Delta Green NPC: Dr Franz Farber

Dr Franz Farber

A Nazi rocket scientist obsessed with escaping the apocalypse through space travel

The playtest used this plot element

...Dr Farber is experimenting with a new type of propulsion system for his dream rocket. By tunneling into another dimension, then back into our reality, the device allows the user to cross great distances in a fraction of the time it would take to do so in “realspace”. The military is fascinated with the possibility of soldiers and weapons that strike from afar without crossing the space in between. The Doctor wants to find another star where his perfect human specimens will be safe from the coming horrors. But the passage through the other world brings back “passengers” from other realities, who are eager to tear open the border between worlds and let more of their kind through.

The session started in 1944, with a handful of MI6 collators at a pub, down the street from the SIS building. Their lunch was interrupted by a series of explosions, which shattered the windows and sent them diving under the tables. They emerged to find a mysterious projectile on the bar counter, unexploded.

Cut to the players as Cichociemni - elite Polish commandos-in-exile, getting a briefing from their Special Operations Executive handler. The "teleporting bomb" that landed in the bar was deliberately sabotaged by the slave laborer who assembled it. The poor sod slipped a note in between the layers of circuits, informing the recipient that he had assembled it in an underground factory in Poland's Owl Mountains. The commandos' mission was simple: parachute into occupied Poland, infiltrate the bunker, steal any material and intelligence that wasn't nailed down and destroy the rest.

I wasted a lot of table time making the players plan their attack, choose a drop site, parachute in, meet up and hike across the countryside to the target. Lots of meaningless "choices" where there was really only one viable option. If I run it again I'll jump straight to the bunker, and leave all the planning in the background. Every player gets a token to spend on something they prepared retroactively, like a hidden supply drop or a resistance attack to distract the guards.

The attack on the bunker was more interesting. The players shot up the labs, held off the SS guards with some well placed thermite grenades, and rigged the strange rocket in the silo with explosives. They rescued the mysterious prisoner who wrote the initial letter from the cells in the medical testing area. He told them he could get them home, if they'd climb into the rocket with him. Two of the commandos accepted the offer, while the other two set off cross country with as many stolen documents as they could carry. With a minute to spare before the explosives went off, the spooky prisoner activated the missile's translocation abilities and teleported it to another dimension.

The other world was a hostile place, bombarding the commandos with malevolent psychic energy even through the aluminum shell of the rocket. They avoided possession by the malignant spirits through sheer force of will. Then the prisoner tried to hit them with an oxygen tank. The tank burst in the ensuing scuffle, and the possessed madman yanked the hatch open to the seething void beyond. That was his plan all along: to expose the commandos to the festering energies of the great beyond, and bring them back with otherworldly passengers in their brains. The commandos foiled his plan by tackling him out the hatch and into the abyss, ensuring they would never return to the real world.

With no idea what happened to the rocket, the surviving operatives laid low until they could find a resistance courier to smuggle all the documents they'd recovered back to blighty. They successfully evaded the Gestapo and the following Soviet operations to liquidate the Polish underground once they took the country, escaping back to England rather than living permanently in the woods as Cursed Soldiers.