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.

Permanent Injuries and Prosthetics in Delta Green

The Surgery skill doesn’t get enough love in Delta Green so I wrote this house rule for it.

Permanent injuries can be prevented with a Surgery test. This must take place before minutes equal to the victim’s CON score have passed since they were reduced to 2 HP or less. Success prevents the victim from developing a permanent injury. A critical success also restores 1D4 HP. If the Surgery test fails, the victim rolls CONx5 as normal. A fumble imposes a -20% penalty.

TOE-FAT COUNTRYSIDE: Session Six

Picking up right where we left off, the group parked their truck outside the quiet zone's perimeter and proceeded on foot. Soon, they had entered a strange world of fog and distorted sounds. Thanks to the Taylor's wilderness survival skills, the team was able to evade four Leng Spiders disguised as men and riding a fifth Leng Spider as a "horse" long enough to brace themselves for the arachnid cavalry charge. It was harrowing and chaotic, but everyone kept their cool and somehow no one got bit or hurt. 

Guest Post: The Prosecution Rules

I did some math relating to the prosecution rules (AH page 80), and found that due to a quirk of those rules, a trained lawyer using his 50% Law skill to work the system has next to zero impact on average. More surprisingly, using his main professional skill for its intended purpose actually puts him at a slight disadvantage.

As written, a character's attempt to make the legal system work in his favor uses a Law roll to generate a modifier to a Luck roll. If the Law roll crits, the Luck roll is made at +40%, a success makes it at +20%, a failure at -20%, and a fumble at -40%. On it's face this sounds fair, but for reasons we'll get to later it is actually quite unusual for DG.

TOE-FAT COUNTRYSIDE: Session Five (part 2)

The next morning, Big Bill made sure to arrive at ISI HQ as early as possible. When Akhtar Ghazali exited the building, he was waiting, leaning against a rented car and smoking a cigarette. When she drew closer, he offered a hand, "Hello, I'm special agent Fox Mulder and I think we have some common interests." Ghazali stared at him for a few seconds before plucking the cigarette out of his other hand and grinding it underfoot. Bill grinned, "Okay, but I do actually work with the American government and I think we should talk before anything bad happens to you." Jim drove the two of them back to her apartment. 

Names to Say, Ways to Pay

The Delta Green Handler’s Guide suggests that rituals may have different variants, each with their own ways to pay the cost. I decided to combine that idea with how the Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic for Call of Cthulhu has different names for nearly every spell in the book. Together, these should help Handlers keep rituals (and hypergeometry in general) fresh, even for experienced players or ones who have read the Handler’s Guide to run games of their own.

How I Use Inhuman Stat Tests in Delta Green

Delta Green has some monsters (and people) with stats outside of the normal human range of 3-18. Just using the rules in the Agent's Handbook makes resolving stat tests a bit weird when the stat in question is at 20 or higher. Fortunately, page 188 of the Handler's Guide has us covered: they succeed on all rolls except for 100, which fails and fumbles, and critically succeed when the dice match and if the result is less than or equal to their stat. I like this rule. It's elegant, and because of the way opposed tests work, it makes 20 CON different from 30 CON, since one is more likely to critically succeed.

TOE-FAT COUNTRYSIDE: Session Five (part 1)

Bill interrogated the two ISI agents using his red beard and faked accent via fluency in Chechen to pretend to be part of the Taliban. "Just because the big man is gone doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. Now tell me, why does the ISI care about a UFOlogist?" In the scenario, agents Mirza and Kalmati are written as unflappable and tight-lipped. But I figured the recent course of events was enough to shake them up. Mirza explained al-Zahabi had tipped them off to a downed aircraft in North Waziristan and that the higher ups were very interested. There were machinations going on, but the conspiracy didn't go all the way to the top. It was just a new project within the ISI, albeit a large one. Jim drove them to the hospital where Chester unceremoniously rolled the unconscious Kalmati out of the truck bed and onto the ground. As they drove away, they could see Mirza frantically making a few calls on his phone. Pretending to be Taliban was a smart move, as ordinarily the ISI agents tell al-Zahabi the CIA is looking for him and that he needs to get out of town.

