The Curwen Connection

Okay. Let us start with the pitch. The Borellus Connection is The Case of Charles Dexter Ward meets The French Connection with the journalistic attention to detail of Frederick Forsyth writing a Suppressed Transmission. And if that fails to get your gaming juices roiling, then there is definitely something missing from your essential saltes since your last resurrection. It is crime meets Cthulhu, the Age of Aquarius shot up on smack, DELTA GREEN versus the drug trade, when the cowboys could protect the USA—and the world—with a bit of swagger, and evil was still easy to identify, sometimes because they were still your allies despite what happened in World War 2. It is a campaign of Lovecraftian investigative horror that will take you places rarely visited in the genre in an age that remains all but unexplored in roleplaying.

The Borellus Connection is a campaign for The Fall of DELTA GREEN, the winner of the 2019 Gold ENNIE Award for Best Setting. Published by Pelgrane Press and using the GUMSHOE System, what The Fall of DELTA GREEN does is turn the clock back on DELTA GREEN—and its modern iteration, DELTA GREEN: The Roleplaying Game from Arc Dream Publishing—to take a ride through its last hurrah, the decade of the swinging sixties in which the USA would land men on the Moon, but get mired in conflict in Southeast Asia, in which the optimism of hippism and free love would be marred by murder, and in which DELTA GREEN would be overwhelmed by threats domestic and foreign—and its own hubris. The campaign will take the Agents from the sweltering heat of the jungles of the Vietnam War and into the sweaty morass of money and misfeasance that is Saigon, before swinging into the weird reality of burgeoning international air travel, and then to Turkey and Lebanon. From there it races back across Europe to the cutting edge of the Cold War and the dark aftermath of the previous war, and at last, brings the campaign home and into the wake for the death of the counterculture, as the dark romantism of the previous century torments the next. This is a campaign designed by Ken Hite—the author of The Fall of DELTA GREEN—but actually developed and written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan.

The campaign does not stipulate what types of Agents it requires the players to roleplay. Both military veterans and former members of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics will be useful, but members of the FBI will be good as will any Agent with good surveillance skills. Similarly, there are no skills stipulated as being necessary to complete the campaign, but slots left open for languages may prove to be useful.

The campaign begins in 1968 just prior to the establishment of the BNDD, or Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, by the Justice Department. As the precursor of the DEA, it is assigned to investigate and disrupt the flow of drugs into the United States, in particular, the heroin coming out of the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia and Turkey. The Agents are assigned to the new agency, but investigating and stopping the worldwide trade in narcotics is only half of their job and their least important one. The global nature of the trade means that the Agents can be assigned to any number of exotic, faraway places with legitimate reasons to be there. Which is perfect cover for their other job—investigating and thwarting the forces of the Unnatural before they become a threat to American interests and the world. What this means is that there is a constant duality to The Borellus Connection. The Agents’ investigations are always twofold—the drugs and the Unnatural—and there is always a constant pull back and forth between. Fortunately, or unfortunately, as the campaign progresses, it becomes clear that the Unnatural has coiled its ways around the drug trade, so making it potentially easier to investigate both at the same time, but potentially making the investigation of the drug trade Unnaturally dangerous, as opposed to just dangerous.

The campaign provides a good overview of the BNDD, who the Agents’ DELTA GREEN handler is, and of the linked twin networks that entwine their way through the campaign. One is the drug trade itself, running out of the Golden Triangle, east to the USA and also out of Turkey, and both west through Marseille to the USA. This network is dominated by the Union Corse—and closer to home in the USA by the Mafia. The other network is headed by an immortal sorcerer, an associate of Joseph Curwen of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward fame, who hides within the Union Corse as its chief chemist and who uses its network to secrete his own agents around the world to protect his own interests and to work towards his plans for domination beyond his mortal immortality. This includes moving a lot the necessary materials via the same routes as the heroin. The campaign constantly hints that there is a lot more going than it outwardly appears and there is a shadowy figure behind it all, but the Agents do not learn his identity or get the chance to confront him until the very last mission.

The campaign begins with ‘Operation JADE PHOENIX’. Following a briefing at the CIA headquarters at Langley, the Agents are sent into Laos to confirm that a Kuomintang-backed Shan warlord is funding his operations through opium smuggling, but in reality, their mission is to help conduct a double assassination. The CIA wants the warlord dead, whilst DELTA GREEN’s target is a Kuen-Yuin sorcerer. They will have a military escort, but the assassinations are to be carried out by a United States Marine Corps sniper, one Sergeant Adolph Lepus, already just a few shots away from being the stone-cold killer feared by every DELTA GREEN agent in the future. The scenario is perhaps the most straightforward, certainly the simplest, of the missions in the campaign, even if it is complicated by an inexperienced commanding officer of the escort, the limited time frame set by Tiger Transit, and the Mythos machinations of the second target. It is otherwise a twisted military or mercenary style scenario, one in which some of the Agents are likely to be out of their depth—or out of their comfort zone, that should introduce the players and their Agents to the core of the campaign.

That core comes to the fore in ‘Operation ALONSO’, the most complex scenario in the campaign. The Agents are turned around in Hong Kong on their way home and sent back to Vietnam as newly minted recruits for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Once there, their cover operation is to run surveillance on a narcotics summit at the Continental Palace hotel in Saigon between Unione Corse bosses and emissaries from Marseille with local operations, whilst their actual mission is to ferret out signs of a resurgent Cthulhu cult that DELTA GREEN targeted a decade before. The challenge for the Agents is not only to navigate an unfamiliar city and equally unfamiliar military and espionage operations all on a war footing, but navigate a city where virtually everyone is on the take and their actions have a chance of alerting not only the heroin operation they are investigating, but also the Viet Cong that have infiltrated the city. Arouse the suspicions of either and the Agents will find themselves becoming the targets. In addition to infiltrating the hotel where the summit is being held, the Agents have to look for the activities of the Cthulhu cult in Saigon and beyond into the swamps outside the city where they might get a chance to conduct their own defoliation operation. They will also discover for the first time how weird and twisted some of the operatives connected to Union Corse really are. This as opposed to ‘Operation JADE PHOENIX’, where the weirdness seems local.

The scenario is made also the more complex by being set at the height of the Vietnam War and so amidst a morass of strange names and abbreviations. Add in a lot of organisations with different aims and sometimes overlapping areas of responsibility, and there is a lot for both the Handler and her players, let alone the Agents, to keep track off. It also makes it more challenging in comparison to prepare. Otherwise, this is a quagmire of a scenario, hot and sticky, that will take multiple sessions to complete.

The campaign narrows—quite literally—to the width and length of a Boeing 707. In ‘Operation HORUS HOURS’, the Agents are given another pair of assignments to conduct during their return to the USA. The BNDD wants the Agents to track some smugglers into the USA and DELTA GREEN wants the Agents to identify the purchaser in the USA of an Unnatural relic being transported aboard the aeroplane by a courier. The scenario takes place at the very dawn of the golden age of international air travel, but before the arrival of the Boeing 747 and similar large passenger jets, so the journey back from Hong Kong is via Sydney, Australia, Tahiti and Easter Island, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Panama City, and Los Angeles, and takes over one hundred hours in total! Since this is 1968, the Agents and other passengers aboard the flight have a lot of freedom of movement and face much lower security compared to modern flights, so the Agents have scope to move around, identify the smugglers, and spot the courier—and similarly, the smugglers and the courier have the opportunity to realise they are being watched and who by.

This tense, enclosed environment is exacerbated by the release of a nasty chemical that gets into the ventilation system and unleashes some of the Unnatural contraband being smuggled as well as tipping passengers and crew alike over into series of trippy dreams. And the dreams get weirder and weirder the closer the aeroplane gets to the site of sunken R’lyeh, a lovely contrivance of a flypast that brings another aspect of the Unnatural into play and requires intervention on Easter Island. ‘Operation HORUS HOURS’ has a submarine feel to it, of the Agents lost as if underwater, drowning in dreams and drugs.

