Author Topic: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!  (Read 51037 times)

Zombieneighbours

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #30 on: May 07, 2016, 01:32:16 AM »

Program Op: The Cogs Of Law

Something is very wrong in Chicago. In the last six months there have been three mass killings, and it is starting to become clear that they are serial in nature, thanks to the repetition of certain markers, such as the victim profile (universally criminals and disproportionately people of colour). The strange graffiti at each scene with strange germanic over-tones. The fact that despite each scene looking like a war zone, someone has taken the time to leave a stylised, hand forged dagger stuck through the heart of the gangs leader. Worryingly, it seems that a group, not an individual, is carrying out the acts.
Meanwhile, the Chicago PD has a serious problem. There has been a staggering increase in allegations of police brutality. There has been a upswing in disciplinary proceedings thanks to brawls between officers as attitudes about how to deal with the apparent vigilante mass murder push tensions ever skyward. To cap it all off, an I.A. detective murdered in his home.

Behind it all, a vehmic court made up of a group of cops turned vigilante cult, who have stumbled into the worship of Yog-Sothoth, who they venerate as the personification of natural law. As they push deeper into their worship, they are being destroyed by it, but their ideology has an appeal, and it is spreading.

Punch line: full scale pitched battle between DG and Chicago militerised poilice turned sorcerers

Alethea

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #31 on: May 07, 2016, 08:29:17 AM »
Punch line: full scale pitched battle between DG and Chicago militerised poilice turned sorcerers

So much for op sec there Bartleby!  ;D
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RadioactiveBeer

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #32 on: May 07, 2016, 10:00:01 AM »
In the Shadow of Heshbon

In the aftermath of the 2014 Carlton Complex Fire, the largest wildfire in Washington state history, a group of forest rangers, local deputies and volunteers go out into the ravaged wilds to assess the damage, search for the missing and map the devastation.

Where the lightning struck which sparked the fires, they find hatches leading to an underground facility. It appears that the heat from the fire has caused the pressurised air in the facility to expand and "break the seals". This former MJ-12 research facility contains files, objects and even a few "subjects".

This works as an intro scenario ("hey guys, oops, looks like you're DG now!") but also as a frame narrative ala Final Revelation; essentially, we can use the files, objects and subjects as leaping-off points for, say, a one-shot in the 80's about hunting goatmen in Missouri, or a 1940's scenario set in one of the internment camps the government ran for Deep Ones.

Zombieneighbours

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #33 on: May 07, 2016, 11:36:31 AM »
Punch line: full scale pitched battle between DG and Chicago militerised poilice turned sorcerers

So much for op sec there Bartleby!  ;D

In fairness, that is the ending I hope for. But that is the ending where they screwed the pooch hard.

wilzuma

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #34 on: May 18, 2016, 09:00:11 AM »
I need the RPPR PC-Hivemind or in this case GM Braintrust to help out with a campaign idea I have for Delta Green. I've been tinkering with the idea of a Minnesota based DG cell to make a game that's Fargo meets Delta Green. Highlighting the dark humor, strangeness and absolute clusterfuck pitched violent conflicts become. I have been trying to decide how to start it out with the first session.

The name of the game is going to be called No Norwegians. A joke on how there's lots of Norwegian ancestry in Minnesota and the term is used on the wiki: "as an adjective, anything too public for its own good." So here's the idea i have so far for the start. The games begins with Federal investigators called in to deal with a highly public crime or incident that has been declared terrorism. What they don't know is that this was a DG op gone horribly wrong. Innocent people are killed, civil rights are violated and they follow the clues to perpetrators. Men and women within their own government. As they close in they find clues to the mythos and must deal with the active agents who have basically been fed to the lions at this point. DG A-Cell however makes contact and makes them on offer they can't refuse. "You're in our program now because you know too much. If you try to expose us we'll kill you. No Norwegians."

Thus is born Working Group N.

I'm just trying to figure out what the details of this operation gone horribly wrong could be. Should the burned out DG agents be alive? What aspect of the mythos should they be dealing with. I know i want to have been a very illegal raid, but i have writer's block coming up with it. It's a complex sounding opening, but I think it can be executed simply. I just need help with ideas. Any advice would be appreciated.

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PirateLawyer

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #35 on: May 18, 2016, 01:07:32 PM »
Looks like a good premise for a campaign. There are two caveats, however.