TOE-FAT COUNTRYSIDE: Session Four

Over the past few months, I've slowly been running a Delta Green campaign for some friends in an attempt to finally run Iconoclasts. Glancy's new magnum opus suggests running it as a capstone for experienced Agents, and the pregens on offer all have two damaged veteran packages to match. But I thought it'd be more fun to manually put the Agents through the wringer. Plus I wanted to get to know them better so I could make Iconoclasts pop.

The campaign structure is an alternation between scenarios set domestically and ones set overseas, usually in the middle east. I'd already run them through tormsen's Enemy of the Tribes. Our cast consists of

• Jim Coake, an FBI agent focused on artifact smuggling.
• Gabriel Almeida, a very large FBI special agent
• Nelson 'Doc' Taylor, former navy medic, currently pursuing a new career at the CIA
• William 'Big Bill' Chester, a retired SEAL turned CIA Paramilitary Officer and communications expert.

Big Bill and Doc Taylor were already in Pakistan because of their jobs, while Jim and Gabriel were generously flown out on Delta Green's dime. A month ago, a team of Navy SEALs filled Osama Bin Laden with bullets. In the process, an encrypted flash drive containing an exchange between Bin Laden and the local Taliban was discovered. Once cracked, it contained enough hints of something spooky that Delta Green assigned a team to investigate.

ARCHINT: The Mi-Go Gravity Weapon

The Gravity Cone is an unassuming device, two irregular slabs of black metallic stone that just barely fit into a man's outstretched palm. Carefully tracing one's fingers over the surface or shining a light at an angle reveals a tapestry of razor thin squiggles carved into the material. Delicate hinges surround the edges, making it seem impossible to open.

Taking a rubbing of the etchings is difficult, but possible. Occult likens them to a specific crop circle design made by hovering spacecraft. Supposedly they're the impression left behind by an 'antigravity drive.' Archeology notes the similarity between one of the patterns and the seal of Antaeus. In one version of The Twelve Labors, he first challenged Herakles to lift his halteres, which were impossible for any mortal man to separate from the earth. History compares the alien symbols instead to a series of runes employed by Merlin in one version of the King Arthur legend. Rather than pulling a sword from an anvil (the stone was a later addition), he just picked it up. No one else could lift it because the runes on the anvil increased the sword's weight tenfold for the unworthy.

ARCHINT: The Abacus

From PLUNGE #3; art by Stuart Immonen, colors by Dave Stewart, letters by Deron Bennett

In my previous post, I mentioned a necromantic abacus as a possible artifact. Here's a writeup for it, more in line with mellonbread's game design philosophy.

Artifacts and Devices

The Watcher, from Brian Poor

Introduction

I don’t really like how Delta Green handles artifacts. The Handler’s Guide says that they allow characters to use rituals without having to make a Ritual Activation roll. You just pay the costs and apply the effects. It’s elegant in its simplicity and it’s not bad, but you end up with the odd situation where unnatural entities and 0 SAN NPCs have no reason to use artifacts. The former have a 99% chance to succeed on any given Ritual Activation roll, and the latter can just automatically activate them in the first place.

¹

Another issue is that sometimes "you automatically activate a ritual" doesn’t make sense for a specific artifact. Maybe it’s an alien weapon that you still have to aim in the right direction where we would normally call for an attack roll, or maybe it’s some inscrutable device that you can roughly puzzle out how to use with your human brain, something more suited to a skill check. Artifacts and rituals aren’t interchangeable in the fiction and they should be meaningfully distinct in the game too. 

The following framework isn’t intended as a complete replacement for the one in the Handler’s Guide. It’s meant as a tool for Handlers to use situationally. Sometimes using an artifact can be as simple as “pronounce the words carved into the amulet and pay the costs to activate the effect,” but sometimes it isn’t.

