With the new year we decided to pick up our campaign with the hope of finally getting to play Iconoclasts. As I am still working to prep a few things I asked one of my friends to run a couple scenarios for the group. This week they ran a modified version of In Darkness We Wait set in Afghanistan. Since I didn’t know anything about this scenario I actually got to play as an Agent this week. I’ll leave the rest of the explanation to the Handler.
—
Background
Long ago a Mi-Go crashed in the Afghan mountains. Ever since it has scraped by, surviving its horrific injuries only by cannibalizing body parts of locals. It is not a good solution and the grafts never last long. The Mi-Go needs a constant supply of people to harvest brought to it by its human agents. The latest subjects, however, were American contractors and one survived long enough to get off a sat phone call about being attacked by a ghost. Delta Green chases that rabbit down a hole.
This Week's Cast
Jim Coake, FBI agent and sole member of the core team.
CW2 Elia Ruiz, a special operations SIGINTer played by Top Hat and sole fluent Pashto speaker.
SSgt Pete Adams, an All-American cornfed pararescueman filling the role of team medic.
After Action Report
I set this adventure in late 2014 and opened with a little summary of world events to help everyone in time and place. President Obama has announced the end of the combat mission in Afghanistan, but tens of thousands of American troops remain. This April’s presidential election nearly tore the fragile nation apart with the north threatening secession over allegations of vote rigging to ensure a Pashto candidate won. ISIS has swept to power across Iraq and Syria. This June they conquered Mosul and proclaimed themselves a Caliphate. To spark some rp and make sure this tied back into the campaign with only one core cast member, I asked Jim how felt being stuck in Afghanistan as a Gulf specialist watching this all go down, and how he felt going on an operation on his own.
We then cut to the Agents assembling at Bagram Air Field for their briefing. Two days ago Laura Michaels, a grad student working for a USGS research team in Afghanistan, called her mother from her sat phone claiming she’d been attacked by a ghost. Laura’s mother spent the next two days screaming at anyone she could get to listen in hopes of finding out what was going on. Eventually it made its way to Delta Green. Laura was clearly in a state of shock and spent most of the phone call crying for her mom, so the Case Officer thought there was a high chance it was a bullshit mission but wanted to pursue it just in case.
Laura was in Afghanistan conducting a survey of mineral deposits and helping to identify possible mining sites. She filed a plan for a visit to Kateb Khel, a remote mountain village in North Eastern Afghanistan, a few days before the phone call to her mother and the call was geo located to a spot a few miles north of the village. Before hanging out the gang wanted to learn as much as possible about this mission. I handled this by separating out the info dump across a few scenes, so that even if little happened between the moments the Players still didn’t get one continuous stream of info from a single source.
At Bagram the Players learned that Laura was travelling with a security contractor named Wayne Jefferies. The Players fairly exhaustively checked out Jefferies and ruled that he was clean and as reliable as they could figure without meeting him. They got photos and descriptions of both so they could ID a body if they found one. They also did a surface level dive into Afghan mineral deposits and learned that Laura was probably investigating ore deposits, most likely gold, rather than gemstones. The Case Officer promised to get ahold of Laura’s previous reporting and put the team in contact with the head of the USGS survey team.
The team flew by helicopter to a US special operations base up north where they took the call from Laura’s boss. He confirmed Laura had a good track record, no history of interpersonal problems and the same was true for Wayne. They learned her project was to confirm the locations of known or suspected mineral deposits and identify the most promising candidates for exploitation. In her proposal for her last trip Laura made the case Kateb Khel had a great deal of potential.
Hyperspectral imaging showed gold ore on the surface around the village and suggested more was in the ground. Other data suggested a large concentration of other metals usually not found together and a subterranean system of tunnels or caves. Hearing this Pete Adams’s player correctly guessed it was a crashed spaceship and the gold on the surface was a debris field. Laura also documented evidence of continuous artisanal mining in the area as long as she could find records and most importantly pointed to a Soviet plan to open a mine on the site. It seemed that the Soviets had got so far as to set up prefab buildings and bring in an engineering crew before something went terribly wrong and they gave up the project amidst the collapsing security situation. Laura hoped the equipment on site could make standing up a new effort substantially cheaper and more realistic.
