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Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Kavak posted:

I don't know. Frankly the Cult of Transcendence was lame and I'm glad the Fate are gone- waaay too World of Darkness, complete with canon characters having all the plot fun in the novels. Problem is that basically ALL the big antagonist groups are gone or slated for later books- the Karotechia are ashes, the Mi-go have retreated(?), PISCES has been cleansed to allow for Great Britain campaigns, and the Lloigor/Yithian stuff is going in its own book too. Tiger Transit has evolved but there's no dedicated write-up for them. The Majestic remnants and potential Outlaw-Program conflicts are good plot fodder, but hopefully The Labyrinth expands things like Countdown.
Man Tiger Transit Ascended should not have happened. That whole plot thread should have been culled with the rest.

Also GRUSV8 has evolved into an antagonist group by becoming the Russian state's corrupt Mythos For Economic Gains And Inventions tool thanks to oligarchic bribery and governmental shenanigans, the new Eastern European MAJESTIC.

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Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Kavak posted:

It's given about the same amount of detail as the Tcho-Tchos new setup though, scattered in the timeline section of the Handler's Guide. They're due for a full writeup in The Labyrinth, but I'm not sure I like the new version- the whole guide had this thread of "RUSSIAN MEDDLING!!1!" that hopefully will be calmed down a little in the next book.
I completely agree. Due to the writing process, the new DG is a really good and accurate snapshot of the time and culture in which it was written (2015-2016ish) that has been immediately outdated by a dumber progression of time. At least they got rid of all the metaplot.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

I had a lot of fun with a spin on Ross Payton's BESTOW, hypercubes are hella fun.

http://fairfieldproject.wikidot.com/bestow

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

moths posted:

This one really feels like an overwrought Scooby Doo reference, and I can't tell if that's the intent or not.
I mean yeah it's pretty clearly "what if Scooby Doo was just a ghoul". I don't mean that disparagingly or dismissively just that it's a clear jumping-off point.

Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 05:18 on May 24, 2019

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

And then there's The Fall of Delta Green which is set in the Vietnam War and is explicitly about when DG was still a deep-government agency. Specifically what happens is that DG hijacks a not insubstantial portion of the military industrial complex to fight the Mythos in Vietnam and the surrounding countries, sending expendable grunts and Agent Orange by the truckload to solve their problems. The drain of lives and resources on top of Vietnam makes the government sober up and hang them for going so mad with power and resources. The consequences of their actions also sets up a whole mess of avoidable problems to come home to roost 30 years from now which would be a lot more fun to explore or use as plots if they didn't tend to involve the racist portrayals of the Tcho-Tcho.

Even in the modern day DG are not the good guys. The Cowboys are American insurgents lead by deeply broken people who think the ends justify the means, but because they're lacking information and resources they tend to approach problems with force and thuggery. The Program is a legit government tool that can't actually leverage its governmental power, and the lack of oversight is brewing an incredibly flammable and volatile environment because they keep poking the knowledge they have. Neither side learns. They collate and collect info, they destroy things, but the only lesson people learn is "there are gods and they don't care about you, everything is inevitable, nothing means anything". And this leads to making things actionably worse, especially when it comes to Carcosa.

The official stance on Carcosa is to destroy every single thing that exists because it's an infohazardous memetic virus. It can regrow itself from one cell. And when you destroy everything, you destroy the people who know about it so the info dies with them. DG's hopeful idea is that burying the info two layers deep means it'll die for good. What it actually means is that every time one cell of information bleeds through again, they're not prepared to deal with it in the slightest. It's like anti-vaccination pandemics for mind viruses.

This may all sound like knocks against the system. It really isn't. The system is great and approachable. They dropped all the metaplot (mostly). That bit about MJ12 having to lie to GW Bush is great. But it's also kind of a time capsule of a moment that's rapidly passed and doesn't really go hard enough on "just because you're lighting a candle to fight the darkness does not make you the good guys".

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Sounds like the perfect group to sell exorcisms on Craigslist.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

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.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

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.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

King in Yellow RPG has a good stripped-down version of Gumshoe's rules, I recommend looking at that.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

SCP is kind of about looking at this in-universe document and drawing your own conclusions so unfortunately the best translation to a tabletop scenario in a classic CoC sense would be about playing a bunch of scientists who are prodding a contained substance and trying to figure out what it does and making SAN rolls when you realize it's a Keter-class object.

