well you have to be able to figure it out eventually
DNA, dental records, old bone breaks

could throw in some red herrings

the moment you realize the monster carefully swapped the teeth between agent SOLOMON's and agent SYRACUSE's mouths:

[void sparrow]

Swapping teeth is good horror

Imagine getting horrible toothaches and malocclusion because someone else‘s teeth don‘t quite fit your jaw.

[cosmic spindle]

I feel like either it should be an ad hoc thing in a remote location or in a state of the art facility, and either option kinda sets how you would make the mystery

[void sparrow]

Like, a larger person‘s.

[cosmic spindle]

I personally would go for middle of nowhere since it fits with the whole “figure it out and then make it disappear” thing and obvious spooky potential

[coral pumice]

i think decently remote to cut off easy options

hmm how do you make correct positive identification/deduction important

some level of audio from the op? match the bodies to what they were seeing and where

[steel seal]

alaska moments

[cosmic spindle]

Maybe forensic details somehow?

I guess this is a thing where we’d need to work outwards from what the spooky thing is, it’s goal, and how it works, then build a mystery solvable with those restrictions

Or alternatively work from what the setup should be and backwards from how to get there

Damn this is gonna be living in my head too, I might try to brainstorm on this tomorrow

[queen tinsel]

there was an x files episode about this

[queen tinsel]

just add a blizzard

[coral pumice]

i would have said a blizzard

but then it would be very Lover in the Ice

[queen tinsel]

blizzards are free terror

oooh i have a horrible idea

[queen tinsel]

ok so suggestion for what the fucked up thing is and why theyre struggling to identify it

the fucked up thing is in some way related to MJ

its like a veneer that shrouds a body and dissolves the bone and tissues but adopts a sort of camoflage by deforming itself to appear like soft tissue and bone

this also gives a natural time limit to the mission because the bodies will be eaten

[plucky saffron]

… Michael Jackson?

[coral pumice]

majestic

[plucky saffron]

right

[weary raft]

No MJ

He's Bad

He's Bad

He's Really Really Bad

[cosmic spindle]

He’s a smooth criminal

[plucky saffron]

also yeah, this was my thought as well

not necessarily an incredibly remote location, but one that's reasonably well-contained

There's probably some other questions that need asking:

• What does the cleanup crew know about the people they're supposed to identify? I think you could get away with only being given a name and physical description, personally.
• Can the cleanup crew bring the bodies to a secondary location with better facilities?
• What methods of identification does the cleanup crew have access to? Even if they have a way to look up dental records, for example, is looking up the dental records of a federal agent going to arouse suspicion?
• What is the cleanup crew supposed to do once they've ID'd the bodies?

[shadow inlet]

Chat, I’m not wrong in thinking there are only 2 delta greens right?

The federal and independent agencies?

[coral pumice]

depends on timeframe like you said

1920s to 1970s - officialish but secret group that does delta green things
1970s to 2001 - entirely unofficial secret group that does delta green things, also Majestic is around
2001- - majestic remnants and parts of delta green reunite to form delta green (the program) which has actual support, other parts remain independent, but it's very hard to cleanly delineate the two

the Handler's Guide has a very detailed timeline of how it all happened

[shadow inlet]

Thanks

[queen tinsel]

@weary raft @cosmic spindle @coral pumice so my players got the barbas invitation, opened it up and found the purson seal. They searched online for anagrams of purson, immediately went wide eyed and showed the phone to the most experienced agent in the group who buried his head in his hands and said "oh my godddd you're so fucked. why did you stay in contact. Why did you keep looking"

10/10 group

[coral pumice]

hehehehe

[queen tinsel]

My group doesn't even ask to roll sanity anymore

They just look at me like this

I feel certain one will survive but the other two are cooooooookd

[weary raft]

Amazing

[coral pumice]

@cosmic spindle look i just take the principled stance that if you ever take orders from higher-dimensional alien life you can't really be trusted at any point prior or following the incident

[cosmic spindle]

To be fair those guys are now all in the “we took the weird tech that still worked and are gonna make millions in patents” business or dead or missing presumed ???

