Slasher Serial

There is someone stalking us. Someone faceless or wearing a mask that hides his features, makes him anonymous, who wants us dead. He will catch us. He will slice us. He will stab us. He will play elaborate pranks on us. Pranks that do not make us laugh, but make us die. Then he will fade into the background, allowing a moment of respite to recover, only to come stalking out of the darkness, relentless, unstoppable. Picking us off, one by one. Perhaps always targeting the same person. Again, and again. All for reasons only he understands. Perhaps he has a weakness, something that will stop his unflagging hunt for you all. What will it take for you to survive? What will it take to stop him? What will you tell your family, your friends, your children about this determined horror? This ‘Slasher’ insistent upon bringing your life to end? Nothing? Or reveal the truth? Or let the trauma of your experience fall upon their heads until the Slasher from your youth comes looking for them and they realise that it was all real…

The slasher film is a subgenre of horror films that involves one or more killer stalking and killing people with knives and other sharp implements. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, Scream, and I Know What You Did Last Summer are considered to be classics of the subgenre and most of them have spawned sequels and even franchises of their own, as well as books, games, and more. It is the idea of the Slasher film as a franchise complete with a returning Slasher such as Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Chucky that is explored in SHIVER Slasher: Generation Murder.

SHIVER Slasher: Generation Murder is a stalking, slashing, stabbing sourcebook and campaign for Shiver – Role-playing Tales in the Strange & the Unknown, the horror roleplaying game published by Parable Games. It not only analyses the Slasher subgenre, but also provides six different scenarios all from the subgenre and different eras of the subgenre. These can be run as a single campaign with generational play, the players creating and roleplaying characters who are related to or descendants of the characters who were victims of a Slasher in the previous scenario. The playthrough of each film or scenario follows the structure of the Slasher film, with its advance and retreat format and its building of terror, all to a final confrontation with the Slasher. In turn, they take the Player Characters from the nineteen thirties to the twenty-tens, via the nineteen fifties, eighties, nineties, and noughties, forcing them to confront a different type of Slasher each time. Any one of the six scenarios in SHIVER Slasher: Generation Murder could be run as a single one-shot, but ideally not, because in-between, the survivors will pass on an inheritance to subsequent Player Characters. In effect, the entirety of the campaign in SHIVER Slasher: Generation Murder can be seen as one big Slasher film, with the inheritance interludes between each scenario as the only respite.

Although the campaign in SHIVER Slasher: Generation Murder has its own Slasher(s), the supplement handily categorises the various types as monsters that the Game Master can use them in scenarios of her own creation. So, for the Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers type there is the Unstoppable Force, the Supernatural Terror for Freddy Kreuger or the Candyman, and even the Apex for the Xenomorph or the Predator, which obviously points to a different interpretation of certain Science Fiction film series. There are full stats for all of these and discussion too, of possible attacks and signature weapons, and of course, resistances and weaknesses, the discovery of the latter typically enabling the Player Characters to defeat their Slasher. Lastly, there are some thought upon what the Slasher is going to look like, what makes his appearance iconic. The advice here is fairly broad, but in that, it certainly fits the horror subgenre.

The inter-generational nature of the campaign in SHIVER Slasher: Generation Murder is handled via ‘The Inheritance System’. This starts with the players deciding upon why their characters or one of the characters in their group has inherited the ire of the Slasher stalking them. This can be due to a curse, a transgression, or a prophecy, but whatever the cause the legacy means that they will inherit two things—a Boon and a Cost. A Boon can be an artefact or wisdom, a Cost a certain trauma or a fear. An artefact might be a Lucky Rabbit’s Foot or a Diary; the Wisdom might be First Aid Skills or knowledge that ‘The Truth is Out There’; the Trauma could be Fear Paralysis or Panic Attacks; and the Fear could be of Fire or Masks. The campaign makes use of these and more.

The campaign in SHIVER Slasher: Generation Murder presents six very different scenarios. Each is very nicely formatted, including a set-up, suggested characters for use as both Player Characters and extra NPCs, a Classification Board, details of what the Director knows, enemies, weapons, and items, the epilogue, and the Doom Events. The Doom Events are the four events per scenario that can be triggered over the course of the script, whilst the Classification Board categorises the scenario. Actually the ‘SHIVER Board of Classification’, for each scenario it lists the length of play time, number of players required, Subgenre, Film Age Rating, Content Warning, Recommended Ability Level, and Watchlist. The latter includes the archetypal films that the script references and that the Game Master should watch for inspiration. The six are all quite linear in terms of story and lengthy too, so will probably take two sessions to play through.

