Thread 96437208

So, now you need to decide. Do you close your eyes to what you've seen and go back to sleep? Or do you come with this psycho burnout and do the impossible against the unbelievable and keep the future at bay for another day? What's it going to be? In or out?

Yeah? You dumb shit.

>Thread Question:
What was your Cell's introduction to The Program/The Conspiracy? Did you use a pre-written scenario, or make your own thing?

>Previous thread:
>>96285079

>Unofficial Resources:
https://delta-green.neocities.org

>>96437208 (OP)
So why is Dennis using Ai in his art?
I thought he was an anti-ai guy.

>>96437354
I'm not entirely sure he is. His thing has always been to take an image or stock photo and digitally paint over it. Could be with the output they need, he's just getting sloppier at it and giving it an odd look.

Like, the background of this image straight up looks like early AI output.

>>96437208 (OP)
I feel like "Die For Delta Green" would be a cool slogan.

>>96437442
This screams "painted over AI image"

>>96438106
Yep, it's way different than anything Dennis has done before, is way too detailed (for Denny) and has that oily style that ai art has.

>>96437442
tbf freaky unnatural structures is like the one usecase where wonky ai art is a perfect fit

>>96438106
this one is garbage though

>>96437208 (OP)
Why are there rules for three different types of swords in the DG handbook? How do you even rp a fed just casually walking around with a fucking zweihander? Feels like the low-tech equivalent of giving cruise missiles stats, like how the fuck is that even going to come up?

>>96437465
So like is this bullshit then ? Because if you compare the artwork from like the Handler's Guide to the new stuff like in Dead Letter and God's Eye its such a jarring difference.

Im planning making a Delta Green-esque sandbox using silent legions. Does anyone have any experience with a more open ended DG campaign? Any tripping hazards I should avoid?

>>96437208 (OP)
If there was to be an Archint 2 what items would you come up with/put in?

>>96440377
Something to do with Ghouls

>>96440377
I'd prefer less artifacts and items, and more like...anomalous dangers.

>>96442413
Also something really fucking annoying that Arc Dream seems to be doing is going away from the jackal headed ghouls into what looks like knock-off DnD ghouls.

>>96442895
Like look at this, is is apparently supposed to be new art for the fuckin' KEEPERS OF THE FAITH! That's not even a ghoul, that's a goddamn zombie! I like my jackal-headed, actually Lovecraftian ghouls than whatever the fuck this shit is.

>>96442895
>>96442900
Detwiller should stick to writing fiction, I don't like his art and his scenarios are kinda ass.

>>96437208 (OP)
Is Impossible Landscapes any good and can you just run it with CoC instead of Delta Green?

>>96443317
I've never ran it, but I have read it and listened to APs. It's an unconventional scenario, as far as Delta Green goes.

The first half is really good (Night Floors being the strongest section); the investigation of the Apartment building and then the Dorchester house asylum. After that, it gets a little too railroady and psychotropic for my personal taste. If I were to ever run it, I'd probably just use the Night Floors.

And I see no reason you couldn't just use CoC. There's nothing about it that inherently requites the concept of Delta Green to function.

So I'm going to be using Foundry for my game, and my players and I have already agreed on the optional rule where they won't know the exact number for their sanity, to add a bit more risk and also make it a bit less "game-y" so to speak. However I've thought about another thing to tack onto that or not. Should I have my players rolling sanity themselves or should I do it hidden rolls and describe the sanity loss to let them know it happened or have a mix depending on what exactly caused the sanity loss? I already thought about having little brackets that I could use to tell my players so they at least have a general idea of their sanity level, somewhat similar to the one Foundry plugin that does the same for tokens (instead of a number value, it's something more like "healthy" or "lightly wounded").

>>96444401
I'd let them roll themselves personally. It gives a modicum of player agency and well, people also just love rolling dice.

>>96442900
To be fair Dennis is just re-doing the art pieces from Countdown here, and those never really looked like Lovecraft ghouls honestly. More like VTM Nosferatu with the whole monster hobos living in sewers and metro. So yeah I dont like the looks either but its not really a new thing. The Ghoul in the Handler's Guide looks kino doe.

