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Fall of the House of Usher, by Mario Jodra |
There have been many discussions on the Night at the Opera discord about Delta Green campaigns. I want to record some of the details of those discussions so that the recommendations and knowledge are not lost to time. Thanks to Inixis, who came up with the phrase, I will name these details “N@tO’s Need to Know”.
Without further ado, here are some thoughts on developing Delta Green campaigns.
How do you create a mood?
One way I’ve created a mood is to envision your game like connected movie stills or scenes and come up with vivid descriptions that convey a particular emotion. For example, if your mood is “decay”, I don’t think you could do better than to steal imagery from Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher. Let’s take the introductory passage from the short story:
"It was a dark and soundless day near the end of the year, and clouds were hanging low in the heavens. All day I had been riding on horseback through country with little life or beauty; and in the early evening I came within view of the House of Usher. I do not know how it was — but, with my first sight of the building, a sense of heavy sadness filled my spirit. I looked at the scene before me — at the house itself — at the ground around it — at the cold stone walls of the building — at its empty eye-like windows — and at a few dead trees — I looked at this scene, I say, with a complete sadness of soul which was no healthy, earthly feeling. There was a coldness, a sickening of the heart, in which I could discover nothing to lighten the weight I felt. What was it, I asked myself, what was it that was so fearful, so frightening in my view of the House of Usher?”
You could describe your intro scene where Delta Green agents meet in a rundown motel as having “cold flimsy walls, empty and grimy eye-like windows and surrounded by a few dead trees.” Such a description sets the tone for the adventure and story you want to tell.
Another way is to choose a mood that you want to convey and find words and synonyms that point to that mood. Sprinkle these words in your narrations, descriptions and dialogue. Let’s assume your mood is “decay” again. Synonyms are “decompose, putrefy, rot, and spoil.” You could talk about the smell of trash decomposing in dumpster outside a greasy spoon. Maybe inside the greasy spoon the cook yells at the manager, saying that the meat in the refrigerator has spoiled. Perhaps the waitress smiles and has a noticeable decaying tooth. You get the picture.
A third way to set a mood is to use the idea of synesthesia. Synesthesia, as we will be using it, is defined as when your brain routes sensory information through multiple unrelated senses. For example, “tasting” a sound or “feeling” a smell. In the example mood of “decay”, instead of the air smelling like fruiting bodies, perhaps the air tastes like overwarm tobacco chew, gelatinous and unwelcome. Presenting the senses as “mixed up” can make a stronger impression on the reader or receiver.
How do you make scenarios mysterious?
Generally, in Delta Green games I think the focus of the adventure is on an event (usually a murder, or more than one) with unusual coincidences (a decaying body is found above an identical decaying body buried three months before) or with details that do not make sense (there was a murder victim found in a room locked from the inside). Further digging by the players is required to uncover the entire twisted tale you the Handler (Delta Green Game Master) are telling and have the event make sense.
But how does a Handler carry out the mystery? To answer this question, I will recommend two blog posts by
The Alexandrian. The first blog post deals with the (rather well known now)
Three Clue Rule, that explains how to present clues so players will not miss them. The second post is about how to run mysteries and
why the failure to find a clue is so important. Both of these posts discuss actions a Handler can use to build a mystery that can be successfully unraveled in their campaign.
What is the theme/premise of your DG campaign? Have you made deliberate choices? Should you?
While one could make a campaign out of Delta Green adventures casually strung together, some Handlers want more connective tissue or a theme throughout the campaign for a richer experience for themselves and the players. If you are creating a campaign with a theme, pitch it to your players. One way to do it is to present it as a summary (we are focusing on X, Y and Z).
Another format is to do what Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition did with its campaign settings. They had defined characteristics about the campaign setting world in the introduction. Mechanically, each of the characteristics had a sentence with a paragraph explaining it. For example, in the Dark Sun Campaign Setting for 4th edition D&D, the first three characteristics of Athas (world of Dark Sun) are “The World Is a Desert”, “The World is Savage”, and “Metal is Scarce.” There are eight characteristics in total, but you can get an idea just from the first three statements where this world is going. Use this technique to craft a very clear campaign theme for your players.
What do your players want to do in the campaign?
Ask them! No seriously, asking players what they would like to accomplish during the game gives them and the Handler (you) goals and ready-made plot ideas for your campaign. You can also reflect at milestones during the campaign or after missions and ask your players if they feel like they are achieving their goals or what else needs to be done in order to do so. Player feedback provides instant scenario ideas.
Should you have a home base in a Delta Green campaign? What is your local area?
Some DG Handlers have stated that they feel the 5th edition D&D community has scooped them. 5th edition D&D Game Masters often start their campaign in a single village or town (or even just a tavern) and expand the adventuring area surrounding the village as the campaign progresses. After each adventure the player characters regroup back at the central village, meet established NPCs and engage in inventory management and/or shopping of some kind.
