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| Example sovereign citizen licence plate by Merrrittt - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Delta Green (DG) has a wealth of quality fan created adventures and material. The shotgun scenario contest, which has been run annually for 20 years, alone has generated approximately one thousand adventures.
The problem is my home game yearns for the simpler gangster era of the 1920s, rather than the messy spycraft of the late 90s. So, what is a Handler to do? Adapt, evolve, and change. The adventure that is.
First of all, my players are all veteran Call of Cthulhu (CoC) investigators and wanted that era. I am more comfortable with Delta Green’s systems, so I pitched a CoC game with DG mechanics and they agreed to that. DG and CoC are both based on Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying d100 system, so the transition mechanically was not hard.
The next issue is that I wanted to run some of the DG adventure gems I was familiar with in the world of 1920’s Prohibition era. Specifically, I had a four-hour session coming up and I wanted to run the award-winning (2020’s contest) DG shotgun scenario The (Un)Natural Man by Bird Bailey. GMs, please read the scenario before continuing. It is short.
** Players please avert your eyes. Spoilers for The (Un)Natural Man will follow. **
Here was the trouble. As awesome and compact as this adventure was, the adventure hinges on the main character, Elroy McIntyre, being a sovereign citizen.
The sovereign citizen movement believes, generally, that all government statues do not apply to them unless they consent. The way you access sovereign citizen powers is through pseudo-legal mumbo-jumbo which includes writing down certain statements on legal documents. Also, importantly for the adventure, sovereign citizens hate taxes and do not believe the government can legally take money from them.
Sovereign citizens show up in the US around the 1970s. My players wanted a Prohibition era 1920s game.
The (Un)Natural Man scenario summary
First, I will explain the plot of the scenario.
In The (Un)Natural Man, Elroy McIntyre wants to avoid paying taxes, divorce payments, etc. and thus purchased a pamphlet filled with instructions and a ritual for separating his real self (Elroy original) from his legal self (Elroy fictional) by giving his True Name to a God. Unfortunately for Elroy original, the ritual purchased was real and summoned Nyarlathotep, in the guise of The Black Man, whom Elroy original struck an infernal bargain with. As a result of putting his True Name in The Black Man’s book, Elroy original got his wish of being immune from taxes and alimony. However, since Elroy original sacrificed his True Name, Nyarlathotep created Elroy fictional, a perfect copy of Elroy original except a Hunting Horror in disguise, designed to kill Elroy original and take his place in the real world. The reason for Nyarlathotep’s creation of Elroy fictional is uncertain and done for inscrutable cosmic reasons, but I suggest Nyarlathotep did it because He thought it would be funny.
The completion of the ritual leads to Elroy original getting blackout drunk from the horror of the ritual, waking up to Elroy fictional being present, being physically assaulted by Elroy fictional, attempting to fight back and kill Elroy fictional, both Elroys being arrested by the police for a domestic disturbance, and now both Elroys accusing the other of being an imposter while nursing an epic hangover in a police holding cell.
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| One story that inspired Liam Myrkr. Available here |
Adding a new character: Liam Myrkr, cultist-lawyer
Ok. Having said all that, I asked the author of the scenario if they had any ideas about converting the game from the modern era to the 1920s, given that there were no sovereign citizens in the 1920s.
The author suggested that Elroy McIntyre may have fallen for a bad legal advice scam and now he was crazy.
I turned the idea that Elroy had been suckered by bad legal advice into a character. A Nyarlathotep cultist-lawyer, to be specific, who arrived at a discovery of the Mythos from delving into the law, religion, and accounting. This cultist-lawyer was responsible for drafting and selling the ritual to Elroy. Since one of my players chose the Swedish language at 40%, I made the cultist-lawyer Swedish and named him Liam Myrkr. The name was an Easter egg meaning literally “Light Darkness” as a Haunter in the Dark reference.
In the original The (Un)Natural Man scenario there was an NPC lawyer Al Silverstein. The purpose of that lawyer NPC was to be a vehicle to inform the players about crank sovereign citizen theory necessary to the plot, and convey that Elroy McIntyre original got into a scuffle behind a local diner in his past, thus establishing that Elroy is pugilistic curmudgeon. I decided to move those clues from the character of Al Silverstein into the notes and files of Liam Myrkr.
Importantly I made the decision to have Liam Myrkr not reachable as an interrogatable character. I took a page from Dreams in the Witch House and had Myrkr disappear to unnatural parts unknown by carving the Gate spell into the corner of the bedroom of his apartment. This allowed the players to gradually discover Myrkr through his writings and annotations found in his law office and home.
Specifically, I added three clues at Liam’s law office to illuminate the purpose and nature of the ritual sold to Elroy original.
The first clue was information about making pacts with God through the law (in a bizarre interpretation of the Magna Carta) and pacts with otherworldly Beings through trade or an exchange of one’s life/soul/True Name. I put these details as annotations in the book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) by Margaret Murray which was discoverable in Myrkr’s office library.
The second clue I added was contained in a French Bible (one of my players chose French as a language) as more annotations. These annotations stated, that the Catholic God was not the real God, and cross references between God and the US and Swedish law. Also, there were musings about the fundamentals of the law based on Catholicism, pacts, trade, and Gods.
The third clue was in Liam’s accounting notes. It discussed people owing money to the state, odd mathematical gibberish about taxes, the soul, blood, what “one owes to God,” one’s True Name, and separation from worldly legal taxes or financial responsibilities to the government.
The purpose of these clues was to lead the players to a scenario resolution where they could get rid of Elroy fictional by having Elroy original reclaim his True Name from Nyarlathotep by signing a contract with the US government or the Catholic God. More on that in the resolution section.
