The Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man

Beauty is momentary in the mind, the fitful tracing of a Portal/But in flesh it is immortal.

—WALLACE STEVENS, PETER QUINCE AT THE CLAVIER

I’ve received a wave of emails about my long dormant Dreamlands campaign The Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man. It didn’t do too well in the poll last week (which is a shame, because I love it) but the amount of email inquiry I’ve received indicates there might be life in the old beast after all. I’m considering putting it up as a Kickstarter Ransom as well. If you want it, or know someone who would, post here!

My 3 Ransoms

Good feedback guys. Here’s what I’m thinking (and please note it will take a bit of time to get these Kickstarters together, they are not ready yet). I’ve split them into 3 different ones — DG Fiction, DG Scenarios and DG Video Game.

Each will achieve “success” at their lowest level, every milestone past that will unlock new and better content. If anything jumps out at you, please drop me a line.

I’m hopeful because of projects like DoubleFine’s Adventure Game (3.3 million) and Wasteland 2 (1.4 million) did so well.

Future Ransom Plans

Examining the feedback from the poll leads me to the conclusion that there’s interest for several products. I’ve decided to count anything above 20 votes as “viable” based on a secret scientific method involving q-tips and bourbon (keep in mind, the Poll is unofficially “closed” now).

So It looks like the most interest was in:

• Delta Green: Failed Anatomies 30.95%  (52 votes)
• A New DG Scenario 27.38%  (46 votes)

And then, surprisingly:

• Screw it, let’s go for an iOS Delta Green Video Game! 17.26%  (29 votes)
• Future Perfect Revised 11.9%  (20 votes)

Honestly, I expected (and hoped) The Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man would do better in the running. So it goes. Good info to have to avoid wasting time on a pipe dream product no one would buy.

Delta Green: Dealing with Unruly Players

In my experience, there are two types of players. There are players who honestly want to play, and there are those who want to fuck around. Nothing can ruin a Delta Green game MORE than an unruly player who attempts to seize control of the game. The difference between a great game and a mediocre game is cutting your losses early. Players who min-max (if such a thing were really possible in Delta Green), who correct the Keeper, who talk out of character, ruin surprises or otherwise challenge the Keeper’s authority in some stupid attempt to look “cool” should not be tolerated. The good news is they are easily dealt with.

I’ve had a couple of these types in 28 years of gaming. They didn’t last. Here are a few examples.

Let’s call the first one Mike. Mike was a gun nut. He wouldn’t shut up about guns. He’d correct, he’d revert to the pedantic diatribe about bullets whenever any shots were fired, he’d draw other players into endless reams of gun porn in the selection of their firearm.

I had had enough of him fifteen minutes into the first session. When the creature showed up in the second act, it boiled in from some other dimension and lunged at Mike, who had some amazing, incredible firearm which took forever for him to settle upon (and then we had to buy attachments!) He shot this thing in the face with a critical and blew its head off. The thing proceeded to grab Mike’s character, pick him up over its head and snap his back in two, before vanishing back to where it came — with Mikes’ character.

Mike’s protest was “but I blew off it’s head with my *POINTLESS FIREARM*!” My response was “how do you know where its head was?” In any case, mechanically, Mike’s shot had little or no chance in killing the thing. The other two Agents who ran made it out alive.

Mike never came back, in the game or to the game session. Everyone was happy about that.

Another good example was a person we will call Percy. Percy would shout out what he thought the monster was, and use his prodigious memory to spit back huge reams of information on the creature in question. Number of Hit Points, Armor Points, Attacks, etc… He took a decidedly stupid proactive “let’s do everything we can to end up in front of the monster” methodology which would be the exact 180 of any skilled DG agent. Even worse, he knew this, and didn’t care.

Percy and his group came upon a seaside town, they came across a book about a group of fishermen who summoned a creature called “The Sons of the Deep”. He read the description in the book (took the SANITY loss) and calculated they were up against, at most, a Deep One or two. Percy decided to be proactive, he’d end the threat.

After setting up a vast booby trap at the summon area, they cast the summons. I still can’t express how unnecessary and stupid this was.

