2022 Delta Green Shotgun Scenario Reviews

The 2022 Delta Green Shotgun Scenario Contest wrapped a few weeks ago. I've largely lost interest in Delta Green over the last year or two, but I sent in three scenarios anyway.

 

Reviews of all 53 submissions under the cut.

Unknown Armies Play Report: You're Not Alexander! Part 2

Continued from Part 1.

Pseudanor ran up the hill, quickly scaling the ruined foundation of the Citadel and vaulting the wall into the sacred precinct of the Temple of Athena. He ran around to the portico of the temple, and was about to shake Jocasta awake before he thought better of getting within arm's reach. He tossed a small pebble and she instinctively lashed out with a foot, before realizing where she was. Pseudanor explained that soldiers were coming up the hill, and one of them was among the four who attacked her last night.

By Peltast

Pseudanor was interrupted by the Priestess Tritogenia, second in command at the Temple. She told Pseudanor to get the hell out, then told Jocasta that the place had better be spotless because the Hipparch of Hellespontine Phrygia was on his way to the temple. Jocasta got up to make sure the sanctuary was clean, but was interrupted by a shout from the High Priestess' hut. The old lady Atrytone needed help getting ready to receive a visitor, and her demands trumped those of the younger Tritogenia. Atrytone's mind was still sharp, but her failing body necessitated Jocasta's assistance as a mobility aid. Atrytone needed Jocasta's help dressing quickly, but refused to be carried out to meet the Macedonians, using a staff to support herself.

The Hipparch, clad in a robe and cape and wearing a flat cap over his mostly gray hair, entered the precinct with eight of his elite soldiers.

Unknown Armies Play Report: You're Not Alexander! Part 1

The story was a strange one. Because the Thessalian hero Ajax had murdered the prophetess Cassandra at the end of the Trojan war, oracles had ordered the nobles of the Hundred Families of Locri in Thessaly to send two virgins yearly to the Dardanelles and leave them to make their own way through to Troy. By tradition, the natives would come out to catch and kill them, armed with axes and stones, and only if the virgins escaped would they enter Athena’s temple by a secret passage and live there in safety, dressed in a slave’s robe and shorn of their hair until a replacement managed to relieve them. The rite was to last for a thousand years, but at some point in Alexander’s life, it is known to have been interrupted. As ruler of the Thessalians, it was perhaps Alexander who first dispensed his subjects from their duties.

(The text says Ajax "murdered" Cassandra. Anyone familiar with the lore knows the details are more graphic. Ajax the Lesser raped Cassandra on the Altar of Athena after she claimed sanctuary in the temple, turning the Goddess against the victorious Achaeans.)

 

Enough of that. The time is the fourth century BC. The place is the ruined city of Troy, four miles inland from the West Coast of Anatolia - modern day Turkey. For centuries, a small temple of Athena squatted in the ruins of the Trojan citadel, receiving occasional pilgrims come to pay homage to the heroes of Homeric lore. Then the Great King Alexander crossed the Dardanelles and liberated Troy from the Persians, opening the city to tourists from across Magna Graecia. He dedicated his armor and weapons to the Goddess at the shrine and promised to build Athena the largest temple in the world.

 

Our story begins with three people living in the Trojan Tourist Trap, a decade after its "liberation" by Alexander the Great:

• Jocasta, virgin sacrifice offered by the Locrians in a thousand year ritual to cleanse the sins of Ajax the Lesser at the end of the Trojan War. Survived the bloodrites and was allowed to live as a slave at the Temple of Athena. Champion boxer, serves as the town's police force.
• India, snake handler and devoted worshiper of Dionysus. Sells tourists a "kykeon" made from opium, wine and snake venom. Gains supernatural powers from handling snakes. Deals drugs to Jocasta in exchange for protection from ruffians.
• Pseudanor, India's son by a wealthy tourist who disappeared long before his birth. Incapable of casting snake based magick, but blessed with innate snake abilities. A teenage hellion who loves pranks and mischief.
  

