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.

Because... Just because...

If the Nazis cannot have their Antarctic base at the end of World War II, then they will they will have their base on the Moon! Unfortunately the Nazis like to keep their secrets, so what you need is a guide. Fortunately, there is such a thing! Nazi Moonbase is a complete guide to, and history of, Walhalla, the base established in the Moon in the aftermath of World War II, and the war against it in the second half of the twentieth century. Published by Osprey Publishing as part of its Osprey Adventures line, our guide in this matter is Graeme Davis, the author of several previous titles in the range, including Knights Templar: A Secret History and Werewolves: A Hunter’s Guide, as well as being the co-designer of the seminal British fantasy RPG, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

Nazi Moonbase is a sequel of sorts to the first entry in the series, The Nazi Occult by Ken Hite. In both, the Order of the Black Sun plays an important role, in The Nazi Occult, driving the rise of the Nazis, but then in Nazi Moonbase, pushing first for a way to save Nazi Germany, but in the face of certain defeat at the hands of the Allies, for a way to survive beyond that defeat. Essentially, this is done by taking control of Germany’s advanced weapon programs such as the vehicles of Projekt Saucer and then initiating Protokoll Bifrost first to escape to the Antarctic and then to Walhalla on the Moon using the Haunebu IV saucer where it would form the centre of the base. No Swastika-shaped moonbase for the Nazis! There they survive, repairing and upgrading their ramshackle facilities, even developing technologies, all in readiness to strike back at those that defeated them.

In response, the Moon Race of the 1960s was as much designed to confirm and monitor Walhalla as it was a scientific program. Indeed, the near destruction of Apollo 13 was Walhalla’s response to these endeavours. The American response to this was Operation Lyre, a direct assault on the base which would end in all but total disaster. Only in the last few years has the USA decided to attack the last of the Nazis once again after decades of failed Lunar probes and satellites from various nations.

Ending with a detailed timeline, Nazi Moonbase goes into detail about all aspects of Walhalla and the response to it. This includes its location and layout, how it operates, and the development of technologies such as the Eisenmänner (‘Iron Men’) labour and combat androids and the Mensch-Maschinen androids that could pass for perfect humans or as duplicates for world leaders. The response, primarily by the USA and the USSR, is a more measured and less fantastical in tone—lunar probes and rovers, satellites and manned stations. It does end on a note saying that Boeing is developing a space-plane capable of ferrying six astronauts plus equipment… (or is that a squad of US space marines or six player characters?)

The history lends itself to numerous campaign frameworks and set-ups. So in the 1940s, it might be chasing advanced Nazi technological development to the Antarctic and beyond; in the 1950s, it might be fighting the strange attacks and scouting missions by flying saucers on the Earth or the secret infiltration of replicants from the Moon; in the 1970s and 1980s, it could involve the US and Soviet manned assaults on the moon base; and perhaps in 2010s, the final strikes using remote warfare. The obvious starting point for such campaigns—especially given the links in Nazi Moonbase to The Nazi Occult with the Order of the Black Sun—is Modiphius Entertainment’s Achtung! Cthulhu, but Cubicle Seven Entertainment’s Cold War Cthulhu may open various elements later in this future history.

From a gaming standpoint, it is good to see Nazi Moonbase include a list of games that would work well with this system-less sourcebook. Previous entries have always included a bibliography, but never included games that could be used with such material or reference similar material. There is no RPG that does so directly—though with its depiction of United States Space Command special forces fighting terrorism, Fantasy Games Unlimited’s Year of the Phoenix, might be the nearest—so these are pointers and the GM will need to develop the ideas and background in Nazi Moonbase himself. The bibliography covers fiction and non-fiction, comics, games of all types, and movies and television programmes.

Physically, Nazi Moonbase is very nicely presented. The artwork is excellent and the book is an engaging read. Nazi Moonbase is not so much one campaign idea, but several, spread over a secret history lasting over seven or so decades. As a secret history, it gives you enough details and pointers to take away and develop into your own game, whether that is a war game or a roleplaying game, though there is an obvious inclination towards the latter rather than the former. Either way, Nazi Moonbase provides an engaging alternate background around which a GM can develop a campaign against the evil space Nazis from the Moon!