>>96445046
Yeah, if anyone couldn't ell I fucking love Ghouls, and the art from the Handler's Guide is one of THE art pieces I think of when I think of Lovecraftian ghouls. Guess I'm kinda just tired of Lovecraftian properties just making Ghouls inot generic DnD ones or something else entirely than what Lovecraft described (but oooooh man, they love to make the fucking fish freaks accurate as they can).

>>96445114
While on the topic of Ghouls, has anyone played the Good Life? It's the only official scenario dealing with them so far. Its got some good ideas but I feel they get dumbed down by the plot of "White supremacist Ghouls sacrifice blacks to Nyogtha

>>96445341
No, but that always irked me (aside from the usual "oh we gotta have the evil racists!!1!), like motherfucker you assholes aren't even human anymore, why the fuck do you care that damn much?

Anyways, here's some shotgun scenarios for ghouls that people should check out:
http://fairfieldproject.wikidot.com/the-klickitat-county-fire
http://fairfieldproject.wikidot.com/eat-pray-love
Also you have The Transformation of Henrietta Z and Die Nachtbruder, but people will have to dig around for those.

>>96445509
Oh god damn, I forget to add this one: http://fairfieldproject.wikidot.com/walk-this-hue
Set during the Vietnam War, is definitely a rather interesting little shotgun scenario.

>>96445341
the smug asides about wayne williams are worse

>>96445509
What would a Hotep enemy group be like?

>>96445509
"why would the fucked up monsters that helped facilitate the societal structures we live under or in the shadow of today personally feel those same prejudices?" is certainly a weird take

>>96447870
I'm more so just tired of how a lot of the recent villains or evil groups are just some flavor of racist, like we have other ways of adding some negative traits besides racism. Or in the case of The Good Life we have get racist ghouls when we literally have a fucking holy war between the Keepers of Faith and Heretics that they haven't done ANYTHING with since Countdown came out that they could have made an scenario for instead.

Also it's funny that the ghouls in The Good Life only eat the bodies of white people cause they think all other races are too "unclean" to have any use, but then venerate Nyogtha to near zealotry by giving it sacrifices they deem to be inferior?

>>96448153
Also fuck The Good Life for trying to do this stupid retcon of Ghouls, kinda invalidates almost everything Arc Dreams or Pagan Publishing wrote about Ghouls before.

>>96448214
Wait, I thought the heretics were a threat cause they ate way more, making them significantly stronger than the keepers.
At least the Ghouls in good life look closer to the Handlers guide ghouls rather than the new countdown ones.

>>96448475
If I recall correctly, the Heretics either eat living flesh, or kill in order to get flesh, whereas the conservative ghouls only eat the already dead.

>>96448475
Yeah, also it's described numerous times that while Ghouls don't starve *to death*, they still can starve and their hunger ends up controlling them.

In fact, in Countdown you have this: "With their inhuman metabolism, this starvation has affected them in odd ways. They do not die, but have become manic with hunger, and their bodies (once rich with fat) have thinned to whipcord muscle. Only their religious fervor has sustained them, and kept them from dispatching live humans in the subway tunnels to satisfy their inhuman lusts.
While for the Heretics you have: "Often, those the ghouls recruited to become the next generation of ghoul-kind fow1d their fresh desire for human meat too great to bear. Without the religious fervor of their leaders, the new ghouls found this hungry fever maddening, driving them to violent acts which violated the basic principles of their adoptive race. "The Heretics" were born out of this hunger.

So this, along with stuff like when Agent NANCY was first turned to a ghoul and suffered horrific hunger to the point she blacked out and traveled all the way to a morgue to eat a corpse. But hey, according to The Good Life, they don't require sustenance even though everything before pointing to them NEEDING to eat the dead to stay strong and "healthy".

>>96449252
Fuck, I hate that I can see I made numerous spelling and grammar errors.

>>96448590
And correct, it's one of the central points of the conflict and even has the Heretic developing their Ghoul traits differently thanks to their diet of fresh blood and meat.

