header

Project Nemesis

Project Nemesis is a fan driven website for games that use the One-Roll Engine (like Nemesis, Wild Talents, Reign and Monsters) or Chaosium's Basic Roleplay System (BRP) (like Call of Cthulhu) and the Delta Green setting.

Login

Who's Online

We have 1 guest and 1 member online

Total Users

1681 registered
3 today
9 this week
36 this month
Last: menteroso
Home
Power and Horror PDF Print E-mail
Written by Robert J. Parker   
Wednesday, 28 November 2007

Image
Delta Green represents a unique juxtaposition amongst modern conspiracy games that can be exploited in the name of horror. Players are given all the trappings of power in our society: black business suits, extra-legal powers and firearms. With so many roleplaying games coaching us to play out our power fantasies, it is easy for the PCs to fall into this type of thinking. 

Keepers, allow (and even encourage) this sort of behavior. Early in the adventure you should give the players opportunities to throw their weight around, to show hapless NPCs who is in charge. It doesn't matter; after all, in Call of Cthulhu they are ultimately helpless. When the players feel safe in their positions of strength over others, that's when you pull the rug out from under them.

New York_smThis can be accomplished by handing them an easy mystery scenario in which everything is running smoothly. The PCs find the clues without upset, prisoners fold quickly during interrogation, and women respond in a sexualized manner when observing them in power. When it looks like they're about to wrap up this mundane mystery, show them how everything they've assumed up until this point is absolutely wrong, preferably through a scene of sudden, overwhelmingly brutal violence from which they are forced to flee, screaming.

This is the opposite tactic from a traditional Call of Cthulhu game, in which players experience a growing sense of dread as they realize they are about to face something dreadful, and the growing anxiety is finally released during the confrontation. Here, instead, the players are encouraged to feel overconfident and in charge, so when the hammer falls it does so much harder. Frightened and caught off guard, you have managed to spoil the player's assumptions, and if you manage to continue to do so throughout the rest of the climax of the scenario it should further heighten their sense of helplessness.

The Karotechia are perhaps the most foe most suited for this sort of adventure. Since Germany's defeat in WWII, Western culture has thoroughly indoctrinated us all with the idea that we are both morally and ideologically superior to the Nazi regime. As A. Scott Glancy so succinctly put it, "… stomping Nazi butt is always a worthwhile endeavor." Assuming that your players do not subscribe to white supremacist or fascist doctrines, they will likely feel a certain joy in exerting their force over such archetypical "black hats."

************************

This line of thinking has led me to a scenario idea that I'm looking for some input on. The premise was inspired in part by the MiB's musings on the aftermath of See No Evil (where the investigators turn over the Bischofe's body to Agent Nancy for "debriefing"). It occured to me that, after such a scenario, Delta Green would realize that the first step towards dismantling Karotechia would be the elimination of the rest of the Bischofes, the "big guns" outside of the Triumverate. Since Cell A is nobody's fool, they would know they would have to make a co-ordinated strike against these agents so that the Karotechia could not alert the remaining Bischofes and regroup at La Estancia.

That's where our investigators come in. After months of planning, Cell A is ready to pull off this complicated operation and the player's cell (henceforth referred to as 'Cell H' for convenience sake) is given their orders. They are given an extensive brief on their target and are sent to intercept him at a small private airstip in Northern Idaho that he has commissioned a flight to. They are to observe the Bischofe's movements in the area, determine the purpose of his visit, and eliminate him after two days time.

Everything goes off without a hitch as the oblivious Bischofe glad-hands and fundraises at the all-white country club of a secluded private subdevelopment that houses several Christian Identity Movement sympathizers. When it seems everything is wrapping up and the players move in for the kill, the Bischofe surprises them by not returning to the airstrip (where there is a perfect opportunity for an ambush) and instead heading to an abandoned old house out in the woods.

danversThe crumbling manor, clearly overgrown from years of disuse, was actually the home of the sole survivor from a cult that had passed on decades past. This cult, a ultra-nationalist Greek organization that venerated Dionysus, had been highly active in the '60s and early '70s, using the Mythos to commit terrorist acts against Turkish civilians in Greece and Cyprus (more on them in another article). When a disastrous ritual left the rest of the cult dead, the remaining cultist (who was a Greek American who had originally traveled to his mother country to study before being swept away by nationalistic fever) returned to the states. With him he brought a collection of fragments recovered from millenia past, written during the last days of the Mycenean Era and the Dark Age that followed.