But that's being kind of reductive (and kind of what RPPR did especially because they used Gumshoe which was pretty perfect for that kind of SCP adventure). The more player-facing adventures set in the SCP universe that still scratch the CoC or DG itch would either be being D-class fodder in an outbreak (like the video games)/poking an object or playing as a Mobile Task Force going into an unknown situation (which would be better for player-facing action and poking stuff until you make SAN checks) respectively.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

That'd be pretty dope especially if they're the founders of such an organization and it's the halcyon days of "only half of us will live into our thirties to become bitter executors of the group's goals and management, the rest will either die or go mad or make their own group".

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

The Dregs posted:

I should have said they want to be field agents for the SCP. So, basically the SCP sends them out to investigate strange happenings and then collect or contain what they find, so I guess that just about fits your MTF suggestion. You guys right about their unlimited resources, I'll have to figure that out somehow.
Lean into the horror of logistics and bureaucracy. Unless they're playing a MTF kill team or heavy containment squad out to get something solved by any means necessary, SCP has the resources to get things done...eventually. Have them be a regular scouting and report team that has access to logistics through the bureaucracy skill, let them send back samples and stuff or make supply requests, but only have X units of logistical power at a time. They're the scouts. They're meant to poke and do field studies and if they die, that's data for sending in the first heavy team that's in reserves. If they try to make a lot of requests at once, make them struggle to plan what and who goes where and what's more important in there here and now. The more their help is tied up, the harder it's going to be to get more help.

In short have the players be moderately badass faceless goons but let the horrors grow from logistics, bureaucracy and depersonalization between field agents and command.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Addendum advice: make the bureaucracy/help juggling more meaningful by adding a ticking clock element. SCP stands for Secure, Contain, Protect. The first two are inevitable given enough time and manpower and you can downplay the losses on an after-action report, especially if you have to lie to the general public. But for god's sake you have to try to do the latter. It's important to try and solve the problem sooner than "inevitably through infinite resources".

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Elendil004 posted:

Yeah don't link to the Trove it's a real lovely site.
Is it because of the 4chan connection or is there another reason besides the filehosting, legit question.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Two pieces of advice:

1: you really don't have to do too much to put the boots to them due to how HP is low and how things do a lot of damage. If they're going into a moment where death is very likely, warn them up front that there's a chance their characters will die and then commit to the results. Don't be unfair and make the enemies stronger or them weaker, just be fair and warn them death is possible and then don't back down from the consequences of their action. It's very likely that they're going to want you to pull your punches because they're attached to their characters, and if they make that open and clear then you're going to have a discussion with them about the tone and feel of the game and try to come to a compromise. But definitely straight up tell them "I'll warn you if you're going into a possible death scene" and explain what that means.

2: occasionally just roll dice for no good reason or ask for awareness checks for no good reason. It doesn't matter if they pass or fail them, just any time the GM rolls dice or they're asked to roll dice is good for pumping up a little bit of extra tension and paranoia, even if it's artificial. There's enough times where it Will Matter that you've rolled dice or they've rolled for awareness that a little bit of artificial inflation keeps them on their toes.

Seriously though talk to your players about expectations and tone and weight of consequences. Have a Come To Jesus moment about expectations and what everyone wants.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts8Pu-LfQiI

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Yeah new Delta Green just has guns lumped into "small caliber, medium caliber, large caliber" per type of gun with different rules for automatic fire. It also has rules for lethality or "did you just kill this thing instantly or not".

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Yeah the Player's Guide has absolutely everything you need to just wing it and have quick-functioning combat and mechanics. Handler's Guide is nice but honestly not super mandatory, it's got good neat rules for building mythos enemies and provides stats but it's 90% metaplot and history.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

RPPR's Ross Payton, on the advice of Adam Scott Glancy, used the first scenario from Shadows of Yog-Sothoth to space things out a bit when he did a Masks campaign when the PCs decided to ignore some of NYC to hide out from the heat by running to Boston. The intro module is mostly just about looking into a Yog cult that takes the form of a Bostonian mystery cult/gentleman's club where there's an immortal rear end in a top hat wizard running the show and breaking up the cult. Could be good for giving the PCs a glimpse at other movers and shakers in the Mythos, giving them access to some knowledge and letting them shoot a wizard.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

The things what exist intertwined in our dimension but are mutually invisible and intangible with us in From Beyond, the kind that would normally require the Tillenghast Resonator to view.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Piss Meridian posted:

