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Here's a couple or three things I've been working on for Delta Green. Bunch of scenarios, a sourcebook, that sort of thing. And speaking of DG, good luck everybody in the shotgun scenario contest. I figure if you make something that other people will actually play at some point, that's the important thing.
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Dec 24, 2017 06:30
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Down With People posted:'The beauty of the white ape woman' loving Glad you approve. I ran the playtest on r/nightattheopera last week and it went great. The Agents raided the lab, shot up the skinheads, stuffed the one surviving Nazi in the trunk, and convinced the Ape Woman to get in the car by acting like SHE was the one taking THEM hostage. They spent the rest of the session at the safehouse trying to communicate with her, and going over the trinkets they found at the lab. Dr Wu is an underappreciated gem from the Countdown book, and an interesting alternative to the typical interaction between Agents and strange artifacts. Most players are smart enough not to mess with any wizard poo poo, weird books or alien technology they find on a mission. It makes sense in context but means that all the time you spend filling the Green Box with stuff is wasted, because the characters wisely don't touch it. So here's a guy who will investigate anything the Agents drop in front of him, no matter how ill advised, and report the results. Yeah they'll probably kill him at some point doing this, but he'll at least die doing what he loves. Elendil004 posted:Can confirm, having played in and then ran the first three (the starkweather foundation trilogy) that it's a solid little adventure. I had 5 players and we had a total of 10 PCs throughout it, only 2 of the dead PCs were at my hand, the rest were friendly fire as the group turned on itself in a spectacular moment. I know a guy running Beyond the Mountains of Madness right now. His plan is to recycle any surviving player characters as the immortal inner circle controlling the Starkweather Foundation in a later DG game.
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Dec 26, 2017 01:13
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Down With People posted:I'm stupid, in the Starkweather Foundation writeup where it's talking about Elder Thing writing and how 11111 means 'zero' and also 'the whole universe', what's the horrifying truth about the universe being expressed there? That section was written by my co-creator. If I remember correctly, it's intended as a justification for why you lose maximum SAN when gaining points in Elder Cipher. That was a mechanic he really liked in Beyond the Mountains of Madness. What the actual secret is I have no idea.
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Dec 26, 2017 20:14
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Will the Great posted:Co-creator here (hi folks). Aye. That's also the logic behind A Night at the Opera (the module, not the open table). Just like the Starkweather Foundation and E Cell are doing a public service by collecting brains, the Servitor of Azathoth is doing a public service by collecting musicians to lull Nuclear Chaos to sleep.
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Dec 27, 2017 00:56
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Authorship for the rest of the 2017 entries has been revealed. Doesn't look like vote counts are up. We may never know if we all got just one (our own) like last year. 
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Jan 4, 2018 01:14
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Misc thoughts on Fall of Delta Green after reading the book and playing one session Almost everything you liked and disliked about Trail, you'll like and dislike about this game. There are a couple of important differences, but not enough to convince someone to change their mind about the GUMSHOE system either way:
I think Fall of DG has too many overlapping subsystems for modeling your character's social and reputation networks. You've got Bureaucracy points as a General Ability, Agency Points and Military Science as Investigative Abilities, then you've also got both Bonds and Networks on the other side of your character sheet. All of them sort of overlap in what you actually use them for in-game. The book has some cool descriptions about past DG operations. A few too many are focused on chasing Deep Ones for my taste, you can only blast so many sea orcs before it starts to feel a bit rote. Like the Handler's Guide the book tries to suggest ways to spice the deep ones up. But in my opinion, the best way to use something the players have become too familiar with is to discard it and use something else. On that note, there's a section on the Cult of Transcendence, which everyone hated back in the old DG books. However some of the sub-factions attached to it are actually pretty cool and would make great investigations on their own. The Fall of Delta Green posted:Skorlupa Koshcheiya The greatest disappointment is that the Fall of Delta Green does not, in fact, contain a scenario about the Fall of Delta Green. The introductory module is good, but when the name of your book is a specific event, you create some expectations about what you'll find inside. There are some narrative descriptions of Operation OBSIDIAN, but nothing table ready. Overall if you like Delta Green and Trail of Cthulhu, you'll like Fall of DG. If you like DG but don't care for the GUMSHOE system, this book might still be a good primer on 1960s DG gaming. If you dislike both, this won't be the game to change your mind.