The campaign opens with a prequel, ‘The Quiet Isle’. It is set in the 1920s and inspired by King Kong and Cannibal Holocaust. The Player Characters are the cast and crew of the groundbreaking film, The Lost Temple. Groundbreaking because it is going to be shot on film with the new technology. However, despite the director having sent out an advanced scouting party to get things set up on what is a lost world, by the time the Player Characters get there, it seems to have doubled down on being abandoned. Even getting to the base and the film sets is fraught with danger, and that is before things begin to go badly wrong. And that is all whilst the director is trying to get scenes shot. The scenario switches into a big chase sequence as the Player Characters try to get out of the ancient temple below the island. The scenario would be easier to run if there was a map of the sequence and it feels more Indiana Jones than King Kong in places, but it sets everything up for what is to come. This includes the villain of the whole campaign and a secret organisation with an interest in what he will doing in the next one hundred years! Its filmic nature also means that there is scope for a crossover with the publisher’s other anthology-campaign, SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream.

It leaps forward to the fifties with ‘Static Zone’. The setting is small town America and the inspiration is Stephen King’s It and Channel Zero. Thus, the Player Characters are children and the subject matter is the technological marvel of the age—television. They get to explore the town of Wayville and get a hint of what the lives are like for some of the adults in small town America. In this case, living in a box that is suburban and conservative. As children they do get see behind the façade, if only a little, and may gather a few clues that might be useful in the second part of the scenario. This takes place behind the television screen, first in an unreal reflection of the Player Characters’ own home life, then wider suburbia, and lastly, in a series of very dark versions of children’s television programmes. They will encounter dangerous mannequins, cartoon bullies, a killer pig, and Chippy, an axe-wielding maniac, who could be a man in a beaver costume or a big, animated beaver! Thematically, ‘Static Zone’ takes the conservatism of the fifties and gives it very scary twist.

The given inspiration for the next part is Alien and Stage Fright, but at times it touches a little on The Running Man as well as video nasties. Moving into the eighties, ‘Curse of the Owlman’ shares some of the unreality of ‘Static Zone’, but this time of film-making rather than television. The Player Characters are only a little older, teenagers in their school’s Audio/Visual Club who sneak into a film studio shut down following a series of on-set deaths, for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a never before released film. Unfortunately, there is a very reason as to why the film was never released, which the Player Characters discover as the Slasher on-screen climbs out into the screening room and begins chasing them through the studio, including across sound stages which are set up just like they have seen on the screen! There is more of a mystery to this scenario and some puzzles to be solved before the final confrontation and the Owlman is sucked back onto the silver screen!

As the title of the fourth scenario suggests, ‘Be Kind, Rewind’ is all about VHS video cassettes. Set in the nineties and inspired by Saw and Squid Game, the Player Characters are now adults, looking for a ‘get-rich-quick scheme and desperate to sign up for a business conference promising wealth and success, held at a rundown Las Vegas-style hotel undergoing renovation. The villain of the piece, Mister Flick, only appears on screen for most of the scenario as the Player Characters ascend the hotel being made to play one deadly game after another. The scenario does involve scenes of torture that the Player Characters will need to find a way to stop, typically by winning the various games.

A cross between Terminator and Bubba Ho-tep, though there also hints of the novel, The Thursday Murder Club, ‘Fear, Scream-Lined’ takes place in the noughties at Shaded Pines, a retirement village. The Player Characters are retirees, members of the ‘Midnight Mystery Society’ to stave off the boredom of life in the highly regulated community, when the leader of their group goes missing. Investigating—or rather, being overly nosy—ends with them all following in her footsteps and receiving personalised care in the Shaded Pines’ medical facilities. Investigating further reveals that the retirement home is a front for a secret project to create the next evolution in fear, a biomechanical homunculus capable of transforming into the other Slashers. Which in this case means those Chippy, Mister Flick, and the Owlman! Of course, the creation turns on the creator in the final scene before the Player Characters have to battle it in the laboratory. This is weirdly creepy and made all the more challenging by the players having to roleplay retirees.

The campaign comes to a head in the last and final scenario, ‘Re-Slasher-Ed’. Combining Cabin in the Woods, Monster Squad, and Freddy vs Jason, it brings back the Slasher for 2010s at ‘Slash-fest 201X’, a convention dedicated to the horror subgenre and the works of a late director renowned for his horror films. It unsurprising that this final scenario is self-referential, with room for Player Characters from previous instalments to star as attendees much as Slashers from those previous episodes do, and there are plenty of callbacks to those instalments along with room for more. These include a playdate with Chippy and facing Mister Flick in a virtual realm, all the Player Characters have a final showdown with the villain behind it all. It brings the campaign to a decent close, but is less useful as a standalone affair given that it references so much of the rest of the book.

Physically, SHIVER Slasher: Generation Murder is another good-looking book from Parable Games. Although there are moments of respite, the artwork looms out of the darkness at you, cartoonishly horrifying in its depiction of the monsters and maniacs that will threaten one set of Player Characters after another. Unfortunately, it does need an edit in places and the writing feels a little rushed.