Though there definitely is worrying stuff about the relationship between The Program and March Technologies et al

[plucky saffron]

I know this story is fake because I've never seen my DG operatives even try to get a warrant

[cosmic spindle]

To be fair it’s their in-universe handler who got if for them, they just uh, don’t try too hard to serve it

[queen tinsel]

my players summoned purson and asked why the play exists so I told them the truth and she lost 11 sanity and developed a new disorder and now wants to go the ball to be free from this

[coral pumice]

it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living god

[queen tinsel]

my players have agreed to admit her to Dorchester house btw

Voluntary commitment

While the other two continue the investigation

https://tenor.com/view/kagurabachi-if-you-laugh-if-you-laugh-you-go-to-hell-kagurabachi-if-you-laugh-speed-gif-7884817524351810051

[coral pumice]

LMAO

[queen tinsel]

@cosmic spindle @weary raft @coral pumice
Update on session 2:
||One agent has hit corruption 7. She did the above and is now being sent to Dorchester. They think the night floors exist there but feel she'll be fine. This player is convinced that if she finds her bottle, she'll have the truth that lets her go to the ball and finally understand the masquerade. One agent is at corruption 3 and is trying to normal max to avoid getting consumed by the mystery. The last got a DM from ophelia sitri as yellow sign bait and hasn't fallen for it but is going to Vegas.||

[queen tinsel]

I physically leaned in and whispered the truth of the play and she said "oh........" Out loud

my party genuinely thinks they have free will

[weary raft]

https://tenor.com/view/yu-relax-sit-down-persona-4-persona-4-the-animation-gif-2182570824680492042

[cosmic spindle]

I’m curious what you deemed “the truth,” since there’s a few potential layers to the answer, up to and including “for the entertainment of the players”

[queen tinsel]

I told them a truth of ||the play exists to create the play and in doing so creates the world||

because she wanted to know about creation

Also because i thought it would be funny to drive her more insane

That one player who solves the case but is sent to the zone

[queen tinsel]

I'll probably say something different if she ever asks again but I felt this was a good hook for the bottle

[sudden igloo]

Hell yess, that's awesome

[queen tinsel]

The super normal guy is incredibly funny

[sudden igloo]

Damn it I need to get a physical copy of IL

[queen tinsel]

He got off investigating at Dorchester house and went bowling

[sudden igloo]

Lmaooooo

Bond: Bowling team

[queen tinsel]

The voluntary commitment is so funny

[sudden igloo]

"...sounds like a shity play, Dude"

[queen tinsel]

I can send her into the night floors repeatedly and have her be unable to say anything about it during "regular" session

[coral pumice]

oh are they letting her do a day program

or like

[queen tinsel]

no they're committing her for a full stay lmao

they volunteered to do this!

[coral pumice]

what's she gonna do in regular session

[queen tinsel]

I didn't even suggest it!

[coral pumice]

lmao

[queen tinsel]

appear occasionally to let us know everything is great

but probably session will be split in times

Like meet separately

Since they're gonna be completely disconnected from each other

Spongebob side plot image

[coral pumice]

yea

the unfortunate thing about meet separately is always timeline

which maybe mostly gets to me because i am, as a player, somewhat obnoxious about updating the party

[queen tinsel]

Well yeah but thankfully with night floors time doesn't matter

[coral pumice]

truke

[queen tinsel]

I'll also probably have her appear in the bookshop

[queen tinsel]

@weary raft @cosmic spindle @coral pumice DG update : agent attempted to summon sitri after getting a mind blast from an earlier demon, voluntarily committed to Dorchester, told lies about her mental state and immediately got sedated and sent to high risk ward which had them asking how to fix this immediately. Also the other two booked a Vegas flight

[weary raft]

Amazing

They're fucked six ways to the proverbial

[queen tinsel]

While being admitted she claimed variously that:
She doesn't hear voices
The demons tell her what to do
She has Seen It
A higher power controls her
They knew who she means

It's also separate sessions now so they have no idea what's going on with her at Dorchester anymore

[queen tinsel]

also amazing quote from my player: I don't know why Committed Agent thinks ed has the answers to everything or why he would know what she's talking about

also the committed agent thinks ed can be fixed if he loves her (which also gets info)

[cosmic spindle]

Your players are absolutely not the people who should be investigating this holy shit

I assume the Vegas trip is to ||see the DEA agent’s girlfriend?||

[queen tinsel]

