NoD #126 — Delta Great

All right, this newslettering thing is going better now. Two missives a week, regular. I even seem to not be running out of topics exactly, plenty to write about here.

A new Delta Green book

While puzzling around in DrivethruRPG on Muster-related business, I noticed that a new Delta Green book had dropped! DG is one of my favourite rpg lines, has been for a long time, so a new book is always a treat. Particularly as it’s mostly armchair reading for me, haven’t had much opportunity to play it over the years.

So I found that the new book is just a retitled re-release of the original Delta Green campaign book from 1997, rather than new material. I still ended up reading it, been a few years since I read the original. Damn it’s good, easily among the very top tier of rpg literature ever. Few combine similar subject matter expertise, laborious detail and thematic energy. The game (it’s just Call of Cthulhu in game design terms) is what it is, but the campaign material is so crazy good that I’m tempted to play it anyway. Or fix CoC just so I could play this.

The one thing that I expected, and would have added to the myself, is the “coda” material published later in various DG books. Delta Green’s premise is rooted, like CoC always, in careful historical era depiction; it’s hella realistic compared to your typical “enter an inn to talk to a mysterious stranger” roleplaying game with its paper-thin fantasy setting. The recent 2010s DG publishing has been delightfully aware of this, to the extent of making it very clear how the original first edition DG material is set in the late ’90s, pre-9/11 America. DG was a static setting (no metaplot) throughout its first era of publication, but when it was renewed by Arc Dream, it was made plain (justly, I think) that the setting history would have to move on: the occult threats and political themes of the ’90s are not the same as the ’00s, or ’10s, or those of a bleeding-edge current-day campaign.

So that implies a metaplot, a familiar bane of roleplaying. I think that this new book, The Conspiracy, is obviously great in that it acknowledges that the old setting is not somehow gone just because new material is being created for different historical eras of the gameline. (They even did a ’70s Vietnam campaign book a while back!) The old book’s not exactly easy to find, so reprinting it makes sense, and it’s still possibly the best Delta Green has ever been (for all that it is generally great; the Detwiller/Glancy/Tynes trio are basically the opposite of hack authors, when they publish it’s for real), so yeah absolutely, republish away.

But, that coda: in the original publication it made sense that the scenarios set up in the book are left open-ended, anything can happen, because that’s what the gaming is for, right? But now that the DG line also has new books that are set in the future of this ‘settin’90s setting, and those books very plainly assume and offer conclusions to these scenarios, it would have made great sense to me to add a new chapter at the end. Just a quick summary of what the canonical timeline assumes: who wins the MJ-12 civil war, what happens to Delta Green as an organization, and so on. Many Cthulhu adventures don’t really care about continuity, but the DG campaign absolutely does, so it would have been handy to have the canonical “what happens after the ’90s” material collated here as well.

Aside from that single complaint, the only thing I can say is that the art is ugly and the book would be better without, which is generally true for the new DG line. (Like I care, I’m not here to look at pictures.) There’s a couple of new cool infographics (I love the map of the US with a summary of MJ-12 operational presence), and an amusing clean-up of Call of Cthulhu specific terminology (like the “Human Ganglia Paste” is now “Ageless Banquet”, and so on). The rules stuff has always been basically irrelevant to me in CoC stuff, and the newly independent DG rules are almost identical with CoC anyway, so no concerns there either.

Publishing strategy, though

One more thought that occurred to me after reading Conspiracy, though: I fell in love with Delta Green due to Tynes’s core MJ-12 material, and stayed because it’s all legit, chapter by chapter, whether discussing occult nazis or obscure Amerindian tribes or whatnot. So it’s kinda interesting how the new Arc Dream stand-alone edition of Delta Green doesn’t move campaign first: now that the game has its own core rule book, it kinda has a new marketing problem, namely that I (and supposed similar audiences) would never be interested by Delta Green on the strength of its core rulebook. It’s far too similar to Call of Cthulhu, for one thing, so old hat all around, and then there’s the fact that CoC is just plain fairly boring as far as rpg rulebooks go. Point-buy skills, make some vapid precommitments to character particulars that won’t ever matter for play, care about weapon lists, whatever.