Pseudanor was up late and creeping around town, as usual. His infrared vision let him see at night, and the dark held no terrors for him. What it did hold, which he saw when he left the house he lived in with his mother, was a group of men waiting in ambush. The five figures were watching the house, and conferred with one another when they saw Pseudanor leave. The snake boy pretended to leave, then hid on the terrace above the house to observe the strange men. The strange men must have spotted him, because one raised a burning object to his lips and emitted a cloud of smoke, obscuring the group from Pseudanor's heat vision. He reocgnized the smell from his mother's drug collection - the strange man was burning hempseeds in a clay pipe.

Pseudanor climbed onto the roof of the house to get a better look, concerned that the men were approaching through the smoke cloud. He was right, a hand reached up from the cloud and tipped the heated residue from a clay pipe onto the thatched roof. Pseudanor brushed the hot embers off the roof to prevent a fire, shouting at the arsonist to identify himself.

Dune 2d20: The Spice Melange

I ran a few sessions of Dune 2d20 and found it to be basically a serviceable tabletop version of the Dune setting. The big omission from the game's voluminous gear list is the Spice Melange. This is an absurd omission, Spice is the entire reason everyone is on Arrakis in the first place.

 

By Sketchphase

 
Spice can't be acquired via momentum spend to create an asset. It can be bought from legitimate sources on worlds where the ruling House doesn't restrict the supply, or from smugglers at a markup on the already high market price. Either way, the cost is prohibitive to all but the wealthiest Imperial families. Spice can be looted from the treasuries of Great Houses, or stolen from Nobles who have it on their person for private use. Diluted Spice is easier to acquire, by the time of the Regent Alia Atreides "even the vast middle class of the Imperium ate diluted melange in small sprinklings with at least one meal a day." Spice of any kind is much cheaper and easier to acquire on Arrakis, without the Guild monopoly on shipping and Imperial tithes driving up the price.

Consuming a dose of the spice Melange restores a point of Determination.

Consuming even a single dose grants the complication: Spice Addiction. This is permanent, although it only becomes relevant after the character has gone without Spice for an extended period. Severe withdrawal is fatal. Diluted spice staves of withdrawal but provides no other mechanical benefit. Spice addiction is a great way to control someone, if they can't afford a fix or live somewhere the supply is tightly controlled.

Prolonged, excessive spice consumption grants the trait Eyes of Ibad, tinting the iris and sclera a total blue so dark as to be almost black. This is an unattractive trait anywhere except Arrakis, and most people wear contacts to make their eyes look "normal" in polite society. Fremen consider the Eyes of Ibad a desirable trait, though this alone is not enough to overcome their distrust of offworlders.

ICONODULES Masterpost

 

ICONODULES is a oneshot for Unknown Armies 3e. Cabals across the Fertile Crescent converge on the oldest megalithic site known to man, hoping to steal the living fertility statue unearthed by a University of Istanbul Dig Team.

• Scenario Folder - Including scenario, pregens and a new avatar path.
• First Playtest
• Second Playtest
• Music Post

ICONODULES - Music Post

Music post for ICONODULES

 

Unknown Armies NPC - O'Saa the Yellow Mage

Based on the character of the same name from Fear and Hunger 2: Termina.

By orange

Baron Samedi and Papa Gede. Kali and Shiva and Yama. Edward Teller and J. Robert Oppenheimer. The Gods of Death. The Destroyers of Worlds. Every pantheon has ‘em, but there’s no ascended archetype to match. Someone should work on that.

O’saa is a Yellow Mage, a member of a decentralized avatar cult created by an unknown Motumancer who wanted to uplift the archetype of the Destroyer to the Statosphere. You get this type of Motumancer singularity sometimes - guy spends a major charge to inspire other flagburners to do something. They flame out fast, because by definition they can’t constructively participate in a social movement without losing their powers. Yellow Mages get around it by being an antisocial pyramid scheme. It never rises to a real community, just a shared bad idea that the “members” pursue for personal reasons. Everyone wants to be the Destroyer.

Nobody knows why they're called Yellow Mages. Whatever meaning the name had to the original founder of the sect has been erased by time and distance.

Temple of the Crying Buddha - Music Post

Music post for my first run of The Temple of the Crying Buddha.

 

Unkown Armies Play Report: The Temple of the Crying Buddha

Nanking, 1937.

