Ghouls – A Dipterous Reflavoring

art by Tayna Rezunenko

 

“Ghouls are usually described as doglike or canine in appearance, a description that has as much to do with their pack behavior and habit of digging as it does their specific skull shape.
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To change up ghoul imagery, try other graveyard scavengers. Ghouls in your campaign might also resemble or at least evoke:
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Flies (bristles on arms, segmented eyes, green-blue sheen on flesh)”

 

 — Kenneth Hite et al., “Hideous Creatures – A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos”

I decided to take Mr. Hite’s advice to heart, and write a retheme for one of my favorite monsters in Delta Green. The book lists several other aesthetic options, but I had the most ideas for flies and they were the most different from your 'stereotypical ghoul.' I also took the opportunity to elaborate on and rewrite some existing mechanics I felt were too vague or just didn’t like.

ANGUISHEDWIRES session two

 

 

 

After restocking in Brazenkragg, the party headed back to the dungeon to plunder more of its riches. They stopped to chat with the lumberjacks in the lumber camp, and discovered that the charcoal burners had been acting strangely lately. They were all secretive and "their faces were stained with guilt." The party shrugged and headed off into the forest to find the dungeon entrance. But tarrying in the camp had given a group of bandits their chance to sneak up on them. After a few rounds of combat, they fled. K'rizzt struck down one with a single stroke while Márta weaved between the arrows their leader tried to rain down on her. OSE's random treasure table for bandits yielded nothing on the bandit's corpse, so they continued.

SWORDTEMBER

According to some of my art friends, it's SWORDTEMBER 2022, which apparently means that you draw a sword each day of the month with a theme for each day. I'm no artiste, but I still enjoy drawing stuff and think I'm at least okay at it, so I figured I'd join in. You can also sculpt or 3D-model sword media, but that is far outside my artistic capabilities. Also, to justify the D&D-themed name of this blog despite the overwhelming majority of my posts being about Delta Green, I figured I'd stat the swords up.

The Resistance Table

In Call of Cthulhu, there was a mechanic called the Resistance Roll, to be used when two characteristics were pitted against each other. It could represent shoving someone out of the way, STR vs SIZ, or an Investigator dying from poison, CON vs POT (the potency of the poison). A simple but clunky formula gave you the chance of success given the characteristics, but there was also a table that had the math already done for you for characteristics from 1 to 31 against characteristics also 1 through 31. The seventh edition of CoC did away with this mechanic, as did Delta Green, which replaced it with the opposed roll. So why do we care about this defunct mechanic? Lots of folks like to use CoC content in their DG games (including old DG content published for CoC) and the Resistance Roll is a tricky mechanic to convert. This post seeks to compare it to DG's opposed rolls and offer some conversion advice.

ANGUISHEDWIRES session one

Two years ago, I played in a dungeon crawl. It was pretty fun, despite us basically dying horribly every session. I asked my friend mellonbread for the dungeon's music tracks, printed off the floor maps, and hopped into the discord call. Our three musketeers were:

Márta Benedek, a devout Muslim from the ever-swelling ranks of the Benedek family (a female dominated clan who turns its daughters loose on the world as adventurers).

Octavia, an educated woman, both an alchemist and an arcanist.

K'rizzt Tri'Orgen, a "connoisseur" of dark elf culture so obsessed that he'd dyed and painted his skin to look just like them.

Guest Post: Making Special Operators Special

The Problem
For right or wrong the special operator profession in the Agent's Handbook has got rather a bad reputation. Put simply, when players show up with an operator there is a fear that they are nothing more than a disruptive murder machine. In my experience this fear is far from ungrounded and sadly quite a few special operators really are just one trick ponies. My suspicion is that much of this comes from the players' lack of knowledge about special operations and a misguided belief that they aren't allowed to make their characters anything more than gunmen while staying realistic.

The Solution
While often relegated to the role of action heroes or the cavalry that rushes in to save the main characters, America's special operations community do a lot more than just shoot people. In fact, after twenty years of unprecedented expansion, the range of missions that fall under 'special operations' is truly massive, as are the capabilities of the units tasked with them. This post will offer a few examples of how the reality of special operators can make your characters and your game more interesting.

A History of SWORDS (and how to fix them)

Chainmail, OD&D, and Magic Swords

One of the classic tropes of D&D, for good or ill, is the magic sword. A sword that is just magically better at doing its job of hurting and killing people. Maybe it has a few other properties like glowing blue in the presence of orcs or evaluating the "alignment" of the person holding it. But at the most basic level, it's a +1 sword. When you make an attack roll, you add an extra +1 to the D20 on top of whatever you would add from your class or ability scores, and you add an extra +1 to your damage roll. However, in OD&D, the latter was not the case and magic weapons only improved your chance to hit.

Unsurprisingly, this is not incredibly impactful. You're increasing your chance to hit by 5% and your damage by about 20%. However, players mostly care about their hit-chance as that's what they get immediate feedback on. Additionally, the damage boost is not as impressive as it might seem once you realize its goal, reducing the enemy's HP to zero. Against an enemy with 1 hit-die (HP rolled randomly), the chance for a single sword-stroke to slay them only increases by ~10% when you add +1 to your damage roll. This conflicts with the supposed idea of magic swords as presented by both Chainmail and OD&D. Each one was supposed to be a rare thing with its own personality and name. That's a level of importance that doesn't seem fitting of such a slight increase in fighting ability. However, this makes more sense when you realize that OD&D was initially supposed to use Chainmail's combat resolution system.

Guest Post - The Green Mafia

In just about every power structure one of the surest ways to get ahead is to have friends who are already ahead. An Ivy League education isn’t just valuable for its curriculum after all, it allows for networking with people who will almost certainly end up in positions of power. Similar patterns can be seen within specific organizations. In the British Army, The Rifles were represented among the highest ranked generals almost nine times as much as they were in the wider army, leading to their nickname — The Black Mafia. In the Russian Army a similar phenomenon, this time with the VDV, is commonly referred to as the Air Assault Mafia.

These are more often than not simply cases where implicit bias and favoritism enables a concentration of power, but Delta Green — both the Program and Outlaws — is a conspiracy made up of long term careerists and deeply driven to accrue power. So, why not a Green Mafia?