Man w/ a big knife

There's a DG scenario (A Night on Owlshead Mountain) I really like where the backstory of the whole thing is that this backwoods mountain zone is an old Mi-Go landing site/mining zone where they used to go now and again to dig minerals and freshen up seals keeping a Dark Young under wraps. But system travel becomes a whole drat thing so they start tasking people with watching the site for them and at one point in the 1920s they find an ex-con on the run from being a backwoods moonshiner/shitkicker and are like "hey man you wanna be our property owner to keep an eye on poo poo for us? We will make you immortal". His response is "gently caress yes make me immortal" so they load him up with biotech that makes him functionally unkillable in addition to being immortal; his body keeps adapting to poo poo and he eventually just goes insane in the woods from loneliness and his repeated failed suicide attempts leaving him unable to breathe and not needing to eat or sleep or poo poo combine to just turn him into this murderous and unstoppable boogeyman. And at some point the Dark Young gets loose and causes some deaths in addition to Mountain Man Dan murdering people with an axe when they get too close to the Mi-Go poo poo...but DG and past DG investigators who hosed around on the mountain knew about the old weird seals but not the murderman. All DG know is people are dying on the mountain and agents should try and find out what's up.

So there is a dude running around with a really big knife knifing people in addition to the more outright mythos poo poo.

(the way to solve all problems is to call the Mi-Go and manage to communicate there's a Dark Young and a serial killer and get them to give you poo poo to clean up their messes. Success of communication is not guaranteed and they don't tell you which thing they give you stops which threat.)

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Impossible Landscapes' text is finished, the rest is formatting and layout but the scenario itself is done and playable if you look at the previews (which may only be accessible through Detwiller's patreon).

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

PipHelix posted:

Also saw this for the first time today. Basically the elevator pitch for a DG CoC module set in the 60s or near future:
https://twitter.com/Dustinkcouch/status/1057094474227240960
That's kind of the hook for BLACKSAT in Delta Green. You're a bunch of astronauts who have to take some dangerously unqualified (in the sense that there's a nonzero chance liftoff will cause one of them to just immediately have a heart attack from stress and blood pressure and the other is a chronic smoker) nerds to space to fix a government satellite, there's some grim comedy from having to try and get them up to snuff and then you go up there and everything goes to hell.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Drone posted:

How does Last Things Last compare to PX Poker Night as an intro operation for a group who are new to Delta Green?
LTL is adapted from a shotgun scenario so it's smaller in scope, tighter in plot and backstory and just overall a quicker little thing meant to dip toes and give folks an introduction to the mechanics. It's not a long game, though, you can definitely get it done in under two hours, a hour and a half, depending on how the characters approach debating the Marlene problem.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Realtalk you should look up the scenario Artifact Zero and mash that up with your idea, that would be a neat twist to put on 2000s stuff ending up in the 1920s if the T-radiation exists before it's properly discovered.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

My main complaints about Delta Green is that the system is mechanically very sound and it makes my brain happy to gently caress around with it, and I like the idea of the Agents being slowly abraded by rubbing against the grain until they're raw and rattled and openly questioning if things were worth it. But I'm at the creative point in my life where Lovecraft poo poo just plain sucks a ton of rear end and is the boring MCU of nerds completing a puzzle out of disparate parts found at multiple estate sales, and also the devs want "Nothing Matters, This Is Bleak Horror, Cruelty, Kindness, Torture, Nuture, It's Cosmic Existentialist Horror Babey!" to be the core theme and motivator of the game. Detwiller had a whole thread on Twitter that I can't find right now (because that guy tweets like someone's gonna take it away from him) that amounted to just openly saying that's the point, that the government is hideously corrupt and unethical and crashing ships against the side of a mountain moving ever closer and sure you can play things a lot lighter and softer because he fundamentally can't police what you do with the work when you have it, but that's the pure authorial intent. And then you combine it with the Lovecraft poo poo which is just generally impersonal in addition to being inexplicable, bad stuff happens and you inspect it and react to the situation, probably with guns, and it sucks that it's married to a substantially better system and doesn't stick the landing because there's the looming specter of "Nothing You Do Matters" that makes it hard to kind of care if you know what's up, y'know? Adventures and mission lines end with characters either dead, apathetic by way of San loss/knowing how the universe really works, broken or on the run. And I don't think future iterations are going to change because, I'll be real: some of the devs of the game are pretty deeply politically poisoned by some measure of despair/apathy for the future as politics keep going the way they're going because they're older folks who have been watching poo poo erode for decades. I know some of them have straight-up left America and they also know a lot about how the geopolitical sausage is made and that's the main motivator for why Nothing You Do Matters is baked so deep into the core design of the game's adventures and stuff. It's hard to make a game about the future when you just don't have hope, and I really hope they're talking to people about it.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Owlbear Camus posted:

"Nothing Matters, Least of All You" seems like the thesis statement of cosmic horror so I see that as more feature than bug.

