Twelve Handmade Pregens for Delta Green

Twelve Handmade Pregens for Delta Green

Some explanatory text:

I made these characters because I wasn't happy with the pregens available for Delta Green.

• The ones in Need to Know are... okay. But they aren't how I would create a character, and my rule is that I never give out a pregen I wouldn't want to play myself
• The list of hundreds and hundreds of random Agents is great if you need a new character fast, but it's not something I'd hand a brand new player.
• I admittedly haven't read the Agent Dossiers that came out a year or two ago, so those could be great and I wouldn't know.

I built these characters the way I build my own - very competent at their jobs, but with a good spread of secondary skills high enough to be useful. I've found that new players to a system are happy to be blown up, shot, eaten by monsters and go insane. But if their first exposure to a game is failing at everything they try because their character "can't do anything", they're going to disengage early. In my experience, giving out characters that are just slightly min/maxed also makes the players more confident, which makes them more willing to make stupid/bold moves that make the game fun.

Language skills are all left unassigned, so that the pregens can be used in any setting and still be useful. I favor letting the players leave them blank, with the option to "lock in" what language(s) the character speaks in-game as needed, writing it permanently on the sheet. If you don't want to do this, remind them to assign languages at the beginning of the session, or write them in yourself before the game based on the scenario you're running.

Each pregen comes with a full load of equipment suitable for their profession and role on the team. This cuts away the need for endless gear shopping, and gives the players confidence that they have what they need to do their jobs.

The pregens all come with instructions in the notes section on the back of the sheet. This includes details about the character's personality, tips for playing them, and any special mechanics that the player should know about. These are helpful because even experienced players usually forget things like using a first aid kit to get +20% on a First Aid roll.

Finally, some of the pregens (EASTER, RANDOLPH and ROBERT) know a single ritual. I added this after I noticed that the knowledge/academic based characters were barely getting picked compared to the ones with badges and guns. Knowing a magic spell is more fun than just having 10% in Unnatural, especially in a oneshot where that percentage is unlikely to increase to a useful level. If you don't want the characters to have spells, you can remove them from the "developments which affect home and family" section on the back side of the sheet.

Fallin' Down, or: The Nine Floor Goodbye

Logo by Mechristopheles

Fallin' Down is a dungeon jam that I started on the Night at the Opera server, about a year ago. Users signed up to design floors of a dungeon, which would then be stacked atop one another to form one big map.

Submitters had to conform to some basic rules. All floors were 50 by 50 five foot squares, for a total size of 250 by 250 feet, or 62,500 feet squared. Entrances and exits were randomly rolled, with each downward passage corresponding to an upward passage on the floor below. They were also given an entry and exit point for a stream flowing through the dungeon. Each floor had one upward passage, one downward passage, a stream entrance and a stream exit, for a total of four predetermined points.

Beyond that, participants had broad latitude to design their dungeon how they pleased, as long as it was possible for the players to reach all four points by moving through the dungeon. Submitters were given basic directions on keying rooms, assigning treasure, and formatting their writeups.

Users were instructed to make their dungeons "system agnostic". Participants were likewise instructed to roughly "balance" their floor according the depth from the surface, with hazards and treasure appropriate to the depth.

We had nine participants, including myself. Eight participants eventually submitted their assigned floors (with considerable hectoring from me.) One participant had to drop out, requiring me to pinch-hit the fourth floor myself.

You can view all nine floors here, or go level by level. You can get the high resolution versions of the maps by looking in the respective folders.

Let's see how everyone did.

ANGUISHEDWIRES Political Compass

From the dungeon ANGUISHEDWIRES

Unknown Armies NPC - Adrian LeBarge

I played in an Unknown Armies actual play on 33.3FM, a UA discussion podcast. You can listen to the full series here. It's about a group of occultists in upstate New York, taking on the leader of a local sex cult responsible for the death of their friend.

I played Adrian LeBarge, the con artist who robs cults.