This cultist, his mind broken from the next several decades of studying and translating these texts, decided to summon and bind what he believed to be the Greek god Pan in his basement. Instead, what he called up was one of the hideous piping flutists of the court of Azathoth. The discordant music of the mindless thing from the pit was enough to cause the barriers of reality to break down, transforming the (thankfully locked and magically sealed) basement into something out of a madman's dreams. Unable to escape, the beast trapped inside continues to play its flute idiotically to the tune of the daemon sultan.

Too bad for the Bischofe (and our investigators) that he's got no idea what he's about to unleash on our world. Believing that he might find a few rare Mythos texts, our Bischofe will open the door to
another dimension and threaten the complete collapse of the small town of Priest Lake, ID into nuclear chaos. With the magical barrier penetrated, the music of the flutist will spread out into the nearby
woods. This music will cause the "fundamental rules" of humanity's everyday reality to begin to slip as everything around the investigators falls into entropy.

***************

While that's what I've gotten so far, I'm at somewhat of an impasse on where to take this story next. I see our Bischofe being devoured by the horrible things that reside in that basement, but I don't want to make this a traditional "bug hunt." The players should be scared, disoriented, and on the run from something that's much bigger than the threats they normally face.

Much more importantly, however, is that outside of the nameless horror that dwells in that basement, the threat should come from the everyday reality around them as the world begins to mutate into something approximating the daemon sultan's court. This idea was inspired by the J-Horror invasion a few years ago, where films like Dark Water, Ringu, and (especially) Uzumaki managed to extract horror from mundane events by having the everyday world transform into a source of terror. I felt like they resonated in an entirely different way than the traditional American horror film, the majority of which get their scares from the concept of the intrusion by an evil force from outside. Once this foreign element can be expunged the status quo will be once more established. Yet, you can never be certain of this in films such as Uzumaki, where there is no easily discernable foe and horror can (and often will) erupt from the most innocent-seeming sources.

This is where I need your help. I really need three things, if anyone can give me suggestions:
  1. What kind of supernatural effects can I employ in this scenario? I need your brains to produce horrific weirdness!
  2. How can the investigators resolve this scenario?
  3. At some point previous in the campaign, as either an introduction or an interlude to the normal game, I really want to run John Tynes' In Media Res from The Unspeakable Oath #10. I'd really like to see the characters that passed through the Rorschach blot return (in one form or another) in this adventure. How can I make this happen? What role could they potentially play? Could I somehow tie this in to the resolution to this scenario?
Comments
Add NewSearchRSS
psi breaker   | 80.169.3.116 | 2008-01-21 07:04:58
Just found this thread whilst looking for somewhere where the support files for In Media Res might be - although I've had to resort to good old photocopying instead. I'm actually planning much the same thing today, if my players are up for it - running the game as an introduction to a DG campaign.

My thinking is this: after I run the game with the convicts, I run a game with new agents, mentioning the weird case that led to their induction to the conspiracy, bodies in a house in the middle of no-where, a bloody pattern on the wall. No real threat, but something that suggests something weird going on. The agents then start off with an 'easy' adventure, cataloguing the belongings of a missing person in New York (i.e. 'Night Floors') or investigating the house where a lone agent dies ('Music From a Darkened Room').

That last story is just a good example for the sort of 'reality going bad' thing you've suggested, the Japanes styled domestic horror. Although it's been online awhile I've o...
Only registered users can write comments!

Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.
 
< Prev   Next >
[ Back ]

Latest Comments

One Roll Nemesis PC

Generate Nemesis Character

Clippings Generator

Generate Newspaper Clipping

Greenbox Generator

Generate Green Box

Insanity Generator


Generate Insanity

One Roll Companies

Generate Company

One Roll Talents


Generate Talent
Free Joomla Templates