Delta Green Monster - The Bronze Colossus

The Bronze Colossus

An ancient cyborg, made by a sorcerer using secret prehuman knowledge. A brain and vital organs, suspended in a bronze cauldron of blood and wine, mated to mechanical limbs of great power. A machine of war that slept four thousand years in a vat, and has woken up.

I had an idea for a monster - a bronze machine with the heart of a man, that lives in a dungeon in a jar. If the jar is broken, the monster is an unstoppable badass. The trick was to open the lid and pour acid into the jar while the colossus was sleeping, dissolving its organic components and leaving the valuable armor and clockwork intact.

Recycled into Delta Green, the Bronze Colossus is a monster with a lot of moving parts - maybe too many. Dangerous, but not immediately lethal unless provoked. Well armored, but not invincible. It can be killed in a straight fight with enough damage, and can deal plenty itself, but the best way to kill it is to learn its weakness. It rewards characters with technical and social science skills as much as it does killing machines.

The playtest setup was simple. The players started out as grad students at the University of Washington, attending the Halloween Nightmare at the Museum event at the Burke Museum. Drunk on free beer, they snuck into the bottom floor gallery to check out the exhibits. One of them knocked over a giant pithos while trying to see the paintings on the back. They tried to run before anyone discovered they'd broken a priceless Mycenaean artifact, but their passage out of the basement was halted by a seven foot tall figure, dressed like a hoplite in a bronze mask. They complemented him on his costume. Then his face came off and they all seized up. Two of them escaped, the third was grabbed and drained of blood.

The players took the roles of their Agents and began the investigation of the murder. They entered the museum and began collecting clues. One of the characters was a criminal with minimal Archaeology and Anthropology skills, but I let him roll every time they discovered a new fact about the monster. When he finally succeeded, I gave him the pseudo-Herodotus text.

I rolled a D6 every time the Agents went to a new room or did something time consuming in the current one, with the colossus appearing on a 1. It almost killed an Agent, but they were able to escape and hatch a plan to kill it. They bought some wine from the Safeway a couple blocks away, set it out in the paleontology room, then dropped the whale display (I was basing this on the pre-remodel Burke, I haven't been inside it recently) on it when it came to feed. They severed its head with a breaching charge and shot the owl off its shoulder, leaving it blind. A couple shots to the cooling fins and it overheated as it thrashed and stumbled around the room looking for them.

I really enjoyed the playtest, it had the exact right blend of puzzles, investigation and violence. The players came up with a clever plan, but had to work to pull it off. They agreed with the spectators that the monster was cool. If I can only submit one entry to the Night at the Opera contest, it's going to be this one.