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Mar 8, 2018 20:32
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I'll do you one betterquote:To be fair, you have to have a very high INT to understand Delta Green. The operas are extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of federal law enforcement most of the clues will go over a typical player’s head. There’s also ALPHONSE’s nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from the tie-in novels, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these scenarios, to realise that they’re not just fun- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Delta Green truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the humour in Major General Reginald Fairfield’s existential catchphrase Choose federal law enforcement. Choose the military. Choose NASA or the CDC. Choose lying to your superiors. Choose to ruin your career. Choose no friends. Choose divorce. Choose life through the bottom of a bottle. Choose destroying evidence and executing innocent people because they know too loving much. Choose black fatigues and matching gas masks. Choose an MP5 stolen from the CIA loaded with glasers, with a wide range of loving attachments. Choose blazing away at mind numbing, sanity crushing things from beyond the stars, wondering whether you'd be better off stuffing the barrel in your own mouth. Choose The King In Yellow and waking up wondering who you are. Choose a 9mm retirement plan. Choose going out with a bang at the end of it all, PGP encrypting your last message down a securely laid cable as an NRO Delta wetworks squad busts through your door. Choose one last Night at the Opera. Choose Delta Green. which itself is a cryptic reference to MJ-3 GARNET's assault on his stronghold at Fairfield Pond. I’m smirking right now just imagining one of those MAJESTIC simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Forrest James' genius wit unfolds itself on their night vision sights. What fools.. how I pity them. 😂
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Mar 16, 2018 07:44
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Delta Green Agent's Handbook posted:Delta Green is not about guns. *Cough* Lover in the Ice *Cough Cough* Kali Ghati *Cough* *Cough, Distressed Wheezing* Extremophilia *Cough*
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Mar 19, 2018 02:43
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Fall of Delta Green, Page 263 posted:New Creatures: Theory
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Mar 27, 2018 16:03
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New DG adventures by me OIL AND VINEGAR - 1941. On the eve of WW2, Agents make a dangerous trade to clean up the Quabbin Reservoir. Inspired by the playtest scenario MILK AND HONEY by BurningHeron, and the classic Call of Cthulhu module Call of Duty ROSEWOOD DOGSTAR - 1942. Following America's entry into the war against Japan, Agents investigate an industrial accident at a tank plant in Pennsylvania SOCKEYE FEARMONGER - 1943. Agents investigate a Japanese archaeological dig in the Aleutians. Given the choice, what would you dream about? - Present day. Agents struggle to remember how they got where they are, and what it is they were supposed to be doing. Is it killing when I look to the other side? - Present day. A Russian mobster with worrying facial tattoos is shot dead during a failed child abduction. All linked on my DG Page
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May 20, 2018 05:42
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Spiteski posted:So the thread consensus is that Delta Green is Good™ right? I've the opportunity to buy the two-book slipcase for a reasonable price, but not sure how it lines up against just using CoC7e The system is a big improvement over vanilla CoC. The skill and stat list have been pared of a lot of cruft and the game system is simpler and works a lot better. I've even been running 1920s games with DG and it's worked great. I know a guy who did an entire Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign converted to Delta Green.
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Aug 4, 2018 03:27
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Proud Rat Mom posted:Am I right in thinking both systems start to suck when the Keeper starts calling for die rolls for every simple task? Even the bigger podcasts that run both seem to do this. Plus if you have to roll for everything, the players notice and respond by putting all their points in a few skills they expect to need. This leads to very min/maxed characters in a system which is supposed to be about real people. And when the players can't pump their chance of success, they default to avoiding anything they aren't experts in. "I ask him who owns the house" "Ok. Roll Persuade" "Nevermind, I leave"
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Aug 6, 2018 07:19
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More DG content SCENARIOS A Taste For Skin - A kommando in the Boer War goes a bit too far to keep their families out of the camps No Blood For Sex - An exclusive club hosts a literal sex goddess NPCS Major Sin Woo-Jin - A window into North Korea's Office 44 Matiás Rivera - Warden of La Estancia's leftovers Anastacia Peabody - A med student who rented the wrong room at the wrong time HOUSERULES Character Template: Undercover Officer Character Template: K9 Unit Double Tapping - A simple rule to model the tradeoff between followup shots and "stopping power" The Big Gun Down - Easy rules for Mexican Standoffs THREATS Blade in the Dark - The opposition sends a sacrificial lamb to bait the Agents into an overreaction Federal Agent Counter-Investigation - The Hunters become the Hunted Servitor of Azathoth - Talent Scout for the Blind Idiot God All linked on My DG Page
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Sep 16, 2018 20:44
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It's true. The end result would make combat shorter, due to the increased chance to hit/damage output per-shooter per-turn. On the other hand it would also double the amount of rolling for each attack action. Having played Eclipse Phase I'm biased enough against this outcome that I'm still against double tapping overall. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Sep 16, 2018 |
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Sep 16, 2018 23:17
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Pththya-lyi posted:I read through Fall of DELTA GREEN the other day and the part about the Chicago Police Department's 11th District Station (where they torture suspects and occasionally sacrifice them to The Dweller in Darkness in the sub-basement) inspired me. Now I hope to write and playtest a scenario where the PCs are left-wing activists trying to find out what happened to their friend who disappeared after his arrest. I like it. I suggest following the example of Red Tower and letting the players decide as a group what organization or movement their characters are a part of.