Fanart by Basil

Now that the series is wrapped up, here's Adrian written up like an NPC from Ben's superb Oddities and Endlings blog of UA fan content.

Generic Pursuit System for Dungeon Crawlers

This is Fallout. It's what popped into my head when I imagined a guy running away

If you want players to do something, you need to make it easy enough that it isn't overly punishing, and isn't dramatically harder than the alternative. If it's harder to run away from a combat encounter than fight, the players are going to fight to the death rather than run away. It isn't enough to tell the players "not all fights are designed to be won", you need to provide mechanical support for this concept.

But you also don't want getting away from a combat to be costless, otherwise there aren't any stakes. There has to be an element of risk, even if the odds are tilted in favor of players.

But I also don't want it to be completely up to a roll of the dice. Otherwise you get one of those cases where the players flub the perception test (or surprise roll, or whatever) to spot the monster, flub the reaction roll, lose initiative, get beaten to a pulp in the first round, and then on top of all of that, fuck up the roll to escape the fight and get mutilated.

So the way I handle it is

When player characters run away from combat, each rolls a D20 and adds the number of empty slots they have in their inventory. Their pursuers (if the NPCs chase them) each roll a D20 and add any bonuses they get from their movement speed (default +0, up to +5 for a speedy foe, +10 for a blazing fast one).

If a character is overencumbered, subtract the number of excess slots from their D20 roll.

Escapees who roll lower than their pursuers are forced back into combat for one round, before they have a chance to try and escape again. Escapees who beat their pursuers are able to get away.

If a player (or NPC) fails to escape pursuit, they may elect to drop encumbering items equal to the difference between their roll and that of the pursuer, in order to escape that round.

Get a bonus to your roll to escape for running through an uncharted area, but run the risk of triggering traps or running into other monsters. You can choose to do this after you roll and fail to escape.

A clever solution (I cut the rope bridge with my axe once everyone’s across!) might just succeed automatically.

When dragging an incapacitated character, the person doing the dragging rolls to escape pursuit as normal, but subtracts the number of items carried by the character being dragged from their total. They may improve their odds by leaving behind the victim’s backpack, weapon, etc.

If the players pursue fleeing enemies, it is the same, but roles are reversed.

I'm sure this has been done before in some format, but I'll talk about why I did it like this.

The key is that the players have the ability to make choices after a failed die roll to turn it into a success, at the cost of spending a resource or endangering themselves in some other way. Either throw away some items to move faster, or run into an uncharted area and potentially get in even more trouble.

We can imagine assigning other bonuses and penalties based on things like the player characters' movement speed, where a faster than average character gets a bonus to the roll and a slower than average one (dwarves for example get a malus to their speed in various editions) gets a penalty.

The rules for dragging an incapacitated character omit the weight of the character and only count the weight of their carried items. I erred on the side of making the rules less punishing here because I've seen players get endlessly tarpitted by creatures with stun or paralysis abilities - unable to stand and fight, unable to retreat if they have to haul a downed ally out of the fray, and unwilling to abandon a friend. While the dilemma of leaving a wounded comrade behind to escape yourself is a rich vein of drama to tap, it's not the kind of drama everyone always enjoys.

This isn't a perfectly generic system. It assumes a couple things about your dungeon crawling game:

• It uses a D20 roll over system
• It uses a slot based encumbrance system

If your game doesn't use a D20, you can modify the math so that the sizes of the bonuses and penalties isn't overwhelming. So if you use a D10, divide by two. If you use a D6, divide by three or four, depending on if you want to round up or down.

If your game doesn't use slot based encumbrance, things get trickier. I'm personally of the opinion that non slot based encumbrance (that actually tracks pounds and ounces) is mathematically annoying enough that in practice it's usually ignored where it appears in rules. But I know that some people play games with digital character sheets that might auto-calculate stuff like carry weight of items, making those rules more practical. So there might be people out there who do use pounds and ounces encumbrance, and this system isn't going to help them at all.