The gang tried to do some research into the Soviet mining efforts, but lacking Russian language capability google translate could only get them so far. Laura had cited a 1990s Russian horror film about the incident as what turned her on to the location and searching for that on VK found a few veteran’s and history buff’s comments. The general pattern seemed to be a trickle of disappearances (thought to be Mujahideen attacks or maybe desertions) and then a huge loss of life in the mine either from a disaster or some kind of sabotage.
They got some imagery of the area and poured over it. Kateb Khel looked like hardly even a village, just a few mud walled family compounds, maybe 50 to 100 people. About four miles north, higher up the mountain, there was a flattened patch with about three structures and slightly above that another flattened area with a couple more. Assuming this was the Soviet mine the Players with Military Science (Land) deduced that this would be a pretty defensible position and it was unlikely to have simply been overrun by Mujahideen, adding weight to the idea whatever happened to the engineers happened in the mine.
The Players decided they had done enough research and it was time to put boots on the ground. To get to Kateb Khel the Players talked their way into hitching a ride with a movement of US and Afghan troops headed in generally the same direction, their vehicle would simply peel off and head down the road to the village as they passed it. The group arrived in the evening, there was little activity on the streets but the lights were on in the biggest and most centrally located building so they went there.
As they got closer they heard voices, very loud and angry voices, and walked in on a full blown argument. As best as Elia could make out one man was shouting about his son and the need to do something to another man in some kind of position of power and who she assumed was a religious figure was doing his best to mediate without stepping on toes.
The gang pulled the gaggle apart, Elia took Karim, the angry father, while the other two stayed with the main group. The religious man turned out to speak a little English and introduced himself as Farhad, the village’s Imam, the other man was Hassam the Malik or village chief. This was not a full Shura with all the village’s elders, but they were clearly trying to adjudicate something.
Jim and Pete immediately launched into asking about Laura, while Elia tried to build rapport with Karim and generally shuffled around playing translator. In short order they learned that Laura and Wayne had been in town a few days ago, asking about the mine to the north. Mullah Gulyar, a travelling religious scholar, who spends much of his time in isolation up at the mine agreed to take the pair up there and show them around. There was a distinct air that though everyone respected the Mullah, no one actually liked him. They also learned that the mine had an ominous reputation, the people who worked it before the Soviets were not highly skilled or respected but those who could find any other way to earn.
Karim was shouting that his son, Omar, was missing and that Karim believed he’d gone to the mines with the Mullah. Karim was also very adamant that he thought Gulyar was a sick, old man with questionable religious education and possibly as questionable sanity. He didn’t ascribe any nefarious intent to the Mullah, but was simply terrified by the prospect of anyone, let alone an infirm man leading his son around an open mine at night. This would not be the first time someone had gone up to pray with Gulyar, “gone off to study in a madrassa”, and never returned.
Karim agreed to help the Players find Laura if they helped him Omar, so they all decamped back to Karim’s. Over some chai the Agents learned that while Karim had called Gulyar an old man, they are about the same age, but Gulyar’s illness has aged him prematurely. Pete wouldn’t put his money on a diagnosis from a second hand description of symptoms without any actual examination, but it sure did sound like cancer. As his sickness had got worse, Gulyar’s beliefs and behavior had gotten stranger and more people had got lost or “gone to a madrassa”. Karim also revealed that Gulyar wasn’t some out of towner, but grew up in Kateb Khel with a poor family before he had a religious conversion and went ‘somewhere’ for education.
We also had one of the funnier moments I’ve seen at the gaming table during this sequence. While Elia was making tea with Karim’s wife, Karim went on a rant about how the Taliban would have sorted out Gulyar long ago and spit on the ground. Jim hearing ‘Taliban’ and seeing Karim spit began vehemently agreeing and giving two big thumbs up, just as Elia walked in and had to backtrack the strong message of support for the Taliban.
