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 when the young woman, an African American student at university in Alabama. 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 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 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.