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yea the best way to handle CoC clues is absolutely just give them as much as you can without making it some boring 'you walk in the front door...ok here's the story' thing and just let them go nuts speculating and trying to sus things out. Save the big tie it all together stuff for the climax, obviously, but the biggest mistake I see new keepers make is being stingy with clues out of fear that someone will sherlock it in five minutes so they gate everything behind rolls and that can be annoying.
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Sep 28, 2019 17:31
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sexpig by night posted:yea the best way to handle CoC clues is absolutely just give them as much as you can without making it some boring 'you walk in the front door...ok here's the story' thing and just let them go nuts speculating and trying to sus things out. Save the big tie it all together stuff for the climax, obviously, but the biggest mistake I see new keepers make is being stingy with clues out of fear that someone will sherlock it in five minutes so they gate everything behind rolls and that can be annoying. I was kind of thinking the same thing, that is one of the reasons I chose this scenario. Its pretty clear that the neighbor is a monster from the get go, and the adventure is more about what the hell they plan on doing about it than it is digging up a lot of info.
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Sep 28, 2019 18:44
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It's a hard balance, but running Delta Green is really all about the small victories. The Agents might be people forced into terrible situations by a terrible organization who are often forced to do terrible things, but at the core of nearly every scenario there is an unnatural threat that poses a danger to the innocent—and it is up to the Agents to try and save as many lives as they can. For instance, in Sentinels of Twilight, the scenario included in the Handler's Guide, it is possible, though not likely, for the Agents to save a small six year old child who disappeared thirty years ago and return him to his parents. Doing so requires guile, skill, and more than a little luck, and will likely result in harsh repercussions for the Agents from the Program when it comes time to explain their actions. And ultimately, saving one child is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the terrible things the Agents may be forced to do. But what makes Delta Green a great, unique RPG experience is these small victories, where, even as everything is falling apart and ultimate success is impossible, the Agents can fight like hell to restore a single point of hope and sanity to a small corner of the world, and save a few lives while doing it—if only so they can justify their actions to themselves later. The Standing Orders that can be found in a few of the scenarios really get at this aspect of the game: quote:These are operational priorities that every agent of the Delta Green program learns, although they must never be written down.
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Sep 28, 2019 19:31
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You don't have to go as hard into the paint on theme to run a good game of Delta Green. I often run games that are more akin to Burn After Reading than True Detective. Comedies of error and mayhem as the agents misinterpret the clues they get and then fumble their response and end up getting killed or arrested. This isn't to say there isn't horror. I've plenty of freaky games that explore different ideas for cosmic horror - mythos sorcery as genetic malware to noir mysteries about greed and murder. More than anything else, DG is a framing device to run modern occult horror stories as a RPG. Change whatever elements of the canon you want to run the story you want to.
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Sep 28, 2019 22:20
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First game was a resounding success! Everyone had a great time, and our other DM sounded like she was either considering running it herself, or just switching the group over to CofC for awhile and having me run it. The following is spoilers for Mr Corbitt, which is pretty old as far as I can tell. The players beat the ever loving poo poo out of the hospital guy to get information (one was a hard bitten ex-cop) to the point that the guy was gonna die. I had him sacrifice himself to summon a tentacle creature out of a nearby sewer drain. It tore him apart while the PC's made a getaway. I thought that this might cause the PC's to simmer down a bit, but it backfired. They drove straight to Corbitt's house and kicked in the door in broad daylight and commenced with the violence. One died (the ex-cop, of course)horribly, one is still temporarily insane, and one lost a LOT of sanity and I don't know what to do with him yet, since I don't know the rules well. They burned down the house with the demon child in it and scattered, but not before finding Corbitt's notes and a tome. End of session. I thought it was a disaster, but they all had a blast. They want to meet back up and start a paranormal investigation agency.
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Sep 28, 2019 23:12
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The Dregs posted:First game was a resounding success! Everyone had a great time, and our other DM sounded like she was either considering running it herself, or just switching the group over to CofC for awhile and having me run it. Yeah this is pretty much how most of my Call of Cthulhu sessions have gone too. Glad y'all had fun 
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Sep 28, 2019 23:15
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Lumbermouth posted:Yeah this is pretty much how most of my Call of Cthulhu sessions have gone too. Glad y'all had fun The women in the group didn't participate in the violence. They were the ones who managed to sneak around during the fracas and make off with the tome and the diary, and retain most of their sanity.