Adding a new character: Wilma McIntyre, estranged wife
In addition to Liam Myrkr, I added Elroy’s estranged wife, Wilma McIntyre as a character. I added her to tell the players that Elroy did not have any twins, brothers or cousins that looked like him. This was to remove the possibility in the player’s minds that Elroy fictional was a natural human and have them consider unnatural possibilities.
Also, an important clue Wilma conveyed was that she had been pressing her claim for community property in California (California had community property laws back in the 1920s) for 5 months since the divorce, and then mysteriously dropped the claim and did a complete reversal saying that she no longer wanted her half of Elroy’s property and money.
The reason for Wilma dropping the case was that Elroy successfully executed the ritual giving away his True Name and obtaining his wish of immunity from alimony from Nyarlathotep. Wilma was now under the magical influence of Elroy’s ritual, and her sudden reversal made the players very suspicious of what Elroy original had done in the days prior to Elroy fictional showing up.
I also positioned Wilma “off camera” by having her in Florida with her mother and only reachable by phone. This limited the party’s interaction with her and allowed me to suggest that Wilma only had two clues and otherwise was an investigative dead end.
Additional changes and 1920s Tax Law
One important change was that I made Elroy a landowner (small plot of land with a two-story house) in Castaic in outskirts of LA county. I did this so that it was clear Elroy had the resources for legal recourse incase players got frustrated and tried to use physical methods to get to the truth of who was the real Elroy. Which would not have worked anyway because Elroy original was the real one, and Elroy fictional had access to all of Elroy original’s memories and motivations.
Another change I made was to change Tony Linetti into Elroy’s gardener rather than Elroy’s landlord. Tony Linetti’s clue about there being no breaking and entering to the Elroy house remained the same. Also, he served as another source of the information that the party could receive from Wilma McIntyre, namely that Elroy had no twins, brother or cousins that looked like him.
So how did I deal with the main issue that sovereign citizens do not show up in the USA until the 1970s? Well, I decided to sidestep the issue. By looking into taxes.
I leaned into the idea that Elroy was a drunk who has gotten increasingly crazy over the years and hated the high taxes that had been issued post WWI.
Let’s talk about tax law in California in the 1920s.
For reference, individuals and businesses in California were subject to the federal income tax, which saw significant rate reductions during that decade. In 1920-1921, the top marginal rate was 73% (on income over $1,000,000). In 1922-1923, the top marginal rate on that same level of income was reduced to 58%. Lower income brackets also saw reductions, with the lowest marginal rates falling from 4-11% in 1921 to 1.5-5% from 1925-1931.
Now I’ll be honest, I got this information from the google AI summary. I like my readers but my mind slides right off things like tax law so I didn’t do a deep dive and verify any of this.
Even though the tax rate was dropping, Elroy was still a hoary chestnut and wanted to weasel out of his taxes. The high tax rate and the community property Wilma was demanding from his divorce were the two main motivations for Elroy to find Liam Myrkr and execute the ritual that summoned Nyarlathotep.
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| By Iohn Wright, Public Domain |
One of the ways to resolve the scenario is to get Elroy original to reclaim his True Name by willingly signing himself over to some form of government authority.
I modified this resolution end point by allowing Elroy original to also reclaim his True Name if he willingly signed a document rejoining himself to another God, specifically the Catholic God.
In the Liam Myrkr section, I had introduced three clues that suggestively pointed to the idea that one could reclaim one’s True Name (or do the reverse) by making pacts/contracts with Gods or the government.
I thought all three clues would help make it clear that Elroy would need to reclaim his Name legally by signing a contract with the US government or the Catholic God in order to get out of the previous ritual contract with Nyarlathotep.
This was not obvious to the players at the penultimate portion of the game and I had to prompt them a bit. I was reading the Three Clue Rule by The Alexandrian again recently and realized I violated the Corollary: Proactive Clues A.K.A Bash Them On the Head With It. I should have been clearer and more direct.
In retrospect, the players and I were pressed for time at the end and I accepted Elroy signing a contract with “God” in general as breaking the previous Mythos contract. When Elroy original signed the contract, Elroy fictional disappeared in a crack of unseasonable thunder and a scream from a room on the other side of the cell block.
Honestly, I have some misgivings with this conclusion because the Catholic God has no power in Lovecraft’s Mythos, but I did not really specify which God Elroy was making a new contract with either. Lesson learned for next time.
The following are my post-game musings.
I think putting Liam Myrkr and Wilma McIntyre off camera this focused the attention of the party back on Elroy once they realized there was no cultist to intimidate, which was a good thing! One player was trying to get a reaction out of Elroy saying that the OTHER Elroy was going to remarry Wilma because he wasn’t a drunk and was a better Elroy than him. This led to both Elroys breaking down into blubbering messes, because Elroy fictional was part of the original Elroy’s Jungian Shadow and I played them both as sad and regretful drunk assholes.
Another gem by the players as they tried to get to the truth, was threatening the Elroys with “being put at the bottom of the LA reservoir if you don’t tell us what’s going on.” It was a darkly comical opening move and I think inspired by the film L.A. Confidential. Naturally, it made the Elroys more frightened and belligerent.
After the game I explained the original plot of The (Un)Natural Man to the players. One player found the premise of the Elroys and the sovereign citizen elements interesting and different from most CoC games. My other player keyed into the idea of the scenario being inspired by Doctor Faustus once the Elroy was discussing signing a contract with “Someone” or “some God.”
A good time was had by all in about 4-5 hours of gameplay. Thanks to Bird Bailey for writing The (Un)Natural Man.
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