The Order takes the new Delta Green RPG rules for a spin using the "Need to Know" quick start rules and the included scenario, "Last Thing's Last". A couple agents are called in for a routine clean-up of a dead agent's possessions--what could possibly go wrong?
Featuring:
David L.
Des
And...Edie the Dog
Woo. Looking forward to more DG. Just finishing up Pendragon at the moment, really enjoying the podcast, keep it up!
ReplyDeleteYou should really have called this episode "'Albuquerque' and 'high-value target' don't belong in the same sentence."
ReplyDeleteIt's a bit weird, because although it's obviously set in the present day, somehow it feels like it should be in the '80s and the '90s at the same time.
Listening to Des and David roleplay together is so delightfully fun. They make the best odd-couple investigators.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations to being the first investigator team in history to successfully solve their problem by not investigating, but just burning everything in sight and walking away. Probably in slow motion.
Every time I hear Delta Green, I think, "Oh, right, Green Berets vs Alien Terrorists." But it's not like that at all. I'm not sure why I think that.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, you've got all these Lovecraft themed games set in different periods (Call of Cthulhu, Achtung Cthulhu, ..I'm sure there's some kind of Cold War/James Bond Cthulhu..., Delta Green), you ever consider running an extended campaign over the whole period? I mean, I think that the Great Pendragon Campaign format is something which can fit a lot more campaigns than just that one.
I was just thinking of an Achtung! Cthulhu/Delta Green crossover. But hey, there's Cthulhu Invictus (or so I understand) for an early start.
DeleteI think the problem with an ongoing campaign of Call of Cthulhu is it takes away that lingering dread that if you guys screw up, the world ends.
DeleteThere are quite a few extended campaigns that would be interesting, but in Pendragon if everyone dies you just roll up a cousin or wait for their kids to come of age. In Call of Cthulhu a full party wipe might mean that the world falls into never-ending darkness, or perhaps at best an invasion of lizard people.
Crossovers wouldn't be difficult though. Just open up a portal and Dr. Fountaine will run through it no matter how ominous it looks.
That's an interesting point, Jake. Back when I ran CoC, that sense of dread was never really something that I achieved - and I don't get the impression from the Achtung! Cthulhu episodes here that it's something that Mr. Larkins is really even trying for. And I don't know that one really should.
DeleteCoC in practice is a bit more like a superhero game: there are these colossal threats, but because the implicit rules of RPG storytelling mean that the PCs have a chance to stop them, and a good GM won't make that challenge unfair, it can't ever feel as bleak as the setting is "supposed" to be.
CoC is really a very strange thing to have become one of the great ongoing success stories of gaming history. I mean, there's a strong case for calling it the second most successful and influential RPG of all time!
And yet, the source material is quite unpromising on its face. A game that tried to play Lovecraft straight would be one in which *every single story* ended in horrific failure and madness. (Not fun.) And Lovecraftian horror is very rarely about teams, or about investigators; it's mostly about an isolated protagonist (if one can even call him - it's always "him," of course - a protagonist) who passively experiences stuff happening to him. I would defy anyone to pick Lovecraft out of interwar genre fiction as the author best suited to adaptation to role-playing games. And if one did pick something in Lovecraft, it might not be the horror - it might be the dream/fantasy stuff.
CoC's success isn't because Lovecraft was amazingly popular in the '80s (I read Lovecraft because of CoC, and I'll bet I'm not the only one). It's not because the 1920's setting had or has some tremendous purchase on the modern imagination. And yet it didn't just take off, but really took off.
Anyway, I think the way to do a crossover is to exploit "When the stars are right." Cosmic destruction is set from the beginning for August 5th, 2016. What the challenge is for players before that is to collect, record, and ensure the survival of the pieces of information that are needed to stop things in the final chapter. I'd look to have classic things like an archaeological dig in the 1920's, but have it be digging up the same Evil Roman Villa that the players had to infiltrate when it was a working operation in 100 A.D.
I SO loved your Last Things Last play session :) I'm acting as a first time ever DM (and something like second time ever RPG player) for that scenario in 6 days. This gives me ideas about how to run a great session. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteGlad you enjoyed it! That's part of why I wanted to start putting stuff out there--as an example (or warning) for others. ;)
DeleteGood luck with your session!