Whispers of the Dead (Shub-Niggurath)

 

Shub-Niggurath by Albert Che

The Ritual 

The operator must enter the wilderness and make a blood sacrifice on an altar. Stereotypically, this occurs in a dark, dense forest. However, those with skill in Anthropology or Archeology (or a high Occult rating) know that lush islands, bogs, and even grasslands are suitable. The only thing that matters is that the operator must not be able to see the sprawl of civilization. As such, more modern versions of this ritual suggest that the operator walk until they can't see whatever vehicle they traveled in anymore.

Whispers of the Dead (Yig)

 

Original Weird Tales illustration by Hugh Rankin

The Ritual 

The ritual must be performed in an area suited to snakes and reptiles, such as a swamp, jungle, or desert. The operator drapes one or more snakes over their body and traces curves and spirals into the muck, dirt, or sand with a staff carved or painted to look like a snake. They hum or hiss along to an odd melody played on the flute and drums. Those with Anthropology know that a digital recording will be sufficient. It's the sounds and the effect they have on the operator's mind that is important rather than the instruments or act of playing them.

Whispers of the Dead (Tsathoggua)

Tsathoggua (Artist Proof) by Liv Rainey-Smith

The Ritual 

The operator must first descend underground. In a subterranean chamber, they light candles, oil lamps, and bundles of incense until the air is thick with fumes. As the operator murmurs prayers to Saint Toad, they present their sacrifice and slit its throat. Then the gasses congeal into a hideous form. In a croaking voice, she introduces herself.

I am Tsathoggua, the god-bat of the Pnakotic Manuscripts and sleeping lord of black lightless N’kai. I brokered the secrets of the universe to wizard Eibon and have watched this world since before its veins of rock and fire were born.
My appetite is almost as boundless as my power, why have you awoken me from my slumber?

[Agent’s Name Here]–Reanimator

This made picking the tags tricky

INVESTIGATING HERBERT WEST

A basic look into Dr. West uncovers the tale of a man obsessed with defeating death. Instead of any explanation of his research, Agents only find reports of strange deaths and crimes like arson and grave-robbing that seem to follow West like a cloud of flies. A successful Bureaucracy, Criminology, or INT test suggests that there have been repeated attempts throughout history to suppress knowledge of his work. Books that mention him are checked out and never returned. His papers are damaged by mold and humidity in poorly kept archives, rarely digitized, lost in mysterious fires, and locked behind defunct security clearances that have yet to be declassified.

Whispers of the Dead (Glaaki)

Gla'aki by Davide L Marescotti

The Ritual 

The operator must stand at the edge of a natural body of freshwater, chest bared to the elements, after the sun has gone down. The operator thrusts a dagger into their chest and kneels in prostration to their new god. The surface of the water ripples as if disturbed by something large underwater before becoming eerily still. When the waters return to normal, the operator rises and removes the dagger from their chest, revealing a small bloodless hole. 

Crits and Fumbles for Rituals from The Conspiracy

 

The Conspiracy is a new book from Arc Dream which updates the original Delta Green sourcebook to the new standalone RPG rules. But you probably knew that already. In the appendix, there are some 'new rituals,' though technically they're conversions of old DG-relevant spells from CoC that didn't make it into the Handler's Guide. This continues my project of writing crits and fumbles for rituals from official published DG materials.

Running Out of Air

I think the rules for asphyxiation and holding your breath in the Agent’s Handbook are kind of weird. So I wrote this set of house rules to replace them.

If an Agent has time to take a deep breath, they can survive unharmed for turns equal to their CON plus their current HP. If they engage in strenuous activity, they must make a CON or Swim test or lose an extra turn of air.

If an Agent doesn’t have time to inhale, or runs out of air, they must roll CONx5 or Swim each turn as they asphyxiate. On a success, they lose 1 hit point, or 1D6 on a failure. This continues until they can breathe again or someone clears their airway with a First Aid test.

Any HP lost to suffocation is restored with a successful First Aid test¹. The +20% bonus from first aid kits still applies. If an Agent’s airway is blocked, the test to clear it also restores their HP. If the airway-clearing test fails, their medic can always try again on the next turn. They can either keep using First Aid, or change tactics and attempt a tracheotomy with Surgery. Reattempting a failed test with the same skill inflicts 1 damage on the patient. This damage persists after their airway is cleared and the HP lost to asphyxiation is healed.