The arrival of the Agents in the USA at the end of ‘Operation HORUS HOURS’ brings the first half of The Borellus Connection to close. The second half moves to the Middle East and Europe where the Agents investigate the drug trafficking running through Marseille for the BNDD and what looks like the activities—past and present—of an occultist somehow connected to the Union Corse for DELTA GREEN. ‘Operation DE PROFUNDIS’ takes place in eastern Turkey where the BNDD wants the Agents to investigate how the heroin is being transported through the country and DELTA GREEN wants them to investigate the death of Charles Whiteman, a British archaeologist at a dig site after his body vanished on the way back to England. Since this is set at an archaeological dig site, this has the feel of a more traditional scenario for almost any other roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror, but all more creepier because of the appearance and behaviour of the man who arrives to take control of the dig site with the permission of the dead and missing man! Clumsy and awkward, with a raspy voice and his hands always covered in gloves. He is very obviously suspicious and hiding something… This is likely the Agents’ first encounter with one of the servants of the shadowy figure at the heart of the conspiracy. All of these servants are monstrous in their way, but surprisingly, there is something sad about this man.

The location for ‘Operation SECOND LOOK’ is Beirut, Lebanon where the BNDD wants a drug deal investigated, and DELTA GREEN wants know why François Genoud, a Swiss Nazi sympathiser and intelligence broker, stopped informing for them and ‘gently’ reminded who he owes his continued existence to what he thinks are members of the CIA. Getting to the Genoud takes a bit of work and if they lean on him too hard, he goes running to his actual CIA masters, headed by retired agent, Miles Copeland, Jr., which will likely lead to the Agents earning a rebuke. The Agents can also discover the smuggling operation is shipping something big through the city, something guarded by a contingent of soldiers from the Egyptian army! The city has a post-colonial, seedy opulence to it and members of the Union Corse have a legitimacy that enables them to operate in the open, leading to scenes where the Agents have the opportunity to rub shoulders with them and even receive an offer that exposes the friction within the Union Corse and between the campaign’s two strands.

By now it should be clear that the use the Union Corse’s smuggling routes is twofold. One—and most obviously—to traffic drugs into the USA, and the other, hiding within that operation, to transport occult materials around the world. DELTA GREEN has the Agents follow the latter track, following the route of Charles Whiteman’s body into Germany in ‘Operation PURITAN’. Unfortunately, the Agents get sidetracked by another DELTA GREEN investigation meaning that it is no longer a duality, but a triality! Another DELTA GREEN briefing officer in Munich tasks the Agent with investigating what appears to be Unnatural prayers being broadcast via Radio Liberty into the Soviet Union. This forces the Agents into a more challenging balancing act, but as their investigation into the broadcasts takes them into Munich’s Turkish diaspora, it becomes apparent that all three are connected and lead back to the past activities in central Europe of the sorcerer at the heart of conspiracy. To confirm this, the Agents must cross the Iron Curtain on a quick excursion to Prague in the Prague Spring and almost back in time to dark house warped by monstrous sorceries. The mission comes to an end with a chance to save the world, but potentially end history in another twenty years, although the Agents are unlikely to be aware of either.

The penultimate mission is ‘Operation MISTRAL’ set in Marseille. By this point, the Agents know that they are on the trail of Jaques Vènice, the scar-faced chemist responsible for ensuring the quality of the heroin coming out of Turkey and the Golden Triangle and very probably using the Union Corse’s smuggling network as a cover for his own sorcerous activities. They may also have learnt his true identity. In ‘Operation MISTRAL’ they have chance to track him down in Marseille, the heart of the Union Corse’s smuggling operation. Another Mythos element comes into play here as the sorcerer uses a cult dedicated to another entity and the student protests that began in Paris and have spread to ‘La Cité Phocéenne’ as cover for his activities, as well as links to the authorities for both the Union Corse and the cult. The Agents may have an ally here and may also be able to take advantage of the friction within the Union Corse which will see one faction give up Jaques Vènice and potentially reveal his true identity. Either way, the Agents are definitely on his trail now and the operation will likely end with them chasing him across France and perhaps through another reality, all the way to the campaign’s finale.

‘Operation NEPENTHE’—named for the drug capable of banishing grief or trouble from a person’s mind described in Homer’s Odyssey—brings the campaign home to ‘Mob-town’, the city of Baltimore infamous for its riots, of which the latest it is trying to recover from with a national guard presence on the streets. The Agents are ostensibly here to follow up on Union Corse links to the city, but their DELTA GREEN handler all but gives them carte blanche to do what takes to stop the sorcerer’s plans. The latter has deep historical rather than modern ties to the city and as his gathered energies and plans coalesce, thorn bushes sprout from the strangest of places, the eyes of the city’s junkies turn towards the Agents, and time slips… The Agents need to slip too, back into city’s past and that of sorcerer, perhaps as far back as the last days of Baltimore’s most famous son. Of course, there is also the chance of the Agents getting lost in time and of failure, of the eastern seaboard getting lost in a bubble of time, but if they succeed, knowing that they saved millions is the only reward, and that they alone, are the only ones to know, are the only reward.

The Borellus Connection is a big sprawling campaign in the mode of the globetrotting campaigns of classic Lovecraftian investigative horror. Yet it owes some of its structure and tone to the conspiratorial structure of campaign in the designer’s other roleplaying game, Night’s Black Agents, whilst at the same time being loose enough that many of the individual scenarios could be run on their own. In addition to duality of the campaign’s entwined threads, its secrets are heavily obfuscated behind layers of obligation and history, and is only in the very later parts of the campaign that the players and their Agents begin to realise who or what they are facing. Since the Agents are sent hither and thither, they and their players do not have overall agency as they might in other globetrotting campaigns of classic Lovecraftian investigative horror and so it is not easy for them to step back from the overall campaign and work out what the overall picture is. The intricacy and connections within the campaign mean that the players are probably going to need their own corkboard, let alone their Agents. In terms of tone, the campaign veers towards Pulp, but there is often a brutality to it, hulking in the shadows until forced to act. The best and most unnerving of that brutality may occur after one or more of the Agents has been killed.

For the Handler there is not much advice on setting up the campaign and the advice throughout is not always as strong as it could be. Hence, this really is a campaign for the experienced Handler in terms of its structure and detail, but the balance between the Mythos and the mundane is well handled and the campaign is rich in historical detail. The Agents really get to get to meet some real and genuinely interesting historical figures and the Handler who wants more detail, there is a decent bibliography at the end. In terms of the Mythos, there is no one central threat in terms of the other, although the campaign does bounce between several differing Mythos traditions. Rather the threat faced is arguably all too human, but one who has fully embraced the inhuman in an attempt to realise his ambitions.

Physically, The Borellus Connection is a dense affair and as a whole, heavy going. Individual missions are well organised and explained with details of the mission spine and the key characters at the start before diving into the detail. The cartography is decent, but the artwork is intentionally obfuscatory, hinting and suggesting rather than clarifying.

The Borellus Connection is a big demanding campaign that is going to take no little commitment upon the part of the Handler, her players, and their Agents to run, play, and complete. There is a fantastic sense of energy and grime to this campaign, of the Agents constantly wading through the seedy underbelly of both humanity and alchemy, caught between the mundane and the Mythos, and ultimately, out of game, how far and what strange places, The Borellus Connection takes one of H.P. Lovecraft’s most famous stories.