There’s nothing essentially wrong with the new DG core books (there’s one for the players, one for the GM, which does make sense overall), but they also largely lack the actual charm points of Delta Green. The material is mostly deep background and boring trad rpg rules. Most significantly, because the core book doesn’t want to commit to any specific campaign framework, the DG core lacks the campaign-theming success that the DG recipe has traditionally had.

The original Pagan Publishing DG run has an easier time in that its “core book” (this campaign book here) is diamond stuff, and therefore the line puts its best foot forward for any newcomers. In the new edition you’d naturally read the core books first, and drop the entire game like a hot potato, because who needs another edition of CoC.

I guess another way to say this is that if you’re thinking of checking out Delta Green, read The Conspiracy (or perhaps one of the other big campaign/scenario works) or the original Delta Green, not the core rulebooks. That’s where the heat is, the core book in comparison is just a thing that tells you to not forget to determine how much damage your gun does before you get into the actual scenarios.

A Delta Green reading guide

If you’re interested in getting into Delta Green, I recommend tackling it as a reading project first. Then down the line maybe try to play when and if the stars align, after internalizing the creative prospects and forming your own stance on it. This is absolutely as challenging skill-wise as the art of tabletop roleplaying gets, so I don’t recommend trying to play DG as some kind of lark, one-shot, “let’s try it”, “I wanna learn how to be a GM” thing. Read it first, and think about what it means to you.

In the meantime, though, DG makes for inspiring reading, and if you’re a veteran of the rpg form, and like what you see, I think it has great potential as gaming material as well. I’ve tried setting up Delta Green a couple of times, but you need a stable group, and the GMing attitudes and techniques needed to effectively deliver on the vision really are kinda difficult, at least for a mediocre GM like me. (The Internet is full of master GMs for whom nothing is truly difficult, of course, so if you’re one of those then just go do whatever you do.)

DG publishing history basically runs through a series of big books that each collect a few (like 3–4) scenarios or campaign frameworks for a DG campaign. These DG “chapters” aren’t really adventure modules in the faulty trad rpg sense, they’re just plain full background on various occult threats that the GM is expected to break down and utilize in mixing up their own campaign. A DG campaign basically consists of picking one or two of these chapters (almost in any combination) as your primary content that you spin scenarios from, then maybe spicing that up with another couple of chapters as palate-cleansers and plot noise. Each chapter is essentially a stand-alone occult conspiracy rpg campaign on its own, that’s how substance-oriented this game is.

DG also has a Cthulhu-style history of adventure modules. Nothing wrong with those, but they’re just adventure modules. They’re not “majic” (ha ha a conspiracy joke) the way the chapters are. So my recommendation is to primarily read the actual books, and leave the adventure modules for if and when you decide to start your own campaign and feel like slotting stuff in. I don’t think that it’s that interesting to read Cthulhu adventures unless they come with their own deep setting background, and few do.

So all that being said, here’s what I would suggest as the reading selections and order for considering DG. A numbering for the book series, if you will; a quick Googling didn’t find anything like this, and I at least need to refer to a list on occasion.