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Sep 28, 2019 23:25
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Lumbermouth posted:Yeah, I was fine with the original CoC supplement as written, but this is straight up copy-pasted from the first page of the Handler's Guide
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Sep 29, 2019 00:01
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Lumbermouth posted:I appreciate the original game's tension of "you are trying secretly to do the right thing and your bosses will eventually find out" rather than "you work for something terrible, let's hope that all the other options out there are worse."
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Sep 29, 2019 00:03
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The fact that the new Delta Green corebook didn't include bad guys who weren't just generic cultists is one of my biggest grips with the game considering that Delta Green V1 was probably the ONLY Cthulhu thing where the villains are actually fully fleshed out instead of "Evil POC who stabs you" and they just decided to lazily wait until the supplements that probably won't come out for a better part of a decade to actually give us villains that are remotely interesting. But I probably shouldn't expect better from Delta Green. It's a game where you're expected to play as real life monsters for fun and somehow not wanna end your life right after playing. That's the true terror of the game.
TheNamedSavior fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Sep 29, 2019 |
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Sep 29, 2019 00:07
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TheNamedSavior posted:But I probably shouldn't expect better from Delta Green. It's a game where you're expected to play as real life monsters for fun and somehow not wanna end your life right after playing. That's the true terror of the game. What
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Sep 29, 2019 01:33
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He's referring to one of the govt agency PC options being ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which is something he took particular issue with either earlier in this thread or another one IIRC.
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Sep 29, 2019 01:37
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Delta Green wronged him in some way and he has to let us know.
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Sep 29, 2019 02:00
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It is worth noting that there are bunch of sourcebooks coming out for DG that include additional antagonists, such as Impossible Landscapes (The King in Yellow and Carcosa), The Labyrinth (Four antagonist and allied factions each, with rules on how each develops and evolves as the Agents interact with them), Deep State (March Technologies and other MJ-12 spinoffs), PISCES (duh), Those Who Come After (Great Race of Yith), and Falling Towers (Fighting the Fate in the 2000s). The lack of antagonists in the core book and Handler's Guide is definitely an issue with the game, but it is one that's being actively addressed.
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Sep 29, 2019 02:02
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Lumbermouth posted:Then I'd like that reflected in the book a little more, akin to how Night's Black Agents has Burn and Dust and other little knobs you can twist to reflect certain themes in games. The current DG Handler's book is like 150 pages of detailed timeline of this fictional history and why the cool poo poo from 1e like Occult Nazi Conspiracies or Mythos Crime Syndicate or Hellraiser Pleasure Cult all got destroyed and don't exist anymore. It takes all of this cool stuff away from GMs that want to follow the game setting-as-written and then doesn't replace it with anything. I think they were meant to clean the slate in order to make a new set of bad guys but ran out of room/time. The original box set was originally supposed to be a single book too
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Sep 29, 2019 02:54
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JK Fresco posted:I think they were meant to clean the slate in order to make a new set of bad guys but ran out of room/time. The original box set was originally supposed to be a single book too And I'm not wild about Yithians and the Lloigor to begin with, which are the only real factions that seem to remain in the core book DG cosmology.
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Sep 29, 2019 03:11
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Maybe call of Cthulhu isn't the best setting for campaigns. 2-3 sessions/mysteries at best. I'll shut up now.
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Sep 29, 2019 03:15
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Dr. Lunchables posted:Maybe call of Cthulhu isn't the best setting for campaigns. 2-3 sessions/mysteries at best. The big flaw of "Beyond the Mountains of Madness" in my opinion is that there's a long preamble which is more or less just "and you're going to Australia in a realistic examination of how that would probably go."
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Sep 29, 2019 05:42
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Lumbermouth posted:And I'm not wild about Yithians and the Lloigor to begin with, which are the only real factions that seem to remain in the core book DG cosmology. Don't forget the [pauses to vomit for 45 minutes straight] Tcho-Tcho meta.