A Conjunction of Conspiracies

For many, their first expose to the world of Lovecraftian investigative horror and conspiracy that is Delta Green would have been the scenario, Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays, which appeared in the Delta Green sourcebook published for use with Call of Cthulhu by Pagan Publishing in 1997. However, it was not the first scenario for Delta Green. That was Convergence and if On the Trail of the Loathsome Slime is not only one of the most important scenarios ever to be published for Call of Cthulhu and certainly the one with the best ever title, then Convergence is certainly its equal, in importance, if not the humour of its title. On the Trail of the Loathsome Slime, published in 1983 by Games Workshop, based on the article, ‘Cthulhu Now! - Call of Cthulhu in the 1980s’ which appeared in White Dwarf #42 (June 1983), followed by ‘Cthulhu Now! - Part 2: Mini-Scenario outlines for Call of Cthulhu in the 1980s’ in the next issue, introduced the concept of roleplaying in the modern day for Call of Cthulhu. Up until that point, scenarios and campaigns had been set in the Jazz Age of the Roaring Twenties. With On the Trail of the Loathsome Slime, players could have their Investigators encounter the Cthulhu Mythos in the world that they were familiar with, that is, their then here and now. If On the Trail of the Loathsome Slime updated Call of Cthulhu, then Convergence not only updated it by another decade, but it also introduced both an entirely new way of playing it and an entirely new reason to play it. In introducing Delta Green, what Convergence did was give a reason as to why the Player Characters are investigating the Mythos, that they are both investigating and covering up evidence of the Mythos.

Convergence, though, was not widely available when first published. This was in the pages of The Unspeakable Oath, Issue 7, published in the Autumn of 1992 by Pagan Publishing. Originally published for Call of Cthulhu, Fifth Edition, Arc Dream Publishing [has since updated the scenario for use with Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. The scenario begins in September 1996, after the FBI and Georgia state troopers arrest Billy Ray Spivey, a teenager who has been on a strangely reluctant rampage, robbing gas stations and killing an attendant with punch, in pain, and fleeing his family after killing his father. Medical analysis of the teenager reveals that the muscles in his arms and legs have been entirely replaced with a strange tissue that mimics human muscle, but possesses non-human characteristics, and his arms and legs are covered with microscopic scars. This occurred after he disappeared for two days some nine days ago. The contact for the Agents—as the Player Characters in Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game—assigns them to travel to Spivey’s hometown of Groversville, Tennessee, investigate what happened to him and find out who or what performed the surgery on him.

The Player Characters are Federal Agents, but for this operation go undercover conducting an investigation into Spivey’s drug connections. Their investigation should be as low key as the town is sleepy and quiet, there being an air of melancholy to the place. In the course of their investigation, the Agents will discover classic signs of UFO activity—signs of abductions, cattle mutilation, and more… Then, Convergence really puts the knife in. The Agents are given a means of detecting the cause of Spivey’s condition and it is everywhere… If that is not enough, Convergence takes a firm grip of the handle of the knife and gives it a hard twist or two. Not only are the Agents being monitored—not once, but thrice over, by agents human and inhuman, and cowboy media ready to put them under the spotlight. In both ways, Convergence quickly amplifies its horror and the horror in which the Agents find themselves in. It serves this up in a couple of really great set-pieces, one of which will put the players off from going into motel bathrooms for life! There really are some scenes in the scenario which are going to make the players go, “Oh shit!” This is an indication of the quality of the writing, combined with the quality of the ideas underlying Delta Green. Ultimately, the play of Convergence boils down to two things. One is surviving. The other is surviving and conducting a successful cover up of the investigation. Both are incredibly challenging and there is high chance of a total party kill in the scenario.

If there is an issue with Convergence it is the television series, The X-Files. Both the setting of Delta Green and The X-Files deal with similar subjects and feel similar. However, Delta Green predates The X-Files, but nevertheless, Convergence very feels like an episode of the television series. A very nasty episode. Any player who goes into the scenario thinking that it was going to be like the television series would have received a big shock.

Physically, Convergence is superbly presented in the standard style for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. The artwork is also great, as you would expect from Dennis Detwiller.

Convergence is short, no surprise given its original appearance as a scenario in a semi-professional magazine. But it packs a punch—quite literally. Convergence was a great introduction to the conspiratorial world of Delta Green in 1992, establishing the pattern for Delta Green operations and scenarios for decades to come. It is still a horrifyingly scary three decades on…

When the Wind Walks

Something strange happened in Willis, Alabama at 1:43 am on December 22nd, 1998. The temperature dropped from a typical seasonal average of 3 degrees Celsius to -30 degrees Celsius for a total of four hours. Every person, every creature, is dead. Frozen to death. Is this evidence of an extraterrestrial incursion? Is it freak weather, perhaps a recurrence of a local phenomenon known as ‘Jack Frost’? Or it something else. Above all, what can be learned from it? The authorities want to know. Authorities deep with the U.S. government want to know and they will kill to keep it a secret including even their own staff. Scientists, drawn from an ultra-classified UFO research project, are assigned to investigate the freak incident. They are part of the infamous MAJESTIC programme, specifically PROJECT PLUTO from the top-secret labs at Area 51, supported by the pararescuemen and pilots trained to recover alien technology from OPERATION BLUE FLY, with security provided by NRO DELTA, the lethal ‘men in black’ who keep America’s secrets from America itself. On the ground they will come to realise that what they are examining lies beyond the scope of PROJECT PLUTO and as the weather oscillates, sending temperatures unnaturally plummeting and nerves soaring, events around them exacerbate the growing sense of fear and paranoia. Can the scientists of PROJECT PLUTO discover the cause of the frigidly deadly ‘Jack Frost’ incidents and prevent it from escalating before their own security turns on them? Christmas this year is certainly going to be one to remember—if they survive!

Jack Frost is 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. In traditional scenarios for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game set in this period, the Player Characters are members of Delta Green, the organisation, at times official, but in 1998 unofficial and regarded as an antigovernmental conspiracy, dedicated to investigating the Unnatural, limiting its effects, and preventing the wider public from becoming aware of it. Not so in Jack Frost. In Jack Frost, the Player Characters are scientists working for MAJESTIC and PROJECT PLUTO and United States Air Force personnel from OPERATION BLUE FLY. This puts them on the other side, though their enemy is not the itinerant members of Delta Green, but a combination of themselves, their own security, and what they encounter on the cold nights in the Yellowhammer state.

Jack Frost is a one-shot scenario designed to be played in two to three sessions with six pre-generated Player Characters, four of whom are scientists and two of whom are United States Air Force personnel. It is played out over the course of three days and three nights in the lead up to Christmas Day. Potentially, if there are any survivors, their experiences as part of Operation WEATHERWATCHER may drive them to switch sides and begin working for Delta Green rather than MAJESTIC. However, Jack Frost is a challenging scenario—in fact, a very challenging scenario—and the likelihood of the Player Characters surviving beyond the events in Alabama, let alone in the long term, is low. Anyone surviving long enough to work for Delta Green following an operation a la Control Group is going to be a very remarkable individual and it is going to take a lot of skill and luck upon the part of his player.

Jack Frost begins with the Player Characters being transported to Willis, Alabama, where the scenario proper opens with a briefing. By the standards of Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, it is an incredibly extensive and detailed briefing, the wealth of knowledge presented to the players and their characters a radical contrast to that normally given Delta Green agents. What it highlights, even as it threatens to overwhelm the players, is the means and resources that MAJESTIC has to hand with its extensive governmental funding, whereas Delta Green is operating with virtually no budget! However, with that budget comes not just responsibility, but also oversight. In the case of Operation WEATHERWATCHER, quite literally, as there will be a two-man team assigned to the Player Characters from NRO DELTA to provide security, obviously to protect them and and the operation, but also to watch over their actions every day. As the scenario progresses and events get weirder and weirder, this need to watch the actions of the Player Characters transforms into paranoia. The situation is not entirely hopeless for the Player Characters though, as a combination of their persuasiveness and their knowledge, they may be able to convince them that their actions are the right ones...