Firstly, if this is modern-day Delta Green, there is no A-Cell within the government sanctioned Program. A-Cell is the new leadership group of the cowboys who have refused to come in from the cold. So A-Cell wouldn't be coercively recruiting agents into a Working Group.

If you're setting the game back in the nineties, I recommend (re-)reading the original Delta Green sourcebook, there's a good section describing about how agents were supposed to be recruited back in the cowboy era. Needless to say, A-Cell tended to be assholes towards agents but I question the idea that they would made blunt coercive threats like that. You could hint at it and create a great sense of paranoia if you had some cryptic messages going on and/or some DG NPCs who know the score and are trying to give the new recruits a warning on how the game is really played ...

jeeves

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #36 on: May 18, 2016, 06:11:47 PM »
I've actually worked up a campaign frame that resembled this format: new agents brought into the conspiracy by looking into the aftermath of a botched DG op. If I may offer some of my views:

(1) I would keep at least one of the burned DG agents alive. They will be useful for providing clues that will lead your Player-Agents to the Delta Green conspiracy. They are useful GM mouthpieces for dispensing clues. Even if the burned agent is on the run (presumably a suspect in the terrorist incident now), it will give the players something to chase that will lead them to your plot. Even if the players don't pick up on your other clues, there is at least a manhunt that will keep them on track.

(2) What aspect of the mythos is really a question you are in the best position to answer. What aspect of the mythos do you want your players to tackle? If the tone is humorous, then I think the oldest joke in Cthulhu RPG is the amount of excessive force players use to stop summoning rituals. It could be a summoning ritual for mythos entity of your choice, which the burned agents dealt with by using overwhelming firepower, thereby causing a lot of collateral damage.

For example, the cultists were summoning Ithaqua on the top of a Minneapolis skyscraper, and your burned agents decided the answer was to collapse the building using explosives. Now you have the terrorist incident to trigger your campaign. But who do the security cameras show as placing the explosives? Who flashed their badges to scope out the building a week prior?

(3) I would also find some other way to bring PC's into the conspiracy. Most RPG players I know are not motivated by death threats. In fact, it's usually motivation for them to go in the opposite direction. Within conventions of the genre, a death threat is like a challenge a villain throws down.

Besides, if your player-character are true-blue, hard-core law enforcement agents, I don't think they would let themselves be cowed by death threats from mysterious voices on the other end of the phone call, either.

How important is this motivation? Presumably your players know they are there to play a Delta Green campaign and are therefore on board with working for Delta Green. Do the death threats play some kind of role in your campaign beyond motivating the players?
« Last Edit: May 18, 2016, 06:37:37 PM by jeeves »

wilzuma

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #37 on: May 18, 2016, 07:19:06 PM »
I've actually worked up a campaign frame that resembled this format: new agents brought into the conspiracy by looking into the aftermath of a botched DG op. If I may offer some of my views:

(1) I would keep at least one of the burned DG agents alive. They will be useful for providing clues that will lead your Player-Agents to the Delta Green conspiracy. They are useful GM mouthpieces for dispensing clues. Even if the burned agent is on the run (presumably a suspect in the terrorist incident now), it will give the players something to chase that will lead them to your plot. Even if the players don't pick up on your other clues, there is at least a manhunt that will keep them on track.

(2) What aspect of the mythos is really a question you are in the best position to answer. What aspect of the mythos do you want your players to tackle? If the tone is humorous, then I think the oldest joke in Cthulhu RPG is the amount of excessive force players use to stop summoning rituals. It could be a summoning ritual for mythos entity of your choice, which the burned agents dealt with by using overwhelming firepower, thereby causing a lot of collateral damage.

For example, the cultists were summoning Ithaqua on the top of a Minneapolis skyscraper, and your burned agents decided the answer was to collapse the building using explosives. Now you have the terrorist incident to trigger your campaign. But who do the security cameras show as placing the explosives? Who flashed their badges to scope out the building a week prior?

(3) I would also find some other way to bring PC's into the conspiracy. Most RPG players I know are not motivated by death threats. In fact, it's usually motivation for them to go in the opposite direction. Within conventions of the genre, a death threat is like a challenge a villain throws down.

Besides, if your player-character are true-blue, hard-core law enforcement agents, I don't think they would let themselves be cowed by death threats from mysterious voices on the other end of the phone call, either.

How important is this motivation? Presumably your players know they are there to play a Delta Green campaign and are therefore on board with working for Delta Green. Do the death threats play some kind of role in your campaign beyond motivating the players?