>TQ
I ran Last Things Last with my first group, and I thought it was perfect. It did an excellent job establishing basic expectations, world-building, and tone for the game (spoilers for Last Things Last):
>The game is mostly investigation & conversation, with a chance of decision-making & combat (adventure had a nice proportional mix)
>DG is an old yet secretive organization. The fact that DG has "retirees" suggests this.
>Not all threats are supernatural or dangerous (everyone loved the nosy old lady with the dog)
>There's moral conflict. I was pleased that my group was split on whether to burn the thing in the septic tank. My biggest fear was that they'd all be like "welp, let's burn the bitch and be done with it", but they did a fantastic job roleplaying a split group, they even almost drew weapons on each other.

The only thing I'd change, is adding a better guarantee of a moral question. Like I said I think the decision to let her out and trigger a fight depends a lot on the player's willingness to ignore common genre sense. I also think players might be scared of disobeying their handler. I quite liked the idea of her laying out the cards and offering up important secrets in exchange for freedom, since that would create a moral decision even if nobody buys the poor trapped wife act. But I still think it wouldn't be quite enough for some groups. Maybe I'd find a way to suggest that the world is already full of unexplained supernatural shit, so one more zombie running around in the woods isn't a big deal? Maybe I could make Baughman's wife a former DG agent as well, making her more likely to actually know secrets the players would find tempting? Maybe I'd contrast her offers of knowledge with their asshole handlers' stubborn insistence on not telling them anything or providing any help? Again my group played it well but I'd probably want a more robust plan B if I ran this again.

How do you run shotgun scenarios? I've run published adventures but never a shotgun. Are there any specific prep tasks I should be doing ahead of time, or can I just run it like a one-page dungeon? Are there things that come up at the table for shotguns that don't in a published?

>>96450026
A good way to introduce some doubts is to perhaps make Baughmann out to be a bit more unhinged. Maybe some rambling notes or tapes left behind in the cabin or his apartment and cabin are extremely cluttered and filthy, indicating that he really hasn't been taking care of himself before he died. Or hey, tie that old lady in and have her drop some gossip that the guy was getting a bit senile.

Or drop the Delta Green starting angle and make this the player characters first glimpse of the unnatural and is what gets them into the conspiracy.

>>96450114
They are more the bones of an operation for the Handler to add meat onto. Some are WAY more detailed than others but all in all are made some that the Handler can have their own flavoring to it. But generally you are gonna want at least some prep ahead of times, that way if your players come up with something you won't be too blindsided.

>>96450114
Oh I totally forgot to add, but think of things like Last Things Last, which actually did star out as a shotgun scenario all the way back in 2005!
Here's that original version: http://fairfieldproject.wikidot.com/last-things-last

>>96437208 (OP)
They are the most hated faction here so how would you all fix the Fate?

>>96452889
They're just a false front that DG or MJ12 used in the 90s to deal with the mob in New York.

or alternatively just don't use them at all because they are fucking dogshit.

>>96452889
You don't. You excise them.

>>96440028
>planning making a Delta Green-esque sandbox using silent legions.
What does this mean?

>open ended DG campaign? Any tripping hazards I should avoid?
I'd expect a bit of tension slackening if you pull too many punches, but I know from experience with other games that players actually losing characters mid-season can really damage the buy-in.

>>96450026
I considered changing ||Marlene to be a favourite grandmother of Clyde's grandchildren|| or some similar thing, with an elaborate ||binding/hospice/convalescence with regular visits thing|| going on, just to make sure there are more involved perspectives on the debate.
Never actually run it that way though ||never needed to, also grimderp||.

>>96450114
Often there isn't any more prep needed (or really possible) other than remembering relevant names and nouns, and responding to your players.
A lot of the locations and even NPCs are intended to be improvised almost completely by you, so if you're not comfy doing that you could write those descriptions ahead of time, but usually the motivations and pertinent details are included in the shotgun text.

>>96452889
Don't, eliminate all the authors' metaplot shit from your game and use only the barest skeleton of DG and the four cherry-picked cool things you like (which is The Fate for no-one).

>>96458217
He means he's gonna use the tables in Silent Legions to generate a sandbox campaign, retard.

>>96458217
Why are you using discord spoiler tags on 4chan?