Over the course of the three nights, the situation gets worse and worse. There are some truly horrible moments in the scenario as you would expect, some of which make you glad that it is a one-shot. The threat faced by the Player Characters is Itla-shua, the ‘wind walker’ of the far north, whose presence is felt nightly until the temperatures are cold enough to facilitate an appearance. Meanwhile, his children rise and if not stopped, will go on a rampage that might not end, but occur again and again in deep winters for decades to come. Stopping his coming and then banishing him is very, very difficult. The situation has to play out in a certain way and things have to go right for the Player Characters. There is definitely no guarantee that this will happen and there is the strong possibility of failure and death for all concerned.

Structurally, Jack Frost feels tightly constrained with its time limits and difficult choices made all the harder by the fact that the Player Characters will often need to get permission to follow them through. The information dump at the start of the scenario is daunting and the two Player Characters who are not scientists, but United States Air Force personnel, may initially find themselves with relatively little to do. As the action picks up on subsequent nights, this changes when they may become vital to the survival of everyone. There is scope for the players to each roleplay a secondary character, again from amongst the United States Air Force personnel, as they are better suited to the action scenes in the scenario.

What marks Jack Frost out as a very different scenario for the Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game is not just the fact that the Player Characters are members of MAJESTIC, but that it is a science horror scenario. It is science that drives the Player Characters to investigate the Unnatural and only late into the their investigative efforts do they realise that what they face is beyond science or even beyond the remit of MAJESTIC with its obsession with obtaining the advanced technology of the Greys. Nevertheless, they have to rely on the scientific process, which lies outside the traditional means of investigating Lovecraftian horror and Lovecraftian investigative horror roleplaying games. As a consequence, both the Handler and her players need to make some adjustment in conducting the investigation and reading the majority of the handouts that take the form of instrument and sensor readouts. This is not to say that there are no traditional handouts, such as newspapers or letters, but they need to be searched for whilst under the watchful eyes of NRO Delta agents.

Physically, Jack Frost is very well done. The artwork is excellent, for the most part, and the handouts are all equally as good.

MAJESTIC has always been portrayed as the villain in the Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game and Jack Frost is no different. Except that the players get to see this from the inside, by roleplaying members of the programme who believe in its aims and know that it is doing the right thing. Their experiences in Willis, Alabama will change that outlook—if they survive. Jack Frost takes Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game through the looking glass to discover just how mercilessly cold it is with a shocking, frigidly difficult investigation.

Mother’s Madness

A young woman suddenly moves from Birmingham, Alabama to the Vermont hills in the middle of the night, in the space of an hour—as indicated by her smartwatch. To the local authorities it looks like youthful activities—likely something drug related—gone wrong at best, an abduction at worst, the young woman seeming to have wandered out of the hills where the local kids like to party. Probably the former. To the members of Delta Green, the secret organisation with the U.S. government, it looks like something worse. It looks like signs of the Unnatural. Agents are quickly dispatched to the small-town hospital where the young woman, an African American student at university in Alabama, appeared so mysteriously. Their assignment is to investigate and potentially, negate an occurrence of the Unnatural before it even happens. From the start this is a challenging investigation. The Agents will need to develop a sufficiently strong reason for their being there and conducting an investigation. The victim, Robyn Bullock, seems profoundly shocked by the experience and there is something just a little odd about her experiences. By the time her family arrive, the initial difficulty of the investigation ramps up. They will not deal easily with strangers and whilst they will deal with Federal law enforcement, such is their distrust, they do it under strict circumstances. It is this lack of distrust in the Federal government and in law enforcement that runs through the rest of the investigation.

This is the set-up for Presence, 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. There are no specific requirements in terms of the Agents needed to play it, though strong interpersonal skills are going to be useful given the reaction that the Agents will receive during parts of the investigation. The investigation will switch from Vermont back to Alabama, which effectively means that the Green Mountain State is a diversion should the players surmise that its location suggests the involvement of the Mi-Go. What the Agents should learn is that Robyn has an interest in the New Age, astrology, and modern Wicca, and here the scenario is particularly modern in what they have to investigate—her social media presence. This will enable them to discover other several women in the same Facebook community who appear to have suffered similar situations to Robyn, and begin to close in on a suspect. The investigation is rich and superbly detailed and will take them into rural Alabama and take on a more physical nature.

If the players and their Agents have found the investigation difficult to date due to distrust of the Agents, it gets worse, as some of the inhabitants actively hate the Federal government and will not help the Agents at all. When they track down the culprit, it is effectively a ‘kill house’, but one infused with the Mythos as well as booby traps. It is a very nasty end to a difficult investigation.

This is a scenario that will directly change at least one of the Agents, such is the trauma and power of Robyn Bullock, and the scenario includes rules for that and the way in which they will be changed. These are psychic rituals, and there are six of these described. They include Apportation, Divination, Psychic Intrusion, and so on, and they all require the expenditure of Will Points and Hit Points to empower. This is in addition the Sanity loss involved too.

One of the issues with Presence is with the number of the NPCs who loath the Federal government and law enforcement. This makes for good roleplaying, but it will not be familiar to audiences and gaming groups outside of the USA. For example, one of the NPCs is described as a “Deranged dominionist and sovereign citizen”. Non-American audiences are unlikely to understand what this is and perhaps time and space could have been found in the scenario to explaining it.

Physically, Presence is well done. The artwork is excellent, though unfortunately the maps, done on aerial photographs with swathes of green forest are slightly difficult to read.

Presence is a really tight investigation bookended by some really weird nasty encounters with the Unnatural. At least one Agent will come away radically changed and some may not survive the final encounter, and that is to be expected for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

Awful Artefacts

Delta Green: ARCHINT is a supplement, for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. Published by Arc Dream Publishing, 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. Delta Green: ARCHINT details some of the the conspiratorial agency’s worst, vilest, deadliest, and most insidious of objects its investigating Agents have discovered, recovered, examined, and in some cases, hidden away lest exposure to or experience of, drive others to kill, simply disappear, and ultimately lose their minds. The world of modern law enforcement and espionage both rely upon intelligence. Some analysts develop signals intelligence or SIGINT. Some develop human intelligence, HUMINT. Delta Green deals in both, as well as a third type of intelligence—archaeological intelligence. Delta Green: ARCHINT is a supplement for the conspiratorial agency’s worst, vilest, deadliest, and most insidious of objects its investigating Agents have discovered, recovered, examined, and in most cases, hidden away lest exposure to or experience of, drive others to kill, simply disappear, and ultimately lose their minds. These are objects which seem to run counter the laws of physics—let alone mathematics, come from beyond history, and defy ordinary classification.

Delta Green: ARCHINT details eleven items, some new to print, others drawn from previous scenarios. Some are modern, some are not. The collection opens with ‘The Amulet of the Ai-Apa’, one of the two items in the collection seen in an actual scenario for Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game, in this case, Delta Green: A Victim of the Art. Depicting the twin figures of a man and an intertwined flying beast, this is a meso-American artefact that willingly or unwillingly summons a deadly servant. The other is ‘The Stone of Yos’, from Delta Green: Sweetness, a large blob of obsidian which lets the user connected to it to ‘summon’ a shadowy figure. These are not the only commonalities that run throughout the supplement. ‘The Hunahpú Mask’ is also of South American origins, Mayan this time, and shaped like an over-size human skull, which of course, is deadly to anyone who spends time wearing it. Like ‘The Stone of Yos’, another item which seems to take the user inside itself is ‘The Gowdie Shape’, a green, metal dodecahedron with connections to seventeenth century Scottish witchcraft, that defies mathematical and spatial analysis. Once inside, the user is sorely tested. Similarly, ‘The Mironov Object’ defies analysis, a four hundred pound of unknowable metal that dangerously enhances and energises the user’s mathematical visualisation skills to the point where they begin to resemble reality. Two entries are more modern, one with a shockingly hidden purpose, the other a hidden purpose. Both are constructs of a kind. ‘The Kurville Executable’ is the former, an email-delivered virus that when seen on the screen inflicts what appears to be epileptic seizures so traumatic, that they physically injure the viewer. Their effect is so deadly, the files are physically stored under lock and key with numerous warnings on them. Several artefacts are stored like this by Delta Green, though in some cases the methods of secure storage are laughingly quaint by modern standards. The other constructed item is ‘The Reneteur Device’, an oddly anachronistic computer that tracks the activities of the Great Race of Yith throughout time and space. If only the Agents could decipher the device’s purpose, it could track the Great Race of Yith operatives down and discover what it is they are up to.