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Sep 26, 2018 02:09
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Good Morning Vietnam - 1967 - Power armored soldiers search for an North Vietnamese radar outpost
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Sep 28, 2018 04:59
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Kavak posted:Mellonbread, I'm really liking your Boer War and Weird West scenarios for flashback one-shots in my DG campaign. Are there more good Pre-WWI historical scenarios like that out there, fan or otherwise? I don't think there's much out there for Delta Green itself - the central conceit of the setting (which I chose to ignore by writing those scenarios) is that it gives you a framework to play mythos games in the modern day. Your best bet would be adapting material from Call of Cthulhu, which goes much more into the historical side of things. Cthulhu by Gaslight, Cthulhu Dark Ages and Cthulhu Invictus are all historical settings for CoC, although I can't really speak much to the quality of the scenarios they offer since I haven't read them extensively. There was a pretty good scenario in one of the expansions for Invictus about a bathhouse that contained a portal to the Dreamlands, which I considered porting to the modern day for DG. My favorite pre-WW1 historical scenarios (based only on reading them, never having played or ran any) are in Mortal Coils. It's a scenario pack for Call of Cthulhu with modules set between 1900 and 1930. There are a couple in there by Detwiller and Tynes. I don't remember exactly who wrote what, but there's a few in there that make good use of pre WW1 settings: a "bug hunt" for strange creatures in 1900s Mexico, an effort to organize a lynch mob and hang some Lloigor cultists in the midwest, and a swamp adventure with zombies and a Confederate holdout guarding a lost hoard of rebel gold.
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Oct 11, 2018 19:36
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We were talking about this on the Night at the Opera discord maybe a month ago: Several factions on the Republican side really hated the Catholic church, plundering and destroying maybe 20,000 churches, cathedrals and tombs throughout the war. So the players go out into the very rural countryside to knock over a church that the local lore says is full of hidden treasure and priceless artifacts. They find it guarded by a mixture of strange clerics and half-insane Fascist paramilitaries. It's only after they break through the defenses and get to the crypt beneath that they realize the horrible truth: The Nationalists weren't trying to keep anyone out, they were trying to keep something else in
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Oct 12, 2018 16:59
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More DG content SCENARIOS Pearls of Wisdom - 1963 - Agents smuggle artifacts out of Xá Lợi Pagoda, ahead of the Diem government’s raids The Fifth Head of CHRYSALIS - A vacation to the Dominican Republic conceals a dirty secret Hot Air - Florida man robs 7-Eleven, eats 20 hot dogs, melts into a puddle CUSTOM PROFESSIONS Tanker - Exploit Delta Green’s laughably broken vehicle ramming rules by running over Dread Cthulhu with an Abrams for 120% lethality NPCS Archimedes “Arch” Brabrand - Case Officer who can get you off the hook, for a price Dr Genosha Geller - The Program’s Head Head-louse THREATS Crawling Chaos, I’m CIA - A trio of CIA operatives plot a coup to install a USA friendly Moon Beast government in the Dreamlands The Lovefeast Mennonites - An insular Anabaptist community in rural Manitoba teaches its members to love the skin they’re in. All posted to my DG page
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Nov 27, 2018 08:44
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The 2018 Shotgun Scenario Contest is over. The r/nightattheopera Scenario Contest has begun. More Delta Green content by me: SCENARIOS CAGED HEAT - Delta Green recruits a handful of prisoners to deal with a problem on the inside WINTER PEPPER - SV8 Assets in the 1970s GDR worry that their madness may have supernatural origins. The Pink Men Made Him Do It - A faith healer reminds his disciples that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away My Big Fat Deep One Wedding - A Delta Green Agent is unwittingly betrothed to a clan of aquatic humanoids Welcome to Earth - One night before Halloween of 1938, the sky falls on the town of Concrete, WA The Mind Electric - Agents wake up with a new OUTLOOK on life THREATS The Black Bug - Dehumanize yourself and face to bug’s head Sirens - What is it they want of you? Only your love, only your love All posted to my DG master list
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Jan 7, 2019 18:10
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Owlbear Camus posted:The prison one seems great-- run it as a oneshot to change things up, then have the surviving characters show up as NPC friendlies in a sesh a few months down the road for a callback. The characters in the playtest decided they trusted the talking cat more than whoever sent the letter with the initial offer (which is how they got the mission in the first draft), and ended up joining the Coven. The scenario ended with them escaping prison with Jen, after the fireball burned a way out for them. If I could get that group together again, they would spend the next session having witch adventures and avoiding Delta Green kill teams.
