GM to DM

Come and hang out while we chat about our favorite TTRPGs and whatever comes to mind.

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  • See, Follow Through

    So, here I am, and within the week as promised to the void and myself.

    Last time I talked about the current playthrough for TTRPG world for myself and players, and that sits in the house of Delta Green. We played the introductory module ‘Last Things Last’, it can be found in the free quick-start system booklet ‘Need to Know’ (rad that it’s free, but if you like the vibes of Delta Green, you’ll want the Agent’s Handbook for the nitty and the gritty).

    *Spoilers*

    The adventure set’s agents on the home of a recently deceased “former” (you never really get out of the program) agent to make sure no nasties were left behind that might expose the general public to the mind altering and sanity shattering mythos of the cosmos.

    Fortunately we had a crack team, a project manager from DARPA, a devildoc on loan from the Navy, a steely eyed accountant from the FBI, and a big hoody hacker from the NSA. How do we get all of these people in one room? Well that’s the neat part of Delta Green, Trauma!

    Joking aside, trauma is the meat of what I want to talk about in tandem with a field report on how their Night at the Opera went. Delta Green set me on hooks when I learned about their sanity system. While playing games where you roleplay characters with a variety of disorders, might not be super cool, Delta Green manages to do so with attacking the topic from a place of reasonable compassion. It does this through a couple things that I really like, downtime pursuits the bond system taking up the load of unpaid emotional support being your friends and family as the government sends you through a meat grinder.

    So where did that leave our players? Well it left them in a post office meeting room being instructed to scrub the remnants of a old man’s life. Quickly they set to the task of checking out the sad apartment of one Clyde Baughman. After a bit of paranoid observation, the team eventually made it inside and discovered a solitary living space of a(n even more) paranoid man. Looking around, they found the remnants of his life, his few personal items he kept were of estranged children and a granddaughter, and scratched out pictures of his late wife. Other than that, there were a few illicit drugs, a handful of firearms, a pile of old receipts and tax forms, and a lonely PlayStation controller. Enter the drug dealer.

    I like to look at Baughman through the lens of an agent who had bonds. The key word is had. This was a man who had served his country in fighting the tide that is endless and withering, it drove away friends, pushed his kids away, and the one thing that he fought to maintain, but in the end cancer took away was his wife Marlene. What these losses built was a paranoid and aggressive old man who hid away from the world and took solace in addiction. The remaining bond was one that would be a new one, his drug dealer, the man who sold Clyde pills and felt bad enough to come over once a week and sit down and play Dynasty Warriors while they got high. Mechanically this is a picture of what players might end up with, a broken life that as that support network faded lead to the accumulation of trauma disorders, and in his extensive downtime, Clyde formed a new (but weak) bond with his drug dealer Eugene Meyers.

    Where were we, enter the drug dealer. As the team spread out in the living room to dig through old documents to find out if Clyde had any other holes to hide things, in walks Eugene Meyers, spotting the FBI windbreaker he attempted to flee, but critically failed his athletics as our devildoc tackled him to the ground. Luckily the situation rapidly cooled as the NSA agent smashed up some oxy and did a line with the young man. As the Eugene realized there was no threat of arrest from these folks, he opened up a little revealing what he knew about Baughman. Soon he was on his way and our Agents were headed to the national forest near St. Louis to locate a cabin Eugene mentioned.

    Now the next part is where the past trauma of our Agents shines.

    The drive was about two hours away to a secluded cabin on a lake. The NSA agent napped (passed out might be the better term), they nabbed some fast food, and they set upon the dark cabin. Before making their way inside, they discovered Clyde’s wife, or at least, the thing that was Marlene. Locked in the unused septic tank, was something that I played like something out of a Sam Raimi film. Convinced that she was a casualty of Clyde’s indiscretions, the agents closed up the tank and went inside to look for a solution or at least the rest of his paraphernalia. Now our accounting specialist wasn’t on his first op, so as the rest of the team looked through the cabin, he stepped away and attempted to solve the Marlene problem, just like he had been forced to do on his last assignment. While he made moves outside with 20 gallons of gas, the rest of the team dug into Baughman’s past, things of note were a few artifacts that the DARPA manager secreted away (that won’t have any problems in the future right?), a bloody suit and photo that turned out to have Baughman standing next to the devildoc’s late father (killed in a fire, important in a moment), and the NSA agent looking through an old casefile from Oregon.