Of course, not all of the objects detailed in Delta Green: ARCHINT share such commonalities and where they do, it does not means that they are connected. In fact, as written they are not connected at all. What they do have in common though, is a high level of detail and description that will help the Handler describe them and how they work—or at least what happens when an Agent begins poking around in and about them. The detail and the description includes the known history of each device and how each came into possession of Delta Green. There is more than enough description here to help the Handler bring each and everyone of them into life, whilst also leaving some room for the Handler to add details to the history of each item as she wants. Many of the descriptions, though, will have the Handler repressing a feeling of shock or disgust, whilst also being amazed at how bizarrely inventive they are in detailing each item.

Physically, Delta Green: ARCHINT is well done, although it does need an edit in places. The artwork is as excellent as you would expect for a supplement for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

Delta Green: ARCHINT is a good collection of thoroughly nasty objects and artefacts with histories both fearsome and foul. Yet that is all it is. Despite the rich detail accorded to every one of the eleven entries in the supplement, that is all that Delta Green: ARCHINT is. Of course, a Handler is going to be able to use that detail to create cases for her players and their Agents to investigate, but there are no scenario hooks given that might have helped. Equally, there is no broader background to how Delta Green as an organisation handles objects such as those detailed in the pages of Delta Green: ARCHINT or how its experts go about investigating them. For although the title of the supplement is Delta Green: ARCHINT, there is no discussion of the ‘ARCHINT’—the archaeological intelligence—of the title. That is a bigger missed opportunity than the lack of scenario hooks. Ultimately, though, the Handler is not going to be disappointed with the horrible objets d’art on show in Delta Green: ARCHINT—vile, murderous, tempting, and worse.

Heaven & Hell

The Religious Crimes Task Force is a shitshow, a dead end for any federal agent with ambitions or hopes of a better career. Established by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate and prosecute fraud and abuse in tax-exempt religious institutions, in effect it does no such thing. Instead, it alerts religious organisations that they are running foul of the law and might be in danger of having charges brought against them by the Federal authorities. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the head of the taskforce would not have it any other way as it prevents the government’s ‘persecution’ of white Evangelical Christians. For its investigators, it means rolling into small towns across the USA, investigating some small church and its congregation, and discovering that yet one more fringe, possibly cult-like organisation is effectively harmless. The Religious Crimes Task Force is effectively a smokescreen, but it is a smokescreen that Delta Green can take advantage of. It can flag up reports that suggest a religious organisation might be breaking the tax laws, but which to its analysts’ eyes might be connected to an Unnatural threat, and then have Federal agents wholly unconnected to the Delta Green program investigate, and if they uncover anything worthy of Delta Green’s attention, then it can send in its own experienced agents to deal with the issue. If the investigating agents survive the experience and are judicious in their reporting of it, then they may be suitable for recruitment. It is thus a smokescreen not once, but twice.

This is the set-up for Meridian, 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. It is ideally used as an introductory investigation with perhaps two or three Player Characters. To that end it includes three pre-generated Player Characters—two Agents and an optional character. The Two Agents consist of an FBI agent and an IRS investigator, whilst the optional character is a local social worker, who can either be a Player Character or an NPC. All three are possible recruits to Delta Green, the social worker as a Delta Green friendly. This set-up is not dissimilar to Control Group, the anthology of scenarios designed to create a pool of diverse Delta Green agents with varied origins and introductions to the Unnatural who can then go on to conduct investigations in secret for the conspiratorial organisation. So, Meridian can be used as an addition to that supplement or as a means to explain the addition of new agents to a campaign. To that end, the Unnatural element to the scenario is surprisingly low key.

The scenario is nominally set in the summer of 2018 as the Agents roll into Joplin, Missouri where the Kansas-Missouri-Oklahoma borders meet. They have been assigned to investigate Holy Light Ministries, which files taxes as both a church and shelter for troubled youth, but does not own any property, has just the one officer, the church leader, Daniel Boone Keeler, and uses a mailing address that is actually that of Keeler’s mother. Keeler himself has a criminal record of petty offences going back years, but that halted in 2011. The question is, is Keeler just some small-time preacher and hustler on the make or is there actual legitimacy to his church. The answer to that is yes, there is actual legitimacy to his church, but this being a scenario for Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game, not in any way that you would think was anything other than Unnatural.

Just as the three states of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma seem to overlap, so do the jurisdictions that the Agents have to work. So not just Federal law enforcement, but also local and possibly state, and then Missouri Department of Social Services, because not only does Keeler have a long record with both, but his Holy Light Ministries seems to be primarily concerned with ‘troubled’ youths—teenagers and young adults. A malaise lingers over Joplin, a miasma of economic deprivation, hopelessness, improvidence, and drug addiction which the Agents must navigate in the course of their investigation, but as they make progress, they discover that Holy Light Ministries does offer something. Possibly hope, possibly respite, and a sense of joy in god that transcends earthly, pharmaceutical addiction. Not necessarily though a Christian joy in god, since Keeler does not proselytise in the traditional fashion. Even the run down and dilapidated church he operates out of is more a refuge than a place of worship. As the Agents conduct interview after interview, what also comes up is the mention of the ‘Ghostlight’, a local legend which dates back to the 1940s, red-orange ball of light that appears in the skies at night over the woods on the Oklahoma-Missouri border. Is this what Delta Green wanted investigating? Is the ‘light’ of Holy Light Ministries one and the same as the ‘light’ of ‘Ghostlight’?

The underplayed nature of the investigation in Meridian also means that there is a passivity which runs throughout the scenario. In part, this includes the authorities, but it definitely includes Keeler and the Holy Light Ministries as well as the nature of the Unnatural in Meridian. Unlike in other scenarios for Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game, the Unnatural in Meridian is not an active force, but rather one that welcomes you to it and embraces you in hope. This makes it no less dangerous and frightening.

Physically, Meridian is well done. The artwork is excellent, though unfortunately the maps, done on aerial photographs with swathes of green forest are difficult to read.

Meridian is an easy scenario to run, though more so as an introduction to the conspiratorial world of Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game rather than as a campaign addition. It is run through with a meek malleability and horrific hopelessness, both in the Agents’ current assignment and the teenagers of Joplin, that will ultimately lead the Agents coming to realise that any sense of hope is hideously tied to the Unnatural.

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.

Memetic Madness

Impossible Landscapes is a campaign like no other. It is a campaign of cosmic horror investigative roleplaying rather than Lovecraftian horror investigative roleplaying that forgoes much of what we expect to see in other campaigns for Call of Cthulhu or other Lovecraftian horror investigative roleplaying games. It does involve an uncaring threat to humanity, but this is not a threat whose presence on Earth can be merely forestalled until such times as the Stars are Right. This is a threat that seeps into our world, spreading like a meme before the concept was defined, infecting and altering reality over and over, changing our perceptions, making us vectors, its influence spiralling and twisting until everything we see is connected by it. Mankind cannot stop it. At best we can curtail it—temporarily, for it always finds other vectors. At the very least, we can survive it, but we will not be the same as before, for we will have seen the Yellow Sign. The threat is the Yellow King, whose influence spreads via The King in the Yellow, the story collection by Robert Chambers, from the ur-city that is Carcosa, standing on Lake Hali, out through the surrealist region that lies between Carcosa and our world and into our minds. It is in this surrealist region, this ‘Carcosa Country’ where much of the events of Impossible Landscapes take place.