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Jan 7, 2019 20:05
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More Delta Green stuff. Maybe you'll recognize a couple of these from someplace. SCENARIOS Tower of Babel - In 1932, a disturbing utopia hides an ancient secret Sex Tape - In 198X, a new form of adult entertainment has dangerously addictive consequences The Limo - In 1992, an Agent assumes the identity of a reclusive celebrity Pathways Into Darkness - In 1994, a mission beneath a lost pyramid in the Yucatan seeks to avert the end of the world THREATS AND OPPORTUNITIES Maysoon Abd al-‘Uzzá - The very old woman Cult Collectors - Heresy geeks, going sect to sect, accumulating creeds as greedy as any Renfields MISC Shooting For Survival - Tips on how to survive inevitable gunfights in Delta Green
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Feb 16, 2019 01:15
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Two more scenarios because I like you Migo Killed the Radio Star - In 1994, a radio station in the North Maine Woods agitates the locals and draws unwanted attention Lucy in the Sky With ZIRCONs - A space odyssey to an alien black knight satellite, reactivated by parties unknown for sinister purposes
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Feb 20, 2019 19:34
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BESTOW is a good scenario I don't think I have a dungeon crawl set on a boat. I have one set on a space ship though
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Feb 27, 2019 17:36
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SCENARIOS Nobody Suspects a Thing - Devoted husband, loving father, secret Deep One THREATS AND OPPORTUNITIES Koel - The identity thief Kassandra Getachew - Hikkomori intelligence analyst who scours pornography for mythos activity The Samson Option - A secretive group of scholars hoards doomsday weapons in the Holy Land
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Mar 7, 2019 03:04
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The flow is tapering off a bit. I've been playing and running other games instead of a constant stream of Delta Green. I have stuff in the hopper I'll be able to playtest and post some time in the coming weeks. For now Love the Skin You're In - M EPIC investigates a medical anomaly in rural Manitoba Operation CARRION SHELLAC - The FBI inadvertently seizes Delta Green's porn folder
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Apr 15, 2019 07:12
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Got three groups finished so far. Not sure which ones I'll enter. The submission limit is two, and I'll probably have more done by the end. The Fraternal Order of King Vold Talking Dog Club Moss Covered Arrowhead
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May 23, 2019 17:20
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The line of inspiration is a lot more direct than that. Peep the first paragraph under "PROGRESSION OF TALKING DOG CLUB"
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May 24, 2019 22:12
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SCENARIOS WALNUT CAKES - Parapsychologists, an anomalous meteorite, and a cursed orb Preacher - A Priest in rural Texas gets a message from Heaven GROUPS Inner Life - A mantra to promote mindfulness and positive psychology The Robard Family - A rogue Delta Green Case Officer descends into a sea of love Moss Covered Arrowhead now has expanded character creation rules, important NPCs, and a sample adventure
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Jun 11, 2019 22:36
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alpha_destroy posted:You don't have PMs, but I am getting ready to run this one soon. I am very excited. I think I am going to put together a playlist for WLDR The Sign! radio. WLDR The Sign! is a good enough name that I might retroactively add it to the scenario text. In my experience, having enough music for the whole session is a good idea. I never quite have enough and I always end up repeating something. Let me know how it goes when you run it. You can always hit me up on the Night at the Opera discord mellonbread fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Jun 18, 2019 |
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Jun 18, 2019 23:34
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Elendil004 posted:Mellonbread and I co-wrote one, he wrote two The Fraternal Order of King Vold - Monster hunters become the hunted Talking Dog Club - High school kids rescue an ugly dog on the side of the road Moss Covered Arrowhead - Choose one last Night at the Bunga Inner Life - A mantra to promote mindfulness and positive psychology The Robard Family - A rogue Delta Green Case Officer descends into a sea of love Sons of the Great Devourer - Temporal refugees from the Cruel Empire of Tsan Chan Project BEEHIVE - Glue for broken people Sladosti - The Dining Club More commentary when I finish reading everyone else's entries.
