Delta Green Play Report: Eight Folds to Infinity

You stand on a vast red plain, which extends to the horizon. Mountains are visible in the distance, silhouetted red by a green haze that filters upward into the darkness beyond. The plain is red, ankle deep in blood.

Before you is a massive desk, like a judge would use. It towers above you. On the desk is written:

 

Sitting at the desk, peering down at you, is a gray little man in a green accountant’s visor and red vest. He squints, and asks, in his dusty voice: How many people have you killed?

I ran Eight Folds to Infinity for the latest Jackson Elias convention. I wrote this scenario a year or two ago and I've run it a couple times.

Post theme.

There were three players, and they chose the following pregens:

• Agent GAGNON, ATF Murder Machine
• Agent EREBUS, Fireman and Walking Tank
• Agent SELLERS, Friendly Mob Doctor

The characters had the dream from the intro, and woke up to a phone call from Delta Green. Agent BOULEVARDIER wanted to meet in Confluence Park, Denver, CO.

 

He had lawn chairs, a catering box of sandwiches (“did you know Quiznos started right here in Denver? I didn’t, until today!”) and some forties in paper bags. He also had information on the Agents’ next mission:

There was a murder in the census designated place of Judgement, Colorado. Father Ned Burris, priest at the local Presbyterian church. Beaten to death, eyes gouged out. Interesting graffiti on the wall.

Besides pictures of the corpse, there was a photo, taken by Deputy Hogue, the county cop assigned to the case. Of the church wall. In green oil paint: the same inscription as the one from the Agents' dream.

BOULEVARDIER didn’t know if this was Delta Green business, but was up to the Agents to find out, and if so, put a stop to it. He had a satellite phone which he gives the Agents. There was no cell service out in Judgement. It was obvious BOULEVARDIER had the same dream as them. He admitted that this was the reason he assembled a team to check out the case in Judgement.

Besides the sat phone, the Case Officer gave the Agents a key to an old storage unit full of equipment. Most of it looked like it hadn't been used since the 1960s. In the stash:  

• Benzedrene Tablets
• An Ithaca Shotgun
• An M1 Rifle
• An SKS Carbine
• An old steel GI helmet
• A single tear gas grenade

The Agents loaded the gear into the two vehicles the Case Officer bought in cash for the mission: lemon yellow 1989 Ford F-150 with four wheel drive, and a slate gray 1991 Dodge Caravan. They set off for Judgement, CO.

A few hours later, the Agents pulled into Diner, the “Gateway to Judgement”, facing route 491. There were a handful of buildings. A shuttered tourism center advertising local activities, a gas station, and the eeponymous diner. Paved and gravel roads from Diner led to the other townlets of Judgement.

 

The Agents got out and went into the convenience store attached to the gas station. They browsed for a second before the teenager behind the counter asked if they were cops here to see the body. They said they were, and she showed them the freezer in the back. The dead man had his eyes gouged out premortem by someone's thumbs, then his throat crushed by a series of hammer blows. There were a few sangria red synthetic fibers on his torso, like from athletic equipment. The clerk said Officer Hogue was in the church over in Icicle, investigating the death. He put the body in the gas station freezer because he didn't trust Lester, the guy who ran the diner.

 

The Agents visited Lester at the diner next. The portly, hairy boomer turned from the ocean of gore on the counter and grinned at the Agents. "Normal people!" he shouted. "I'm one of you!"

 

LISA The Pointless by Ed Kandrotas

 

Lester hoped the Agents were here to clean up the town, which had become infested with "jerseyheads". These hooligans wore basketball jerseys with the number eight, and loved to start fights and demand free food from enterprising cafeteria workers. He provided the Agents with:

• Coffee
• Cups of "Moe's Special Blend", a soup rich in protein and tomato sauce
• An old tourist map of Judgement, CO.

 

Lester wanted them to deputize him so he could kill jerseyheads with impunity, but the Agents declined.

 

The obvious play was to visit the church in Icicle and try to catch up with Deputy Hogue. So that's what the Agents did.

The fringes of Icicle had a few scraggly trees, nourished by occasional rain and groundwater. There was a church, an agricultural supply store, and a tractor repair shop. The Agents checked out the tractor store, where a pair of old dudes were fixing up a car. They weren't much help, so they checked out the church. Inside, the Deacon was about to clean up the crime scene. The Agents stopped him, and established that he was in charge of the church after the death of the Priest. Deputy Hogue had a suspect in the killing, and had already left to find her: Skuld Hammerstroem, over at the trailer park in Vincent. The Agents noted that the inscription on the wall was green paint,

 

The Agents checked out the agriculture store. The guy at the register preemptively told them that he was out of green paint. They asked if anyone else had bought green paint. The answer: practically the whole town. They got all the receipts for people who had bought the paint. Skuld Hammerstroem was among them, as was half the population of Judgement. In the back, a woman filled a shopping cart with jugs of ammonia. She said she was rehabilitating damaged houses over in the suburbs of Sangria. The Agents were suspicious but didn't press the issue.