1. Delta Green / Conspiracy: the original book, sets up the setting context. Main chapters:
   • Delta Green, the default player character background conspiracy.
   • Majestic-12, the other US federal conspiracy.
   • Karotechia, occult Nazi organization that has, come ’90s, co-opted ODESSA and is slowly empowering the rise of global fascism.
   • SaucerWatch, an UFO research organization that’s slowly starting to piece together the Truth.
   • The Fate, New York organized crime backed by sorcerers working out of a trendy night-club.
2. Countdown: simply more stuff in the same chapter format. Also great, and more conceptual scope than you could possibly need for a single campaign. Not all of these are equivalent in scope and depth, some are almost just adventure modules without the plot, but generally speaking any of them would carry a campaign arc if you wanted them to.
   • PISCES, a sort of alternate British campaign with their own occult government bureau, their own aliens, etc.
   • GRU SV-8, the Russian occult government bureau and its particular 20th century flashpoints.
   • The Skoptsi, a Russian expatriate community in the US hides an awful cult.
   • The Outlook Group, a more detailed look at a MJ-12 subproject, a sort of behaviorist take on MKUltra.
   • Phenomen-X, a Californian new age self-help sex cult Mythos cult.
   • Tiger Transit, a drug smuggling operation conducted by a clan of degenerate Cho-Cho people.
   • The D Stacks, a more detailed look at a major Delta Green resource of occult knowledge.
   • Keepers of the Faith, what if a society of ghouls lived under NYC. What if, serial killers.
   • The Hastur Mythos, the proof that John Tynes is the greatest living Mythos author?
3. Eyes Only: a ’07 compilation of three chapters originally published in limited fashion in the late ’90s. “Project RAINBOW” alone is worth the effort, and the rest isn’t bad either.
   • Machinations of the Mi-Go, deep background on one of the more prominent alien species in the DG setting.
   • The Fate II, a deeper look at the history, goals and projects of NYC’s sorcerer mafia.
   • Project RAINBOW, a delightful campaign arc about the Philadelphia Experiment, time travel and the Tillinghast Resonator. Just, 🧡.
4. Targets of Opportunity: a 2010 collection of chapters, a sort of last hurrah for the Pagan Publishing era of DG I guess. New authors, which decidedly makes for more uneven and more “traditionally Cthulhu” perspectives, but the editorial stands strong, and quality remains acceptable.
   • Black Cod Island, a very classically Cthulhu Mythos scenario; this is what a CoC adventure written into a DG “chapter” looks like.
   • The Disciples of the Worm, a cult of history-spanning immortal sorcerers with body horror at the root of their power.
   • The DeMonte Clan, a different take on a ghoul community, this time in New Orleans.
   • M-Epic, a “Canada gotta have an occult government agency too” chapter. Solid material, and you don’t have to use all of these different agencies in a single campaign.
   • The Cult of Transcendence, a sort of Mason-flavoured “meta-cult” Nyarlathopean global context. Strongest piece of the book, a fair alternate vision for the overarching campaign flagship subject matter, matching the original MJ-12 framework blow for blow.

Those four books form the “1st edition canon” of Delta Green. The best adventures are in those books as well, and although there is some good stuff floating around besides, you’re not missing much by focusing on the big books.

The era of new Delta Green begun in the mid-’10s and has seen a lot of new cool publication under the Arc Dream label. I’m still digesting them myself, and it’s generally looking fairly good, although I do think that the ambitions to be a “generic” occult investigations game are distracting from what I really want, which is more ambitious chapter-work. The rules and generic monster of the week adventures are kinda distracting from the literary program that I find so enchanting in the above set of books. The new position of the meta-plot (with DG victorious over MJ-12) is also kinda blunt, it doesn’t do anything for me; leave the game without an obvious primary campaign framework. The new material has hints of greatness (for instance, I’m on board with the Great Race of Yith as a major campaign arc), but I’m still seeing how it’ll pan out.

(I’ve yet to read them, but apparently The Labyrinth and Impossible Landscapes are where the rubber hits the road on this edition of DG, if it’s going to. Definitely on my reading list now that I got into the groove with The Conspiracy.)

Coup de Main in Greyhawk

We play weekly, sometimes several times. The game’s open to visitors, newcomers, inexperienced players, cats and dogs.

And, continuing with my play report pile. Let’s do one of each campaign branch here, to actually catch up a bit.

Coup de Main #86

This session from mid-May was the actual beginning of the Griffon Mountain heist that we’d committed to ages ago, back before the entire Illmire Fearmother thing completely derailed the party’s designs. Now the Illmire cult had been destroyed, though, and it was time to go fulfill the promise we’d made to the wizard to look for his starmetal McGuffin in exchange for curse removal. (This was in session #70 in mid-January, so actually 17 sessions ago. How the time flies!) The starmetal thingy should be in a ruin/dungeon on top of a mountain reputed to be the nesting place of gryphons.