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Jul 5, 2019 23:52
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Voting has concluded. Entries were graded by other submitters based on theming, novelty, playability, and interactivity, with a bonus category for whatever other factor the reviewer thought was important. Winners of the contest: 1st Place: Project Big Wheel by Agent Obtuse 2nd Place: The Stormchasers by Lithobraker 3rd Place: The Orne Library by Kevin Ham and mellonbread* *As sponsors of the contest, not eligible to win. Therefore: 3rd Place again: Tie between Throughline News by Michael Fox and Project Praise by WillWrite Compiled feedback document here
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Jul 13, 2019 00:42
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PipHelix posted:1. The combat just DRAGS. This might be a function of my group or a function of the game, but we've spent 2 hours on a 3 on 4 fight where two mooks were flattened by a car with one roll. The roll was a failure but I allowed for anything other than a fumble to count because of proximity and surprise and specifically to shorten the fight. PipHelix posted:Also, towards the end, it's likely the Player might have to have a PC betray the group, including their other PC. I feel like, as an improv nerd and chaos muppet, I might be trying to map my idea of a GREAT time onto (more) normal people, who may not like it.
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Jul 13, 2020 23:20
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Anyone running for Gencon Online? I'm doing three Delta Green games, trying to get the Club Apocalypse whiskey glass from ARC DREAM.
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Jul 30, 2020 19:04
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Nessus posted:"Beyond the Mountains of Madness" has some gunplay in it but is heavily privileged towards antarctic survival and scientific operation skills. I don't know the Berlin scenarios but your GM is bad.
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Aug 5, 2020 04:29
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Played a game of the Laundry RPG. THE BOOK The book was written around the time of Fuller Memorandum. Content from the later novels is covered in later splats. I don't know how far exactly, but at least up to Apocalypse Codex. The core rules do a good job of summarizing the setting of the books, while also extrapolating some original stuff that fits with the established world. The system is a clone of CoC 6e with a few rules changes. The magic system is new, designed to reflect the cosmology and mechanics of the setting. We didn't dive into it at more than a superficial level, but there's a big focus on preparing various dirty tricks to cast spells without paying the full cost yourself. Writing and running rituals on your phone, so you don't have to compute the occult equations yourself and open your brain up to the Feeders. There are also rules for ritual and gutter magic. These function closer to default CoC spellcasting, but also carry the risk of deadly miscast effects and eventual Krantzberg-Godel Spongiform Encephalopathy. There's a budgeting minigame where you roll your Bureaucracy and Accounting skills and spend points from a pool to acquire personnel, items, magic spells, intelligence, and trainings that raise your characters' skills. At its best, it's a fun way to gamify the "bureaucratic horror" elements of the novels. At its worst, it's a painful extension of the usual "everyone spends an hour searching the gear list and arguing over what they might need before the game can actually begin". For a setting with such a big focus on bureaucracy and established procedures, some "standard issue" gear loadouts for different mission types would have been great. It had the usual bullshit Call of Cthulhu hair splitting on skills. Separate percentile ratings for Knowledge: Occult, Science: Thaumaturgy, and Sorcery. Separate skills for punching people versus grappling them. A skill for every conceivable sub-type of firearm. You know the drill. THE SESSION I was thinking about making a Plumber who was also an actual plumber, but one of the other professions in the table of organization caught my eye. So began the saga of Argo Klamm, Grade 1 Shoggoth Keeper, and his faithful companion Douglas. Douglas was a rescue. Some chavs in Lambeth were feeding him people and getting high off the liquid he spat out. They were drinking the Elder Thing equivalent of brake fluid, and it would have eventually killed them anyway, even if the Laundry hadn't intervened. I rolled badly for INT, so the Shoggoth had one more point of intelligence than its handler. Fair play to the Keeper for letting me get away with this character concept, while coming up with interesting challenges that couldn't just be smashed by a 20 ton ball of tar. There were two other players, who both grabbed pregens rather than deal with the headache of the character creation rules. A necromancer from Residual Human Resources, and an MI5 spy conscripted into the Laundry. The adventure we played was LAMBENT WITCH, from the Black Bags scenario book. In the first act of the