When the Starspawn of Cthulhu showed up, things quickly soured. Needless to say, it was a total party kill. When Percy began to rant and rave about the book being inaccurate, I explained it was written in 1704, and had been translated from some horrific hybrid language of Latin, English and Spanish; it used euphemisms and code. Some of the tenses and numbering might have been off. What it had actually said was “The Son of the Deep”. Oh well.

The point of these two stories is to say to Keepers: the game is yours. The rules are stacked against the Players — most effectively I might add and on purpose. It is very easy to tie troublesome players up in knots with little more than a clear enforcement of the rules. Do not be afraid to enforce the one thing that can make or break a Delta Green game: mood.

You, the Keeper are uncaring fate. Act like it.

Delta Green: The Fallen

Do your Agents take their kids to soccer? Do they remember to pick up grapes at the grocery store? Or remember to pay their cell phone bill? Do your Agents go to funerals? Do they visit psychiatric facilities?

Mine do.

I’ve played in many games where the repercussions of daily life never approach the Agents. This is a huge mistake. The glimpses of the horrors beyond are only thrown into stark relief when there is something to lose. Something to measure it against. Family. Down time. Everyday tasks. These are the backdrop to the DG universe. They are what the Agents are fighting for.. 

An Agent named GARRET once returned home to his house in REDACTED to find Stephen Alzis squatting in the back yard with his five year old son, playing trucks. As far as the Agent knew, no one knew his address or true identity, though Alzis called him by it. This meeting ran in secret from the rest of the group, and put this player on edge. Finally, when the call came, the player knew what he had to do: he stole and handed over the recovered artifact without a word of protest. The life of his family was on the line.

What happens when Agents fall? Insanity, or just another disappearance, it happens all the time.

Let me tell you a story about a DG friendly named Thomas. Thomas was an expert on astrophysics and was brought in on an operation dealing with the end of the world. He and his compatriots survived a half dozen operations, working as a team, only losing one of their number (who vanished along with a monstrous, glowing, hairless ape, never to be seen again). Thomas was solid. He worked at REDACTED University. He was a trusted member of the conspiracy.

That’s when the children started disappearing.

By the time the cell tracked the source of the missing children down, Thomas had killed four and chopping them up, kept them in a freezer in his basement. A basement the cell had met in many, many times. Thomas would cook and eat the remains. He had done so for a long, long time. Too long for some of the other Agents to handle.

But was Thomas gone from the game? No, Thomas was committed. His ranting about government agencies and immortality and dead children was chalked up to insanity and, from time to time, one of the cell would visit him for advice. Thomas was a player character, and the last few sessions of gameplay, he had 0 SAN. The player and I planned Thomas’ obsession and demise, and did so with amazing effect on the other players. They were…devastated. After that, Thomas became a tool for me, the Keeper, to heighten the horror.

Let me tell you another story. Once, a group of Agents conspired to build a bomb to remotely deal with a paranormal threat. Errors were made. The bomb detonated early, taking the arm of an Agent off in the process. This Agent was far from his jurisdiction and would no doubt be identified as a Federal Agent. A-Cell issued instructions for the cell to “take care of it”.

Cut to a lake. The cell wrapped their dead compatriot in a polyurethane sheet, bound him with rocks and tried to sink him, but the body would not go. Finally, one Agent, suffering severe SAN loss, STABBED the corpse in the chest several times to let the air out, finally causing it to sink. The cell watched, horrified as they committed a series of crimes and grotesque disfigurements. The group never spoke of it again, but all knew they were complicit, and that someday, the body might be found.

What is the moral of this story? Make every decision cost. Make every choice have repercussions. Illustrate the depth of the Agents fear and danger from both paranormal and bureaucratic sources.

Every choice counts. Every action comes back to haunt you. Even at the end of the world.

Delta Green: The Hollow Men

Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

-T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

The Great Race of Yith has long architected the comings and goings of human history and beyond. Their minds have raced through the corridors of time, flung into creatures malign, indifferent and struggling, to steward and shape a future they could escape to, when the dreadful Flying Polyps overwhelm their prehistoric civilization.

