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.
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