    Now, as the accountant tried to handle the brunt of the trauma single handed, Marlene made it known that she wasn’t simply a corpse in a tank. She used her supernatural strength to overwhelm him and get out, she was however covered in gasoline. Not long after, combat ensued and the team rushed to come to the Agent’s aid. Long story short, they were able to put a lot of rounds into Marlene before she could escape, set her on fire (and also unfortunately the DARPA manager), and were able to put her down. Through the quick action of the devildoc and her fear of fire managed to put out the DARPA manager with a fire extinguisher she picked up at a hardware store on the way. The NSA agent and the FBI agent had significant wounds from Marlene’s claws, but this didn’t stop the accountant from emptying his magazine into the charred corpse that was Marlene.

    As they burned the remainder what they could, that drew Last Things Last to a close. It was a fun opener for Delta Green, something to get everyone’s feet wet, mine included. We’ll start the next session with home scenes and downtime before launching into Sweetness.

    Aside from that I’ll be working on a few things on the side. I’ll be putting together a spreadsheet of Mothership equipment that will be a culmination reference sheet of items and slot counts to use the Heat Signature inventory system. We like a little extra crunch. I’ll be outlining a few potential modules for Mothership for our home games, and maybe getting myself in the mood for more writing in general.

    Thanks void for letting me yell into it.

    -Cole

  • Follow Through…

    So, it’s been about a year, I though it would be easier to find inspiration for continuing, but it’s a struggle to keep my mind on a single avenue, but here I am.

    What does that mean though? to be honest, it means that I bounce from creative thought to creative thought without giving a plan a chance to unfold. But what does that look like? It looks like a shelf full of RPG modules and games that I read and reread hoping to play someday. I’m sure I’m not alone on this front. But for the near future, my current fascination is with an TTRPG that goes by the name of Delta Green.

    Much like with Mothership, my inspiration follows the media I devour like a hungry sandworm. First I’ll give an update on that realm before delving into the nihilistic depths of the federal government. After my last post, I proceeded to run a series of modules for Mothership building an ensemble cast for running a campaign revolving around Prospero’s Dream. We blew up an undersea laboratory in the time twist of Decagone, we nearly had a TPK on the rat infested Year of the Rat (okay, one player may be an ascended rat god, one OD’d on stims, and one was pulled to a cryo-pod in a coma by the lone survivor set adrift to be rescued by space rangers), and finally I pulled my players into a moss infected trap of an ice shelf research station on the frozen planet Murandal in Bloom.

    Luckily the web of the AID (Azure Horizons, Ishiyama Dynamics, and Dyson Industries) continues to take souls at the cool liquid price of galactic credits as more of my player’s characters limp their way to The Dream to return in A Pound of Flesh.

    But… Where does that leave the rest of the time since I’ve been gone?

    It’s been diving into the depths of the secret conspiracy of The Program in Delta Green. If you aren’t familiar with Delta Green, it is a Lovecraftian Horror game that is set in the contemporary era. And boy do I love it. The base is a nihilistic horror story that watches the few true believers futilely fighting against the coming apocalypse.

    And at the end of the day, it is futile, because in the scope of the great old ones and the elder gods outside of space and time is so vast, that the struggles of humanity isn’t even a footnote. But we’re human, the character’s are human, and what do we do when presented with an impossible task? We thrash and spasm all the way through our death throes.

    It’s really a fantastic fantasy, not because it is a power fantasy, but because it is a self-sacrifice fantasy. How far can we bend, bleed, and beat our characters before they finally break? That’s what we hope to find out as we play through Black Sites (or most of it with Last Things Last as an intro).

