Rolling up a Wizard for Begone, FOE!

One of my friends, mellonbread, wrote up a dungeoncrawling game. If you follow the blog, you've seen me mention it before. I've been helping him turn it into a complete system by writing up a bestiary. Most of my inspiration was drawn from B/X, though I grabbed some cool monsters from AD&D and other editions and retroclones. A lot of these monsters are people, or rather, humans with class levels. 

This poses a particular problem for magic-users, as their spell selections are to be determined randomly. Lots of other games make this pretty easy. A wizard has a number of spells of a certain level that they can cast per day. You consult the table and roll up the appropriate amount of spells. WotC made it even simpler in 5e by giving archmages and priests set spell lists in their statblocks.

However, that doesn't work for Begone. There aren't any spell slots per day of a certain level. It's more vancian than any TSR or WotC edition of D&D ever was. The more powerful you are, the more powerful spells you can hold in your head. This could either by one big spell, a lot of little spells, or a mix of something in between. So how do we decide what "loadout" a wandering wizard has?

Top Hat's Home Delta Green Campaign: Session Seventeen

This one's been a long time coming, but to be honest, I just kinda forgot about it for a while.

The team decided they needed to scope out the compound first. And what better way to do that than to seduce the reverend. Sadie hit him up with a booty call and said she'd bring two of her friends. The reverend was excited and gave Sadie, Barbara, and Gina a tour of the place. Using Demolitions and Stealth, Gina picked out two spots for the two IEDs she'd created with Barbara's help. One was hidden in the living quarters to cause general chaos and destruction while the other was planted on the wall of the radio station. The latter was supposed to punch a hole in the wall and fence to make it easier for the team to get into the building.

Sadie lied and said she had to use the bathroom and so Father Gauss-Wernstrom took her out to the outhouse that they'd hooked up to a septic tank. This was to cover for Gina while she placed the IED inside the radio station. The reverend was expecting some sort of outdoor sex situation, which it eventually turned into. He left his hand-radio on one of the tables inside. Gina and Barbara figured it was important, but forgot to do anything about it. After that, Gina and Barbara lied that they weren't feeling well and everyone went home.

Bears Fruit Dungeon Review

 Woah, what's this, top hat? A post about an OSR game? We thought you'd totally abandoned the Old School Renaissance for Delta Green.

My internet friend Jojiro wrote a solo module called Bears Fruit and people thought it was pretty cool. I also thought it was pretty cool and decided to review it since no one else had. Also my blog was in some desperate need of some Spears-related content. You can find Joji's blog, Dungeon Antology, in the sidebar of this one! There's some cool stuff there.

Top Hat's Home Delta Green Campaign: Session Sixteen

Now with the whole group (and mom hat) double vaccinated, we could all meet up in the hat basement for rpg funtimes. We ate some pasta and brownies and went downstairs to pick up where we left off.

SESSION SIXTEEN

The team drove out to the land of cell reception and found that the Free-Life Temple's next 'healing session' was due in a week. They asked for a Home scene which seemed like a bit of a stretch, but I said they could check off any skills they could plausibly train in the meantime. Sadie, of course, spent the week trying to get closer to Fox Tox.

The church bus drove out to another county and set up shop with a big tent in an abandoned lot. Gina stayed in the jeep to provide overwatch while Barbara, Ren, and Sadie hung around the back of the crowd. The reverend gave a normal sort of service with the usual deviations one might expect from a faith-healing sect. Ren didn't note anything too out of the ordinary with Anthropology, nothing about star people or crystals that one might expect to find out here in Montana. 

Top Hat's Home Delta Green Campaign: Session Fifteen

With all of us having had at least one dose of the vaccine (and two of them being in the same bubble) and Blue's roommates being out of the apartment, we decided to meet up in person to rekindle some of the excitement of the campaign. It was a bit awkward sitting in the four furthest corners of the largest room with the sound of wind and traffic coming through an open window, but it was nice. Most importantly, I brought props! They now had an envelope to tear open "IN EVENT OF POSITIVE TEST" and a spray bottle to spray. We jokingly declared that you had to be holding the bottle if your character had it and any sprays had to be both in and out of character. I forgot that the bottle still had a bit of water in it and we almost sprayed the cat.

SESSION FIFTEEN

Once again, my players surprised me with their recall of the previous session and we picked up where we left off after just a few minutes of recollection and shitposting. The latter would be a great theme throughout the night and the primary reason why we didn't get much done.

An Analysis of the "Defensive Properties" of Creatures in Delta Green

WARNING: This post sort of contains spoilers for some creatures and mechanics in the Handler's guide. If you wish to remain unspoilt as an Agent, read no further.

Delta Green is filled with various critters, some unnatural, and some completely mundane. However, all of them usually have what the Handler's Guide calls a "Defensive Property." This blogpost exists to expand upon the "Creating Your Own Unnatural Threats" chapter. I think it's a good resource, but it glosses over the finer details of DPs, plus I have my own bones to pick with a few of them.

Top Hat's Home Delta Green Campaign: Sessions Thirteen and Fourteen

With Matiopia busy doing things with her family and Winkdeath busy doing...something, I was left with only one player, Blue. Fortunately, when I suggested a solo session she jumped at the chance. I deliberated between running mellonbread's Rehab or ChiefMcClane's Now You See Me with some additions from Br1t15h. I'd run both scenarios before and both as solo ops (as the latter was initially playtested with three players) but opted to go for the latter, as Agent Leonard's skills were better suited to finding its clues.