This is a ceaseless task. The timeline is a precarious tower of choices which is forever toppling, and requires thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of corrections to keep it on track to the Colepterous future they conspire to flee to when the time comes. The human epoch is simply a blip in the midst of the vast timeline the Yithians police, but humans offer a ready vessel for the vast and cool intellects of the Race.

The Great Race has long seeded the modern era with human servants — temporal coolies if you will — called the Motion. These people, to whom the Great Race has revealed but a fraction of their power and plans, have lost themselves in supplication to the powers beyond.

Occasionally, a Great Race Agent will be flung forward to the human epoch, to occupy a mind and carry out the inscrutable plans of the creatures. The huge minds of the Great Race cannot fit in the human vessel. Invariably some data is lost in the transfer. Great Race Agents inflict a debilitating and serious damage on their minds every time they enter a vessel with limited intellect. Still, those who return to the prehistoric time of the Race are repaired with their technology.

Sometimes, however, there are fatal mistakes: huge copy errors in the transfer, due to temporal disturbances, sun spots and worse. In these instances, more often than not, the human the Yithian was traveling into is wiped clean like a slate, and the Yithian is lost in the corridors of time. But sometimes, a portion of the alien consciousness is slammed into the human and the Yithian perishes in the transfer, leaving behind fragments of inhuman knowledge in a severely damaged human mind. These are the Hollow Men.

The Hollow Men have access to limited knowledge of the future (for invariably, the Yithian agent must have studied the nearby timeline) and access to the science and technology of the Yithians. They can create lightning guns, time gates and more. This knowledge is imperfect, as is the drive to use it. The Hollow Men are creatures set on an imperative with no clear goal — the need to complete a task consumes them, but due to the copy error, they have no idea what that task may be. Sometimes they are drawn to one another — particularly if multiple Yithian agents were to coordinate in the human epoch — and pool their efforts.

They tend to be drawn to profound events, elections, historical inventions, wars, in the hopes they might discover their purpose. To the outside world, they appear as lone madmen who have slipped a mental track, and have become obsessed with a single world event or person.

They are hunted by the Motion, and the Yithian agents, and represent some of the gravest threats to the timeline that exist. Their power and influence is so great, they have “destroyed” the forward progress of the Yithian’s chosen many, many times.

Featured Scenario: Delta Green – The Last Equation

Since there seems to be such interest in a new Delta Green scenario (second only to Failed Anatomies) I thought I’d throw some light on the last DG scenario written for ransom; Delta Green: The Last Equation.

Math as a dangerous weapon goes back to the very core of the Delta Green concept, and its something I pushed in the original Delta Green codebook (in the Roswell notes) to great effect. I still love it here. The idea that math is just something we think we understand, but which is actually a much bigger and scarier power is still a rich vein to mine, I believe.

In Delta Green: The Last Equation a rogue mathematical equation infects and kills as it goes, and the central tenant of the scenario is: how do you stop an idea?

Check it out for free, here.

I’m Writing About the End of the World

As usual. I’m focused on a story for Delta Green: Failed Anatomies which deals with the end times. I’ve been reading up on some physics concepts which outline the idea that physics itself changes from place to place in the universe, that constants might no longer be constants, for instance, and I for one, find the concept terrifying. There is a reason it is the last story in the anthology.

In the story After Math a police officer struggles with the end of all rules while crossing ten miles to Pasadena to find his brother at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory — who happens to be a DG friendly. It’s an attempt to paint an end of days that matches Lovecrafts’ concepts, as well as leaves room for the bizarre human future he portends. It also does some other nasty things — ending on a tableaux of horror which puts an end to all possibility of resolution.

Fun.

I’m going to let the poll run for a bit more, but I found some of the answers surprising. I thought for sure the revised Night Floors would score higher, for instance. So, right now, it seems clear Delta Green: Failed Anatomies has a future, as does a new Delta Green Scenario. We’ll see what else survives the cut. I’m hopeful The Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man creeps up; I do dearly love the scenario.