The Agents drove through Sangria on the way to Vincent. They passed an abandoned suburb, and a boathouse on the edge of a dry lake. Fissures in the lakebed had produced a chaotic terrain, with strange cliffs and gullys that went down beyond line of sight.

 

Vincent was once be the center of civic life in Judgement. Now it was the center of the town’s managed decline. It had a courthouse, a senior center, and a trailer park.

 

A crowd of old people in blood red jerseys with green piping staggered out of the community center, toward the trailer park, where four youthful jerseyheads were trying to break into one of the trailers. A Sheriff's Dept cruiser was parked behind the trailer.

The Agents shouted to get the attention of the crowd. The elderly residents turned and began shambling toward the Agents instead. GAGNON pulled a gun and shouted a warning, while EREBUS and SELLERS ran toward the trailer park. The sight of the weapon excited the oldsters, who brandished canes and improvised weapons at her. She tried to fight the crowd off with fisticuffs and almost got swallowed up by the mob, which rained a hail of weak blows on her, shouting that she "couldn't keep people away from the Franchise!". The other Agents got in a fight with the goons trying to break into the trailer, and Deputy Hogue came storming out to assist them. GAGNON retreated to her car and executed a deadly ramming attack against the crowd, while EREBUS, SELLERS and Hogue fought their way out of the brawl in the trailer park. SELLERS loaded a dead body into the car with him as the whole group retreated back to Diner with the cop.

 

What they saw in Diner was a little unsettling. Someone had spraypainted "Infinity Franchise" graffiti all over the abandoned community center, and left a crate of jerseys. The teenage clerk at the gas station was now wearing an infinity jersey, along with one of her high school friends. They were more interested in beer and cigarettes taken from the gas station than the Agents, who went into the Diner with Deputy Hogue.

 

Lester was arguing with a man and a woman, both clad in burgandy jerseys. They demanded free food and threatened his life. As the Agents entered the diner, Lester killed both moochers with a single stroke of his enormous tuna knife. After what they'd seen, the Agents were willing to overlook this act of self defense. Lester had a bone to pick with Deputy Hogue, who didn't believe him when he said the town was overrun with monsters disguised as people.

SELLERS took a look at the dead jerseyhead. The jersey was fused to the top layer of his skin, but it was possible to remove it with a little effort. It didn't stick to SELLERS

Hogue wanted to go back into town and save the kids at the school in Apple Crest. The Agents also wanted to see what was going on with the crane. They left Lester to clean up the bodies and got back in their vehicles.

Apple Crest was ridge with gentle slopes, covered in dried up apple trees once fed by a vast irrigation system. There was a K-12 school, a gigantic crane out in the dust, and an abandoned swimming pool. A crowd of people were milling around outside the public pool, and a man on the roof was yelling at them with a megaphone to line up and stop pushing, there were enough jerseys for everyone. The Deputy's cruiser pulled ahead of the players' two vehicles as they trundled down the road. As he pulled into the bus turnaround, a school bus came barreling out of the school parking lot. Inside the bus was a methed up but non infinitized bus driver, and a whole lot of terrified kids. Three carloads of jersey wearing teachers and parents followed.

The bus driver forced one pursuing vehicle off the road, leaving two closing in on him. EREBUS blocked the pursuing vehicles with his car, and was promptly t-boned. The second carload of infinitized PTA members rear ended the first. EREBUS and SELLERS crawled out of the disabled vehicle and got into a big brawl with the surviving jerseyheads, while GAGNON rushed in to assist. EREBUS and SELLERS withdrew from the fight, but GAGNON wanted to kill all the attackers, blazing away with her service pistol. An even bigger crowd of attackers advanced from the school, and Deputy Hogue was forced to withdraw before they overran him. GAGNON was undeterred, firing away. SELLERS thought she had become infinitized too, after achieving the first (or potentially even the second) Fold of Infinity through mass slaughter. EREBUS and SELLERS drove off in the other car. GAGNON tried to flag down Deputy Hogue, but he either didn't see her or just didn't stop. She tried to run, but was swallowed up by the crowd.

The Agents took shelter in the shadow of the crane, surprising a trio of teens drinking their parents' beer. EREBUS called up BOULEVARDIER on the satellite phone. The Case Officer had a plan to contain the situation, and told the Agents to meet him back in Diner. They pulled the car around and headed back to where they started.