Unfortunately, SHIVER Slasher: Generation Murder does not work quite as well as the publisher’s other shared anthology campaign, SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream. Whereas in SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream, the players are roleplaying the same characters from one film or scenario to the next, although performing a different role each time, in SHIVER Slasher: Generation Murder, the players are not roleplaying the same characters in each of its scenarios. They are roleplaying different characters, some or all of whom are related to characters who appeared in a previous scenario. They are also playing in different eras, decades apart, with each scenario showcasing a different type of Slasher each time. Whilst there is the connection of the villain between scenarios, the overall connection between the scenarios is not as strong or as immediate because of the campaign framework. Obviously, the supplement has to showcase the different types of Slasher and different types of Slasher particular to each era, but this weakens the connections between the scenarios and the campaign, because unlike the film franchises which inspire the supplement, there is no horrifying realisation that Michael Myers or Freddy Kreuger has come back from the grave to hunt us down again.

Conceptually, SHIVER Slasher: Generation Murder is a great idea, but the supplement really shows how difficult that idea is to bring to fruition and make it engaging for the players. This is not to say that the idea is unplayable or indeed, that SHIVER Slasher: Generation Murder is unplayable. Rather that ultimately, SHIVER Slasher: Generation Murder is easier to run as an anthology of disconnected Slasher scenarios than as a connected campaign.

—oOo—

Parable Games will be at UK Games Expo which takes place on Friday, May 30th to Sunday June 1st, 2025.

Miskatonic Monday #308: The Game is Rigged

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. 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.

—oOo—

Name: The Game is Rigged

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Ryan Graham Theobalds

Setting: Gulf of Mexico

Product: Scenario
What You Get: Twenty-seven page, 2.63 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: The Thing, but on an oil rig

Plot Hook: Some diversions are just not worth the danger

Plot Support: Staging advice, five pre-generated Investigators, two handouts, four maps, eleven NPCs, one Mythos tome, and six Mythos monsters.

Production Values: Good

Pros

# Tightly plotted scenario

# Dramatic set-up

# Nice build up of tension

# Cinematic style

# Myxophobia

# Oleophobia

# Hoplophobia

Cons

# More maps of the oil rig would have been useful

# Tightly plotted
# Not every NPC has stats
# Could have been a shoggoth

Conclusion

# Tensely plotted, paranoid disaster versus Mythos film

# The Thing, but on another platform

Miskatonic Monday #179: Camp Otter Lake

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.

—oOo—

Name: Camp Otter Lake

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Sean Liddle

Setting: 1980s USA
Product: Scenario Outline

What You Get: Six page, 241.81 KB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Summer camp scares, again. Again.

Plot Hook: Summer camp promises freedom and pay, but serves up scares and haunting.

Plot Support: Staging and set-up advice, timeline, and two handouts.

Production Values: Undemanding.

Pros

# Straightforward plot outline
# Minimal investigation, mainly a physical investigation

# Phasmophobia

# Diokophobia

Cons

# Requires development by the Keeper

# Requires Player Characters to be created

# No Sanity losses or gains

# Requires a strong edit

# Non-Mythos slasher horror cliché

Conclusion

# Non-Mythos slasher horror cliché 
# Single-session scenario outline which requires development by the Keeper

Abhorrent Operettas

A Night at the Opera: Six Terrifying Operations for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game is an anthology of scenarios for the Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, the roleplaying game of conspiratorial and Lovecraftian investigative horror published by Arc Dream Publishing. All six are standalone affairs and so can be used as one-shot scenarios, but whilst they are not connected beyond being investigations for Delta Green, they do have campaign possibilities. Ranging in complexity from basic to labyrinthine, the six can easily be slotted into an ongoing campaign, fitted to the Agents as they gain experience on operations or ‘nights at the opera’. The sextet can also be run after the introductory set-up scenarios in Control Group or the scenario in Delta Green: Need to Know. Some of the scenarios in A Night at the Opera are not new, having been available for the previous iteration of Delta Green as well as having been available singly, but it is good to have them here in a definitive collection for the Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

The collection opens with ‘Reverberations’ by Shane Ivey, an introductory investigation into the reappearance of a designer drug from the 1990s on the streets of Chicago. Then distributed by Tcho-Tcho streets gangs—since broken up by police and federal crackdown—the question is, who is distributing the drug two decades later, why are users and dealers disappearing under mysterious circumstances, what has it to do with the much maligned Tcho-Tcho community? Old Delta Green hands will no doubt confirm that reputation, but different times and different attitudes means that investigators need to be more respectful. The least complex of the investigations in A Night at the Opera, more experienced players of roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror will probably determine the problem at the heart of ‘Reverberations’, but in keeping with the Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, there is a certain degree of obfuscation when presenting the Unnatural threat. Another thing that ‘Reverberations’ does—and this is something that several of the scenarios do in the anthology—is hint at the deeper and wider conspiracies in the world of the Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. ‘Reverberations’ is a short and engaging investigation, which nicely works as an introduction at the start of a campaign or a later interlude in an ongoing campaign.