If an Agent wants to get a Special Training in holding their breath like professional divers, they get a +20% bonus to all CON or Swim tests to hold their breath.

With these rules, the average person with 10 CON and 10 HP will last ~18 turns underwater. If we assume that a combat round is 6 seconds long on average (individual ones may be longer or shorter as the narrative demands), this is about 2 minutes, the standard figure for how long humans can go without air before falling unconscious and risking death. 

In the ideal circumstance (18 CON, 18 HP, and the special training) someone can last for 5 or 6 minutes without air. This might sound nuts, but compare it to the Bajau sea nomads in Southeast Asia who famously can remain underwater for 13 minutes at depths of up to 70 meters. Admittedly, they do this by puncturing their eardrums to equalize water pressure and by benefiting from a few genetic mutations that help them manage blood-oxygen levels.

1 Since the damage is technically temporary, being revived from 2 HP or lower may not require a CONx5 test for permanent injury. Though it definitely should if the Agent is left unattended for more than CON minutes or if the First Aid test fails.  ^↩

Crits and Fumbles for Rituals from Published Scenarios

After writing the original post, I considered doing the same thing for every other 'official ritual,' but put it off for a while. As of now, I've written up enough of them to show off. Obviously, spoilers for scenarios and campaigns follow, though I tried my best to put them in the order of when they were released. That way the more recent stuff is harder to accidentally read.

Currently, I have material written for Night Visions from Control Group, Hourglass, Impossible Landscapes, Iconoclasts, and Presence. I'll try to keep this list updated as new things are published, but it'll take a while. I can't read everything the second it comes out and others I'll be holding off on because I want to play in them.

Whispers of the Dead (Cthulhu)

 

cthulhu C by Francois Launet

The Ritual 

It can be performed anywhere. The operator only needs a special drink, chalk, some of their own blood, and time. The drink must be prepared before the chalk is even touched. There is no one specific recipe, it just has to be thick, foul, and psychoactive; for example: a mixture of honey, vinegar, coffee, and nutmeg spiced rum. The operator then uses the chalk to draw a complicated diagram of squares, circles, and lines. Once they begin, they cannot step outside the allotted area. It usually takes up 5 or 10 square meters, though operators skilled in Art or Science (Mathematics) can make do with smaller diagrams. Those with high ratings in both skills can get it down to a single square meter. 

Whispers of the Dead (Dagon and Hydra)

pixel art by Brian "ink" T

Mutable Godhood

The exact nature of Father Dagon and Mother Hydra's existence is unclear. Some say they're a pair of alien gods, some say they're just extremely powerful Deep Ones. Others claim this distinction is meaningless. The two leading theories are that they're either the ancient progenitors of the Deep One 'species,' or an aspirational future goal, when the children of the ocean become just like the Old Ones. 

Likewise, the ritual can be performed in two modes: communing with Dagon and Hydra as if they were Deep Ones of immense power or as if they were Great Old Ones in their own right. The only difference seems to be the operator's perspective on the matter and how willing they are to push through the boundaries of reality. If contacted as Deep Ones, the ritual costs 9 WP and 1D6 SAN. The operator gains an overarching sense of the Deep Ones' plans. Without a high or critical activation roll, the visions are mostly limited to wherever the operator performs the ritual, or the locale of whatever tradition they learned the ritual from. If they spend 1 POW, the operator contacts the pair as Great Old Ones and loses 1D8 SAN. They are overwhelmed with visions of the Deep Ones' past, present, and future.

ARCHINT: The Five-Sided Ankh

Last month, I ran a short scenario centered around an unnatural artifact. The scenario leaves the exact mechanics up to the Handler, so I thought I'd write them up, plus some spot rules for Raise From Essential Saltes. I recommend making Potemkin an archeologist of some sort and having journals from the dig he recovered the ankh at. They contain sketches and descriptions of the ankh enough for an Agent to guess at the later clues, but not draw any solid conclusions.

