Guest Post - Locked Doors and Investigative RPGs

If you play Delta Green, or any other investigative RPG, for any length of time you will inevitably run into a ‘locked door’ — an obstacle in the path of the investigation that seems insurmountable, at least with the skills you personally have. However, if you apply some critical thinking and creativity to the problem there are often quite a few ways through that locked door well within your grasp. This blog post offers some examples for getting through a literal locked door and hopefully will inspire Agents and Handlers alike to think more creatively about solutions.

This list is hardly complete and in several circumstances different skills could very validly be used for the same purpose. It is not meant to be a definitive list of ways to get past a lock or a guide to breaking and entering. It is merely meant to serve as inspiration.

Guest Posts!

Some friends of mine are going to be writing some posts for this blog. They didn't feel like making a blog of their own and I'm happy to host their ideas that would otherwise go unseen. So hopefully you can expect a slight uptick in posts in the future.

An Analysis of SAN Loss in Delta Green

When Agents (and theoretically NPCs) encounter unnatural beings, they usually have to make a SAN test and risk losing some SAN. Most SAN losses in Delta Green follow a rule of thumb set out in the Agent's Handbook's Sanity chapter.

If the cost of failing a SAN test is 1D6 or less, the cost of success is usually zero. If the cost of failure is 1D8 or 1D10, the cost of success is usually 1. Some unnatural events and encounters are even more catastrophic (AH, 66).

You can map out the progression of SAN loss like so: 0, 0/1, 0/1D4, 0/1D6, 1/1D8, 1/1D10, 1D4/1D12, 1D6/1D20, and 1D10/1D100. We don't find 1D10/1D100 until we open the Handler's guide, and 1D4/1D12 is purely a theoretical SAN loss that fits very nicely between 1/1D10 and 1D6/1D20 but I've never seen it in any published DG material. 

EDIT: as of Fall 2021, we actually now have an official 1D4/1D12 SAN loss in ARCHINT.

Some listed SAN losses deviate from this progression. Most of these anomalies are unnatural, but first I'll cover the mundane anomalies found in the Agent's Handbook.

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.