GM: Bill (Whkm)
Players: Lee Randazzo, Max Beckman-Harned, Glenn Goffin, Sean Nittner, Eric Rollins
System: Delta Green
Delta Green is always one of those games that I think I’ve played, but haven’t. I’ve heard so much about it that it sounded familiar, but when doing a search through my archives, I don’t think I’ve ever played it before. So, I decided to give it a shot, which was really my approach to games in general this year, playing things I hadn’t played before, and in most cases (albeit not in this game) trying out different OSR systems.
Premise
Born of the U.S. government’s 1928 raid on the degenerate coastal town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, the covert agency known as Delta Green opposes the forces of darkness with honor but without glory. Delta Green agents fight to save humanity from unnatural horrors—often at a shattering personal cost.
Shadows Over San Mateo
The game presented by our GM bill was a bit more grim than that however. The duties of a Delta Green agent, as he described them were to cover up the supernatural, survive, stop the horrors, and maybe, if possible, help people. The fact that covering up the supernatural was the first priority, and helping people was the last meant that it was very common for agents to setup others to take the fall, kill swaths of people, or perform other heinous acts in the services of their job. That’s a premise I don’t tend to accept without having the personal experience to know why that is necessary, and even then, I’d question it. So I knew from the start that this probably wasn’t a great fit for me.
Setup
As agents (who didn’t know each other), we were giving a scant briefing with the following details:
- Something weird arrived at SFO via private courier service and it disappeared, the flight crew with it. Later we found it was sent by Mixlogics.
- At a local gaming convention (KublaCon) people were showing anomalous behavior after paying an indie board game published by Polyphage (owned by the same parent company as Mixlogics).
- Our job was to prevent the board game from being distributed and frame someone else for the strange behavior at the convention.
Arrival
10AM at SFO the agents arrived from Arizona State, the FBI office in DC, the CDC HQ in Atlanta (that was me, Leslie Harper), Manilla, and one just a short hop from San Jose.
We made our way to the private hanger where the plane that carried the missing package was housed and talked to the manager Kenton Woo and his staff to learn the following:
- There were three crew members missing (pilot and two others)
- They have recordings, but the tapes abrupted ended the night before last at 7:30 PM
- The paperwork the crew should have filed was not filed.
- This was their first time carrying packages for Mixlogicis.
- On the video footage that was present, we saw the crew get off the plane pushing dolly with a box on it that had Chinese characters that indicated where it had been sent from. The location seemed insignificant, but the characters had extra markings which we sent to DG headquarters to decipher.
- The package also had labeled indicating biological markers (though not biohazards, and the client had signed an agreement that they would not send hazardous materials using the service).
- The flight came from Shenzhen, stopped in Guam to refuel, and them to SFO.
- Background checks on the crew revealed that two two members who were not the pilot both had military combat experience. Airforce search and rescue and they both spoke Mandarin.
Inside the plane
Strapping on her latex gloves and mask, CDC Crisis Manager Leslie Harper and agent Tall Square (the main form Manilla wearing a Hawaiian Tee) went on board to inspect the plane. Onboard they experiences synesthesia in the form a crystalline hunger. For Leslie it was as specific obsession with a particular episode of Scooby Doo she saw when she was a child. Jinkies!
The remaining agents went to the employee parking lot and found that the two other crew members cars were still there but the pilot’s car was gone. We split up to go to the pilot’s home (IRS Agent Darren Sanchez and FBI agent Robert Winthrop) and the local convention (the rest of us).
Burn the horrors
The GM took the players aside for the scene at the house so I don’t know many of the details, but from what was recounted to us, we learned that:
- Sanchez didn’t make it back (yay for backup characters)
- The pilot and his family was there, his child was dead and the rest were changed (details unspecified)
- The house was filled with entrails.
- Winthrop had commissioned some incendiary grenades, through the into the building, which burned it down and started a fire in the neighborhood, from which he fled (more evidence of this not being my kind of game).
A local bay area convention
At the con we found hotel and convention staff that Phineas Fog (our doctor of anthropology from Arizona State) made friends with and we learned
- Tall Square witnessed con-goers (in My Little Pony and Cthulhu t-shirts) obsessively playing the game at ever increasing speeds. Polyphage staff unaffected by the game’s mesmerizing properties.
- Reports of a horrible shriek followed by people acting erratically (causing us to wear ear protection for the rest of the adventure)
- A housekeeper Yolanda that has been stitched together with a con attendee an formed some hypergeometric monstrosity that nearly killed Leslie biting deep into her neck (7HP damage from a bite out of her 9HP), but was dispatched by Phineas, who then patched Leslie back up again. “Best Vampire Victim Cosplay Ever!” a convention goer yelled.
- We were joined by ATF agent “Willie” who had a big fuck off gun, which was important when we had to kill a sorceress with a flesh ward.
- The walls were lined with geodesic patterns that unnerved us all, the smelled of yellow.
VIG (Very Important Gamer) Room
Phineas was able to talk to the con staff to get the location of the stored games (which we collected discreetly and sent to the agency to destroy) and the VIG Room where a private game was being held. We cleared the area and then everyone but Leslie went into the room (I just had this feeling that everyone playing it would be bad).
Hypergeometry ensued. Winthrop ran scared. Most were mobbed. Willie pulled out and assault rifle and shot the sorcerer enough times that ever her magic did not protect her. She folded in upon herself impossibly. Tall Square issued the warrant (Winthrop had acquired) to collect all copies of the board game…for not paying adequate tariffs. [Real world needs to stop being worse than horror fiction].
Gunshots drew cops. We ran.
Finishing the job
We had collected the board games but they were the symptom not the problem. Dodging the police we followed the trail to the parking garage across the street from the hotel, and there we found the 5th Dimensional Starfish creature at the center of it all. There were three paths that we had to follow: Masks, Flames, and Blades, each interacting with each other (rock/paper/scissors style) and when we were locked in geodesic prisms we tried to break the puzzle, but failed.
Thankfully we also bought a thermite charge and miraculously Leslie and Phineas were able to pull the others from the prisms [three successful Power checks] and then somehow blow up the creature [Luck check at -40%, so 10% change, I rolled a 02!] and get away [Luck check at -40%, so 10% change, I rolled a 05!]
Huzzah.
Thoughts on the game
Player interaction in convention games has so many impedements:
- Most players (and most games) are goal focused. We we want to complete the scenario by learning the information needed and accomplishing the goals
- Since players start not knowing anything, they rarely have plot information to share so they don’t help one another accomplish tasks.
- Player often want to highlight their characters actions and aren’t interested in the other characters. “My guy” phenomenon.
- For anything to be true the GM has to acknowledge it, so conversations just between players are less concrete than those between player and GM.
- Most characters don’t need anything from each other. NPCs have all the important bits. When a player does need something from another, the interaction is usually transactional and once the important item or information is obtained, their interest in each other disappears.
- There often isn’t time allocated in game for two players to talk. The GM or other players will simply start talking over them or butt into the conversation.
Though I’ve tried to form bonds with other characters, I rarely am successful. Partially because I also fall into the patterns above (focusing on plot and personal edification over connections) and because, well, it takes two to tango. There was nothing especially different about player interactions in this game, but I found that because I didn’t enjoy the callousness of the expected game play, I was hoping to form more of them.