The gas station was on fire. BOULEVARDIER watched it burn, flanked by two agents he brought with him. All three were wearing jerseys. The players turned around and went back the way they came without getting out of their car.

They pulled over on the side of the road and weighed their options. They needed to find the source of the jerseys. The guy on the roof of the pool seemed to be distributing them. Maybe they could shake some answers out of him. They drove back to Apple Crest and took the long way around, observing the pool from the safety of a deserted apple orchard. They saw the guy on the roof climb down and get in the back of a panel van with a bunch of green eights painted on it. He drove off toward Sangria. The Agents were able to follow him without being spotted.

The guy parked the van at the boathouse and got out. He and a couple other guys took some crates from the van and went down into the canyons. The Agents got out of their car and geared up. EREBUS pulled on his turnout gear and grabbed the M1 rifle and tear gas grenade. SELLERS took a helmet and the shotgun. They radioed Hogue and waited for him to join them before descending into the ravine.

At the bottom of the ravine was a sinkhole filled with blood, issuing forth in pulses from an enormous ventricle in the wall of the pit. At the bottom, the men from the van were sloshing around in the blood like a cranberry bog, pulling up jerseys from the slime. They hadn't spotted the Agents, who tossed the tear gas grenade into the pit before opening fire. The jersey farmers didn't stand a chance, going down in a hail of 30.06 and buckshot.

Nobody wanted to go into the giant ventricle that was gushing blood.

The Agents and the NPC police officer went into the giant ventricle that was gushing blood.

Inside was the wasteland the Agents saw in their dreams - a red plain in all directions. They turned around, and there was the little man at the desk. He was excited that they finally got into the spirit of things, but knew that they had come to put a stop to his fun. If they wanted to take on the Franchise, all they had to do was beat their star player. Their weapons wouldn't be any use - they looked down at their guns and found them completely jammed with a sticky mass of what they hoped was raw hamburger.

Agent GAGNON stepped out from behind the desk. Her wounds were all healed and her hands sizzled with green energy. She was wearing an infinity jersey. She slipped on her brass knuckles and squared her shoulders.

GAGNON swung with all her might, but missed EREBUS. The firefighter got her in a joint lock, but Deputy Hogue's baton bounced right off a sheen of green vapor around her head. SELLERS had an idea. The doctor swung a scalpel and cut the jersey off GAGNON's torso, right as she escaped EREBUS' grasp. The ATF agent was incapacitated by a near psychotic break as the jersey's influence over her was neutralized. The little accountant scowled.

"You're no fun at all."

His body split up the center and tore open like a sheet, unfolding to reveal what was inside. Before the Agents' minds could be blanked by the sheer horror of the thing inside the kite of skin, the thrumming of blood in their ears seized up and the world around them collapsed like a heart attack.

By magnifulouschicken

The Agents woke up in the sinkhole. There was no blood, no ventricle and no jerseys. Deputy Hogue was nowhere to be seen. The trio got up, dusted themselves off and climbed out of the canyon. Case Officer BOULEVARDIER called them and asked why the gas station was on fire. The Agents climbed into their one remaining vehicle and drove back to Diner. As they drove through town, they saw a lot of the surviving townsfolk in the throes of nervous breakdowns, or other understandable reactions to waking up and realizing they murdered their own families.

The corpses of the two jerseyheads Lester killed were nowhere to be found. Lester himself was ecstatic. The Agents did it - they got rid of the Infinity Franchise. He promised to make them a special treat. As he went to work in the kitchen, the Agents debriefed BOULEVARDIER and the two feds he brought with him, ARGO and JESSICA. BOULEVARDIER was wearing a suit jacket and nothing else as a shirt, and had the same strange rash as GAGNON where the jersey had obviously stuck to his skin.

Lester reached up to grab a pot off the shelf, and bumped the latch on the meat locker. The door swung open, revealing the two jerseyheads dangling from meathooks, sans a few limbs.

By me

Good session overall. With only three players I had the Deputy accompany the players and provide backup for the tougher fights. I think it would have been better if I killed him off and made Lester the designated helper NPC. Lester has tons of personality, while Hogue is just another guy with a gun. I didn't go super hard on introducing the "miniboss" first and second fold jerseyheads, which left the hordes a little lacking in personality. I think I should have at least read out the names of the NPCs they were fighting, even if there's no way the players would have known it. GAGNON was a great stand-in for the usual final boss, Francis Jubilee.

I don't write or run a lot of Delta Green anymore, but now I have to think about whether I want to write something for this year's Shotgun contest.