‘Reverberations’ is followed by ‘Viscid’, a richer, deeper investigation written by Dennis Detwiller. The Agents are brought in to investigate the bloody death of a geneticist (and his girlfriend), who had links to secret defence research projects and appears to have been continuing his research despite being retired. The horrors uncovered are inspired as much by The Thing from Another World as The Cat in the Hat, but they do take no little uncovering and they do play upon the concept of the near-unstoppable, mutable horror seen over and over in the genre. In the hands of other scenario writers, the set-up and the threats might simply tip over into being clichés, but as much as the Unnatural horrors are well-handled, what really lifts ‘Viscid’ out of the ordinary is the layering of the conspiracy covering up the fallout from the collapse of MAJESTIC-12—the top, top secret organisation that kept the existence of extraterrestrials a deep, deep secret and exploited the technologies they were given by them—in the wake of September 11th, 2001. There is the possibility that the Agents will even come across one of its notable figures, which gives the Handler—as the Game Master is known in the Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game—a really good NPC to roleplay and add to her campaign. This is a nicely detailed, meaty investigation with lots of clues and some nasty confrontations, both mundane and mythological.

Dennis Detwiller’s ‘Music from a Darkened Room’ is a Delta Green classic, an investigation into the odd death of a fellow Delta Green Agent in a supposedly haunted house. Its structure is one of two halves—much like its precedent, ‘The Haunting’ for Call of Cthulhu—with Agents investigating and assembling data in the first half, then entering the house in the second. The scenario has been restructured heavily around an array of experiences and encounters to be had from room to room in the house, all varying according to the Agents’ Will Power stat. This enables the Handler to tailor the encounters and experiences to the Agents, enabling her to start with a sense of unease and build up through creepy to weird and the outright bloody confrontations. How much of a solution there is to this situation is another matter, and this may be one that the Agents finding resolving almost impossible.

Shane Ivey’s ‘Extremophilia’ has the problem in that has similarities with the earlier ‘Viscid’ in that inheritors of MAJESTIC-12’s legacy have their experimentation get out of hand. The Agents are called in when a sheriff’s deputy in Lewis and Clark County, Montana turns up dead after suffering massive heavy metal poisoning. Clues point to a researcher at a local, but obscure pharmaceuticals company, but he is nowhere to be found. In places suitably weird and creepy, what  ‘Extremophilia’ lacks in comparison to ‘Viscid’ is the layering of the Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game’s conspiracy as deeper background. Its movie reference is more obvious, being Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which may well impinge upon the tone of the scenario. Were it be in another anthology, ‘Extremophilia’ would be a solid scenario that a Handler would be happy to run, but alongside ‘Viscid’ it pales in comparison.

Greg Stolze’s only entry is ‘Star Chamber’, a powerhouse of a scenario which calls for grand staging and excellent roleplaying. Much like the Akira Kurosawa film Rashōmon, it involves multiple conflicting points of view and testimonies, with the Agents tasked with determining if not the truth, then at least the least worst outcome for Delta Green as an agency. The set-up has the Agents being sent to hear an after-mission report of an investigation which went wrong, but rather than hear the reports given verbatim via the Handler, the players get to roleplay out what happened on the out-of-country mission as the survivors. At each stage though, the emphasis is upon the point of view of a different survivor—or secondary Agent, so getting at the truth, or at least, a truth, should prove a challenge throughout. The set-up requires much heavier staging than other Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game scenarios with a greater degree of direction needing to be given to the players when roleplaying the survivors recalling (and playing out) events in the unsuccessful mission. Although it may call for more than they expect from a Delta Green scenario, most players should relish the roleplaying challenges written into ‘Star Chamber’ which should leave their Agents wondering if the same might happen should they really screw up an investigation. ‘Star Chamber’ would work as a one-shot or convention scenario, but whether played as either of those, or as part of a campaign, this a markedly different and enjoyable scenario.

The last scenario in A Night at the Opera is Shane Ivey’s ‘Observer Effect’. The Agents are hurriedly assigned as Department of Energy agents to investigate whether the Olympian Holobeam Array, a new high-technology physics laboratory which has just gone online, is using technology from previously classified United States Air Force programs. The facility’s scientists and engineers seem disgruntled, if not affronted, to have the Agents on-site, but as the laboratory is beset by a series of strange energy spikes accompanied by distortions in the fabric of reality, their reactions begin to vary wildly. Some are secretive, some forthcoming, others disappear, and the situation only grows worse and worse as the spikes and distortions escalate… This is as direct a confrontation with pure Cosmic Horror as any of the scenarios in the anthology present and may well mark the ending of a campaign should its timeline play out free of Agent interference…

Physically, A Night at the Opera is a sturdy, well-presented, full-colour hardback. It would have been nice if the various NPCs from the scenarios had been given thumbnail illustrations for the Handler to show her players, but the main presentation issue with the anthology is that the background information for the secondary Agents is not presented as succinctly as it could be for ease of use. Of course, the main actual issue with A Night at the Opera is whether or not the Handler already has any of the six scenarios within its pages as they have long been available separately. So a Handler may already have one or more of these, which means that the collection is not of as much use as if she had none of them.

