"'Rashomon' with anti-gods and automatic weapons"
over 8 years ago
– Thu, Oct 08, 2015 at 09:24:11 PM
A quick preliminary note: Today we updated the pregenerated characters in the Quickstart Kit to flesh out their backgrounds and give newcomers a better sense of their role in Delta Green. Download the latest version, grab some players, and play Delta Green tonight! We want to hear what you think.
The Handler's Screen
A lot of you have been waiting to hear how much the Delta Green Handler's Screen (the GM screen) is going to cost. Wait no more!
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PHYSICAL SCREEN AND QUICKSTART KIT: $25 including shipping & handling in the U.S. (see the FAQ about international shipping).
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PDF DOWNLOAD: $10.
Just add the appropriate amount to your pledge. At the end of the project we'll send instructions so you can tell us which rewards you want.
The Star Chamber
This morning we hit $150K, which unlocks our latest goal: "The Star Chamber," a Delta Green scenario by Greg Stolze. In "The Star Chamber," your Delta Green team gets the unpleasant job of debriefing another Delta Green team over an op that went very wrong. At first each player plays his or her usual Agent. Once the explanations and accusations begin, the players take the roles of the other team, exploring different versions of how the mission went bad. The fate of the wayward team is in your hands. Reserve "The Star Chamber" in your pledge now (it's a $5 add-on reward, unless you have a bundle of all the PDFs we create). We'll send it out as soon as it's ready.
Our next milestone is $160K, when we'll send In the Court of the Yellow King FREE to all backers. In the Court of the Yellow King is a short play by John Scott Tynes, co-creator of Delta Green and author of the infamous Hastur Mythos chapter of Delta Green: Countdown.
At $170K we'll unlock "I Have Seen the Yellow Sign," a look the challenges of containing the King in Yellow "infection" in the Information Age. It too will go FREE to all backers.
Then at $180K...that's the good stuff. That's Impossible Landscapes, a campaign of interlinked adventures for Delta Green, all concerning the manifestations of an unnatural force known as the King in Yellow.
Have you read or played "Night Floors" from Delta Green: Countdown? That's merely a teaser for Impossible Landscapes.
Here's another.
What Is the King in Yellow?
To some, The King in Yellow is merely a book. This book contains a play about a stranger who comes to a masked ball in the far-off realm of Yhtill. He reveals that of all the revelers at the party only he does not wear a mask, that his porcelain rictus is his true face. In doing so, he announces the end of their world.
This play, written in France sometime in the 1800s, warps minds. It opens doors within them that allow imagination and ideas to spill out into reality, to grab all that they can see and change it into something horrible.
To others, the King in Yellow is a pallid figure from that play that somehow seems to appear in the real world; a malignant creature adorned in ancient golden cloth, wearing a porcelain mask. To others still it is a series of symbols and codes embedded in reality, flagged by a single, terrible emblem that causes madness and death.
In truth, it is all of these things. It is none of them. It is anything on the edge of the tide of human understanding. Minds open to accept the input of this unnatural force and are flooded, washed away and destroyed in a torrent of madness. Some are drawn into this tidal sludge of imagination, forever.
What is the King in Yellow? It is the end of human thought and order. It can never truly be defined.
—Excerpted from Delta Green: Impossible Landscapes, by Dennis Detwiller, © 2015
"Making Horror Scenarios" and "Iconoclasts" unlocked; Carcosa glimpsed
over 8 years ago
– Tue, Oct 06, 2015 at 07:32:57 PM
The backers of Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game have unlocked two more stretch goals since our last update: "Making Horror Scenarios," a GM's guide by Dennis Detwiller, and "Iconoclasts," a scenario by Adam Scott Glancy.
Making Horror Scenarios
We'll send "Making Horror Scenarios" in a FREE download link to all backers later today. If you want to see how the mind behind "Night Floors," "Music From a Darkened Room," "Artifact Zero," and "A Victim of the Art" comes up with ideas that twist player-characters into taut knots that are ready to snap, this is your chance. Back this project and check the backer-only updates.
Iconoclasts
In "Iconoclasts," Delta Green hears a report of a deadly catastrophe in Iraq—and the players get to play it out, taking the roles of perpetrators who soon become victims.
Here's a description from RPPR, where you can listen to Scott running "Iconoclasts" at Gen Con 2015 a couple of months ago:
A group of useful idiots from the West have journeyed to war-torn Iraq in search of power and fame as soldiers of ISIS. Barely speaking the local language, they are used as pawns and propaganda tools. Their latest mission seems like a cakewalk—search an old man’s mansion for possible hidden antiquities and artifacts. The man is unarmed, assisted by a few servants, one of whom is an informant for ISIS. Ancient artifacts can be sold on the black market or smashed on video for propaganda, both valuable to the terrorist organization. Little do the intruders realize that some artifacts are not meant to be sold or broken.
I asked Scott for some thoughts on how "Iconoclasts" has played for him. Here's what he said:
"I’ve run 'Iconoclasts' seven times now with no fewer than four and as many as seven players per session. Since the players are running pre-generated members of the Islamic State, all the messy and horrible deaths have been primarily due to the players gleefully rushing their characters towards their much-deserved fates.
