GM to DM

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