On A Dark Desert Highway

When thirteen people vanish along Highway 70 in the Arizona desert in a matter of weeks, a stretch of road that the press calls it the ‘Devil’s Highway’, local enforcement is at a loss to explain the disappearances. This includes both tribal police—because Highway 70 runs through the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation—and state police, and so the FBI is called in. Despite the wariness of the local police and the distrust of the local populace, what the agents discover is trail of bloody terror that stretches along the highway and then back across America. Investigating murder site after murder site reveals a determined monstrousness, seemingly inexplicable by normal standards, and weirdness and one implausibility after another. Do the FBI agents have one of America’s worst serial killers on their hands or is there something else going on?

This is the set-up for Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays, a scenario published by Arc Dream Publishing for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. This is the modern roleplaying game of conspiratorial and Lovecraftian investigative horror with its conspiratorial agencies within the United States government investigating, confronting, and covering up the Unnatural—the forces and influences of Cosmic Horror—and long-time fans of Delta Green will recognise Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays. This is because it originally appeared in the Delta Green sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu, published in 1997, and was thus for many, their introduction to the world of Delta Green. Then it served as an introduction to the setting of Delta Green and the conspiracy of Delta Green, as well as a recruitment to the latter, and Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays does all three of these once again with this new version. More specifically, this version of Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays serves as an introduction to the setting of Delta Green and the conspiracy of Delta Green, as well as a recruitment to the latter, but as it was in the late nineties, when Delta Green was an off the books, unofficial, and cowboy conspiracy outside of the government, and its enemy, MAJESTIC, was very much inside. This then is an introductory scenario for Delta Green ‘Classic’, one updated to accompany Delta Green: The Conspiracy, the nineties sourcebook for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

The scenario is designed for a small group, as most Delta Green scenarios are. Here, the Player Characters are specifically FBI agents, almost the default Agent background for Delta Green and certainly the most familiar to players. That is really due to familiarity with a big television series of the period, The X-Files, an influence certainly on how the player and the Handler then approached the setting of Delta Green, though notably, not an influence on the designers, since the creation and appearance of Delta Green as an organisation pre-date that of the broadcasting of the series. Another parallel perhaps is with the film The Hidden, but that is lesser known and if there are parallels, then Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays goes in a very different direction to that film, most obviously in the conspiracy of Delta Green and the Unnatural of Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

The investigation is relatively straightforward, but rich in details, and the Agents are soon faced by a wealth of clues, often strangely pointed out to by scavengers. What the Agents initially find is a series of both bloody and bloodless deaths along the highway and nearby, but the investigation then telescopes in and out, as first the Agents discover that the trail of death leads back across the USA, and second, outside agencies—what is actually Delta Green and its enemy—take an interest in the case, the latter a very direct interest in the case, and then the identification of the prime suspect sets up a manhunt across the Arizona desert. The investigation is hampered by the distrust locally—both at large and in law enforcement—and the need to be aware of Indigenous American cultural attitudes, and not just because of native attitudes towards to the Federal authorities. Essentially, if the Agents run roughshod over them, they will find that the local Apache tribe will no longer co-operate with them. This takes some careful roleplaying upon the part of the players.

In terms of the antagonists, the alien threat and the seemingly unstoppable killer of the original Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays from 1997 remains the same in the 2024 version. What is different in the new version is the naming of the horror at the heart of the scenario and the development of the presence of the Unnatural in the scenario. This includes tying the scavenger to a particular Unnatural deity and then to a particular figure in the Delta Green Mythos, one whom only veteran players of Delta Green will recognise. Of course, if the scenario serves as the introduction to a Delta Green campaign, then that figure can appear and serve as a callback to Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays.

Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays is designed to introduce the classic period of Delta Green for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game to the players, and introduce new Agents to the conspiracy of Delta Green. To that end, the Agents are both hounded by NRO DELTA Agents of MAJESTIC and recruited by Delta Green. That said, Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays can be played as a one-shot. For campaigns set in the contemporary period of the core rules for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, then it could possibly be run as a flashback, especially if one of the Agents is a veteran of Delta Green. There are notes on running the scenario if the Agents are already members of Delta Green, although sadly, not for adapting it to the modern period of Delta Green.

Physically, Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays is well done. Now in full colour rather than black and white as in the original Delta Green sourcebook, all of the scenario’s illustrations, handouts, and maps have been redone.

Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays has aways been regarded as a classic scenario for the Delta Green setting and after twenty-five years since it was originally published, it still stands up as a great scenario. It has fantastic cinematic pacing to it, especially in the often-desperate action scenes against its antagonist, but it gets up close and personal—especially in the autopsy scenes—where it becomes really creepy and unsettlingly, before leading to desperate action scenes once again. In many ways, Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays set Delta Green up, and it is good have it doing that job once again for the nineties for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.