Although they do suffer a little in terms of repetition of plot elements, for the most part, the six scenarios in A Night at the Opera are singular pieces of horror that at their best are strongly wrapped in the conspiracies behind Delta Green. That they can all sit alongside each other and be run as part of the same campaign showcases the strength of the framework in the Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game in providing motivations for Agents and players alike to investigate the Unnatural. Of the six, ‘Viscid’ stands out as a deliciously deep slice of conspiratorial investigation, and of course, ‘Star Chamber’ as a fantastically staged roleplaying set-up and premonition as to what might happen to the Agents (much like in the earlier Delta Green: Need to Know) in the future. A Night at the Opera: Six Terrifying Operations for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game is an excellent set of scenarios for the Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, whether used as one-shots, convention scenarios, or as part of an ongoing campaign.

Unnatural Results

Control Group is an anthology of scenarios for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, the roleplaying game of conspiratorial and Lovecraftian investigative horror published by Arc Dream Publishing. It presents an odd set of scenarios which can be used in interesting ways, but bar the last and fourth of the quartet in anthology, none of them can be used in a standard, ongoing Delta Green campaign. All four can be used as one-shot scenarios and all four are, to one degree or another, suitable as convention scenarios. This though is not the point of Control Group. The first three scenarios are designed to be the first encounters that the player characters have with Unnatural—as the Mythos is known in Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game—with the survivors being potential recruits for Delta Green. If they are recruited, then the fourth scenario is intended to be their first ‘official’ ‘Night at the Opera’ as actual agents for Delta Green. All four scenarios are set in the past, so there is potential to use them as flashbacks also.

The quartet opens in 2010 with ‘BLACKSAT’. The player characters are NASA astronauts training for their next shuttle mission when they are assigned to a top secret mission to repair a satellite in low earth orbit. For the crew, the urge to get into space again in the face of an ageing shuttle fleet and potential program cancellation offsets the secret nature of the flight. That though, is the very least of their problems, for none of the crew are either qualified or cleared to repair the black satellite, and that means babysitting civilians who are. Worse, neither of the civilian specialists are certified—either professionally or physically—as astronauts. Neither is capable of passing any medical examination either… 

Unsurprisingly, given the nature of the mission, ‘BLACKSAT’ is tightly plotted, almost linear and fairly heavily scripted. So for the player characters, it is primarily reactive than proactive in nature. There is still plenty of room for the astronauts to act though, both prior to the launch and once they reach low earth orbit where all hell seems to break loose as the Extra Vehicular Activity specialists literally have to manhandle the civilians out of the shuttle and up to the satellite. None of this stops ‘BLACKSAT’ from being an effective piece of scientific horror as the player characters cope, first with an impossibly bureaucratic situation, second a horridly physical situation for which only they are trained to cope with, and third, the Unnatural in uncomfortably confined spaces… 

‘BLACKSAT’ is relatively short, probably taking no more than two sessions to play through. Designed for play by four or five players, it is nasty, claustrophobic piece with some horridly sympathetic NPCs for the Handler to roleplay. The likelihood is that it will end in the death or madness of everyone aboard (or not), but survivors are likely to their careers severely affected. It need not be run with a NASA crew or as shuttle mission either. There is the flexibility to shift it forward and run it with a contemporary commercial space venture, or even run it in the 1980s as a one-shot with the player characters being the cosmonaut crew of a Buran VKK Space Orbiter. After all, was the lack of funds, the real reason that the Russian shuttle programme was cancelled?

The second scenario, ‘Night Visions’, is also relatively short and also set in an enclosed space. Set in Afghanistan in 2011, the player characters are a CIA Foreign Service Officer and her protection detail attempting to make contact and negotiate with the Gath, an isolated tribe reviled by the surrounding tribes, but known to hate the Taliban. The strangely emaciated and scarred Gath are welcoming, eyeing them oddly, whilst their corpulent queen draws them ever deeper into the tribe’s strange customs. It is not difficult to think of the Tcho-Tcho here, but the Gath are weird in their own way. Getting answers from the Gath will be hampered by the language barrier and an avaricious translator, but their answers are often obtuse. ‘Night Visions’ will push at the limits of how far the player characters are willing to go to accept tribal customs. The scenario is likely to end in a cathartic gun fight—and there is a coldly technical epilogue—but up until that point, ‘Night Visions’ is a creepy and unsettling. Again, there is some flexibility with ‘Night Visions’ as a one-shot. With some adjustments, it could be run at any point during the British Empire’s interest in the region or in the 1980s during the Soviet invasion of the region.

The third scenario takes place in 2012 and is the most technically complex of the quartet in Control Group. ‘Sick Again’ switches the action back to the USA, with a quick-response team of doctors and scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent to Hudson’s Well, a small town in Arizona, where an outbreak of unknown origins has occurred. The town is ill-equipped to deal with an outbreak and the team will have its hands full tracking the infection status of the patients, researching the victims, and examining the symptoms and developing a treatment, and enacting a containment plan, as well as dealing with other events. There is a lot here for both players and Handler to keep track of and as oddly unsettling as the disease involved is, there is relatively little horror to ‘Sick Again’. That is, until the investigators locate the disease vector and then it gets weird… ‘Sick Again’ has ties back to classic Delta Green canon and may well be a frustrating piece of scientific horror until the completely strange finale.