scenario, the players are emergency deployed to an oil rig in the North Sea, which just pumped up an ancient evil from the depths of the North Sea and became infested with brain-devouring exonomes. The players get to command an SAS squad from the Artists Rifles, so if everyone brought computer scientists and librarians the scenario doesn't flounder and die in the first combat encounter. It's not just a meatgrinder of mindless shooting, though. There are rooms to explore, computers to hack, files and handouts to read, puzzles to solve, and magic spells to cast and un-cast. A couple characters from the novels make appearances, in situations that don't feel stupid or obviously crowbarred in. Call of Cthulhu works best if the players aren't already intimately familiar with the source text, but I worry that Laundry RPG might have the opposite problem. Hypothetically, you could run the game with people who had never heard of the books, and start their characters off as similarly clueless neophytes, who slowly gain an understanding of the world of magic and mystery around them. In practice, if LAMBENT WITCH is any indication, the game is quite demanding of the players' specific setting knowledge. The specific example I'm thinking of is the feeders aboard the oil rig. At the beginning of the scenario, the players are told that camera footage of the platform showed people with glowing green eyes. Anyone familiar with the novels knows this is a sign of feeders - low level "information predators" that slip into our world through improperly cast magic spells and infect people's brains, spreading from person to person via touch contact, converting victims into mindless zombies. The proper response to a feeder infestation is to grab a high level ward, load your weapon with banishment rounds, and pull on a suit of painter's coveralls with a full face mask. If nobody in the group has this setting-specific knowledge, the consequences can be game ending. There's a specific point in the scenario where anyone wearing anything less than a Class Three ward is subject to possession by roving spirits. The ward player characters get by default is Class Two (though this is never mention in the chargen section, only the gear list). Being possessed is survivable, if you're exorcised within minutes equal to your character's POW score. Anything beyond that and your brain is too full of holes. And exorcism also requires specialized knowledge and equipment. We had a couple veterans of the series, so we were fine. The second act of the scenario is a little weaker. The players discover that the shoggoths siphoned off the ocean floor, along with the binding stone that kept them dormant, have been shipped to a secret MI6 facility in Scotland. This section is basically a mandatory combat encounter with some machine gun wielding security guards, and a Shoggoth Lord for a boss fight. Thankfully, the security cameras at the facility are all backdoored with the SCORPION STARE network, meaning a single phone call allows the players to delete the entire garrison in a haze of excited silicon atoms and gamma radiation. Thankfully, the conclusion isn't as railroaded, offering the players a few different outcomes, along with a description of what happens in the broader world if each is chosen. I wrote a little debriefing for afterward. The world of Laundry is more interactive than default Call of Cthulhu. The players have more options for dealing with the supernatural than just running away or blowing it up. Letting the players systematically manipulate magical energy, creatures, etc robs them of their mystery, but is also more interesting and fun than just "wow that's hosed up, roll SAN". As a result, Laundry doesn't really work as a horror game. But in my opinion, neither does Call of Cthulhu, most of the time. Laundry lacks the mechanical quality of life improvements that 7E or Delta Green bring to the Call of Cthulhu system, but I'd play it again. The developers understood what people liked about the book series, and what made a fun RPG, and combined the two wherever they could. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 18:21
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Ran a game of Laundry RPG. I have to retract some of my praise for the Budgeting, Training and Magic subsystems I handed out in my previous post. The ideas behind all three are great, but the math just doesn't work. Budgeting In the budgeting mini game, you get a budget of points to spend. 25 for a moderately important mission, 50 for a serious one, more for an apocalyptic mission. When you want to spend your mission budget, you roll a D100 versus the Status score of the player character requesting the item or service. If you roll under, you get the item without spending anything. If you roll over, you pay the difference out of the mission budget. If you run out of mission budget, you can try a Bureaucracy roll to pay for it out of your departmental budget instead (though this will have consequences for you later). The difficulty of the Status roll can be modified based on how soon you need the the thing, how expensive or difficult the thing is to get, what priority level your mission is, etc.