Yeah

[queen tinsel]

one of them is really good! He contacted the group through the satellite phone

They told him to let her summon sitri and then commit her for her own safety

he believes he's cooked but doing a genuine DG mission

The other one doesn't know what the fuck is happening but is trying her best to aid the mission

It's just one of my agents is insane and a conspiracy theoriest

[cosmic spindle]

Yeah but like, the phone is, you know

[coral pumice]

i don't know what you're talking about

[queen tinsel]

She believes insane things like ||bael wrote hygromanteia, ed has the answers and knows the play, the drowning room can be found in Dorchester house, daribondi is an agent of the king, that the bottles hold the secret to the ball, and that Abby is at the masquerade as a clown||

[queen tinsel]

he doesn't know that

[coral pumice]

its just a satellite phone

[steel seal]

its the bananaphone from bananaphone

i dont see whats wrong with it

[coral pumice]

manamana

[queen tinsel]

after two and a half sessions btw

I can't tell if she's a genius or dead as fuck

strong chance she escapes Dorchester intact while the other two chase after Vega and samigina

[cosmic spindle]

What’s their character backgrounds btw?

[queen tinsel]

Super sane guy is an EPA agent doing coverup work for DG who has stayed on as a paper pusher for the past 17 years after 4 years of field work.
Girl who's not really sure what's going on and is there to try and help is a former green beret who finally shot someone in the night floors and immediately regretted everything and went to Maine to be a park ranger.
Girl who is figuring things out and going insane is an FBI detective with a kid who has only done limited work with DG but is obsessed with solving the Abby Wright case

[cosmic spindle]

||I mean, damn girl you kinda have already||

||She Rust Cohl-ed that shit||

[queen tinsel]

She still wants to find Abby tho

She came up with the Abby theory after the first session

I'm lucky my other players think she's crazy

[weary raft]

both

[honest sky]

incredible stuff really, love this for everyone involved

Real Delta Green Shit at the table

[steel seal]

out of curiosity actually

as someone writing a game in somewhat similar areas

if this is your groups first experience with delta green, how have they found IL as an intro to the game

[queen tinsel]

They've loved it
One of my players is actually a complete newbie to TTRPGs in general but she's adapted well, and it helps I'm a good GM
She's definitely been the one who's struggling more with it but has been adapting well to the system and vibes
I think that the key is I just treat new players like regular players and answer questions if they have any, as well as being people I know well irl

for an intro to the game its worked very well, surprisingly

My players have found it engaging so far because there's a lot of mysteries but a constrained number of leads

also two of them know nothing about the king in yellow irl

As a GM I think IL works for these players because it has me running it and the general outline of the book is descriptive rather than prescriptive

Also that they're new to TTRPGs honestly

They have no toxic culture or bad play habits

They're just here to experience the horrors unbound

Definitely requires a good GM tho

[cosmic spindle]

I think DG is also interesting because it exists in a world that’s ours, just with the occasional “OH DEAR GOD WHAT IS THAT” which can make people settling in a bit easier, since the stakes of stuff like “you know if you do this you could get fired/go to jail” is more obvious for how it’d effect your character

[steel seal]

yeah thats a big point

[cosmic spindle]

And you can know more about how stuff would work since it’s the real world, rather than not knowing how customs in Fantasy Dragon Land are

[steel seal]

especially for... obviously DG is not OSR. but there is plenty of explicit reliance on realistic logic to make shit move

[cosmic spindle]

You know about car payments and felonies and what a search warrant is (generally)

Yeah you are kinda intended to think through how you would do something based on what you know of the world plus the Spooky Stuff

[queen tinsel]

Yeah theyve been approaching this much more like. Irl-ish? Like insta stalking victims and trawling Reddit for obscure hits to find out about people. And definitely taking advantage of most people not really knowing the boundaries the FBI has. And just straight up lying a lot about minor things

[cosmic spindle]

Yeah that’s what makes it neat, doing those things that would just occur to you as a person to do

[queen tinsel]

one of the funnier small things they've done is never using the same fake name twice

and one guy got a temp job arranged at the gateway bridges restaurant to wire it

[cosmic spindle]

Since you can generally spitball something of an answer even if it’s not been included in the scenario, but they often do think of those kinds of things

[cosmic spindle]

