Delta Green: All My Dreams Are About Raids

A belated entry to Luis Vito's JUKEBOX Jam. A Disciples of the Worm minidungeon for Delta Green.

Once a Spanish trade post, then a Mexican army fort, then an antebellum slave plantation. Now a small citrus farm in the Texan backcountry, producing sweet Marrs oranges and Mexican key limes.

The locals don't have much to say about it. The workers keep to themselves, act polite, and pay in cash. They're not all Mexicans and Guatemalans either, a few had odd foreign accents. Maybe European? 

They don't see the tunnels twisting beneath the earth. The crates of guns and bombs and worse hidden beneath sweet-smelling citrons. The parasites coiling inside perforated intestines, pain barely dulled by fistfuls of pills. The thing in the pool, robbed of language but still begging for death in wordless screams.

ARROYO AGRICOLA

A farm owned by a limited liability company of the same name based out of Mexico City. It's a corporate shell, calling their offices gets you forwarded to a UAE asset management company in Dubai.

The man who answers the phone speaks with an odd whistling cadence. It's not quite an accent, closer to the effect of wearing ill-fitting dentures. He denies any knowledge of wrongdoing, if confronted with evidence he promises to take it up with management. The next time the Agents call, the LLC is dissolved, phone-line is disconnected, and the fort's occupants have bugged out.

BADLANDS

The land surrounding the Arroyo farm is rugged and tiled with titular dried creek beds - steep rock formations divided by the corpses of narrow waterways. The farm itself is built on a small, well-irrigated plateau in the centre of the badlands. There's a single dirt road leading through the craggy terrain, watched by an poorly concealed array of solar-powered CCTV cameras. They're hooked up remotely, so a skilled computer scientist could hit them with a man-in-the-middle attack.

Beyond the road, the few navigable arroyos are choked with prickly pears. The cacti are already prolific across the Southwest, but the garrison anointed these specimens with the Milk of Shub-Niggurath, swelling them in size and gifting them with 4-inch barbed spines dripping with toxic sap.

Giant cochineal bugs swarm over these mutant succulents, so bloated with carminic acid they stain the clothing of interlopers with blood red blotches whenever they brush past.

THE FARM

Arroyo Agricola is a collection of prefab buildings, canvas tents, sheet-metal warehouses, and citron orchards surrounding a refurbished adobe fort. Water is pumped from underground reservoirs, power is supplied by solar and diesel generators - the occupants avoided hooking it up to the mains.

ORCHARDS
The orchards surrounding the fort are well-kept - regularly pruned, watered, and sprayed with pesticide by the field hands. Though the cultists are careful with their experiments, the proliferation of unnatural radiation often leads to mutations of the fruit. The workers are careful to remove any unusual specimens, and the farm is littered with burn pits where they are disposed. The Disciples frequently burn votive offerings to minor and major Mythos entities in these same pits.

DORMITORIES
These worker dormitories are canvas sided, framed with metal and floored with cheap plywood. The two dozen men inside (they're all men) are a mixture of Euros, Chinese, Hispanics, and Arabs. Despite appearing as undocumented migrant labourers, they're all initiates of the order, undergoing a bastardised Lent of pharmakeia and hard labour to develop the requisite mental fortitude for hosting a Worm.

The field hands pretend to be cruelly oppressed, feeding the Agents bad intel to lead them into ambushes. In combat they draw razor-sharp machetes and concealed handguns from their long flowing clothing. They're desperate and cruel, but not suicidal. Automatic gunfire suppresses them as usual. 

WAREHOUSES

The warehouses are creatures of battered corrugated iron, rattling with air conditioning units, containing stacks of crates filled with citrons and farm equipment. Below a layer of fruit and machinery, minor glamours conceal all manner of occult artefacts, narcotics, and weapons bound for all over the globe.

