I ran a Delta Green campaign for my game group for several years. We put it on hiatus almost exactly 2 years ago, to try other games and -- later -- to playtest This Favored Land. Now we're getting back into DG, but this time we're using NEMESIS as the game system (with a couple of things stolen from WT).

The first scenario we're playing is "A Night on Owlshead Mountain". I finished converting the NPCs and nasties to NEMESIS, and so I thought I'd share them with the mailing list. I'd appreciate any criticisms you might have to offer. I also plan to post these to the files section.

This message has my "design philosophy". The next post will have the stats for the scenario.

Note that these conversions are quite subjective, which is typical of any system-to-system conversion. I tried to translate the NPC's and/or creature's capabilities from their BRP stats to ORE. My way of doing it could be entirely different from your way. I welcome comments on how you would do it differently.

One final note: I have not playtested thesed stats yet. I just did the preliminary alterations for our first game. We'll be playing in about two and a half weeks, at which point I'll get to see how well they worked out.

Conversion Rules

I used Shane's Cthulhulike conversion rules for the most part, with a couple of departures.

Brains are derived from the BRP INT stat instead of an average of INT and EDU.

The Education skill's dice pool is found in a unique way. Take the BRP EDU stat and look it up as though it was a NEMESIS stat. This is the skill's dice pool. For example, an EDU of 19 becomes an Education skill with a total dice pool (including the Brains stat) of 5d. This can then be shifted up or down based on the character's abilities in skills covered by the NEMESIS Education skill: science, math, social studies, etc. skills. If the Education dice pool is less than or equal to the character's Brains dice pool, the character does not have an Education skill. The Education skill covers a number of skills in NEMESIS. If a character doesn't have the Education skill but has an area of expertise normally covered by such skills (for example, a native American who learned Astronomy as a boy), that area of expertise shows up as a new skill.

The NEMESIS Health skill is found by taking the BRP CON stat multiplied by 5, assuming the character leads an active, healthy lifestyle. If the character has an unhealthy lifestyle, subtract 1d (or more) from the skill.

Some skills have a dice pool but the skill itself is 0d. This means that the dice pool is equal to the stat associated with the skill. The "0d" means that the character has some understanding of the skill. If the character doesn't have points in a skill, its dice pool in NEMESIS is equal to the base stat's dice pool minus 1d. With a skill of 0d, the skill has a dice pool equal to the base stat's dice pool. Example, a character with Brains 3 does not automatically have a 2d dice pool in every human language. A 0d in Language [Spanish] means that character does have knowledge of Spanish, and the character has a 3d dice pool in Spanish.

The skills in NEMESIS are broader in scope than BRP skills. As such, several BRP skills are incorporated into one NEMESIS skill. A good example is the NEMESIS Stealth skill, which encompasses the BRP Hide, Sneak and possibly even Conceal skills. In general, the NEMESIS skill is based on an average of the BRP skills. If a character is particularly adept at one of the skills, the NEMESIS skill can be altered to give the character that greater ability.

Some of the more common Call of Cthulhu skills do not exist in NEMESIS. One such skill is Library Use. This is covered by the NEMESIS Education skill.

The character's hardened and failed notches are very subjective, based on the description of the character in the adventure. I looked at the list of Madness Meter Intensities and decided what, if any, the character was immune to. If I thought the character was immune to a specific Intensity, I gave the character hardened notches equal to that Intensity. For instance, I figured Deputy Fitzgerald was used to being a disappointment to his associates due to his drinking, so figured he had four Hardened notches in Self. As a police officer he likely saw dead bodies, so had 3 Hardened notches in Violence. However, anything weird was going to send him over the top, so he has no Hardened notches in the Unnatural.

For Failed notches, I looked to see how many major psychological issues the character had. For each major issue, they need 5 Failed notches. I then spread the Failed notches around as I thought best based on the character's experiences.

Example: Cooter McGee's Madness Meter is based on the NEMESIS madness definitions on page 21. He's clearly a psychopath by the definitions under Violence and Helplessness, so he's totally hardened in those. The only Mythos creatures he's encountered are the Mi-Go, along with what they did to him, giving him an Unnatural hardened of 7. McGee is obviously still susceptible to madness with regard to Helplessness, so he has 3 in that.

McGee is also insane from his mental trauma. Most of this is due to what the Mi-Go did to him, and his inability to kill himself (heavy on the latter). His BRP San stat of 4 shows he's on the edge of complete collapse. To represent that, he has 6 Failed notches in Helplessness and 3 in Violence, leaving him one Failed notch away from another major insanity.