Stealth and Surprise in Begone, FOE!

 So one of my internet friends wrote up a system because he was tired of adding house rules to B/X but still wanted something that could run "old school content." I've played in it a whole bunch and I think it's pretty neat. In fact, right now, I'm working on some stuff I intend to run in the system.

This is the Surprise Table, as of revision eight, at least.

Roll	Result
1-4	Monsters alerted to players’ presence, players unaware
5-10	Monsters and players fail to detect each other and “surprise” each other
11-16	Monsters and players both detect each other at the same time
17-20	Players alerted to monsters’ presence, monsters unaware

Top Hat's Home Delta Green Campaign: Session Twelve

After an annoyingly long hiatus, my friends and I were finally able to coordinate our schedules for another game night. We briefly covered the new errata while catching up on each other's lives and jumped right back in. They remembered a surprising amount of the situation and quickly put together a plan. Sadie would lie in wait beside the building, Ren would hide in the car, shotgun at the ready, while Hopps would actually confront Rupert. After exchanging a few pleasantries, Hopps asked if Rupert would mind stepping outside, as she had some "sensitive information to discuss."

She started off by telling him that despite his claims, Gita had been seen around his diner. In fact, she had a witness who said they thought they saw Gita killed behind the building. Rupert feigned concern as Hopps continued to push, getting closer and closer to an accusation.

    "I know you know something about this. What happened to her?"

    "Why, my darling, the same thing that's going to happen to you..."

Top Hat's Home Delta Green Campaign: Sessions Ten and Eleven (probably)

SESSION TEN

After leaving The Diner, the group headed towards The Church. As they opened the doors, they were greeted by the pulsing sound of EDM and vapor pooling at their feet. Confused but intrigued, they stepped inside. The group immediately split up, Ren on the hunt of a mysterious movement he saw up in the rafters, Sadie wanting to surveil the patrons, while Hopps wanted to check out the bar.

Hopps met the bartender, Frast, who explained that he and his wife, Fia, ran the establishment. Hopps noted that his long limbs and digits bore signs of Marfan Syndrome, but that his torso was too short for that to make any sense. Ren tried to sneak upstairs, but was stopped by one of Fia's children. He found a back entrance and a spare uniform which he used to disguise himself and check out the basement. There he found the mysterious portal. After shedding his disguise, he met up with the other Agents at the bar and took them to the back entrance. As soon as Hopps heard about a magical portal, she rushed on in. Ren told Sadie to make a distraction on the dance floor and ran in after Hopps.

Top Hat's Home Delta Green Campaign: Session Nine (probably)

Despite the OSR-styled name, I guess this is more of a Delta Green blog, though I do have some D&D-adjacent things planned. This post is an account of the most recent session of the DG campaign I've been running. The players are two of my friends from High School and one of their brothers, who I guess is my friend too, now. I'm writing this mostly to keep track of what happens but also in case anyone is interested.

 The group consists of three Agents, all FBI employees.

• Sadie, a federal agent who specialized in crime scene analysis. (blue98)
  
• Ren, part of the FBI's counterintelligence division, an intelligence case officer with a psych degree. (Winkdeath)
  
• Hopps, former Intel & Ops Support Section, now graduated to fieldwork, also the group's senior Agent and designated "wizard character." (Matiopia)

Analyzing Delta Green's Monsters via Average Damage Output (and other things)

This post will be a little outside my usual repertoire. For those of you who don’t know, my other RPG of choice besides a mishmash of OSR titles (and whatever home-brew I happen to be toting around at the time) is Delta Green. The Handler’s Guide has a monster manual of sorts and in the interest of laying bare the mechanical underpinnings of games, I now tackle the average damage outputs.

But before I get to the actual “math,” I need to decide how I’m going to deal with the Lethality mechanic. It’s a common feature among unnatural beasties but the trick is that it doesn’t deal HP damage like everything else. It just reduces your HP to zero, ignoring armor, basically killing you. Even the one spell in the game that might complicate this with magical armor doesn’t. If you have a single point of Armor from Exaltation of the Flesh, you’re immune to successful Lethality rolls, taking normal HP damage. However, there is a handy part of the rule: successful Lethality rolls ignore Armor. So rather than treating it as infinite damage, I can instead treat it as 18 damage, enough to kill even the toughest Agent from full health. A quick glance at the back of the Handler’s Guide also shows that this still roughly works for all mundane creatures that still interact with this part of the Lethality mechanic. The others that have significantly more than 18 HP take flat damage to the Lethality rating, thus sidestepping the problem. 

The fact that successful Lethality rolls ignore body armor can be represented by thinking that these average damage values have a Lethality% chance to ignore body armor. Or on the scale of averages, only (100-Lethality)% of your body armor actually applies.

However, Lethality doesn’t always ignore Armor. If you have Cover, which also gives you Armor, the Lethality roll automatically fails and deals normal HP damage. So wherever it’s appropriate, I’ll be splitting the average damage of Lethality attacks into “against Cover” and “not against Cover.” Other relevant considerations like Armor Piercing and whether or not the attack should be able to used to Fight Back will also be notated. I’ll also be including Lethality ratings to put perspective on things.

Agents read no further I guess?