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LuiCypher posted:[*]Immigration crackdowns and other international affairs foibles not only make it harder for Delta Green agents abroad to solicit the help of Friendlies, but the focus on the Enemy Without (immigrants causing trouble) is creating a vacuum for the Enemy Within (U.S. citizens engaging in cult activity).[/list] On the "plus" side anyone up to suspected Cthulhu stuff short of a full citizen, including legal permanent residents and green card holders, can now be bad-jacketed and deported with comparatively trivial ease. "Oh those weird tattoed squiggles? MS-13 stuff. Bad Hombre. Better get him on the next plane out Senior ICE Agent Knuckledragger, thanks for your cross-agency cooperation."
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Jun 18, 2018 18:05
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LuiCypher posted:The real question you should be asking is - How has the Trump Administration affected the public's faith in the federal government? That has a real answer that's easy to source/understand, and that has a real implication on Delta Green's ability to do its job. For example: These are all great points and ones I wished the book had brought up instead. Maybe they shied from them because they're kind of hot button, but a timeline full of terrorist attacks and the Mueller investigation doesn't match with that.
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Jun 18, 2018 18:08
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Mueller stuff is in there? Haven't gotten there yet; still in the 50's with the thwarting of Evil Zombie Stalin. Kind of odd that they went that topical; probably part of the reason it took so long for this badboy to get out with some late breaking rewrites and additions. .
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Jun 18, 2018 18:12
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Owlbear Camus posted:On the "plus" side anyone up to suspected Cthulhu stuff short of a full citizen, including legal permanent residents and green card holders, can now be bad-jacketed and deported with comparatively trivial ease. "Oh those weird tattoed squiggles? MS-13 stuff. Bad Hombre. Better get him on the next plane out Senior ICE Agent Knuckledragger, thanks for your cross-agency cooperation." Man, totally forgot to contemplate the fact that ICE now has a lot more legal (but in reality it's probably extralegal) authority in this day and age. Don't forget that increased defense budgets mean lots of irresponsibly-spent cash, which includes more operating funds siphoned off the top for the Program - you can run them as slightly better-funded than they used to be. Hell, even the Outlaws could manage to score a spot of that cash somehow. Just file off 'anti-terrorism' and replace it with 'anti-immigration'. Mueller investigation can still be totally relevant, though - in his investigation, he comes across account items that at quick glance appear to be ways to launder money and he takes that angle. A Friendly working the investigation, though, blanches when he sees a 'G. Marsh' as the owner of the company account 'Es. O. Dag., ZAO' and quickly informs Delta Green. Owlbear Camus posted:Mueller stuff is in there? It's mainly just a recounting of recent history as part of the overall timeline. Other ideas:
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Jun 18, 2018 20:38
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LuiCypher posted:Other ideas: And I thought my campaign idea of "The Director mindswaps with Trump when he threatens the Program and the Deep One hunt " was too much.
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Jun 18, 2018 20:47
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Kavak posted:And I thought my campaign idea of "The Director mindswaps with Trump when he threatens the Program and the Deep One hunt " was too much. Hey man, this is inspired by the Handler's Guide where they write, no joke, that in order to keep recruits who bounce off DG from ever talking about the program they tell them to look in their kitchen for a USB drive full of child porn and then muse to the now-failed recruit 'imagine how many USB drives there could be' when they call the police.
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Jun 19, 2018 01:23
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LuiCypher posted:Hey man, this is inspired by the Handler's Guide where they write, no joke, that in order to keep recruits who bounce off DG from ever talking about the program they tell them to look in their kitchen for a USB drive full of child porn and then muse to the now-failed recruit 'imagine how many USB drives there could be' when they call the police.  The Program knows how to keep mouths shut. EDIT: Nevermind, joke in bad taste. Kavak fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Jun 19, 2018 |
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Jun 19, 2018 02:54
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That's a pretty good way to keep people tight lipped. Dead federal employees create problems that need even more possibility of exposure to fix. A deranged pedophile talking about occult conspiracies can get shived in a prison shower without the Program lifting a finger. (Also, I don't want to google search anything involving kiddie porn to get citations, but I'm 1000% sure this is and has been done IRL.)
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Jun 19, 2018 03:10
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I do wish they'd gone with "Bush Jr. shuts down Majestic 12 because he's angered by their incompetence in stopping 9/11 and failure to locate Osama" rather than "Majestic 12 pretends it doesn't exist to Bush Jr and Bush Sr keeps mum about it".
