Twoflower
Mercenaries, archaeologists, and thieves from the Land Down Under
A MAJESTIC to rival ESPER's Delta Green. Based on a throwaway line from the old Eyes Only splat, about mercenaries guarding the Yithian ruins in the Great Sandy Desert. Further inspired by a user on the Night at the Opera server, who suggested that Cypress (the original name of the mercenaries from the old sourcebook) might be rivals to ESPER for contracts with the police. Mercenary groups often change their names in real life, to avoid negative publicity. See Blackwater becoming Academi and XE, before finally being bought by Constellis. Cypress had a checkered past according to the original sourcebook, something the new head would have been glad to clean up. Twoflower is also the name of the tourist from the early Discworld books.
I've been trying to avoid Yithians and Polyps, focusing more on human-scale threats which are easier for Handlers to write around and players to interact with. Humans plundering and doing unsafe experiments with alien technology are much more interesting than omnipotent, invulnerable aliens railroading the players from millions of years in the past.
Some of the descriptive text about mercenary life is borrowed from Chris Gunning's writeup of Constellis (a similar real world organization) in The Complex, a pretty good splatbook for the new Delta Green.
The Labyrinth offers a framework for how the groups in it react to the actions of the Agents and the existence of Delta Green, escalating their response in concert to the players. Since Tynes pushed the early draft, I've seen more and more fans using the same approach in the design of their own groups. Twoflower is full of scary people with dangerous powers, but they're constrained by a need for absolute secrecy and a real fear of ESPER, preventing them from doing their worst until they figure out what they're up against.
This one's never been playtested, so we'll see where it goes.
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