On the iOS game front, I’d love to ship a XCOM style cell management game. iOS is chosen specifically because it is accessible to many, cheap to develop, and has a decent chance of returning its money — it is also naturally limiting. Building a PC game (the only other real option) is a vast undertaking that can go in many directions and cost millions of dollars. A decent XCOM style DG management game would run something like 200k to develop for iOS and take 3 or 4 people six months. All in all, it did startlingly well in the poll. We’ll see where it falls next week.

Thanks for the feedback. Please follow me on Twitter or subscribe for future updates here.

What to Do, What to Do? You Pick!

Hey there guys. I have too many projects going at once: help me pick which I should put up for ransom (that is, fill a certain amount of cash donations and the project goes free on the web forever).

Here they are, in no particular order.

Delta Green: Failed Anatomies is a fiction anthology of stories set throughout the decades of DG’s existence. It includes work by Robin Laws and Ken Hite. It’s pretty much wrapped and ready to go.

The Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man is a 1920′s Dreamlands campaign, the first part of which appeared in Worlds of Cthulhu and which received some acclaim. It is a dark tale of opium addicts struggling through the horrific Dreamlands to find their way home to New York. I already have laid out the first section of the book with layout, art and maps. This is indicative of the art and quality I hope to finish the book with. This is VASTLY different than the plain text file found below, please check it out.

Future/Perfect Revised. You can find a copy below. Future/Perfect is a DG campaign in need of a big pass of love and care. I’d love to expand and lay it out with final art and maps in a much more detailed manner.

A New DG Scenario. Like the Last Equation this would be a completely new DG scenario. The one I am thinking of would be to do with the King in Yellow.

Night Floors and Victim of the Art Revised. I would take the two plain text PDFs below and lay them out and illustrate them with lavish attention to detail (see the Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man link above for an example). 

Screw it, let’s go for an iOS Delta Green Video Game! This is obviously an expensive undertaking, but I am a bit of an expert in iOS dev and know many people who could get this done. If the money could be secured, I’d love to do it.

Fear vs. Control in Delta Green

I’ve talked to a lot of people who have different experiences with Delta Green. Some play it like a Michael Bay movie, or a Marvel comic. It’s their game, and they can do what they want, but… they’re missing out. A lot of people know the real meat and potatoes of DG is simple and primal and perfect. Delta Green is about fear.

Fear of the unknown, of losing control, of losing; though most in the organization know they will lose, eventually.

In many ways, control is the opposite of fear, and players yearn for control. They want guns to control their enemies, they want badges to control legal entanglements, they want Sanity points to control their decline. While Call of Cthulhu goes to great lengths to provide rules for these things (well maybe not the badges but we’re working on that), one might argue that these systems are in place for the opposite reason — they are there to illustrate how fragile humans are in the face of the Mythos. In all other games, stats are a comparison, in Call of Cthulhu they are a warning.

A lot of players don’t understand this. For that matter, a lot of Keepers don’t understand this. Control in Delta Green is not an option. The spells and creatures and magic and sanity rending books are stacked against you from the first moment of the game. Played in a purely mechanical fashion, Delta Green is a machine that produces Agent deaths interspersed with (sometimes miraculous) stories of survival. It is a story of decline — moral, mental and physical, with horror and death on all sides. It is never about winning, or if it is, such victories are fleeting and doom is always eventual.

Some people have suggested that this point of view — that the fight to hold back the black for another day — is too bleak for them. I agree that some people just can’t handle this type of game. However, I would also argue that to remove the desperation, fear and eventual ruin that is the hallmark of Lovecraft’s work from the equation is to remove the point.

To make an upbeat, winnable Delta Green is to make a simple science fiction game, or a military sim. It is not Lovecraft, so what’s the point of that? It’s like playing a Dungeons & Dragons game set in spaceships (yeah I know — and YUCK) or a Zombie horror game where there is no Zombie apocalypse. What’s the point? Why do it? Removing the essential core of Lovecraft from the equation is to neuter the whole concept.

So, players — embrace the fear. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had in gaming: not knowing what’s coming next. And Keepers, take the reigns, let the dice make the life and death calls, and bring more of the battle back to the internal struggle of fear.