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Jun 19, 2018 05:49
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You just know that they would have reopened the Remote Viewing program as part of efforts to find out where Osama was.
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Jun 19, 2018 05:52
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Bush II shuttering them after failing to remote view Iraq's (non-existent) WMDs would have been pretty spot on.
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Jun 19, 2018 12:28
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gradenko_2000 posted:You just know that they would have reopened the Remote Viewing program as part of efforts to find out where Osama was. Really if I have a top line critique of DG it is that it seems to be real easy to parse it as "Actually, every bad foreign policy idea was totally good because it blew up some Cthulhus," and that bugs me more than being noir detectives and college jazz babies in the '20s.
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Jun 19, 2018 12:36
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It's double-edged though, in that most US foreign policy choices still read as "Only a good idea if fish-men are happening." The outrageous lengths needed to justify them in-game illustrate the even more egregious excuses actually pitched to rationalized them.
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Jun 19, 2018 12:50
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LatwPIAT posted:I do wish they'd gone with "Bush Jr. shuts down Majestic 12 because he's angered by their incompetence in stopping 9/11 and failure to locate Osama" rather than "Majestic 12 pretends it doesn't exist to Bush Jr and Bush Sr keeps mum about it". When I first heard about it I assumed that would be the story, but it's far more pet NPC-related. That's my real problem with DG as a setting, although it's kept to a minimum in the book.
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Jun 19, 2018 14:31
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What are some good DG/Cthulu podcasts?
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Jun 19, 2018 14:42
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RPPR is the Delta Green podcast, with the exception of getting it from the authors themselves via The Unspeakable podcast
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Jun 19, 2018 14:56
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LatwPIAT posted:I do wish they'd gone with "Bush Jr. shuts down Majestic 12 because he's angered by their incompetence in stopping 9/11 and failure to locate Osama" rather than "Majestic 12 pretends it doesn't exist to Bush Jr and Bush Sr keeps mum about it". Actually Bush Sr. doesn't keep mum about it? He directly asks Bush Jr. 'How useful was The Report?' and the resulting White House scramble to procure The Report (which is no longer accurate/obtainable due to the breaking of the Accords) leads to a lot of work on Majestic's part to prevent exposure and to keep some of those vital details (e.g., they're incompetent) from leaking out.
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Jun 19, 2018 16:02
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Nessus posted:Really if I have a top line critique of DG it is that it seems to be real easy to parse it as "Actually, every bad foreign policy idea was totally good because it blew up some Cthulhus," and that bugs me more than being noir detectives and college jazz babies in the '20s. Eh, reading the timeline entries it struck me more as "as long as we were there, they knocked over some cults" but it didn't really seem to be working too hard to frame the overall conflict as a utilitarian good because of it.
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Jun 19, 2018 17:42
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Nessus posted:Given the general attitude of the premise of Delta Green, would they not have been actively disinterested in finding Osama with any particular dispatch, but would have loved that they now had a great cover to go blow up mi-go steles and contact points in central Asia, forever? Delta Green, the conspiracy within the US government, would use "possible Osama sighting" as a cover for blowing up Mi-go sites. Delta Green, the RPG, is thematically about how the US government goes "can we ally the Byakhee against communism?" In Delta Green the CIA gave the Tcho-Tcho weapons and money because the Tcho-Tcho were anti-communist. The result was very little fighting against communism, Tcho-Tcho expansion against and subsequent cannibalism of their neighbouring tribes, and the foundation of smuggling networks that would flood the US with capital-U Unnatural drugs. The quintessential Delta Green is the US government selling American lives to aliens in return for Intel on Soviet troop concentrations. LuiCypher posted:Actually Bush Sr. doesn't keep mum about it? He directly asks Bush Jr. 'How useful was The Report?' and the resulting White House scramble to procure The Report (which is no longer accurate/obtainable due to the breaking of the Accords) leads to a lot of work on Majestic's part to prevent exposure and to keep some of those vital details (e.g., they're incompetent) from leaking out. Yeah, but when Majestic claim there is no report, Bush Sr. doesn't say anything else to his son, complete with not mentioning the part where the US government once "cooperated" with aliens. Or that aliens exist. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Jun 20, 2018 |
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Jun 19, 2018 21:11
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Owlbear Camus posted:What are some good DG/Cthulu podcasts? Going to self-shill a little but us at the reddit have started recording us talking about Delta Green. https://greenboxpodcast.blogspot.com/2018/05/episode-01-double-bill.html
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Jun 19, 2018 22:16
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Owlbear Camus posted:What are some good DG/Cthulu podcasts? The Good Friends of Jackson Elias is by the guys who wrote CoC 7th edition.
