Unknown Armies: Mack "the Knife" Heathrow - Avatar of The Highwayman

No one knows where exactly Mack came from. Some say he was a famous mob boss who got bored of being in charge, faked his own death, and then used magick to change every aspect of his appearance. Maybe he's a disgraced godwalker, who hid rather than try to reclaim his symbolic throne after getting kicked out of the statosphere. His strange accent and outdated slang might also point to potential time travel. The only thing anyone knows for sure is that he drove into town one day on a Harley, robbed a bank, and then invited everyone for a round of drinks at the bar two blocks down.

Whispers of the Dead (Nyarlathotep)

Nyarlathotep Triptych by Jens Heimdahl

The Ritual

Contacting the Crawling Chaos is deceptively simple. You just need to distinguish yourself from the rest of the ants somehow. It's the purest expression of the principle behind Delta Green's Ritual Activation rules. You have to be willing to break away from the dull reality of the herd, and those with the lowest SAN and highest Unnatural scores are the best at that.

Unknown Armies: The Highwayman (new archetype)

Attributes: The Highwayman lives on the margins of society. If there’s something they want, they take it. Sometimes they correct social injustice by appropriating wealth from people who hoard it through dishonorable means. Other times they’re social parasites that prey on people who have nothing. Sometimes they’re social parasites who inexplicably acquire reputations as Robin Hood-style characters.

Like the Two Faced Man, the name Highwayman is a holdover and not restricted to one sex. Some female avatars call themselves “Outlaws” instead.

The path of a Highwayman typically ends before they reach a high Avatar score. They either get caught, get killed, or retire and taboo into normalcy.

TOE-FAT COUNTRYSIDE: Session Eight

When Jim and Taylor left the Abu-Ghraib prison complex, they had a message waiting for them: there's another Khawla sitting in a Baghdad police station. The two sped off to snatch her up before, in their case officer's words, it "ends up on the front page of Al-Jazeera."

ARCHINT: The Ring of the Defiler

It's pale yellow with a tinge of green and shaped like a cupped hand. Your finger goes through a hole in its center, ringed with little wedges etched into the 'palm.' The words "if you take the pain/no one will take you." are etched onto the back of the miniature hand's fingers in ancient Greek along with a series of nonsense letters. It's hard to make out, but the hand is wearing an even smaller version of the ring. If worn properly, it transmutes mental pain into physical. 

TOE-FAT COUNTRYSIDE: Session Seven

For the next scenario, I decided to have one of my friends run Jessica's Bodies, or more accurately, Khawla's Bodies, as they 'ported' it to Iraq, right after the US pulled out.

The group's case officer briefed them on the situation. Two parents refused to accept the bloody corpse they found in their apartment was their daughter, Samira. The Iraqi police tested her DNA and found she was an exact match for a woman who had been killed by her ex-boyfriend a few weeks ago, Khawla Rahim. They chalked this up to shoddy labwork and asked the remaining Americans to double-check their work. They got the same result.

Looking Upon the Face of a Dead God: the aftermath of a 1D10/1D100 SAN test

art from Lovecraft: The Blasphemously Large First Issue by Daniel Govar and Mat Lopes

In Delta Green, if a Great Old One makes a big enough appearance in the game for you to have to make a SAN roll, the game's usually over. But sometimes it's not the end. Maybe a Shan only briefly exposed your mind to Azathoth as a punishment, or like Johansen, you ram Cthulhu in the face with a steamboat, who understandably decides to go back to sleep. You've still lost 1D10, 1D20, or 1D100 SAN, which is an awful lot. Just because Yog-Sothoth didn't let the Old Ones break through and trample all over the earth doesn't mean you survived. There's a good chance you're babbling at 0 SAN or some other number low enough for an exit from field work. In this post, I'm going to crunch the numbers to find the probabilities of the different results of a 1D10/1D100 or 1D20/1D100 SAN test.

Whispers of the Dead (Y'golonac)

 

The Ritual

You don't contact the Defiler like you do other Great Old Ones. There's no set of steps to follow. Instead, each transcription of the ritual is a different story of how an individual sank into depravity before eventually meeting the infamous Great Old One. When reading a tome, Occult and Unnatural indicate that this narrative is the ritual.