Unlike the previous two scenarios, the pre-generated investigators provided for ‘Sick Again’ do not come with any background and so not only are they bland, the players are expected to create their backgrounds, bonds, and so on. The backgrounds and connections allow for some motivated interplay between those characters, but here the investigators feel cold and impersonal.

No pre-generated investigators are provided for the fourth and last scenario in the anthology, it being expected that investigators be created by playing the first three scenarios. ‘Wormwood Arena’ takes place in Kansas in 2013 when a Delta Green affiliate flags a potentially dangerous symbol on a pamphlet from a New Age-style sect called ‘Harmonic Bliss’. Further investigation reveals that the sect’s founders are missing and it has a new charismatic leader. So the question is, have they been kidnapped or murdered? In order to find out the investigators will need to go undercover, which requires roleplaying upon roleplaying upon the part of the players. Again there is the element of how far the investigators will go in order to learn what they need to know, followed by an unexpectedly weird turn of events. Until then, ‘Wormwood Arena’ feels underplayed, even languid until the potentially explosive finale.

Although the book needs a slight edit in places, Control Group is a very nicely presented hardback. Its fully painted artwork is excellent and the handouts are all very well done.

The design intent of the four scenarios in Control Group may well mean that a Handler is unlikely to use them, since barring the fourth scenario their various set-ups are for specific groups and so cannot be added to an ongoing campaign. Beyond this limitation, there is a surprising flexibility to the first three, whether they are used as origins stories, flashbacks, one-shots, or convention scenarios. Of the four, ‘BLACKSAT’ and ‘Night Visions’ are the easiest to run and the most direct in their presentation of the Unnatural, whilst ‘Sick Again’ nicely builds its mystery before making a swerve into the uncanny. Overall Control Group provides some excellent means of introducing players to Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game and their player characters and potential agents to the Unnatural and the mission of Delta Green.

Coping with the Unnatural

Originally published by Pagan Publishing in 1997, twenty years on, Arc Dream Publishing is updating Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, ‘A Role-Playing Game of Lovecraftian Horror and Conspiracy’, its take upon modern Lovecraftian investigative horror, to a post-War on Terror, Trump-dominated, divided world. A taster of the setting as well as a scenario and a Handler’s Screen were provided in Delta Green: Need to Know. The roleplaying game consists of two books, Delta Green: Agent’s Handbook and Delta Green: Handler’s Guide. The first of these presents the core rules and the background to the game’s investigators—or Agents as player characters are known—whilst the second presents the greater background, the secret, but unfortunate true nature of the world and universe which will ultimately drive those exposed to it insane and cause them to lose their humanity. 

The Agents are primarily members of United States law enforcement agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation or Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the Department of Defense, such as the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases or 318th Cyberspace Operations Group; intelligence and diplomatic agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency or the Department of State; and public safety agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Environmental Protection Agency. Some are civilians, typically specialists of one kind or another not usually employed by the US government. What they have in common is that they have been co-opted into Delta Green, a covert group within the United States federal government tasked with investigating, containing, and concealing unnatural threats and events which are a danger to the United States, let alone the world. They work off budget, hiding it within normal expenses; they do not know who leads the group—indeed they are unlikely to meet Delta Green members other than their fellow cell members and their briefing contact; and they keep what they discover a secret—and they suffer for it. The consequences of their facing the unknown will corrode their sanity, and consequently disrupt their mental wellbeing and both their professional and personal relationships.

Delta Green is a roleplaying game whose themes are investigation and uncertainty, suspense and horror, violence and moral choices, sanity and comprehension, keeping secrets, and personal and professional consequences. What it is not, and this despite its origins, is a roleplaying game of investigating the Cthulhu Mythos. Rather, it is one of investigating the Unnatural, that which is not natural to the fragility of the human psyche—and sometimes the human body—but in fact reflects the true nature of the cosmos. It is also a game of covering it up and containing it, lest the world at large is exposed to its corrosive effects. To an extent, this is made easier by the fact that the Unnatural is rarely encountered, but lethal when it is, and in the main, because humanity is jaded enough to not believe the stories of its existence. Of course, the Handler—as the Keeper is known in Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game—as well as veteran players of Delta Green and other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror, will recognise many of these elements as being of the Cthulhu Mythos. The latter though, is not a term used in the Agent’s Handbook, where hints as to the nature of the Unnatural are shifted to the documentation and reports which appear in the book’s stunning illustrations. Fundamentally, this shifting of the Cthulhu Mythos to the Unnatural represents an attempt to mystify and occlude the races and entities from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and others—at least from the point of view of both player and Agent.