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Jun 22, 2018 00:54
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So mechanically how does fall of Delta Green compare to other Gumshoe games?
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Jun 22, 2018 15:01
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Our Setpiece contest is live if any of y'all wanna throw anything into the ring that would be pretty awesome. https://www.reddit.com/r/NightAtTheOpera/comments/8tlqdd/2018_night_at_the_opera_setpiece_contest/
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Jun 25, 2018 03:57
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neaden posted:So mechanically how does fall of Delta Green compare to other Gumshoe games? Combat has a lot of additional options and firearms are really truly lethal. Any firearm dropping you to 0 or lower adds an extra 6 to damage and drops you to wounded. Autofire (5 point spend) adds lethality, which has changes of instant death or massive additional damage. There's more. Oddly, they left assault rifle as d6+0, making it less damaging than a handgun, which was explained in NBA as a cinematic thing to emulate thrillers--though with lethality they're plenty lethal. It adapts a lot of what I think of as the "real world psychology" stuff from DG. You have bonds, adaptation to violence, and things like that. You take permanent hits to stablity or bond or interpersonal skill for killing other human beings. It uses a template based character creation, so you don't randomly pick your skills, instead you have a particular set of skills automatically slotted for being in a certain profession. Again, this is taken from percentile DG. It's less useful here IMHO as you still have a lot of choices to make where with DG, it really speeds up character creation. Overall, it seems pretty solid. I am more interested in longer campaigns and I'm worried about the lethality of combat, but I'll see.
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Jun 26, 2018 18:55
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gradenko_2000 posted:RPPR is the Delta Green podcast, with the exception of getting it from the authors themselves via The Unspeakable podcast Thanks for the suggestion. Just listened to the most recent DG sesh. I'm totally stealing the central conceit. I feel like he could have dressed it up a little more, but it's a good one.
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Jun 26, 2018 19:23
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Is Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos Book any good? Does it interface with the Pathfinder ruleset well? I’d love to run a Cthulhu Mythos game at some point but my group is a little sick of new systems every time we try something new so this looks like it could be a cool stopgap if it doesn’t suck! e: also how have I never posted in this thread before 
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Jun 28, 2018 01:48
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Quidthulhu posted:Is Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos Book any good? Does it interface with the Pathfinder ruleset well? I’d love to run a Cthulhu Mythos game at some point but my group is a little sick of new systems every time we try something new so this looks like it could be a cool stopgap if it doesn’t suck! I don't have experience with the Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos book, but I do have experience with running Call of Cthulhu games in d20 and playing horror games in Pathfinder. My guess is that the monsters work perfectly well mechanically in Pathfinder, but that you're unlikely to get a Cthulhu Mythos mood going in that system. There's two reasons for this. First, D&D (and PF) are games about overcoming challenges. So regardless of how horrifically the monster is described (or if the book bolts a sanity system onto base PFRPG) players are going to fall back on what they know. And what they know is scouring over their sheets for the right spell or ability to do extra damage to a shoggoth. Second, even if the Sandy Petersen book incorporates the official versions of Lovecraftian monsters, most of them have been mined for D&D already. Deep ones aren't that frightening in a world full of hybrid species; shoggoths are basically gibbering mouthers, and so on. I played in a Ravenloft type Pathfinder game with a really great GM, who managed some extremely unsettling scenes. However, even then, the tension drained away once we got into combat - and PFRPG does prime you to solve problems with combat. If you absolutely want to stick with D20, there's also a D20 Call of Cthulhu book from back in 3rd Ed D&D that's not bad, especially if you just keep the characters to level one. It looks like you can still get copies on Amazon for about $25. It works okay and I enjoyed the book, though many CoC fans at the time were unimpressed. (It also stats up the Great Old Ones in d20, though that is always a silly exercise.) What I'd really recommend is maybe waiting a bit and just diving in with a cosmic horror game. You can get the Delta Green starter rules (or CoC7, for that matter) on DriveThruRPG for free. There's sample adventures for DG on the official Delta Green site, too. Delta Green is really simple to learn and explain; I've always been able to teach the base mechanics in less than five minutes and it comes with pregens. I think that a new system can really help with establishing the right mood. It can shake up people's expectations ("I have 8 hit points??") and help them understand that it's about doing the best you can in a bad situation. That can help them lean into the horror instead of feeling frustratingly powerless in a game that's normally a power fantasy. Your experience may vary, but I've never had much luck using cosmic horror as a seasoning rather than the focus.