    But what brought me over to the temporary stop (hopefully intermittent like an ice hauler run between Saturn’s rings and Ceres Station)? Well Quinns Quest did. But then I very quickly lost myself like I was reading the Necronomicon.

    I proceeded to produce a trailer (using Davinci Resolve and HandBrake) without any prior knowledge of video editing, spent weeks interviewing my players in background information on characters (I promise it wasn’t that bad… I hope), watched all of the X-Files with my partner, and then we finally arrived at our first session.

    And that’s my next post.

    Really my next post will be within the week and not in ten months.

    -Cole

  • Another Bug Hunt Pt. 1

    Another Bug Hunt Pt. 1

    So, this is the first post for this site. To be upfront, I do not know what I am doing, I do not know if this will ever be read by someone else, and I am in all reality, a hack and a fraud.

    And that’s what this is about, I would like to discuss imposter syndrome as I feel it within gaming, even when it is a piece of performance, or content, or gaming for my closest friends. Without a doubt, every single time I have run a game, I do not think it will be good enough. And that’s okay.

    With every time I sit behind the screen, it is one more opportunity for my anxiety to skyrocket for a good 4-8 hours (I know that my group is unable to have a short session). I love it for some reason and it has continued to bring me back to the table again and again for some 22 years.

    Now, how does this pertain to the wonderful module prepared for us by Tuesday Knight Games and Written DG Chapman, Luke Gearing, Alan Gerding, and Tyler Kimball? It has to do with the mindset that time scarcity fuels action. For the players, this was the changing of the module to all fall within a 24 hour window, start to end of in game time, the crew knew that they were on a timeline for evac because of the storm. For me, this was enforcing a strict prep schedule that I have struggled to do in the past.

    So what did preparation look like for me? A little background for this, I picked up mothership on a whim at a local game store. Immediately knew I wanted to run some games but wanted to start off small. I picked up Ypsillon 14 and ran it for my normal group. As a bit of a departure I decided I wanted this to be old-school, pen and paper, physical handouts, no screens, and just a composition notebook for notes. It was a blast and truly one of the best experiences I have had with a tabletop.

    How could I follow it up? Panic set in, I have found that one of the worst things I can do is set myself up with what I feel is a great session, it is a surefire way to assume that I will be hounding myself. For better or worse, this wasn’t an immediate issue. The other future contributor here runs our other ongoing D&D game and this gave me time to think on things. I am however also a procrastinator, and as a result proceeded to struggle to get my process going.

    What saved me? Ripley, seriously eventually I decided to put on Alien, and for the duration of the film, I prepped. It was a perfect, condensed, theme appropriate backdrop to think about how to have the survivors of Ypsilon 14 begin their mission to free themselves of company liability. I had my perfect method for focusing up and not letting myself get in my own way for prep. That brought us to our first session of Another Bug Hunt.

    The game progressed as expected, our five players landing planetside with a rough and bumpy landing at Greta Base. The initial crawl is an excellent start in to Samsa VI, plenty of immediate questions, intrigue, and room for red herrings. With the discovery of perished marine after marine, the crew grew more suspicious of their surroundings. Coming freshly off of a Ypsilon 14 run with the same characters really sent them spiraling with being sent by the company on another shit detail, and that’s when our marine Octavia attempted to make contact with the ship… becoming our sacrificial member for the “krebslieder” or “crabsong”. We now had our second time crunch that would become a focus for the remainder of the scenario.

    The session went on until their discovery of Sgt Abara and Demar in the hanger, their first fight went off with a bang and the lurky crawl suddenly invited a xenomorph into the equation. With a wound dealt with some clever tactics on the crews part, that took us to the end of session one with the crew in possession of an APC, a deranged Demar, and one infected marine with a fairly lucky timescale roll.

    And that’s all for now, next time I’ll dive into my process further and see about embracing imposter syndrome and running my crew through the rest of their time on Sansa VI

    Thanks for reading, hope to write more, improve and continue this soon.

    -Cole