Oh man these people are actually pretty good as players go then

[queen tinsel]

it's very much "apply real logic to absurd problem"

[cosmic spindle]

That’s what’s great about DG

[queen tinsel]

This is the most experienced one, TBF, the other two were out buying supplies to summon demons

[cosmic spindle]

Or occasionally “apply absurd hypergeometrical solution to normal problem”

[queen tinsel]

to be fair it's not like those two are stupid either given one is the girl who knows everything

And the other is generally just sane support

honestly really good bit that she got to ask me one singular question and she zeroed in on "why does the play exist"

[steel seal]

"i know. because im the knower"

[queen tinsel]

absolutely the right question to zero in on

[steel seal]

holy shit lol

[queen tinsel]

Unfortunately that's 1d20 sanity loss

[steel seal]

bro is playing rpgs with deviant ollam

[cosmic spindle]

https://tenor.com/view/again-and-again-true-detective-rust-cohle-matthew-mcconaughey-forever-gif-14603751962896868727

That person is just gonna be this, but gender swapped by the end, I can already tell

[queen tinsel]

almost certainly

51 year old FBI detective SOLVES reality

[cosmic spindle]

Seriously though Rust Cohl between the first time jump and the last in S1 is a such a great description of a high POW moderate SAN to low SAN progression of a character

[queen tinsel]

they got the info about the Dorchester patients and a license plate of Dr barbas and their first question was "could we use DG strings to pull employment records and personnel files"

[cosmic spindle]

Have your players seen Alphonse’s Axioms for Agents btw?

[queen tinsel]

no

They haven't seen a thing

they're almost completely new

[cosmic spindle]

Damn they just picked it up like crazy then

[queen tinsel]

I played mother ship with them before

[queen tinsel]

I do think that two things about their background should be considered

[cosmic spindle]

He will know your ways as if born to them…

[queen tinsel]

We are all in planning or engineering

And we are all rock climbers

I think this group naturally has problem solving and pattern seeking brainrot

[cosmic spindle]

That last one gonna be a prooooooblem

[queen tinsel]

Already is

I've mentioned the bottles THREE TIMES

THREE

and she already has her Theories

there's been literally three phrases mentioning bottles

1. Where is my bottle?
2. Bottle? Labyrinth?
3. Go then, and in your bottle find your truth

And she's extrapolated into the subjectively correct answer as to what bottles are

the funniest thing is there is a player disagreement

She thinks the bottles hold a secret truth about the world

The super sane guy thinks they hold bottled inspiration that drives you totally sane and aware

And then makes you kill yourself

[cosmic spindle]

I will say, are you planning on tweaking the penultimate section of the campaign? I thought it was interesting but in desperate need of fleshing out further

[queen tinsel]

Oh absolutely

I'm definitely including parts of boston in carcosa

and visions of the world that was but never came to pass

[cosmic spindle]

Especially since they include a hook of ||an American disappearing in a French chateau in WWII in the background and do nothing with them in the partly wwii themed combat zone||

[queen tinsel]

They contacted this guy btw and have forgotten about him despite having everything they would need to find him which is funny

[cosmic spindle]

Like, you can so easily link something to the ||field radiotelephone||

[queen tinsel]

ultimately it will depend how they progress

[cosmic spindle]

Glass Cannon’s playthrough of IL included some neat expansions of that section

Though they did slim down ||the Broadalbin section||

Which also seems interesting in how lynchian you can make it

[queen tinsel]

j also included a twin peaks dream sequence

Where barbas was dancing in a house made of books

[cosmic spindle]

I was also thinking that could be a neat thing to include ||for high corruption characters||

[queen tinsel]

And then printed a red book and handed it off to a guy

and then barbas danced into the camera and became drapes surrounding chairs

Where mark roark advised the agent to get some sleep, because they'll see him again in a while and they need their rest now

and then they decided they needed to move out of room 616 in the Star view Motel

the dreams were too much

[cosmic spindle]

I can’t remember his name and I’ll have to look up a role I remember him in to find his name, but there’s a specific actor who has a vibe in a lot of his roles that I think is bang on for Roark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Root

Great at playing guys who just feel sleezy

[plucky saffron]

another thing that’s kinda easy to gloss over is that DG’s framing of the players as already bought into the same extrajudicial conspiracy helps solve the classic Cthulhugames problems of “why are you all here and why haven’t you called the police”

[sudden igloo]

"there is no back up, you're the back up"

[plucky saffron]

also WRT the realistic setting; great way to smash people with horrors that are like, reflective of the American system specifically. Both in terms of fictional problems but also getting to drop fun facts about stuff like “hey did you know that the NPS doesn’t keep organized criminal records” or “hey did you know the average American is seen on a camera about 250 times per week”

(Not that these are particularly scary but things like that which are like, mildly unsettling)

I really should run DG again soon

[coral pumice]

and that number's going up up up!