The D&D players have a home base, and that seems to be missing from the majority of Delta Green campaigns, but there is no rule saying you can’t steal from D&D! First, establish what your home base will be. Is it a town, a city, a Holiday Inn, or a Delta Green safehouse with really good Thai food down the street? Having a home base allows the players a sense of familiarity and relaxation once they complete a mission. Maybe they would be wrong to relax because you want paranoia to reign supreme, but that is a discussion for another post. Also, players can interact with NPCs and see how they change over time; possibly for the better if the DG agents are successful in their missions, and maybe for the worse depending on what you the Handler wants to do.
Home scenes are more than just reciting that bonds were damaged for Delta Green agents to protect their sanity or acquire new skills or whatever. Setting a home scene (say an important phone call to a loved one) at a home base may increase the poignancy and could give an excuse for important PCs and NPCs to give commentary on a player’s home scene. Is everything falling apart at a PC’s home, but the Delta Green team is hale and hearty? Does the PC spend their time meeting commitments at home but get dirty looks from the team whey they are down important gear that no one can afford (without burning bond points)? Having home scenes at a home base, or interspersed with scenes at a home base can add additional emotional weight to a scene. And that may be just what you want for your campaign.
On the flipside, maybe you want a globetrotting campaign. Hey, 007 gets along fine. Masks of Nyarlathotep (the classic Call of Cthulhu campaign) does this as well. In an international campaign you may want to focus on the local area on each “hub world” stop for the players. As a Handler, ask some questions of the area before you introduce it to give it flavor. What are the gun laws of the location? Can firearms be trafficked into a location by land, sea or air? How do the locals and the local government respond to criminal activity that the players will surely get up to? How friendly are the citizens to foreigners or shady types like the investigators? Do the PCs have access to all resources in each “hub world” they land in? Or does this require additional skill checks or expenditure of resources to get what they are looking for?
What is the quantum language skill and should you use it?
The Delta Green “quantum language skill”, comes from the concept of a “quantum ogre” which is a Game Master technique. A quantum ogre is the idea that the Game Master has designed an ogre encounter, and no matter what choice in the dungeon the players take (i.e. right or left passageway) the players will always run into the ogre.
In Delta Green, deciding your character can read Latin, Ancient Greek, or whatever; and never having that particular language show up in the campaign can be very frustrating. Thus, some Delta Green Handlers allow for the choice of a language to be a “quantum language skill”. The language skill the player has is undefined until a foreign language is encountered in the campaign. Then the player with the quantum language skill may spend that slot to know that given language at a skill level that they bought upon character creation. This is a bit metagame-y but it prevents language skills from being useless in the campaign.
Alternatively, if you the Handler know all the languages that will be used in the campaign, because you just did that much preparation, you can give a list of languages used to the players at the beginning of the campaign and have them decide what they want.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the following people from the Night at the Opera discord for ideas and review of this post: anonymous, zomner, Splizwarf, and Inixis.
*Another way is to choose a mood that you want to convey and find words and synonyms that point to that mood.*
ReplyDeleteTrophy Dark uses this method in every scenario, although there it’s called “theme.” You pick a concept to build the scenario around, and then you keep hammering on it in your descriptions of the world, just like in your examples about “decay.” Touch on the theme every chance you get. Subtlety is good but not important: keeping the idea upfront in the players’ minds is important.
*How do you make scenarios mysterious?*
An idea I’ve had but not implemented: give every NPC a secret, some piece of information they don’t want the players to find out. Not all of them have to relate to the main mystery; in fact most should be totally mundane. Adam is having an affair with Betty, Cheryl is stealing money from her workplace, Dana is living under a false name, and Eric is propitiating the Seven-Who-Are-One through blood sacrifice on the nights of the new moon. All of them have reasons to act shady, but only one is Delta Green business.
*If you are creating a campaign with a theme, pitch it to your players. One way to do it is to present it as a summary (we are focusing on X, Y and Z).*
I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned CATS, because you’re creeping up on its ideas. It’s a framework for pitching a game before play begins, and the acronym stands for:
* Concept – What is the game about?
* Aim – What are our characters trying to achieve? What are we as players trying to achieve?
* Tone – How is the game meant to feel? How serious vs jokey should we try to be?
* Subject Matter – What ideas and topics should we expect to come up? What content do we want to avoid?
And considering the different approaches GMs and players have towards Delta Green in particular, you'll want to get on the same page about whether you'll be playing a police procedural or pulp sci-fi or survival horror.
Hey BurningHeron! Thank you for the detailed comment.
DeleteI had never heard of Trophy Dark before now so I’m glad you brought it up. It looks like an interesting take on “traditional” D&D graverobbers subjected to more horror than treasures and riches. Are there more techniques in the book to put horror into player’s minds?