In Delta Green, characters or Agents are defined by six statistics—Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Power, and Charisma; derived attributes which represent their mental and physical strength; a Profession, what an Agent does as a job and what skills they have; skills—their training and their education; and their Bonds, the ties they have professionally and personally which keep them grounded in the natural world. Every stat has derived value—equal to five times its value—to roll against when using it directly and stats under nine or over twelve also have a distinguishing feature. An Agent also has Bonds—personal connections—that tie him to the natural world that to some extent will bolster his ability to withstand the ‘Unnatural’, but yet will suffer as consequence. In terms of skills there are relatively few changes, most of which to reduce the number of skills to choose from. So Alertness covers perception-based skills like Spot Hidden and Listen, Firearms covers guns, and so on. For obvious reasons, there is Cthulhu Mythos skill, it instead being replaced by the Unnatural skill, which covers all “Things Man Was Not Meant to Know”. In addition to skills, Agents can have special training, such lockpicking, parachuting, or SCUBA diving, each tied to an existing skill, or in some cases, a Stat.

To create an Agent, a player either rolls his Agent’s Statistics (roll four six-sided dice, drop the lowest, and assign freely), divides seventy-two points between the six Statistics, or choose from one of the sets of numbers included in the Agent’s Handbook. After determining the derived attributes, a player picks a Profession. The most obvious Professions for Delta Green are Federal Agent, which can represent working for any one of a number of United States government federal agencies, and Special Operator, representing a member of the United States’ special forces. Both the agencies and special forces are detailed later in the Agent’s Handbook, allowing both player and Handler to detail their Agent’s professional life and background. Only a few of the Professions can be described as being classically Lovecraftian, the others are all very modern. Skills provided by Professions are set values, as are the Bonus Skill Points a player can assign. A player is free to assign the eight Bonus Skill Points or can choose any one of the optional Bonus Skill Point Packages, each representing specific training or previous training, from Artist, Actor, or Musician, Athlete, and Author, Editor, or Journalist to Soldier or Marine, Translator, or Urban Explorer. Besides this a player needs to decide on his Agent’s Bonds—essentially the more time consuming the job, the fewer bonds available, Motivations, and if playing a veteran of the covert group, then the reason for being co-opted into Delta Green. This is a traumatic incident in their past such as Extreme Violence, Imprisonment, Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and so on. Each is mostly traumatically deleterious to an Agent’s stats, though there may be some minor bonuses too.

Captain Mary Purcell, MD, US Army
U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
Age 32, American

STR 10/50
CON 14/70
DEX 14/70
INT 17/85 (Logical)
POW 15/75 (Dogged)
CHA 16/80 (Persuasive)

Hit Points 12
Willpower Points 15
Sanity Points 75
Breaking Point 60

Bonds
My father, Professor Henry Purcell (16)
USAMRIID Team (16)
My boyfriend, Jeff Carter (16)

Motivations
Understanding disease
Fulfilling my service to the United States
Being equal to any male colleague

Traumatic Background
None

Incidents of SAN loss without going insane
Violence [ ] [ ] [ ] adapted | Helplessness [ ] [ ] [ ] adapted

Skills: Alertness 50%, Bureaucracy 70%, First Aid 60%, Forensics 40%, Medicine 60%, Military Science (Land) 20%, Persuade 60%, Pharmacy 70%, Science (Biology) 60%, Science (Epidemiology) 50%, Science (Genetics) 50%, Search 40%, Surgery 20%

Weapons
None

Overall, the creation process is relatively quick, mostly a matter of making choices and assigning set packages of points. The result is that an Agent looks not dissimilar to an Investigator, the same attributes being used as statistics, although Size is not used. Mechanically, Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game employs a percentile system—no surprise given that it is derived from the Basic Roleplay System, but it keeps its mechanics even simpler. Penalties and bonuses rarely amount to more than a flat -20% or +20% and when it comes to a Luck roll, an Agent has just a flat 50%. In Delta Green it is not a derived value. Combat is noticeably deadlier with many weapons having a flat Lethality rating in addition to the damage they ordinarily do. For example, a short burst from a submachine gun has a Lethality rating of 10%, whilst a grenade has a Lethality rating of 15% in a 10 metre radius. Roll under this and an Agent or the target—if human—is dead. Not even Body Armour protects against this, though cover will. Even if failed, the results of the percentile rolled for the Lethality check are added together and applied as damage, rather rolling individual damage dice. It can thus be very deadly, so Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game is not designed to be a combat focussed game. It plays a role, but its lethality should ideally encourage players to be as cautious as their characters are probably trained to be. 

As befitting a roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror, Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game has rules for Sanity, including loss and recovery. In comparison to other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror, those here are both complex and nuanced. An Agent can suffer Sanity loss from both suffering and inflicting violence and from a sense of Helplessness as well as the Unnatural. When an Agent suffers a loss of five points of Sanity in one encounter, Temporary Insanity occurs, simply triggering a ‘flight or fight’ response and lasting only a few minutes. If an Agent loses Sanity enough to fall below his Breaking Point—essentially when the terror or stress has become too much, equal to Sanity minus his POW or Willpower—he can acquire a Disorder which will develop later. The nature of the Disorder is determined by the source of the Sanity loss. So PTSD from Violence, Anxiety Disorder from Helplessness, Depersonalisation Disorder from the Unnatural, and so on. Should an Agent lose Sanity or encounter a traumatic trigger related to his Disorder, an acute episode of it can occur.