I tend to be a philisophical absurdist IRL so I tend to answer it by saying: gently caress you I'm making it matter. It matters to the one person out of a thousand you save. It matters to the people who get to savor the 5 minutes you hit snooze on the apocalypse. This is my boulder and I'm rolling it. These are my fellow prisoners and I'm showing them all the kindness I can until the headsman comes.

To me the heroic agents being flawed and doomed and in the long view their efforts being futile both mirrors the enormity of reality where on a long enough timeline all is dust, and adds to the tragic romance of performing one's moral duty even in the absense of all hope.

e: I'm not saying you gotta agree or even that that's conveyed well in the text. I think one of the little nods towards it is published modules tend to have San regain rewards that scale with how much you mitigated the alien spaghetti monster destruction
I mean I'm gonna be real: I come at my approach of life much in the same way you do. I get that. The problem is that the initial point of view they're writing from isn't that you're lighting a candle to beat back the darkness, or even that you're literally burning yourself alive to curse the darkness. The fact of the matter is that when you hit San 0 you see the cosmos for how it really is, nothing matters, you're the only person that matters, do all the magic you want without worrying about consequences. Sanity is the lie we tell ourselves, gaining Sanity is just entrenching the lie even if you do things for a good reason or because you want to stand up and make things try and matter. They're writing it from the perspective of "the whole world is darkness, and it's raining, and all you have is a pack of matches". It's an inherently defeatist position to use as your jumping-off point to work from and I agree that it's a cornerstone of cosmic horror but, again, it's written from a perspective devoid of hope.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Impossible Landscapes is the only book that entire tone works for because it's written from the ground-up that existence is impersonal and distant and emotionally cold and then is like "and then sometimes it isn't and that's worse sometimes". It's an unwieldy beast but interesting.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

I believe that branding yourself with an Elder sign permanently costs POW most of the time, but, y'know, investments.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

mellonbread posted:

I asked because Glancy has also mentioned working on a book where you play one scenario set in every decade from 1900 to the present day, and I wouldn't put it past ARC DREAM to give it a name that was way too similar to another adventure.
Oh yeah one of his many dream babies is a series of adventures detailing a century-long development of weaponizing the visage of Ghatanothoa as technology develops to share it better, clearer and to more people on account of its Medusa-like powers being a clean weapon to use, with early instances being like splicing a few frames of it into film reels and then later on you have smart phones and wireless internet and everyone's hosed.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Honestly you may want to broach the topic with your players if you want to go for that kind of loss of helplessness. You don't have to give them the context of what's going to happen or why, just be like "this is kind of a specific idea I have that I think would be cool for narrative purposes and we can all have like a moment where you all recount what happened in brief and how you got snatched' give them some agency and also explicitly tell them so they can work off your ideas and have fun with it 'cuz there's nothing worse than "this is a dream sequence but I didn't tell you and nothing makes sense and you don't act like it's a dream".

Alternately lean into the pulp and make the kidnapping a spectacle setpiece of your session where suddenly everything gets turned on its head because the dude pushes a button and all of the radio-activated security snaps shut.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Thanlis posted:

Anyone read Raiders of R'lyeh? It's a pulp d100-based Cthulhu game set in 1910, and there's a Kickstarter up for a new sandbox campaign using tramp steamers. This is exciting and right up my alley. However, a bit of research tells me that RPGPundit was involved in the core book and there's a special thanks to Doug TenNaple in there. This doesn't mean I won't buy it, but if the game is a celebration of colonialism in the Edwardian era I'm not gonna be that interested.
I read through it a minute ago and my impression is that RofR is 100% "oops all sandbox!" period along with a shitload of "we got CoC at home" vibes in the construction. The core book was full of everything that could be statted out and the premade adventure...I don't remember the specific context, I just remember it being deeply racist because it took place in a Louisiana swamp and was marrying two-fisted pulp adventure as told by people who are gleeful fans of the genre with a Lovecraft-inspired sandbox story where there were a lot of Black people. It struck me as a forest for the trees type deal, for people who wanted to play CoC as more adventurous and pulpy without understanding why that could be a problem, and I didn't even notice the fact that Pundit was a consultant and TenNapel gets a lot of special credits. I would just pass, period.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Biomass and radioactive materials on the heels of the radium health craze going by the wayside when people started dying.

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Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

I also like the idea that the shoggoth needs radioactive material because it's using it to loving do synthetic nuclear reactions to make bits and pieces it needs, I just picked my idea because it was Topical.

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