FORT
The old fort still has some original adobe walls, refurbished with modern brickwork and stone. Thick enough to stop rifle fire, and the defenders know it. A half-dozen Disciples of the Worm work from here, handling the administrative load of an interdimensional railway exchange. In the case of a raid, they don't immediately bug out, but prioritise hauling the most valuable cargo into the Higher Plane.

In terms of defences, a stolen Bolivian light mortar is concealed on the roof, but only two of the cultists are trained to use it and they've never test fired it before to pre-determine ranges, for fear of discovery. The cult can also bring to bear a Czech LMG, firing it from the upper windows to suppress attackers. Once inside, it's the usual knife fight of automatic gunfire, hand grenades, and combat rituals.

GROTTO
Below all the buildings are a network of tunnels - well ventilated, supported with steel beams, and carved with power tools. Despite being a hundred miles from the border, the Disciples still brought in a team of coyotes to dig these out for them. Minecarts powered by motorcycle engines carry valuable goods through a nexus of gates to the Higher Plane. This is reason for the outpost's existence, an interdimensional railway exchange for the Disciples' occult smuggling ring.

LOCATIONS

Found within the bowels of the Disciples' fort and the grotto stretching beneath it. Locations are interconnected with doors and tunnels, allowing Agents to move between them without need for an exhaustive floorplan. Booby traps are unlikely, unless the Disciples are given ample time to prepare.

ALCHEMY LAB
A modern kitchenette renovated into an alchemical laboratory. One part cartel drug lab, one part Baghdad House of Wisdom. Vessels of crystal and gold and silver and pewter are filled with foul-smelling powders and dark fluid. Worms lie in various states of vivisection and decay, intricate diagrams detailing their anatomy and the effects of the analgesic they excrete. 

LIBRARY
Reeks of burning paper and burnt pork. Filled with creaking bookshelves that lie mostly empty. A huge hookah dominates the room attached to a barometric chamber. Anything placed inside is vaporised by an enslaved Fire Vampire - the resulting smoke can be breathed in to absorb the sum total of the knowledge therein. Works on books as well as people, though it must be deep cleaned afterwards.

BLOODLETTER
A dark room reeking of body odour and dried blood. An ancient, emaciated man lies on a silk mattress, pristine if not for the blood soaking into it, hooked up to a wide array of advanced medical equipment and diagnostic monitors. He ignores the Agents as they enter, attention fixated on a plasma flatscreen playing Arabic dubs of Anthony Bourdain cooking shows.

Nearby documents in neat shorthand explain him to be an experiment in inducing a form of auto-brewery syndrome that causes a body to constantly secrete opioids. The Disciples bloodlet from their comrade with an ornate golden scalpel and matching bowl, ingesting the blood as a potent painkiller.

The man is wholly uninterested in conversation. Don't you get it? He's got his 72 virgins, he reached Heaven, he's escaped Samsara. With a body filled to bursting with worm analgesic and Shub-Niggurath milk and morphine and arcane wards, he is unbothered by any physical threat. The exception is blocking his view of the TV. First time, he warns you. The second time, he blasts you with Withering.

INTERCHANGE
A railway turntable built in the nexus of a half-dozen stone gates, all leading to different paths through the Higher Plane, connected by train tracks and minecarts festooned with protective talismans. Travel through the alien dimension is exceptionally dangerous, even when properly protected, so the Disciples prefer to break up their journey using waystations like these.

Against one wall sits a human nervous system carefully pressed between two sheets of clear glass, twisted into the shape of an Elder Sign. A sticky note warns against touching it lest offenders end up dead or worse. The effigy prevents Mythos entities from waltzing through the stone gates into the turntables. If destroyed, it's dealers choice as to what comes boiling into reality to attack anyone in the room. A Dimensional Shambler, Hound of Tindalos, Star Vampire...

BATHHOUSE
A beautiful bath house in the Arabic style, with whirring filters to keep the water clean. Sitting moaning in the pristine waters is a lobotomised Worm Mother, hooked up to an array of IV drips and force-feeding devices. The Disciples never enter the room without a casting of Soothing Song ready to sedate the thing, lest it surge out of the pool and club trespassers to death, spewing Worms all the while.