>>96459299
They probably asked someone on Discord and just copypasted that part of their question here

>>96437208 (OP)
What stuff do you want to see in Operational history?
Personally I want to see some artifacts, tomes, and spells.

>>96461243
definitely stuff like that over being all writeups. i'd like to see some attempts to weaponize unnatural stuff

>characters wake up in an odd situation without memories or events happen while party is split
>ask NPC a question in character regarding an event they aren't aware of, due to the above circumstances
>other player, out of character: "bro, remember x, y, z is what happened"
>happens multiple times in a session
Fucking kill me

>Drug cartels have been in the cultural and political zeitgeist for about ten or so years now
>Arc Dream has done nothing regarding the War on Drugs and has instead shelved The Disciples of the Worm and Tiger Transit
>Meanwhile FoDG just released a campaign about investigating the heroin trade
It's amazing how much Arc Dream bragged about bringing DG to the modern day and has done absolutely nothing interesting
>Hey guys do you want another scenario about a cult in an isolated town or what about scientists researching some sort of anomalous formula

>>96463216
They use Christian cultists way too much.
If we got some kind of religious cultists why not Islamic ones?

>>96465035
They did that in Iconoclasts

>>96463216
Honestly, the Fate should be taken out of NYC and rewritten as a cult related to the Mexican cartels.

>>96437208 (OP)
So, how are the mechanics for this? I hear a lot about the setting, but is it actually, you know, mechanically interesting?

>>96466018
It's just Call of Cthulhu with some (good) tweaks.

>>96465838
Whoops forgot about that.
How good of a campaign is iconoclasts anyway?

>>96466000
maybe they dont want equate santa muerte worship to the unnatural (even though its the most obvious connection in the worl)

>>96468043
Honestly, I highly doubt Arc Dream would be willing to publish anything that would upset the race/gender obsessed crowd.

Dennis is an alarmist doomscroller, Shane and Caleb are your typical "Good White Man™" shitlibs, and I think John seems like an alright dude (based on the Discord) but is probably pressured to include certain topics in his scenarios/supplements. That's pure conjecture on my part tho.

Honestly as much as I adore Delta Green, Arc Dream seems less interested in unique cosmic horror than in spotlighting American identity politics and tacking on some Lovecraftian outer god.

>>96466871
It's peak Delta Green
There's no A24 tier "spine tingling" horror or gay political soapboxing
It's about pipe hitters and spooks in the sandbox hitting the ground running, taking names and rolling heads brother

>>96469657
NTA but any other official scenarios you'd really recommend as peak Delta Green?

>>96469657
it's alright, doesn't do half as much with the premise as it could. especially the support 'mechanic'

>>96469657
I like that its a campaign that the players can complete, and just continue on. We need more of those.
I also like the use of foreign intelligence agencies, which makes me wish that we could see an Iran or Assad delta green equivalent, I know they don't want to make too many Delta green types but we need at least one from a sketchy yet not too powerful nation.

>>96469749
Just do a little research and make your own, I guarantee it'll be more authentic than whatever they could come up with, and inherently better tailored for your table.

I had peak arrive in the mail yesterday (also had the core rulebook for 1e arrive too)

>>96470513
It annoys me that they only have hardcover available for pod.

>>96459299
>>96459000
||I am cognitively impaired due to being kicked in the ead by a orse.|| I don't need someone else to tell me to forget which window I'm typing in.
I didn't know Silent Legions had that sort of generator. Is it worth finding for that alone? Is the rest of the book(s) worthwhile?

>>96468521
Unfortunate but true, the writing room in probably ankle deep in good ideas discarded for being politically uncomfortable.

>>96469749
Just make it DG in a different country. Every structure like that is going to be stocked with bleak pragmatists across the middle layer, and controlled by weird ideologues at the top, from which your players should be fully insulated anyway.

>>96470566
The game inside Silent Legions is not worth it. The sandbox generation is! It let's you generate a pantheon or two of elder gods, alien species cults and artifacts. Then you plug these into into your adventure locations using the Tag system. This gives you possible schemes, enemies allies etc etc. Then you can use the investigation generator that gives you further ideas to put it together, not dissimilar to a shotgun scenario maker. Then using your own intuition you bring it all together to create the grander conspiracy and, tada! You got your very own mythos sandbox!