[sudden igloo]

Every time I see something about Impossible Landscapes I want to run some DG, maybe once I've finished Winter Scar

[queen tinsel]

My players did call for backup at macallistar to evac the residents and burn it down

Which i think of one of the few cases calling for backup does make sense

but also very much made that session end feel like an x files episode stinger

Btw @coral pumice @cosmic spindle @weary raft @steel seal the full coworker green notes

[weary raft]

looks like madness yeah

[coral pumice]

have you seen it?

[queen tinsel]

I might ask the player if I can save these and handouts for any future impossible landscapes I run as notes from a previous group that got lost

or as an example of the kings madness

love the note that just says take off mask

[cosmic spindle]

Yeah, Caleb Stokes’ works in particular like to do that

[cosmic spindle]

Honestly fits super well with the idea of it having been “preformed” before

Also I feel like any campaign of Impossible Landscapes should really start with the Handler reading that short “opening” semi-poetic description of the game and campaign that’s in the opening of the book, feels like it’d be a great mood-setter

Also related, do y’all look at the music quote they always have at the end of the publishing and legal info at the start of their books? It’s also an interesting tone-setter

Impossible Landscape’s is from the theme to the remake of Susperia, which is an excellent movie to watch for vibes (so is the original, but the feel of the two is very different): https://youtu.be/BTZl9KMjbrU

[queen tinsel]

I do but my players don't see the book at all

I use my own music choices

[cosmic spindle]

Oh I just think it’s neat as a way to set the vibe for the book, sorta a statement of intent from the gate

Like, as a person reading it

[queen tinsel]

I gave them a short intro but not the book one I just never thought of it

[coral pumice]

tell me o muse of a wronged king

[queen tinsel]

Well guys

Anothwr session today

Agent who was constrained in Dorchester house went through group therapy and was on the track to maybe getting better

Had a vision of someone telling her it's time to unmask

@weary raft @acoustic forge @cosmic spindle ||so she took her mask off and revealed the true face underneath of an agent of the bureau of internal investigation within the Kingdom of America and has basically completely turned to a servant of the King. She now believes that she lives in the night world and can only escape by serving the king as a demon of hygromanteia, or by doing enough favours for mister wilde||

[cosmic spindle]

Did they go to 0 San or what?

[queen tinsel]

no just corruption 10

She's still sane. She believes this while sane

[cosmic spindle]

Oh was it them who came up with it?

[weary raft]

the what of where

[cosmic spindle]

Clearly you haven’t talked with Mr. Castaign enough, smh

[coral pumice]

the kingdom of america

a shining marble suicide booth in every city and magnificent parades of strapping young cavalry officers

a land of art and beauty

[queen tinsel]

Yes lmao

[queen tinsel]

The Kingdom of America

the land of estoty and antiterra

Where Russia is a province in America and the cavalry ride past the statue of Tecumseh

[weary raft]

ah yes the dynasty.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1207690/My_Work_Is_Not_Yet_Done/

Steam

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Release Date

To be announced

[queen tinsel]

that one player who low-key us a servant of the king

She has never lost a point of corruption btw lmao

Type shit

this is where she's at

[cosmic spindle]

Oh, unrelated, did God’s Legs, the scenario Caleb Stokes ran/tested on RPPR, ever get any sort of release, or did it get dropped?

Seemed like a very neat haunted house concept

Also, speaking of haunted houses, Music From a Darkened Room also seems like a very fun classic haunted house

[plucky saffron]

I don’t believe it was ever slated for release

[cosmic spindle]

Gotcha, just thought I’d ask

Also, thanks for recommending I check out RPPR, it’s a lot of fun