This! All of This! Thanks, this was VERY helpful. I love the idea of DG agents bringing heavy machine guns and explosives to a summoning circle. I can lay out an elaborate and absurd crime scene a la No country for old men (And then Woah Differences!).

I plan on ONE agent from team FUBAR is on the run. The other motivation I have is I am going to Bond one of the players to the family of one of the agents who did get killed in this madness.

This was helpful. I'm removing the threat of death. You're right. It's a bad motivator. I think that someone might say to them, "listen, if you know more than you should now, and you aren't dead, then you work for the Program now." Something like that.
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RadioactiveBeer

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #38 on: May 19, 2016, 11:22:21 PM »
One for the [screaming internally] files.
 
The unsolved murder of a homeless woman whose body was found on an island off the coast of Essex, England. Her body had a strange mask made out of gaffer tape. Her cause of death is unknown due to the near-skeletonised condition her body was found in. Over the course of two years, two men have been taken in over her death but later released without charge.

The island she was found on is owned by the Ministry of Defence and operated by a private defence contractor, because that's not shady at all.

The island's name is Foulness, because England apparently decided to have enough with the cheekily playful place names and just call a place disgusting. Foulness is a real place that definitely does not have something sleeping under it and waiting to reclaim the world. Allegedly the name actually means "fowl-naess" (an old Germanic word for "promontory") but let's be honest, that's definitely not what the name really means.

I mean, this stuff writes itself. Even if the murder wasn't committed on the island, the fact that she washed up on MoD property easily makes it the problem of Pisces if we just throw in, say, that the mast is a certain shade of saffron. Or given the proximity to the sea (and the fact that Foulness Island also features Foulness Point and sits just south of Foulness Sands) perhaps she was an offering to something unsavoury. Hell, let's throw in the fact that the island can grow organically by a process of "innings" - salt-loving plants take hold of silt washed up on the tide, tethering it in place - means the island itself might well be a sort of genus loci, semi-sentient and carrying out an agenda all its own.

Either way I guess you could say this is... murder most foul.

Zombieneighbours

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #39 on: May 20, 2016, 01:28:30 AM »
Ah. essex. Home sweet home. If your Agents are goinv to foulness, they better take their hazmat suits. A lot of our early nuclear research happened on that chunk of land.

Don't forget  to visit Southend. One part clone town, one part bleak coastal poverty and decay, two parts essex working class anti-intellectualism and hypermasculinity. The blare of arcades under a slate gray sky.

Adam_Autist

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #40 on: May 20, 2016, 06:14:57 AM »
You might want to read Warren Ellis' latest non fiction Cunning Plans he has a whole thing about the local mythology and witch craft becaise He's from there

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #41 on: May 20, 2016, 08:59:34 AM »
Ah. essex. Home sweet home. If your Agents are goinv to foulness, they better take their hazmat suits. A lot of our early nuclear research happened on that chunk of land.

Don't forget  to visit Southend. One part clone town, one part bleak coastal poverty and decay, two parts essex working class anti-intellectualism and hypermasculinity. The blare of arcades under a slate gray sky.

Just throw in some fishmen in trakkies! It writes itself.

constructacon

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #42 on: May 22, 2016, 09:56:02 AM »
i had an idea for a campaign that would need to be fleshed out some more and mythosed. the idea came to me while watching orphan black, what if in 1996 when"dolly the sheep was born that was a cover-up by the cowboys, and there were a bunch of clone children at the"farm" they "sanitized." only the agents that were sent couldn't do the job, they couldn't kill the chldren. instead they secreted them to foster systems all over the US. Cut to present day where the players are these children, who have all suspisously been recruited/joined the goverment.  go from that story seed...let's see what grows.

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #43 on: May 22, 2016, 05:34:54 PM »
i had an idea for a campaign that would need to be fleshed out some more and mythosed. the idea came to me while watching orphan black, what if in 1996 when"dolly the sheep was born that was a cover-up by the cowboys, and there were a bunch of clone children at the"farm" they "sanitized." only the agents that were sent couldn't do the job, they couldn't kill the chldren. instead they secreted them to foster systems all over the US. Cut to present day where the players are these children, who have all suspisously been recruited/joined the goverment.  go from that story seed...let's see what grows.

I like this. Bonus points if you namedrop CATALYST somewhere.

wilzuma

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Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!
« Reply #44 on: June 02, 2016, 05:57:19 PM »
No Norwegians.