With respect to giving every NPC a secret, that is a really good idea. Now that you’ve proposed it, I recall that I heard an idea like that from Monty Cook of all people when I was reading his Arcana Evolved in the mid-2000s. He used it in his Dragons vs Giants setting and I think he said give all repeat NPCs that you would encounter (ie tavern bartender, blacksmith, healer, etc..) like one or two possible secrets so that repeat visits were actually interesting for the players and relevant to the plot. Having said that I did not consider using that technique to make scenarios more mysterious as you have proposed.
I didn’t bring up the CATS acronym, because again I’ve just never encountered it! It makes sense that someone would summarize the idea of a session zero so cleanly. Thanks for talking about it.
Glad you enjoyed that level of detail, because I have a wall of text coming. Trophy Dark is designed for one-shots where most, if not all, characters die horribly, so it uses a couple of tricks to drive the theme home while building up dread. I’ll name some examples from the scenario “A Warm and Pleasant Hum,” where the theme is “bees.”
Delete*Moments*. These are environmental details or scenes in progress for the players to stumble onto. They largely exist to creep the players out but might become the basis for a new scene. For example: “A forager's sack, dangling from a thin tree branch overhead, out of reach, carrying yellow-and-black-striped fingerling fungus.”
*Questions*. Trophy Dark pushes the GM to ask the players questions and incorporate their answers into the story. For example, when they make camp: “What were the songs about, that lulled you to sleep as children? The rocking of babies? The sweetness of honey? The warmth of the hearth?” Now you might tell one player they hear a buzzing with the exact same melody as their old lullaby, turning that comforting memory into something ominous.
*Conditions*. Every time you take a point of Ruin, coming closer to death, you also take a Condition that describes how you have been changed for the worse. For example: “You crave sugar.” That may not seem onerous, but Conditions offer fictional positioning for things to get worse, and additional Ruin can either give you new ones or make old ones more extreme. That means your craving might turn into: “If you don't keep talking or chewing, wax will seal your mouth."
*Rings*. Scenarios have a specific structure, divided into five “rings” that each present a different type of threat:
1. The first uses easy obstacles to build up their confidence. For example: a group of beekeepers after the same treasure, but ill-prepared and struggling to control a packhorse covered in stings.
2. The second features environmental hazards that slow them down. For example: a forest of flowers tall as trees, where the thick growth and haze of pollen make visibility poor.
3. In the third, the players are meant to question whether they can trust each other. For example: swarms surround one player’s head like a halo, showing the bees favor them and not you.
4. The fourth ring focuses on monster attacks. For example: getting chased by giant soldier bees, wingless but aggressive and big as dogs.
5. In the final ring, the players learn only one of them will be able to leave with the treasure. Anyone who survives this long is expected to kill the others for that privilege.
A day later and I realize my explanation of the role of questions was inadequate.
DeleteThe GM should ask pointed, leading questions. You want to presuppose a conclusion and get the players to provide the evidence for that conclusion. A specific variant of this is called "painting the scene." When the players arrive at a new location, the GM poses a question to all of them. This question reveals a detail about the location, then asks what they perceive or experience that confirms it is true. Two of my favorite examples don't come from Trophy Dark, but from The Between.
When the players visit a mortuary while investigating a cosmetic surgeon turned serial killer: "Is there something beautiful in death? What do you see here that does or does not confirm this?"
And when they enter the attic of a haunted house: "How do you know the ghost is here with you right now?"
I appreciate you taking the time BurningHeron to give more information and sources for people looking to enhance their Delta Green storytelling. Thanks to your discussion of Trophy Dark, I’ve put the pdf on my DriveThruRPG wishlist, which functionally means I’ll buy it and get to it eventually. Also I have been listening to the Roleplaying Public Radio episodes of Trophy Dark, The Flocculent Cathedral, found here: https://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/2023/03/genre/horror/trophy-dark-the-flocculent-cathedral-part-1/ In the beginning of the first episode the storyteller uses the CATS framework you mentioned in your first comment.
DeleteIn your description of Moment from Trophy Dark, I am reminded of a passage in the very good Storytelling chapter in the second edition of Vampire the Dark Ages. In the Creating Mood and Atmosphere subsection on page 227 and 228, under the header Use Analogies, the Dark Ages book suggests to the Storyteller that if you wanted to create the mood of “fragile hope”, that you should use visual metaphors such as: two beggars warming their hands over a fire, or the silhouettes of young sweethearts kissing before they part for their separate ways. Minor details that set the scene rather than be plot points to be interacted with. I like how you describe moments as “environmental details or scenes in progress for the players to stumble onto.” I think that is a good technique to build mood.
Your description on how Trophy Dark handles Questions is really interesting in that the questions are more leading and pointed than I expected. Usually, I’m used to how Blades in the Dark has the storyteller pose general questions to the players for co-worldbuilding purposes; but “painting the scene” with questions that have a detail of the location/scene is a great technique I was not aware of. Hopefully these details help people who want to run and play Delta Green have a more enriched roleplaying experience.