Clearly an Alignment-limited entrance, in case that’s not obvious; Kermit is Good, which is fairly rare among adventurers.

Yep yep, an Alignment-limited dungeon feature has a trap in addition to the Alignment protection, guaranteeing that only the people of that Alignment walk into that trap. That would sure make a lot of sense; you’re an Evil person setting a trap, so you make it so only Good-Aligned people can walk into it by preventing Evil people from getting in. Adventurers be paranoid.

I didn’t participate in this adventure myself, but it sounds like the party did fairly well in the intensely magical environment of the Griffon Mountain dungeon. No sign of the darkstar periapt yet, though.

Coup in Sunndi #59

Roughly meanwhile in Sunndi, or rather in the kingdom of Idee now, on the other side of the Hollow Hills, we were on a new epic adventure, what with the city of Naerie Doomed to die and all that. The paladin party was kinda-sorta working on secondary lines of investigation while waiting for background processes to grind on; the temple of Wee Jas was working on a Greater Divination on the behest of the heroes to find out more about the threat, and there’d soon be a summit with the king, and so on. But in the meantime, the party’s kinda covering bases and seeing about maybe leveling up Under the City.

Notably, while the players are like 90% certain that the Doom that the various mystics are warning about is simply the undead horde barreling down from the cursed mountain, soon to ravage the countryside and besiege the city, who’s to say that the GM isn’t doing a bait-and-switch, or there could be undead-friendly elements already inside the city walls. Keeping eyes open for untoward Evil in the city won’t go to waste.

This all being said, the party decided to double down on exploring the secret caverns beneath the city, the ones they found while tracking the missing sheep earlier. The party was disinterested in doing through urban investigation, but the incidental rumours and ideas (e.g. from PCs native to the city) were kinda painting a picture where discovering a Duvan’Ku cult or something similar down there was conceivable. There clearly was traffic in those tunnels aside from the troglodytes.

The party had found an entry into what seemed like the city sewers last time they were down there, this long ladder going up into a dungeon section of masonry and running water. Exploring there further, they found a large rain sewer presumably running to join the waterways of the hillside. The water into this old sewer rained down as a great cascade from an upper level still, seemingly gathering what must be the entire waste water output of the old city (the best the adventurers could do in terms of pinpointing where they were, underground; under one of the two hills of Naerie, the original foundations of the city).

There wasn’t much of interest in this place, except for a chance encounter with a totally fucked up magical secret of the city, the Wax Cauldron. The PCs were amusingly under-informed about what the fuck it was that they were looking at, but it was basically this large cauldron lit by witch-fires, boiling a disgusting mixture of waxes and razor-blades that started pouring out and taking the shapes of pod-people with murder in mind.

Some fun Wax Cauldron facts, most of which the party was woefully uninformed about in their encounter:

The Cauldron is a historical artifact: An important archmage of Naerie, Andreas the Trap-Wit, a native Naerian member of the Hexumvirate (the ruling magocracy of the Zelradian kingdom, a Migration era Suloise polity in the area), was a great crafter of magical cunningworks. The present-day wizard schools of the city contest over the authority of his broken school, and would furiously desire ownership of one of the famous works of the Trap-Wit.

The Cauldron is a serial killer: Goes to show how “whatever” the party was about the situation in the city, but they’d never heard about the strange series of murders that have been slowly brewing in prominence in the local rumours landscape. What was happening was that the cauldron (secreted away underneath the city) had, as per its nature, been gathering the emotions and spiritual bleed-over of the city for its witchy brew, and in the case of the ancient and honorable city of Naerie that pretty much amounted to razor-wielding wax duplicates of prominent citizens sneaking around doing a Jack the Ripper bit.

The Cauldron is a Karma Trigger: Ever since the campaign started, I’ve been allowing the players to “discard character seeds”, taking a badly rolled stat line during character creation and giving it up to the GM, trying again for a better stat line. The purported price of this practice is Karma backlash: the GM keeps these “character seeds”, abandoned stat lines deemed too bad for the player to bother with them, and uses them later to create NPCs who are for incidental reasons of fortune and fate horribly hostile to the player’s current character. So yeah, obviously when somebody with bad Karma goes near the Cauldron, it just goes wild and vomits out hostile doppelganger bad seeds in reaction.