Im excited because im trying an open table, with agents coming and going. I'll have a sort of communal corkboard where they can piece together what they know do future agents can be let in on the skinny.

>>96469728
Convergence, the OG and still the best.

>>96472178
Oh, that does sound cool.
I've had fun with the below generator a couple of times, having more of a full-spectrum builder would be handy and interesting.
chartopia dot d12dev dot com slash chart slash 59676

>>96448214
More proof from earlier DG products about how Ghouls need to sustain themselves as well as extra stuff about the DeMonte clan.

>>96475279
God I want to have my players go against the DeMontes or some survivors of the 2005 operation. The last little bit is gold and I'd love to use it in a game.

>>96475279
>>96475289
I wonder how targets of opportunity will be adapted.
Especially since the Cult of Transcendence will be taken out to be fleshed out on their own.

>>96477435
I'm waiting to see how Arc Dream butchers the fuck out of M-EPIC, because you just know they aren't gonna leave it untouched as it is.

>>96478023
Detwiller moved to Canada and sucks its dick so hard that it is bound to get some rewrite as a beacon of light and justice.

>>96452889
Just have it be an underground club of New York sorcerers. Given the rules for magic and how everyone that uses it are evil as shit you don't really need to fix the baseline concept. A guy that knows how to summon star vampires working as a freelance killer for hire is goddamn scary. A painter that welcomes his "friends" into our reality by creating gates with his paintings and letting loose a string of horrific murders as fucked up monsters turn up and incubate wherever his disgusting magic is sold and housed at. Breaking into a museum to get rid of a highly valuable demon painting is a hard proposition, even when a Dimensional Shambler shambles itself out of there every evening to dine on the local bums.

>>96475289
I can't believe I glossed over it yesterday, but they really snuck the "lowering the age of consent" in there, didn't they?

>>96479683
Nah, you know he'd go full bore into "they mean racists for targeting the natives". I wouldn't be surprised if he does that retard shit with the "mass unmarked graves" while ignoring that they were just graveyards that had the wood grave markers rot away over a hundred years or so.

>>96480867
Really, the thing should be that they fought to keep the age of consent from getting raised. Christ, it used to be 7 somewhere in the US somewhere back in the late 1800s.

>>96480867
So the villains are liberals
How do you think they will retcon this?

I feel like Delta Green suffers from the same problem Resident Evil has were creators are worried about the franchise being to action focused so they try way to hard to pivot towards making characters and scenarios pedestrian with weak characters

>>96485214
I feel like Delta Green suffers from the same problem Resident Evil has where the creators are worried about the franchise being too action focused so they try way to hard to pivot towards making characters and scenarios more pedestrian

Well this was said 2 hours ago in a Delta Green post on the DG subreddit (yeah yeah, fucking sue me). We ain't getting some of these books for a long fucking time.

>>96485579
Will they finally notice that it's not called the GRU anymore?

>>96485628
You expect them to actually do research on anything Russian (or anything that doesn't conform to their bubble, as many others have pointed out)?

For those who run or play DG through a VTT, how do y'all do combat? Do y'all use combat maps or keep it more theater of the mind?

>>96462169
I know the feeling, I had to deal with this massive fucking retard that someone couldn't grasp basic sentences. Of course, he also turned out to be one of those guys that as soon as their character gets some power they immediately start bullying and torturing NPCs for the fun of it.

>>96485579
we should put together a list of projects they say they are working on, instead of the listed kickstarter projects, I want to see how distracted they are.

>>96481327
Yeah, it's fucking wild that they snuck that in there among all the other stuff touted as progressive and good.

>>96492128
do you think they are gonna leave it in when they release Legacies in 2035?

>>96494011
I really doubt it. Also I think 2035 is generous, it takes them several years to put out even a single updated version of an old scenario, and they barely have to update some of them.

Bit of a tip for any VTT users for Delta Green, use the site thispersondoesnotexist and run the pics through something like the Oilify filter in GIMP, and voila! Good images for NPCs and you can do the same for pictures of places to have a unified look for all of your stuff and the filter can cover up the rough edges of any photobashing you might do.