Amidst a grand guignol of violence and pillaging, Captain Hojo sat on a heap of loot taller than a man, a fat bladed dao with a jeweled hilt laid across his knees. Beneath him: antique furniture, gold and silver, wine and rare spirits. There was a Mercedes in there somewhere, half buried under a massive bolt of silk. A pair of kempeitai goons came in with a crate of pure morphine and left it at the base of the pile.

The Captain leaned forward and grinned at a trio of Imperial Japanese Army privates.

• Katoki the gambler, in need of money
  
• Suzuki the addict, looking for his next fix
  
• Takeo the glutton, always hungry
  

“You louts are going to do a job for me. There’s a temple near the Purple Mountain. Inside is a special cup. It’s made of a big piece of jade and shaped like a dragon skull. You’re going to get the cup for me.

Anything else you find in the temple is yours, you can keep it. I’ll keep the others out so you’ll have the place to yourself.

Go!”

To refuse the Captain would be unwise.

 

Without wasting time on preamble, the three Privates made haste for the iron gates of the Temple of the Crying Buddha.

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?

Unknown Armies Play Report: ICONODULES V2

Another day, another playtest of ICONODULES. Another year, another Jackson Elias Convention. If you want to read up on the premise and the basics of the adventure, check the first playtest.

 

This time, we had

• Ecrin - Experienced Occultist and Wage Slave
  
• Mehmet - Closeted Defender of Gay Turks (And Armenians… and Kurds)
• Suliman - Expert Fencer, Martial Arts Master, Total Coward
• Zuhal - Precocious Technology Expert

After character selection and a rules tutorial, play began with the burger warriors pulling into the Akpet off the highway to take a piss and grab some snacks before the final drive to Göbekli Tepe. They spotted three weirdos who seemed worth investigating.

• A seventeen year old Syrian kid, filling up gas cans at the pump. 
• An American guy in a fiberglass mask emblazoned with a hand of mysteries, carrying bottled water and calorie dense snacks out of the store.
• A Kurdish lady in a blue headscarf smoking a safe distance away from the pumps, who Zuhal recognized from Kurdish_Professionals, a weirdly ritualistic lesbian XVIDEOS channel that got taken down after people mass reported it. 

The group offered to help the Syrian kid, but he wasn't interested in strangers pestering him, especially a girl his own age. Mehmet tried to forge a connection with the Kurdish lady, using his Solid Citizen powers to connect with a member of his tribe. The lady misinterpreted his "how do you do, fellow gay?" overture, but not in the way he expected. Rather than a fellow member of the homosexual underground, she assumed he was a fellow worshiper of the Goddess.

Delta Green - Shooting For Survival

I've cooled off on Delta Green over the years, but I was recently asked by a friend of the blog to repost this article from my DG master document. I wrote it a few years ago when I first started playing Delta Green. I saw a lot of characters die because the players misunderstood how the game system worked, made poor choices due to rules inexperience, and didn't take advantage of simple but easily forgotten mechanics that would have protected them. Automatic weapons and explosives killed more Agents than all the monsters in the game combined.

The tips presented here are mechanical rather than tactical. They will not save Agents from poorly chosen fights, bad strategic decisions, or an overly bloodthirsty attitude that comes back to bite them. But nobody should die because of a game rule that wasn't intuitive.

Unknown Armies NPC - Jenny Wex

In her mind's eye, something made Jenny want to recoil even before it came into focus.

A man. Mustard. A mustard m- no, a man in a mustard pin-stripe shirt... the room smelled vaguely of mustard. Old, like the kind around the rim of a squeezebottle.

The man was nondescript, sitting in a room like Darth Vader's chamber in Star Wars... meditating? But the horrific thing... the horrific thing was that he sat on a pink mass. The pink mass was slick and soft and luminous with a meaty sheen all over its carpetlike surface...

Jenny's mind ejected itself from her astral form.

"Nope," she said definitively, reaching for the Tums in her purse. "Too close, even at that distance."

A light came on in his head, disrupting the symphony of flesh surrounding him. There was a smell like tiny cubed onions, frying. In his shadow body, a thousand light years away, a fresh stream of drool issued from the side of his mouth, joining the layer of effluent caking his chin and neck. The edges of his jaws hurt in anticipation of the taste. The carpet rippled under him like it was alive.

 Then he was away from the sealed chamber and back in the mass, moving toward the spot where the light had come from.