However, in Delta Green, there are ways of preserving an Agent’s Sanity. Willpower can spent to reduce to Sanity loss, but at the same this reduces the value of an Agent’s Bonds, reflecting the loss of and connection to humanity represented by the Bonds. An Agent can adapt to sources of Sanity loss from Violence or Helplessness, but whilst this makes him immune to such losses, he also becomes more inhuman. Willpower is a finite resource, but it can be regained through rest, fulfilling a motivation, and so on. Personal pursuits away from an assignment enable an Agent to strengthen a Bond, undergo therapy and regain Sanity, improve a Stat or skill, and so on. A disorder can also be overcome, but it takes time and it never truly goes away—trauma or severe Sanity loss can trigger it again. In general, the Sanity rules in the Delta Green: Agent's Handbook reflect the wider effect of Sanity loss and the place of each Agent’s place in the world.

This is continued with the guide to ‘Home’. Just a few pages long, this explores what might happen to an Agent once he has returned from a Delta Green mission. Each player is expected to roleplay a scene exploring how their Agents have been changed by what happened on the mission, but are then given the opportunity to deal with any sanity loss, perhaps by going on retreat, fulfilling responsibilities to Bonds and personal relationships, entering therapy, working to improve a skill or Stat, and doing special training. Alternatively, an Agent can study a previous case or the Unnatural! This is likely to result in a Sanity loss, of course. Worse, an Agent might get fired or prosecuted as the result of a Delta Green mission and this is also covered.

Although these Sanity rules add a complexity in comparison to other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror, they also add nuance and subtlety, and they add opportunities for the players to explore the consequences of their Agents’ actions. The Bonds definitely serve to make the rules for Sanity in Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game more than just numbers and to provide good hooks for roleplaying.

The Agent’s Handbook provides not just the physical details on the equipment and the vehicles that an Agent might be able to obtain, but also how to get them—either by purchasing them or requisitioning them. This can be very difficult as the funds an Agent may officially have access to may be fairly limited and the ability to hide expenses or obtain other sources of funding makes the Program Manager Occupation and the Accounting skill a whole lot more important and a whole lot less dull. Money is treated as an abstract, as a series of expenses ranging from incidental and standard up to major and extreme. The tools of the trade are covered for most types of Agents, as are weapons, armour, vehicles, surveillance, breaking and entering, survival, and communication devices and computers. A range of services is also detailed. 

Perhaps a third of the Agent’s Handbook is devoted to the agencies, departments, and regiments that an Agent can belong to. Delta Green was always renowned for the fact that it set high standards in its treatment it gave the alphabetti-spaghetti federal agencies. The Agent’s Handbook not only meets those standards, but exceeds them. For each agency, department, or regiment, it explains its jurisdiction, whether it can enforce laws and what they are, how it is organised and how it operates, any areas of friction, and how to play a member of the organisation. Various Occupations are also listed for each agency. The ten agencies covered are the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defence—including the various military service branches, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of State, the US Marshals Service, and US Special Operations Command. Previous versions of Delta Green provided information about a far greater number of agencies, but not necessarily in great detail. Here, the agencies are afforded greater detail—some three or four pages each—the result providing more information about playing a member of each, how they operate, and so on. Not only is this background much more playable than before, it also provides a good overview of the US federal investigative landscape.

Rounding out the Agent’s Handbook is a set of appendices. These give an introduction to tradecraft with accompanying mechanics for surveillance, pursuit,  interrogation, disposal of body, and Delta Green’s infamous ‘Green Boxes’, the latter being cell’s storage facilities and boxes for anything and everything from weapons and corpses to medical supplies and evidence of the Unnatural. Glossaries lists terms for equipment, persons, information/misinformation, locations, operations, and so on. All useful facts and procedures for playing characters who have specific professional information and skills that the players probably lack.

Physically, Delta Green: Agent’s Handbook is a superbly professional hardback. The writing is clear and easy to understand, its treatment of its subject being matter of fact and straightforward with barely a hint of the Unnatural. Where the Unnatural creeps into the book is the fully painted artwork and the faux documentation of Delta Green operations. The latter are a horrifying read in themselves and they could easily form the basis of handouts ready to unnerve a Handler’s Agents and their players.

The Delta Green: Agent’s Handbook provides a superb resource for both player and Handler for roleplaying modern conspiracy and Lovecraftian horror scenarios and campaigns that is Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. The first with some well written background the US intelligence and federal agency landscape, the latter with the nasty nature of the Sanity rules, which very effectively show off the corrosive effects—and more importantly, the consequences—of encountering the Unnatural. What is amazing is that it does so when only hinting at the terrible nature of the Unnatural via the book’s art and in-game documentation. In updating it to the modern day, the Delta Green: Agent’s Handbook brings lethality and a grim and gritty tone as well as PTSD and depression home to Lovecraftian investigative horror, whilst saving the Unnatural for the Handler’s Guide.