Impossible Landscapes – A Pursuit of the Terrors of Carcosa and the King in Yellow is a campaign for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, published by Arc Dream Publishing. Its origins lie not just in Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow Mythos, but also in the writings of two Delta Green stalwarts. First in John Scott Tynes’ own attempts to write a campaign focused on the King in Yellow that would lead to both short stories and his lengthy exploration of ‘The Hastur Mythos’ in Delta Green: Countdown. Second, in Dennis Detwiller’s ‘Night Floors’, a highly regarded scenario for Call of Cthulhu, also found in Delta Green: Countdown in which the Agents investigate the disappearance of a tenant from the Macallistar Building in New York and discover how easy it is to get lost in the building and its new floors at night. It is ‘Night Floors’ that forms the basis of the opening part of Impossible Landscapes, greatly expanded and connected to the rest of the campaign. In terms of scope, Impossible Landscapes is both a small campaign, encompassing just New York and Boston as its key locations, and a huge campaign, taking in as it does, the whole of unreality.

The campaign opens in 1995 with the reiteration of ‘The Night Floors’. Abigail Wright has gone missing from her New York apartment in the Macallister Building. As part of Operation ALICE, the Agents are to assist the FBI in collecting evidence from her apartment connected to her disappearance and determine whether or not there is something unnatural behind it. Almost from the start, the collection of evidence will appear strange, a random assortment of oddities glued to the wall in layers, but the building itself is stranger still. The other residents are initially recalcitrant and self-absorbed, but they seem to change at night, as does the building itself. There are new floors to the building, which seems to go up and up, yet never changes from the outside. ‘The Night Floors’ lays the foundations for the campaign, showcasing a duality between night and day, between reality and unreality, between rationality and irrationality, all of which runs throughout the initial parts of the campaign until they all begin to blur into one another. ‘The Night Floors’ is creepy and weird—and whilst the rest of the campaign is also creepy and weird, here it seems constrained and containable. Of course, it is far from that, but it does not seem to sprawl as it does in the rest of the campaign. The scenario also shows the Agents for the first time, that survival is their best and only hope.

‘The Night Floors’ is likely to end without a sense of any real achievement. It is not intended to, but this is not helped by the radical shift as the campaign jumps forward two decades for the second part, ‘A Volume of Secret Faces’. The options here are the Agents to have been deactivated during the intervening twenty years or the Handler to run some cases set during that period. The jump in timeframe has another effect though. It enforces the sense of unreality as connections begin to be spotted between the encounters in the here and now of 2015 and the past investigation of 1995,and that the Agents are being called back to that sense of unreality, and for them, that it truly never went away. In the second part of the campaign, the Agents are asked to investigate Dorchester House, a Boston psychiatric facility dealing in trauma where other Delta Green agents have been committed and disappeared. What the Agents will discover is a similar, but worse duality to that of the Macallister Building that will draw them deeper into the Impossible Landscapes. Here the campaign seems to pulsate with its unreality, expanding out to some utterly bizarre and frightening encounters, before contracting again to focus solely on the corridors and rooms—and beyond—of Dorchester House. Ultimately, the Agents will find themselves trapped in Dorchester House and its duality, but they will be able to escape.

The third part, ‘Like a Map Made of Skin’ turns the Agents’ paranoia back on themselves and sees them hunted, any trust issues they have fully justified now. The Agents will find themselves pushed and pulled, and though there are chances to revisit previous locations, ultimately, they have one choice and one destination, from where they can push on through to the other side—perhaps in pursuit of answers or even Abigail Wright still. This location, the Hotel Broadalbin, is one of many places in the campaign where it possible to transition between times and places in the campaign itself. Many of these are optional, and may or may not be discovered by the Agents. Hotel Broadalbin is not. Transitioning here will enable the Agents to make the final crossing into the Impossible Landscapes in the campaign’s last part, ‘The End of the World of the End’, and onwards towards Carcosa itself. Here the Agents will find war and despair as they search for a way to attend the court of the King in Yellow.

In terms of what the players and their Agents will confront—or is it what will confront the players and their Agents?—it is primarily a sense of the ineffable, of uncertainty, of never knowing quite what is going on and who to trust. That lack of trust has always been present in Delta Green and in Delta Green, but here the author winds this up so that it is not just a case of the Agents barely being able to trust who they work for as operatives of Delta Green, but they can no longer trust reality. Once exposed to the influence of the Yellow King, the surrealism never lets up, the motifs of Carcosa and The King in Yellow seeping in everywhere. Nowhere does this show more than in the clues the Agents will discover and the cascade of connections between persons and places in the campaign that never once seems to let up. There is moment at the beginning of Masks of Nyarlathotep in which having confronted the killers of Jackson Elias, the Investigators are presented with a thick wodge of clues that connect from New York to the rest of the campaign and in its opening moments threatens to overwhelm the Investigators with too much information. Impossible Landscapes is like that moment, but it never seems to end.

As a consequence, Impossible Landscapes all too often actually feels impossible in terms of an investigation. Although the campaign is quite linear in structure, determining where and what to investigate, what clues to follow up, can be daunting for the players. At other times, the campaign funnels down to one choice, and whilst the Keeper is provided with suggestions and tools with which to push the players and their Agents forward, this does undermine the agency of the players. To an extent this fits the campaign and its intentional uncertainty, but at the same time, it feels as if the author is writing the Agents and their players into a labyrinth, thus getting them lost, and then having to force them out again via a deus ex machina and into the next…

The campaign is also deadly. There are scenes and moments where it is physically deadly, but these seem almost inconsequential to the way in which the various encounters, discoveries, and more importantly, the realisations about the connectivity of one clue or fact or encounter to another constantly threatens to scour away at each Agent’s Sanity. Actual Sanity losses are individually low throughout the bulk of the campaign, but they are ever present and they mount up over the course of the Agents’ investigation. In addition, the influence of the Yellow King and each Agent’s susceptibility is measured by a separate track—Corruption. As this increases, invariably through actions and decisions upon the part of the player and his Agent, each Agent has the chance to learn more and access other locations, thus encountering ever greater moments of surrealist uncertainty. There are moments—few and far between—when an Agent can regain Sanity and lose Corruption, but once gained, Corruption can never be truly lost. Any Agent who actually survives Impossible Landscapes will be both scarred and corrupted by his experiences in the Impossible Landscapes, but to be clear, when the Handler decides to run this campaign, there is no play beyond it.

Physically, it is clear that Impossible Landscapes is not just a roleplaying campaign or a roleplaying book. It is a tome in and of itself, subtly recursive as if trying to infect the Handler as she reads and prepares the campaign. Images are not placed in the book, they taped in place haphazardly with masking tape, as if some unknown Delta Green agent is attempting to put together a file on the investigation for the archives. The influence of the Yellow King seeps into the pages with every mention of him marked and appended with the question, “Have you seen it?” There are subtle changes throughout the volume that startle both Handler and reader, just further adding to its atmosphere and tone of uncertainty. Throughout, the book is annotated by different voices whose identities can only be guessed at, throwing in weird anagrams and comments that suggest further connections, and suggesting that somehow, these annotations have been made post publication to the copy in the Handler’s hands. And then there are the handouts. There have never been handouts like this before. They are used to enforce the campaign’s surrealist uncertainty for much like the campaign itself, they are layered, they cannot be taken at face value, and they hide their ‘true’ information. In essence, the handouts have to be investigated in themselves in order to become useful clues to the investigation. For all this, as well as the fantastically accessible, but layered graphic design and the excellent artwork, it is no wonder that Impossible Landscapes won the 2022 Gold ENnie Award for Best Graphic Design and Layout. (It is also a travesty that Impossible Landscapes only won the 2022 Gold ENnie Award for Best Graphic Design and Layout. It deserved more.)