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Sep 29, 2019 05:51
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Nessus posted:The big flaw of "Beyond the Mountains of Madness" in my opinion is that there's a long preamble which is more or less just "and you're going to Australia in a realistic examination of how that would probably go." I'm currently running a group of CoC newbies through it and yeah the first part of the campaign requires the DM to gauge how much drudgery the players are willing to roleplay through. We also ended up skipping Melbourne in about 15 minutes because when the campaign book's most interesting suggestion is "go hand-make tinned goods out of whale blubber and minced meat", yeah no we're not gonna spend an entire session on that poo poo anymore. The buildup is glacial, but when poo poo starts to go wrong it starts to go wrong fast.
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Sep 29, 2019 06:39
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Bushmeister posted:I'm currently running a group of CoC newbies through it and yeah the first part of the campaign requires the DM to gauge how much drudgery the players are willing to roleplay through. We also ended up skipping Melbourne in about 15 minutes because when the campaign book's most interesting suggestion is "go hand-make tinned goods out of whale blubber and minced meat", yeah no we're not gonna spend an entire session on that poo poo anymore.
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Sep 29, 2019 07:45
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Dr. Lunchables posted:Maybe call of Cthulhu isn't the best setting for campaigns. 2-3 sessions/mysteries at best. That's what I thought too. I was excited for this because I honestly hate long campaigns. But now my players are all talking about what they want to do next. I'm like, well, you're half insane, some of you participated in what looks like a brutal murder, and you're on the run. I really don't think it's time to start a paranormal detective agency.
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Sep 29, 2019 11:35
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Sounds like the perfect group to sell exorcisms on Craigslist.
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Sep 29, 2019 11:51
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Or the occult equivalent of the A-Team.
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Sep 29, 2019 13:55
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John Tynes' The Labyrinth both a) looks to be a significant solution to the "no cool enemies" problem and b) also offers a fleshed-out version of what he calls a "narrative sandbox", which sort of offers a model for investigative campaigns beyond the "episodic 2-3 session" thing.
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Sep 29, 2019 14:07
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The Dregs posted:That's what I thought too. I was excited for this because I honestly hate long campaigns. But now my players are all talking about what they want to do next. I'm like, well, you're half insane, some of you participated in what looks like a brutal murder, and you're on the run. I really don't think it's time to start a paranormal detective agency.
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Sep 29, 2019 14:08
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My current plan is to have them relocate to New Mexico till the commotion dies down, and run the Secret of Castronegro. One of the PC's is a taxi driver with a van. I imagine them as something like Scooby Doo. I'll probably have the government sweep their last shenanigan under the rug.
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Sep 29, 2019 14:52
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Woop woop, Delta Green crossover time! (One of the things I do miss from the original Delta Green supplements in the DG RPG are organisations like Saucerwatch and Parasearch - civilian UFO/paranormal research organisations which could be there for the PCs to be if you wanted an alternate rationale for a campaign, or you could use them as an NPC group for the PCs to infiltrate/manipulate/mislead/befriend/destroy.)
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Sep 29, 2019 15:56
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I realize WW2 has fallen out of living memory and in 2016 no one realized what great and bad guys Nazis would still be, but it is a bummer the Karotechia were written out of the official version of the setting since punching up Nazis is unambiguously good. Hell, it would have been worth it for the dipshit CHUDs saying "wow way to make your game POLITICAL, you just lost yourself a customer." Of course the enterprising handler can decide that raiding the boys in brazil wasn't the quietus for paranormally powered Nazis it was supposed to be when an invincible hundred year old SS officer shows up on Youtube shrugging off bullets or whatever.
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Sep 29, 2019 23:14
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Honestly a DG game premised on the Karotechia showing back up and both the Program and Cowboys freaking out over "These fucks are supposed to be dead" could make for a great campaign.
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Sep 29, 2019 23:21
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Take the Tiger Transit angle of the Tcho-Tcho being EEEEEEEVIL racist cannibal chefs who addict people to human flesh and replace it with a still-living Reinhard Galt opening a South American fusion restaurant looking for white foodies with agreeable mindsets to turn into SS sous chefs.
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Sep 29, 2019 23:32
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Glancy has said in person that he regrets killing them off.