The Cauldron is a thematic counterpart of the Black Cauldron: This is highly amusing to our group in particular, as we’d just ended a major Chronicles of Prydain rpg campaign a couple years ago. So here we have what is basically that same exact damn cauldron the players had already spent one campaign worrying over, back to haunt them in a new campaign.

So yeah, fun times in wax-people town as the Cauldron put out wax homunculi who kept harassing Teemu’s character in particular, as he’d been unusually active about discarding seeds through the campaign. One of the paladins (Sparrow I think?) took it upon themself to dash into the room and tip the cauldron over, putting a stop to the wax-people generation. While creepy and clearly evil as fuck, the wax people generally couldn’t hold up against heavily armored combatants with their razors, so the party managed to clean up the situation.

While the rest of the party went to figure out the logistics of transporting the cauldron, Ben the junior paladin stayed to safe-guard the cauldron. Ben is much more spiritual than Sparrow (the latter’s an old soldier who became a Temple Guardian to atone for his military sins), and he tried to meditate upon the thing while waiting for the others to come back. Normally wouldn’t do much (paladins do not have any particular spiritual sensitivity abilities at low level), but Ben critted his meditation roll and proceeded to have a convoluted vision of insight over the nature of this wizarding artifice. One interpretation failure later, and Ben became convinced that the Cauldron was actually a holy artifact of Syrul, the Suel goddess of lies and treachery. Syrul is commonly considered a horrid anti-god by the cult of Rao here in the Sunndian cultural sphere, so what the heck, this thing has to be destroyed!

(I guess Ben was kinda-sorta not entirely wrong about the nature of the Cauldron. Its substantial history is not that of a Syrulite artifact, and the goddess has not actively touched it, but the spiritual nature of the brew, the psionic detritus of the city of Naerie, is definitely to her tastes.)

The Paladins got a nice mid-scenario quest out of this spiritual realization; they’d get some XP for destroying the cauldron. This is all of course very amusingly parallel to that entire Black Cauldron story arc, and all the more so as the party had to deal with the entirely mundane logistics issues of getting the cauldron out of the sewers. Not exactly easy due to the dungeon architecture.

The party decided that they didn’t have the means to destroy the cauldron. The party’s arcane specialist Muscle Wizard (he’s a Wizard with STR 18; these players aren’t the most sane sometimes) parsed together the cauldron’s nature as a relic of Andreas the Trap-Wit, so there was some awareness about it being worth a lot of money, but of course the zealous and heavily armed paladins gave the marching orders here. So, the next best plan for what to do with the One Ring if you can’t get to Mount Doom: throw it in the sea.

The party carried the cauldron out of the dungeon and to the city harbour in the dark of night, rented a boat and took the cauldron to a location in the harbour. Muscle Wizard took careful note of the location so as to sell it later to the local wizard schools, but for now the Paladins could rest easy, as they consigned the Wax Cauldron to a watery tomb where nobody would know to seek for it. Worth half the quest XP for a partial success.

As tends to happen with this play group, they have amusing difficulties staying “heroic” for any meaningful length of time. Like, consider the core party in this adventure arc:
Sparrow, an old veteran soldier who’s become a paladin of peace.
Ben, a young, idealist paladin of peace.
Muscle Wizard, who’s at least not an actual demon worshipper, to his merit.
Notathief, a “commoner” who is actually an Assassin.

Best friends forever, I’m sure.

State of the Productive Facilities

These newsletters are starting to come out better, which is a sign of my working habits reasserting themselves. Do a bit of writing every day, preferably early enough in the morning to avoid being disrupted by distractions.

I’m now a bit ahead of schedule on these (I’m writing this a week in advance, basically), so it’s time to try to do something useful on the side as well, namely get that darn Muster print edition finished. After that I’ll need to work on some year-end bureaucracy stuff, and then we’ll see.