The walls are lined with stone shelves, upon which sit glass jars filled with slumbering Worms ready for transport via the Higher Plane to Disciple installations the world over. A wooden chair with thick leather restraints and a bloodied hole in the seat stands on the far end of the room, along with urns filled with the rare herbs required for the Quiet The Worm ritual.

TRINKETS

The Disciples of the Worm are renowned as occult smugglers. If the Agents loot a room, open a container, or search a railcar bound for the Higher Plane - aside from the usual Mythos tome or magical weapon - they can find one of the following curios:

• A woven net full of dead vultures. Begin screeching loudly whenever approached. Can be desensitised to certain persons, letting them act as a crude occult alarm system.
• The crystalline skull of a K'yani, ornately scrimshawed with pidgin Aklo.
• Turkish rug depicting a man with a red tongue for a face. Unusually heavy, the interior is impregnated with ten kilograms of uncut cocaine.
• An untreated wooden 2x4 stained with blood. The dried hands of a dozen White Apes are nailed to it, each with three fingers curled to the knucklebone.
• A Greek orthodox triptych bound with human flesh. Inside, the face of the Theotokos weeps droplets of the Milk of Shub-Niggurath.
• A series of styrofoam fish-packing boxes filled with ice and a dismembered Deep One hybrid.
• An overexposed photograph of a spined Dark Young exsanguinating a screaming woman.
• A Limbo Stalker suspended in a novelty-sized fish tank filled with formaldehyde.
• A crumbling soapstone idol of a Chthonian, missing several of its tentacles.
• A bundle of stuffed Zoogs tied together at their tails. Bear signs of feline predation.

FINALE

If they're able to delay the Agents or simply given ample forewarning, the Disciples gather their most valuable occult goods and flee through the stone gates in their grotto, closing the portals behind them.

Unwilling to risk leaving behind evidence, and eager to indulge their natural tendency towards occult cruelty, the cultists contact a Mythos entity to clean house for them. The thing promptly demolishes the fort, kills any trespassers, and rampages across the surrounding countryside for good measure.

• A Chthonian that liquifies the surrounding earth, collapsing the fort and grotto into a sinkhole. Agents attempting to flee the resulting collapse are hampered by it driving them to Temporary Insanity with its psionics, extoling them to SHOUT REVEL KILL even as the walls come down.
• A cactaceous Dark Young lying dormant among the mutant prickly pear cacti, called down to trample the fort into dust and drain the blood from any surviving Agents.
• A Fire Vampire unleashed from the library's hookah, promised whatever scraps of unnatural knowledge might've been left behind in exchange for razing the fort to the ground. It eagerly pursues Delta Green Agents, knowing their minds to be delicious repositories of forbidden lore.

WHY ARE YOU HERE?

A low-ranking Disciple of the Worm was flipped by Delta Green, giving up the location of the portal nexus below Arroyo Agricola. It's only a matter of time before word reaches the garrison that they've been burned and they bug out with all the occult goodies. The Agents only have one day to plan, make requisitions, and scout the site before launching their raid against the immortality cultists.

After a botched operation against the Disciples, one or more Agents were kidnapped by the cult and dragged into the Higher Plane. Tracking devices on their person/s pinged below Arroyo Agricola, where the captives are being prepared to replace the garrison's aging Worm Mother. Delta Green crashes out an impromptu rescue team to save the hostages before they're converted.

Arroyo Agricola is a useful installation, but it lies too close to the southern border for the cult's comfort. Given America's immigration crackdown, the Disciples' elders want the portal nexus moved. Right in the middle of the fort being mothballed, a raid team of ICE goons show up operating on some bad intel (likely seeded by Delta Green). The Disciples try to allay the Agents' suspicions of illegal immigrants, but it's inevitable they'll stumble across something they shouldn't and the knives come out.