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Sep 29, 2019 23:46
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Hey CoC thread! I'm starting a new homebrew campaign starting off in the late Victorian Era that's meant to be very drop-in/drop-out. I was originally going to try to reverse-engineer D&D 5E into the setting as that's what many of my players are familiar with, but A) that's one hell of a square peg, B) I'm going to have a bunch of new players and I wanted to do something simpler, and C) it looks like with the "roll under" rules that Cthulhu may be the best option. I'm going to start them off trying to solve the Whitechapel Murders and then eventually turn that into the secret Gothic history of the world (with side jaunts into Cthulhu one-offs), but that means I'm going to want to make things a bit more survivable, so I'm probably going to use Pulp Cthulhu rules. As far as book-materials I absolutely need, is it basically the 7E Keeper's Guide, Pulp Cthulhu, and maybe the Quickstart rules? I know in D&D that the Dungeon Master's Guide was almost totally useless for me and I would've been fine just with the Player's Handbook and some splatbooks, but I'm not sure whether I also absolutely NEED the Investigator's Handbook.
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Oct 2, 2019 00:58
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Speaking from experience with introducing people who've only played 5e to Delta Green, it's an easier system for them to grok and it flows that much faster. You should be fine with those three books and skimming what Pulp adds to CoC. Don't sweat the deeper rules and mechanics too much, just feel out the moment and also don't go too crazy with accurate monster designs or running them exactly as presented, y'know? You should be fine. Probably keep an easy-access equipment list for weapon stats though so you don't get hung up on seeing how much damage a shotgun does every time a player forgets.
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Oct 2, 2019 01:27
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I played my first game with people who only knew 5e last weekend. I bought the Keeper's book, but we really didn't even use it for the first game. We printed off a few copies of the free rules PDF and passed them around as we played. The system is super easy to understand, they had that down within the first hour. That part where combat is super dangerous and not something you want to do unless your life literally depends on it, well, they learned that by the end of the session.
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Oct 2, 2019 13:29
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Well, that's good to hear. It's going to be predominantly a social/crime-solving game without a ton of combat, but when there are dangerous things to deal with, CoC looks like a decent system to fall back on. I don't want them dying immediately, so I think the Quickstart rules and Pulp Cthulhu will cover me. Thanks!
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Oct 2, 2019 14:24
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99 CENTS AMIGO posted:Well, that's good to hear. It's going to be predominantly a social/crime-solving game without a ton of combat, but when there are dangerous things to deal with, CoC looks like a decent system to fall back on. I don't want them dying immediately, so I think the Quickstart rules and Pulp Cthulhu will cover me. Thanks! Check out either Cthulhu By Gaslight for earlier editions (conversion to 7e is pretty trivial) or Hudson & Brand, Inquiry Agents Into The Obscure for a 7e version that's more of a combo Victorian London sourcebook/organization and home base for the investigators to be involved in.
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Oct 2, 2019 14:58
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Pulp is a great book, but if all you want is surviveability, just double the hit points and let them regenerate more luck. Those are core parts of pulp without the pulpy stuff or the need to buy the book.
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Oct 2, 2019 15:33
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Lumbermouth posted:Check out either Cthulhu By Gaslight for earlier editions (conversion to 7e is pretty trivial) or Hudson & Brand, Inquiry Agents Into The Obscure for a 7e version that's more of a combo Victorian London sourcebook/organization and home base for the investigators to be involved in. (Bear in mind that if you have strong ideas as to who was behind the Whitechapel Murders, there's strong hints in H&B about a particular solution because you don't investigate the Mythos for as long as Hudson and Brand do without fraying about the edges, but that's easy enough to work around.)
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Oct 2, 2019 15:44
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Warthur posted:Yeah, Hudson & Brand is quite good. The idea is that Hudson & Brand ran this Victorian detective agency which, because of their particular interests, included a number of run-ins with the Mythos; after the duo disappear at around the time of the Ripper murders (handy for your campaign plan!) the PCs unexpectedly inherit the business, including its headquarters and the servants in H&B's employ and perhaps some of their enemies. It's a nice setup because as well as providing a ready-made reason why new investigations might fall into the PCs' laps, there's also all sorts of loose ends tucked away in H&B's old files. Oh man, I did not know about those spoilers and that makes me A LOT more interested in picking up H&B for a Trail campaign.
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Oct 2, 2019 15:50
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