Everyone set off to the mine and began to sweep through the lower plateau. Tucked behind what looked like a prefab bunkhouse was a truck Karim said belonged to the Mullah. From inside they heard a low continuous thumping and saw it rocking on its suspension. When they pulled open the boot they found Omar tied hand and foot, setting just about everyone into a murderous mindset.
Elia asked Omar what happened and he explained Gulyar had hit him over the head and tied him up, mumbling about how they would go on a trip out past Pluto to meet god. As Elia debriefed the kid with his father, the rest of the team combed out searching for the Mullah. Jim spotted something on the road back to town. It turned out to be Gulyar, trying to sneak away down the winding path. Jim leapt from his ledge and landed spread-eagled on top of the Mullah.
The old man begged for his life and explained that there was an ancient evil he had been keeping at bay in one of the mining tunnels. He claimed he could no longer fight it, and that the Agents should enter and do battle with it. Elia called bullshit. What could they do against an evil that not even a holy man could thwart? And for that matter, why was he suddenly helpless against it? Had he become less holy? Gulyar made a break for it and was shot in the legs by Jim for his trouble. Pete was able to stop the man from bleeding out. Under the influence of medical narcotics, he confessed the truth. Or something close to it. He was high as a kite, after all. Jim decided enough was enough and executed Gulyar on the spot. The other Agents freaked out a bit, but soon turned their attention to the mines.
There was some considerable thought about prepping the interior with frag grenades or just collapsing the structure, but the hostage rescue mindset carried the day so the team began their journey downwards. Eventually they came to a turn with a harsh green glow emanating from round the bend. Around it, they found Laura Michaels, or what was left of her, and the horribly injured Mi-Go harvesting her skin and organs to keep itself alive. Agents went temporarily insane, mags were dumped and the alien was blown to pieces as it begged for its life. We called the session there as we were over time by far.
Lessons Learned
I decided to experiment with how I handled language during this session and it worked great. Elia Ruiz easily could serve as the group translator and usually I would just let everything be relayed through her. However, I thought this might be a fun opportunity to stress the difficulty of operating somewhere you can’t actually speak the language. Especially because Jim Coake also had 5% in Pashto which I took to mean he could recognize some words and had memorized certain important phrases even if he didn’t speak the language. Since we were playing in discord when a conversation started with an NPC who only spoke Pashto I had Elia hop down to a different channel, would tell her what was going on and then we’d hop back to the main channel and her player would relay the fragments Jim understood. I was worried this would leave the other Players feeling bored, but they all said it added fun tension.
Shopping trips and equipment decisions always take time, but this is especially true in unfamiliar settings, but totally removing choice there can frustrate Players. One player suggested giving a set of options and letting the team pick between them to find a happy middle ground.
This was very much a duct tape and bailing wire job of scenario conversion with large swaths of it improvised. I had originally prepped an original scenario, but only one player was available on game night and I really wanted to playtest that for the whole group. I like to think this shows how easy it is to move a scenario to a different setting with just a bit of knowledge of that place and its society.
Make sure you finish your prep with enough time to read through your notes, I had some dumb errors I would have caught on a reread I never had time to do. For example, all my Afghan knowledge is largely on the country’s east so I made my fictional village Pashto, but placed it in Badakhshan, a primarily Tajik province, due to its relative stability and low violence. A second thought would have caught this mistake, but I didn’t have a chance to reflect on my notes before play.
Don’t just use national name-lists when you are representing a multi-ethnic society with sectarian tensions, make sure the name fits for the character. For example, Farhad is Persian and Gulyar is Uzbek. What I should have done was either pick solely Pastho and Quranic names or made sure to research the overlap in naming between ethnic groups. Most sites mention the origin of the name, so pay attention to that (and try not to prep 20 minutes before your game).
No comments:
Post a Comment