As to the writing, Impossible Landscapes is well written and easy to grasp. This does not mean that the campaign is far from challenging to prepare and run, given the complexity of the connections that snake back and forth across its length—though there is good advice given to both ends. What it does mean is that the writing does not complicate the process of either preparing to run or actually running the campaign.

Impossible Landscapes – A Pursuit of the Terrors of Carcosa and the King in Yellow begins with surrealism and uncertainty and never lets up on either, let alone the tension. This is superb creation, one which supplants the very way in which the King in Yellow is presented as a threat in other scenarios—typically as an attempt to stage a performance of The King in Yellow, with or without the Investigators’ involvement, to pull them or others into Carcosa. Impossible Landscapes does that to an extent, but always seems to be skirting the performance, instead focusing on the reality destabilising/unreality enforcing that takes place somewhere between our world and that of Carcosa. This is not an experience that any Agent can win nor does it involve a threat that any Agent can defeat. Rather it is an experience to understand and survive, a threat to be avoided, knowing that its infectious, reality warping surrealism is never going to be stopped. As a result, Impossible Landscapes elevates the Yellow King and his influence into an existential contamination that unbinds, rebinds, and connects reality and truly delivers a superlative cosmic horror campaign and playing experience.

Tell me, have you seen the Impossible Landscapes?

Miskatonic Monday #240: Beyond the Veil of Dreams: Susupti

Between October 2003 and October 2013, Chaosium, Inc. published a series of books for Call of Cthulhu under the Miskatonic University Library Association brand. Whether a sourcebook, scenario, anthology, or campaign, each was a showcase for their authors—amateur rather than professional, but fans of Call of Cthulhu nonetheless—to put forward their ideas and share with others. The programme was notable for having launched the writing careers of several authors, but for every Cthulhu Invictus, The Pastores, Primal State, Ripples from Carcosa, and Halloween Horror, there was Five Go Mad in Egypt, Return of the Ripper, Rise of the Dead, Rise of the Dead II: The Raid, and more...

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

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Name: Beyond the Veil of Dreams: Susupti

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Byron the Bard

Setting: 1980s Arkham

Product: Scenario
What You Get: Fifty-nine page, 1.79 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Sometimes the missing disappear for a reason

Plot Hook: A missing persons case leads into strange research and encounters with desperate people
Plot Support: Eighteen handouts, eight maps, ten NPCs, one Mythos artefact, and one Mythos creature.

Production Values: Plain

Pros

# Modern Lovecraft Country scenario

# Very detailed investigation

# Very detailed backstory

# Would work as a ‘Night at the Opera’

# Oneirophobia

# Somniphobia

# Antlophobia

Cons

# Never actually defines the nature of the threat

# Needs an edit

# Very detailed backstory

Conclusion

# Highly detailed investigation that threatens to overwhelm the Keeper with information whilst leaving the real threat undefined

# Potentially interesting combination of Indian mysticism and the Mythos

Magazine Madness 19: Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue

The gaming magazine is dead. After all, when was the last time that you were able to purchase a gaming magazine at your nearest newsagent? Games Workshop’s White Dwarf is of course the exception, but it has been over a decade since Dragon appeared in print. However, in more recent times, the hobby has found other means to bring the magazine format to the market. Digitally, of course, but publishers have also created their own in-house titles and sold them direct or through distribution. Another vehicle has been Kickststarter.com, which has allowed amateurs to write, create, fund, and publish titles of their own, much like the fanzines of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest. The resulting titles are not fanzines though, being longer, tackling broader subject matters, and more professional in terms of their layout and design.

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Most magazines for the roleplaying hobby give the gamer support for the game of his choice, or at the very least, support for the hobby’s more popular roleplaying games. Whether that is new monsters, spells, treasures, reviews of newly released titles, scenarios, discussions of how to play, painting guides, and the like… That is how it has been all the way back to the earliest days of The Dragon and White Dwarf magazines. Wyrd Science is different—and Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue (Wyrd Science Vol. 1/Issue 3) is different in comparison to both Wyrd Science Session Zero and Wyrd Science – Expert Rules. Gone is the ‘BECMI’ colour coding of the colours and the focus upon fantasy and the Old School Renaissance. Instead, the issue focuses on a much darker genre—horror, and instead of providing new monsters or scenarios, it explores the genre which has threaded its way through roleplaying since 1981 with the publication of Call of Cthulhu with a range of interviews and articles. This is not say that other genres are completely ignored, but the emphasis in this issue is very much on the dark and the forbidding, the scary and the spinetingling, and the unknown and the uncertain.

Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue (Vol. 1/Issue 3) was published by Best in Show in September, 2021 following a successful Kickstarter campaign. There are some ten interviews in the issue, beginning with ‘Publish & Be Damned: The Merry Mushmen’, or rather Eric Nieudan and Olivier Revenu, the French publishers best known for Knock! #1 An Adventure Gaming Bric-à-Brac and its subsequent issues. They give a little of their history and how they came to work together and their interest in the Old School Renaissance, including both Knock! and other projects. ‘Cast Pod: the Vintage RPG Podcast’ continues the magazine’s showcasing of a podcast in each issue and this time it is the podcast, The Vintage RPG Podcast run by Stu Horvath and John ‘Hambome’ McGuire. The podcast is dedicated to the history and art of RPGs, but the interviewees explain how they came to hosting a podcast and how they about creating an episode and in the process create a community around themselves.

Two artists are interviewed in Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue. The first is Tazio Bettin in ‘Art of Darkness: Tazio Bettin – Fighting Fantasy’. An Italian artist, he is the illustrator of Secrets of Salmonis, one of the two titles released for the fortieth anniversary of the Fighting Fantasy series and the first to be written by the series’ co-creator, Steve Jackson. There is some fantastic artwork on show here alongside the interview, in which the artist talks about his work and his turning his interest and hobby into a full time occupation. The second is Jonathan Sacha. In ‘Monstrous Arcana: Goblins & Gardens’ we find out how he came to be interested in Tarot decks and adapting the monsters of Dungeons & Dragons in weirdly bucolic, but unsettling Tarot deck by combining them with a gardening book!

Where all of the previous interviews have been conducted by John Power Jr, the editor of the magazine, Will Salmon interviews David Hughes of Plumeria Pictures on the release on Blu-ray of the 1982 television film starring Tom Hanks, Monsters & Mazes. The interview provides some context for the film and is more positive about it than others might be.

The issue’s horror theme swings into action with ‘I Will Show You Fear In A Handful Of Games...’ by Shannon Appelcline, which takes the reader through a history of the horror genre in roleplaying. He does this in a series of one-page mini essays, each one dedicated to a particular ear. Thus we begin in the early days of the hobby and Dungeons & Dragons, in which its horror was best seen in modules such as X1 Isle of Dread and I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City veering towards the Lovecraftian, but quickly steering away following issues with Deities & Demigods and mostly adhering to Pulp horror. The title of the opening essay, ‘Dark Shadows: 1974-1986’ is a nice nod to the soap opera of the period. The article really takes off with the appearance of Call of Cthulhu, the Satanic Panic of the eighties (of which the aforementioned Mazes & Monsters was a partial instigator), and the appearance of Vampire: The Masquerade in 1990, tracing their evolution over the past forty years and coming up to date with the more recent broadening of means, such as the Jenga of Dread, and areas explore, like LGBT adolescence with Monsterhearts and the feminine fairytale in Bluebeard’s Bride. It is an excellent history and with any luck, should future issues of Wyrd Science explore other genres, there will be similar articles.

Roleplaying games and the Gothic collide in Jack Shear’s ‘Wuthering Frights’. Here he looks at his favorite setting, Ravenloft. First seen in the 1983 module, I6 Ravenloft, this would be later developed into a full setting with the Realm of Terror boxed set in 1990. Shear examines the origins of Dungeons & Dragons’ signature villain, Count Strahd von Zarovich, of I6 Ravenloft fame, in Dracula and then each of the other Domains and their villains more recently for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition presented in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. A clearer bibliography might have helped what is otherwise an informative article and useful accompaniment to whichever version of the Ravenloft setting that the Dungeon Master is using.

