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 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.