"Most have fallen to the scenario’s Big Bad, facing a death that only deals out 1D4 points of damage per round. Plenty have committed suicide to stop the pain, or died when other players tried to 'help' them.
"One died running an ISIS roadblock. One opted for what might charitably be called a 'martyr operation.' Three left their friends to die, in one case sealing the rest of the party in the bunker with the Big Bad. Another three died during flubbed attempts to deploy dynamite (another perennial favorite amongst Mythos investigators).
"But until this last session, no player ever opted for switching sides. Faced with the alternative, I honestly expected more apostates than that."
When "Iconoclasts" is finished it will be an optional add-on for $5 in PDF.
Last Things Next
Our next goal was listed as Greg Stolze's brilliant scenario "The Star Chamber" ("Delta Green meets Rashomon") at $150K, but we have too much going on to wait.
We're prepping an updated version of Bret Kramer's "Last Things Last," a classic scenario that's a favorite with the Delta Green writers. It's perfect for a one-session demo of Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. If all goes well, tomorrow we'll make it available along with a set of pregenerated characters, so you can put Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game in front of your group immediately. Watch this space.
In the meantime, I've been meaning to put in a kind word for Tales of the Caribbean from Golden Goblin Press. Oscar Rios and his team are friends and fellow travelers, most of them contributors to The Unspeakable Oath. They do fine work. You're missing out if you haven't backed their new scenario collection.
Now, our next big goal is coming fast: Impossible Landscapes, a campaign and sourcebook dedicated to the King in Yellow. Here's a glimpse.
Impossible Landscapes
Wherein minds are lost but truth is found
By Dennis Detwiller, © 2015
"We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them—or they'll march."
—Charles Fort
THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL
(Written in a mad scrawl on the back of what look like asylum papers. Blood and fingerprints smear the page.)
This is a book. In this book are ideas. Ideas with teeth. One of you must eat this book; chew it and swallow it and let the book become you. Then you must act as the book might act.
This is no small trick.
Then, of course, there is the dance.
Once the dance begins, others join. It is their job to pretend to be someone else but to feel real fear. As they pretend, they dance. They dance with the person who has become the book. They dance with the fear of the unknown. They dance around a table and a story is told in the tracks of their steps.
There are dice. The dice tell you things. They open doors, and cause brains to spray across walls, and translate books, and climb burning tapestries, and scream and go mad and hide, weeping in the dark as marionettes spin in empty, Victorian halls.
The dice sing and the people dance the tune.
And the book tells a story. And whether you want to or not, you dance.
We dance.
We all dance, hand-in-hand, until the world ends.
INTRODUCTION
Impossible Landscapes is a campaign for Delta Green that focuses on the mythos of the King in Yellow (from Robert W. Chambers' book The King in Yellow; and found in the Hastur chapter and “Night Floors” scenario in Delta Green: Countdown; and featured in fiction such as "Ambrose," "Broadalbin," and "Sosostris."
It focuses on a mystery—a missing woman, a strange book, an asylum, the end of the world—and in this mystery the Agents find a thread which unravels their lives.
It is a mystery that many Agents will find difficult to confront. It is not a conventional Delta Green operation. Instead it focuses on psychological and surreal horror, the sort you can find in The Shining, Jacob's Ladder, Lost Highway, or The Ninth Configuration.
Characters do confront monsters, but these monsters shift and change. They seem to be products of the human mind, the run-off slurry of human imagination that is Carcosa, the realm of the King in Yellow, a cancer of human thought that mutates the world.
...
UNMASK
Read the Hastur section of Countdown. Play "Night Floors." Tell your friends what it's like. Help us spread the word and make Impossible Landscapes happen.
Stretch goals falling: "Unripened Fruit," the GM Screen, "Making Horror Scenarios"
over 8 years ago
– Mon, Oct 05, 2015 at 07:56:44 PM
Since we unlocked the Case Officer's Handbook yesterday we've knocked down stretch goals more quickly than we can announce it.
"The Unripened Fruit," a study of the ways Delta Green agents can deal with corpses (there are always corpses), is available FREE to all backers. Watch for a backers-only update for the link.
The Game Moderator's Screen and Quickstart Guide is available as an Add-On Reward for just the PDF version. You can get it when it's ready by adding $10 to your pledge. (Of course, if your Reward Tier includes all new PDFs funded by this project, you'll get the GM Screen and Quickstart Guide PDF without paying anything more.)
We'll offer the physical GM Screen and Quickstart Guide as an Add-On Reward as soon as we confirm the cost. I'm getting estimates on that now.
As of 1:22 pm, October 5, 2016, we're about to hit $135K. That will mean "Making Horror Scenarios," a guide to creating terrifying adventures for Delta Green, will be available FREE to all backers as soon as we can post it.
After that we unlock "Iconoclasts" at $140K. That's a new scenario by Adam Scott Glancy, wherein Delta Green learns of the repercussions of ISIS zealots destroying artifacts that were better left alone. You can get a taste of it now by listening to Adam Scott Glancy running "Iconoclasts" at Gen Con 2015. You can sign up to get "Iconoclasts" when it's ready by adding $5 to your pledge. (Of course, if your Reward Tier includes all new PDFs funded by this project, you'll get "Iconoclasts" without paying anything more.)
There's more to come. Keep fighting.
