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 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.