When an Agent wears the amulet for the first time, they lose 0/1D4 SAN from a brief moment of dissociation as they feel a wave of dry heat. Ask the the player if they want to shut it out (ie: project onto a Bond). What they learn from the vision depends on the amount of SAN lost after projection, if any.

Whispers of the Dead (Azathoth)

 

The Ritual

It must be conducted under the sky on a starry night. Attempting it on a rooftop in a city clogged with light pollution imposes a -10% penalty to the activation roll. The operator plays an atonal melody on a wind instrument, though no Art skill is needed. It's like a musical form of automatic writing. Most versions of the ritual include sheet music or instructions for writing your own. Part of learning the ritual is understanding that while great skill is required manipulate Azathoth's dreams, it is also completely irrelevant, as everything is destroyed as it comes in contact with His maelstrom of creation.

Whispers of the Dead (Masterpost)

The Premise

The Whispers of the Dead ritual can be used to contact an unnatural creature, but also a Great Old One or similar. However, there’s not much reason to do so. It’s a serviceable ‘contact spell,’ but the text tells the Handler outright that using it to commune with a god is basically useless. Additionally, the spell costs a point of permanent POW when used that way. Ordinarily, I'd rule the spell is more useful than the Handler's Guide suggests, like I do for a lot of other lackluster rituals. But it doesn’t feel right here. Gods should still maintain that air of mystery. 

My Proposal

Successfully activating a Whispers of the Dead (Great Old One) ritual leaves the operator with a vague sense of the Old One’s will and desires, but also marks them with a supernatural ability or characteristic as a fraction of the god’s power, a Boon. 

Crits and Fumbles for Rituals

The Premise

Magic, excuse me, hypergeometry, is supposed to be weird and scary. These rules exist to add a bit of mystery and tension to the existing mechanics of Ritual Activation rolls.

Basic Overview

Ritual Activation rolls critically succeed on a success with matching dice or a roll of 01. The operator loses the maximum amount of SAN listed for the ritual and the effect is stronger. Activation rolls fumble whenever they fail with matching dice or roll a 100 (00). This carries negative consequences dependent on the specific ritual activated. If a character spends a point of POW to force a connection to the unnatural, fumbles become critical successes. Assistants are partially insulated from the raw power of critical Ritual Activation rolls. They only roll for normal SAN loss and can roll INTx5 to avoid the negative effects of fumbles.

Ankhs but no Thanks - A Play Report

 

a plaster cast of the titular ankh

I ran Ankhs but no Thanks, a Delta Green scenario by mellonbread. The party consisted of:

Karina Lask, AKA 'Rowan,' a woman in her mid forties who still looked twenty-five thanks to a vampire bite that so far has had no other effects.

Sophie Walley, an actual twenty-something who worked for the CIA's Covert Influence Group who would look more at home on someone's Instagram feed.

They were told a coroner friendly in New Jersey had found something weird and wanted Delta Green to check it out. The coroner's office was a converted bungalow with a climate-controlled shipping container shoved through a hole in the wall. It served as a relatively more secure lockup and after sealing the gaps between the metal and the bungalow's drywall with insulation, it kept the office cold too. Despite the ramshackle nature of his workplace, Dr. Goldberg was a real doctor and kept his certificates framed on a wall. He showed the Agents over to his find.

The Stats Chamber: A Tool for Handlers

How This Came to Be

Sometimes when you're writing a scenario, you want to know exactly how dangerous an attack is to ensure a certain game experience. Maybe you've killed a bunch of Agents before with situations you thought were relatively safe and want to avoid making the same mistake. Maybe the narrative pacing requires an enemy dangerous enough to command attention but not so dangerous that it wipes the party. In either case, you have some math to do so you can make an informed decision on what damage to use.

2022 Shotgun Scenario Contest Reviews

I managed to review 51 of the 53 scenarios submitted to this year's Delta Green shotgun scenario contest. But it's okay, because I didn't really understand the last two scenarios and didn't have anything important to say about them.