At the end of the game, if you have money left over in your mission budget, you can spend it to send your characters to skill training. This is a five step process for each training:
Some trainings have progression trees, requiring you to take lower level courses before you take the higher level ones. You don't have to actually learn anything at the low level courses in order to get into the high level ones, which is a nice touch. Magic Finally, the magic system. You can cast pre-baked applications with spells on them for free, no questions asked, as long as you have the software and a computer to use. You can get up to Level 2 spells using this method if you've got a good enough computer. What if you want higher level spells? In that case, you've got to use computational demonology to boost your spell power somehow. But to do that, you have to actually know the spells you're casting, instead of just hitting a button. What spells do you know? At 15% in the Sorcery skill, you know how to cast all Level 1 spells. At 30% you get all the Level 2 spells, at 45% you get Level 3, and 60% you get Level 4. Far as I can tell, the highest Sorcery skill you can start with in the base game is 10%. That means you don't know any spells. If you chew through the lower level training courses, you can get to some higher level stuff that might give you some points, if the dice go your way. In concept, I kind of like this. It marks the progression of a cube jockey to a Deeply Scary Sorcerer as the players discover things they're not supposed to know and accumulate power and influence. In practice, it has the same issues as the budgeting system. Denying the players access to the good poo poo is all well and good when you're preventing them from tossing fireballs around. But when the game world is filled with parasitic spirits that can infested anyone without proper magical defenses, and can only be exorcised by high level magic spells, you've got a real issue. In Play The adventure I ran was DOMINO REDSHIFT, a scenario I wrote myself. One of the Laundry's Shoggoth Keepers is missing, and the Agents are activated to quietly track him down and bring him home safely before someone freaks out and calls a Code Blue over his absence. I wrote and ran the adventure using only content in the corebook, not from any of the later splats (although I allowed the players to draw from the Agent's Handbook when requisitioning equipment). I had one player who had read the novels (and all the splats for the RPG), and two who hadn't read any of them. Two of them used characters they made themselves, the third grabbed a pregen from the Agent's Handbook splat. The team was focused on technical and bureaucratic skills, with a Computational Demonologist, a Lawyer, and a Civil Servant. They got through the whole adventure without firing a shot, and brought the wayward handler home before anyone noticed he was missing. They did this by carefully listening to people's concerns, mollifying their anxiety about losing their jobs, and using the information they weaseled out of them to go to work on the next person in the chain. In other words, exactly like working in a real government agency. Which sounds like hell, but the players said they really enjoyed it. The game does a good job simulating office life in a way that's fun and not bullshit. Except for the aforementioned subsystems I described above. You can address all three of the problem areas by being more generous than the book suggests, which is what I ended up doing. The game didn't break after a single session just because I let the players spend their budget on a few Level 3 wards and some body armor. It didn't even break when one of them checked out a basilisk gun (which he never fired). The primary constraint on spellcasting is having a powerful enough computer, favorable enough conditions (which the playerers have to work to engineer) and enough casting time to actually get enough POW for a higher level spell to work. You don't need an additional "thou shalt not" on top of that. And the training system could be fixed by eliminating the Teacher's teaching skill from the equation entirely, and just skipping straight to the rolls versus the players' skills. Whether I run Laundry again will depend on whether I have an idea I like enough to go through the pain of dealing with the game system. Even when you fix the game's unique systems, it's still got all the old CoC 6e clunkiness under the hood. You could port the whole thing to the new Delta Green for a more streamlined bureaucratic horror experience, but then you'd have to rebuild the chargen process with new professions, and potentially a new skill list. And then you've done significant work for a relatively niche product that you still might not use much in the future.
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Sep 24, 2020 06:48
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Dholes or Bholes Chthonians
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Sep 29, 2020 18:50
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Fire Vampire
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Oct 10, 2020 20:30
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 17:19 |
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The old Delta Green had a couple campaigns. The original splat had Convergence and New Age which was more or less a direct sequel, each of which had multiple parts that could take a few sessions. The four parts of Future Perfect all dealt with the same threat, though the connective tissue between them is was little thin. New Delta Green doesn't have any campaigns yet. Impossible Landscapes and God's Teeth are supposed to fill that role when they eventually drop. Pagan Publishing, the original Delta Green developers, also wrote a few campaigns for CoC. I've got Walker in the Wastes and The Realm of Shadows sitting on my shelf right now. But neither of those were set in the modern day, and don't help us solve our initial dilemma.
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Dec 4, 2020 18:58
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