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Jun 28, 2018 15:28
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Sionak posted:If you absolutely want to stick with D20, there's also a D20 Call of Cthulhu book from back in 3rd Ed D&D that's not bad, especially if you just keep the characters to level one. It looks like you can still get copies on Amazon for about $25. It works okay and I enjoyed the book, though many CoC fans at the time were unimpressed. (It also stats up the Great Old Ones in d20, though that is always a silly exercise.) I have that book. It's... eh. If you want D20 statblocks for shoggoths and stuff, it'll do. One of my favorite bits from that is they had an illo of the D&D 3E "Iconic" characters fighting Cthulhu.  The dead fighter who there is sort of a proto-meme. He was depicted in books throughout that iteration D&D getting owned in various ways (the very dead subject of a resurrection spell, a statue in the garden of a medusa, etc). Kind of funny that it even made it into a crossover. Apparently it was the artists thumbing their nose at a marketing directive to center the iconic party on a white guy, somewhat interesting thread here: https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?532957-The-Many-Deaths-of-Regdar
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Jun 28, 2018 15:43
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there's legends of the old Delta Green book that was double statted for both CoC and d20, but I've never been able to find it
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Jun 28, 2018 15:54
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gradenko_2000 posted:there's legends of the old Delta Green book that was double statted for both CoC and d20, but I've never been able to find it I used to have it, but gifted it to a friend, since I still had a copy of the OG softcover. Came out in 2007. Other than the dual-statting it was just a straight reprint of the '97 softcover, so no update to the timeline or anything. I recall it even had a dumb layout error or two with a sidebar section bleeding onto the next page, and the d20 stats seemed uninspired but maybe that's because I'm not a fan of 3E era D20. (Star Wars Saga and 4e were the best iterations of the basic engine for my money). I guess it was nice that it was hardcover, and it had a good binding.
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Jun 28, 2018 16:07
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Owlbear Camus posted:I have that book. It's... eh. If you want D20 statblocks for shoggoths and stuff, it'll do. I like how it also, though certainly unintentional, shows how poo poo the fighter is in 3rd edition.
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Jun 28, 2018 21:08
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remusclaw posted:I like how it also, though certainly unintentional, shows how poo poo the fighter is in 3rd edition. It was a running joke to have him die because he was pushed on the dev team by marketing. He's actually getting killed or wrecked in most pictures he's in.
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Jun 28, 2018 23:14
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apparently Masks of Nyarlathotep is getting a re-release? https://twitter.com/Chaosium_Inc/status/1012698223729733632
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Jun 29, 2018 15:05
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gradenko_2000 posted:apparently Masks of Nyarlathotep is getting a re-release?
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Jun 29, 2018 15:32
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I dream of running this one day (probably in Trail)....there is too much rpg and not enough human lifetime in this world.
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Jun 29, 2018 16:14
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We can always do a goon game in discord or roll20 if there's enough interest.
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Jun 30, 2018 19:16
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I picked up Masks this morning and have been flipping through the .pdfs today. It's really nicely done and I'm excited to start running the Peru chapter for my group that's largely only played D&D. Should be a good introduction to CoC.
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Jul 1, 2018 22:56
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Yeah I was gonna post about this, it comes out July 1st and includes a new chapter at the beginning. It's $50 for a pdf but you get that much off the slipcase release later this year. Apparently it's 600+ pages this time around? it's exactly 666, which is a nice touch.
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Jul 2, 2018 00:41
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Anybody know what the new Delta Green book, The Labyrinth, is about? It's getting kickstartered tomorrow and all I know about it is that John Tynes wrote it.
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Jul 2, 2018 22:59
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long-rear end nips Diane posted:Anybody know what the new Delta Green book, The Labyrinth, is about? It's getting kickstartered tomorrow and all I know about it is that John Tynes wrote it. Sounds like a bunch of splatbook style stuff. "new allies, antagonists, and terrors"
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Jul 2, 2018 23:28
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