Just as horror roleplaying games have changed over the decade, so have their portrayal of mental health. After all, the nature of the genre is all about the loss of self and control—physically, emotionally, and mentally. However, as Stuart Martyn points out in ‘Mind Games’, the portrayal of that loss, especially the mental loss, has not always been an accurate one, often leading to the enforcement of stereotypes about mental health and a lack of understanding of those suffering from poor mental health. To be fair, much of this can be explained by a game’s age. Call of Cthulhu is rightfully acknowledged as the first roleplaying game to explore fear and model the loss of control through its Sanity mechanics, but Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: The Masquerade are singled out as leading examples poor portrayals of mental health. However, as the article moves into the twenty-first century and comes up-to-date, it makes clear that modern iterations of these roleplaying games, as well as others, designers have shown more awareness and understanding of the subject and better tried to reflect that in their games. This is a fascinating look at a key mechanic, or least concept, that almost no roleplaying game can really avoid dealing with, and how it has changed over the years.

John Power Jr. takes us temporarily to the ‘Mythic North’ of Scandinavia, before returning to the British Isles in ‘This Septic Isle’ and an interview with Graeme Davis about Mythic Britain & Ireland, his supplement for Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying. This highlights the stronger tensions and divisions present in nineteenth century Britain, discusses some of the new Vaesen to be found in the new setting, and interestingly, suggests how the limited geography of the setting can lead to distinct variations upon the Vaesen within only a few miles. Davis also draws the distinction between the horror of Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying and the horror of Call of Cthulhu, primarily in that the later the aim at best is not to lose, whilst in the former, it is possible to resolve situations without necessarily resorting to despair. A different type of horror roleplaying game, Campfire, is discussed in ‘Flames of Fear!’, Samantha Nelson’s interview with its creators, Adam Vass and Will Jobst. Campfire is a storytelling game inspired by the horror anthologies such as Creepshow and Are You Afraid Of The Dark? The game uses decks of cards as prompts to encourage the players to tell horror stories about the protagonists rather than a single character each and also allows the players to step back from the story itself to comment upon the ongoing narrative as they are watching it unfold. This is shared storytelling and designed for shorter sessions than most roleplaying games.

Just as Call of Cthulhu remains the template for horror roleplaying in general, Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien remains the template for all Science Fiction horror games. John Power Jr.’s ‘Dark Future’ looks the three roleplaying games and how they handle horror and fear in examining this meeting of genres. Most obvious here is Free League Publishing’s Alien: The Roleplaying Game, but Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG – Player’s Survival Guide is also inspired by the film too. The third roleplaying game is The Wretched, a solo-journalling game about the last survivor aboard a spaceship whose crew was killed by alien monstrosity except for the survivor. One aspect of these settings that the article does not really explore is the class distinction between these and other horror roleplaying games. These are all Blue-Collar sci-Fi horror roleplaying games whereas many horror roleplaying games are not. Again, this is a legacy of the film Alien. Featuring interviews with the designers of three roleplaying games, article however, does nicely balance the unknown, but not cosmic, nature of the sub-genre’s horror against the possibility of survival—and even hope.

Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue also interviews the team at Rowan, Rook, & Deckard. They talk to Luke Frostick in ‘The Importance of Powerful Deaths’ about the origins of Spire: The City Must Fall and the consequences that its protagonists—Drow rebels seen as terrorists by the High Elf state—suffer in acting against the regime. Spire is not necessarily seen as a horror roleplaying game, at least not in the traditional sense, but the article makes it clear that it has strong horror elements. The article explores how the team works together and some of the ideas and concepts which make it into the setting, but without restricting the setting for the Game Master and her creativity. The issue returns to the Old School Renaissance with ‘In The Darkest Recesses of Ourselves’, an interview by Walton Wood with Paolo Greco of Lost Pages about The Book of Gaub. This brings out the horrific nature of the book and its spells and their broader effect upon a campaign. It is a pity that this book comes from Old School Renaissance, because being systems agnostic it can have a wider use in non-fantasy genres and settings too. The interview does not necessarily suggest this, but it highlights the nature of the book and will hopefully bring it to the attention of a wider audience. The interview by John Power Jr. of Guilherme Gontijo, in ‘Silver Scream’ turns to mundane horror, but horror, nonetheless. Blurred Lines – Giallo Detective Solo RPG is the Brazilian designer’s solo journalling game designed by the Italian giallo cinema of the sixties in which the protagonist is a crime scene photographer who hunting, and in turn being hunted, by a serial killer. Like the earlier The Wretched, this explores the notion of playing alone and at night, how that can immerse the player deeper into the game. The interview also notes the difficulty in bringing designs from Latin America to the English-speaking hobby and various attempts to support this.

The last two articles in Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue do not switch subject, but they do switch format under discussion. In ‘Roll & Fright’, Dan Thurot asks whether a sense of horror can be created in playing a board game, pointing to hidden identity or movement games such as Fury of Dracula or Battlestar Galactica, as possible vehicles as they both add a high degree of uncertainty to play. Whilst he acknowledges that most horror board games are merely themed, adding the veneer of the genre, he ultimately concludes that it is possible, if only under its terms. The challenge being that sense of immersion and the loss of control at the heart of the genre makes it all the more difficult to do in a board game. The last interview in the magazine is again by John Power Jr. and with wargames designer, Joseph McCullough. In ‘A Field of Horror’, the designer of the highly regarded Frostgrave: Fantasy Wargames in the Frozen City talks about his latest design, The Silver Bayonet, which fuses Napoleonic wargaming with horror and narrative storytelling. This looks to be a fascinating setting and with rules for solo play included suggests it can be played on a more casual basis without the need for more confrontational play of traditional wargaming.

Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue is rounded out with ‘Hit Points’, its extensive reviews sections. It includes reviews of wargames such as Warlord Games’ Sláine – Kiss My Axe Starter Set, roleplaying games like the RuneQuest Starter set from Chaosium, Inc. and Orbital Blues from Soulmuppet Publishing, board games such as Tales From The Loop: The Boardgame from Free League Publishing, and a range solo games (all revewed by Anna Blackwell), like Be Like a Crow and Bucket of Bolts, before looking at Christopher Frayling’s Vampire Cinema – The First one Hundred Years and various films and television series, which has a report from the FrightFest 2022. Two of the more interesting reviews here are of The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity by Jon Peterson and Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs, pleasingly placed opposite each other in an entirely appropriate pairing. Lastly, the issue catches up with the adventures of Mira Manga in ‘Appendix M’. It adds a personal touch to the magazine and brings it to a close.

Physically, Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue is impressively bright and breezy—despite its subject matter. The layout is clean and tidy, but the issue does need another edit in places though.

Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue covers a wide range of roleplaying games in exploring the issue’s genre. Some of the roleplaying games and supplements, such as Call of Cthulhu, Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, and Mythic Britain & Ireland obviously fall into the horror genre, others less obviously so, for example, The Book of Gaub. There is a lot to read and discover in the pages of the magazine and that is where it is at its best, finding out about a game you never heard of or wanted to know more about. Yet the format of the magazine, or at least this issue, makes it unbalanced and often not as engaging to read as it deserves to be. There are simply too many interviews in the issue compared to other articles, so that the other articles, whether Shannon Appelcline’s ‘I Will Show You Fear In A Handful Of Games...’ and Jack Shear’s ‘Wuthering Frights’ stand out more because they are different rather just because they are both interesting and informative. Consequently, whilst the issue is interesting and informative, providing an engaging look at a particular genre in roleplaying, Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue is better for what it covers rather than the way it covers its content.