So I think I may have finally worked out how to begin my No Norwegians game. Minnesota is known for its lakes and so this story largely features a lake in it's dark foreboding landscapes, a symbol as it were for the darkness that lies just below the surface.

It begins on a cold and stormy night in Minnesota. Late May. But the night is unseasonably cold. Frost and freezing rain, even snow is reported in parts of the Twin Cities. But it's the winds that stand out. Those howling, destructive winds toppling trees and power lines knocking out half the Metro power grid.

A phone rings, an agent picks it up. it's his old partner from the Bureau. Naveed Olsen, assigned to the FBI anti terror task force tracking Al Shabob recruitment in the cities. At least he was until he was put on administrative leave for misuse of agency funds. His words are full of madness and regret, but they hint at something more… something the agent will soon come to learn. They hang up. There is a silence.

Another phone call. All hands on deck.

The PC’s are called to a very bloody and bizarre murder scene on a Hidden Beach on Twin Lake (a real place). The carnage includes the naked / stripped all sporting bullet wounds, a scorched body with its feet chopped off. There are some odd things that stand out, including a left boot that doesn’t fit any of the bodies. The other scene is the getaway van. The interior was lit up in flames, from the body burned after the vehicle lost control and crashed. The suspects fled from the scene back into the park where they could disappear.

The pc’s either join the manhunt or the investigation. Investigation ID’s the bodies as Norwegian nationals and their US counterparts staying at the nearby Regency Minneapolis. There are few from the trip that are alive, at the hotel and claim ignorance of the whole affair. Testimony has it that they went out to the lake for late night skinny dipping.

Those on the manhunt are searching through the park and nearby areas, a golf course and neighborhoods looking for signs and sightings of the suspects. These agents will stumble upon one of the attackers, as well as the sole survivor. A woman who doesn’t seem bothered by the strange coldsnap...

What’s going on? The victims are all Ithaqua cultists who gathered on this particular lake, when the stars were right to summon an avatar of Ithaqua to impregnate a woman with his spawn. The agents of Cell-K (our doomed DG cell) have been working on this case for a while. And rather than stop the ritual before it started decided to use it as a way to draw out its members, its figurehead the Occult Sorcerer Sten Fritjolf. The game was set.

During the ritual a storm of Icy Rain pours down, and howling winds hit the Twin Cities. They are about to move in then realize, that Fritjolf is not among them. K-Cell hesitates, one man goes back to check out the nearby hotel the targets were staying at. The rest move in. But hesitation was lethal. As they blow away cultists the avatar forms out of the air. The first agent who faces it down panics and fires at it. It simply picks him up on a gust of wind and pulls him into the sky. Only one shoe is left behind. The agents retreat as a huge murder of crows swarms them. They drag another fallen comrade through the park trails to their car. Unfortunately as they take off a swarm of ravens pelts their windows, they crash and their buddy in the back bites it. So they do what anyone else would do. Light him on fire. Then flee the scene.

The agents arrive at this aftermath. One or two agents still at large, though they don't know that. They still need to end Fritjolf before he leaves the country. As these are his coworkers and country men the pc's have to interview him. I'll let on that there is something off about him. That's the main thing, is there will be small inexplicable things that are totally off about survivors.  K-Cell's priority though at the end is finding the woman the mother of the wendigo before she is whisked away forever.

There could be a violent scene at the hotel as they try to take out Fritjolf. K-cell may also attempt to go after the “Consort” and Fritjolf at the airport as they attempt to depart the country.

During one of these moments is when I plan to reveal Olsen’s involvement to one of the players. I’m not sure which way will be more disturbing, having them fight him or discover he’s one of the dead bodies. There is also the man with the missing shoe. I can imagine a very Fargo-esque moment where as PC’s are shocked as suddenly a body falls from the sky and lands on the trunk their car. This would involve a SAN check because A. That is f’ed up, B. where did it come from? As soon as they get a look they realize the body is missing a shoe. This guy was at their scene. Roll SAN again. This would also be a pretty quiet, strange moment to introduce this. They would want to know what happened to this guy. Especially our PC who got the call from him.

That’s what I got so far. Let me know what you guys think. I want this to be a single session type scenario. I don’t want things obvious at all, but i want to try to keep it not too convoluted. Essentially this was a DG mission in the vein of burn after reading. And they have to piece it together before DG higher ups arrive to “take over the investigation.”
« Last Edit: June 02, 2016, 06:08:16 PM by wilzuma »
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