I've fallen behind on my New Age play reports. Rather than try to remember precise details and give a blow-by-blow of each sessions, I'll be writing up vignettes of interesting moments.
This is only half of what I intend to write, but considering this post has been sitting in my drafts folder for over 2 months, I thought I'd at least get something out.
This post is dedicated to Fee Fi Fo Fin's Belli Occulta campaign and the brave Friendlies of Y-Cell, delousing the United Kingdom one parish at a time.
October 21st, 1997. North Platte, Nebraska.
The Agents of J-Cell convened in North Platte's FBI field office a few months after the St. Louis incident. With the heat still on them for killing Ronald Valiant, A-Cell had assigned other cells to continue investigating Enolsis. In the interim, the conspiracy had a job for J-Cell. Senior researcher at the Great Plains Cruciform Array (GPCA), Stan Arnold, has been flagged for seeking out a copy of the 10th volume of the Revelations of Gla'aki. Some astronomer looking for a tome wasn't necessarily cause for concern, at least if Arnold hadn't just stabbed his girlfriend to death and committed suicide-by-cop.
With Doug Walters in the wind, J-Cell set about getting a search warrant for the Enolsis chapterhouse. Fortunately, FBI forensics had already run samples taken from the Mercedes. The blood type matched Ronald Valiant's military records, and they even discovered it was a genealogical match for Senator DiTorrio thanks to a hospital trash bag JENKINS had absconded with.
Given Valiant was a wanted fugitive with a laundry list of violent offences, JOSEF had no issue getting a federal judge to sign off on a clandestine warrant. He even assembled a crack team of US marshals from the St. Louis field office for backup on the warrant service. Meanwhile, Scanlon was ratfucking every tracer round and smoke grenade he could find from the FBI armory. If bullets didn't hurt that shapeshifting monster, maybe burning magnesium and phosphorous would.
Knee deep in enhanced photography, microfilm, manilla folders and interagency reports, JOSEF had found some leads. The marine in the photograph with Colonel Daniels was one PFC Ronald Valiant, a dishonourably discharged teen delinquent with a storied criminal record. Apparently Valiant used to run drugs for the Contras, before being shot down over Nicaragua and imprisoned by the Sandinistas. After somehow escaping back to the US, he'd entered the St. Louis drug scene, garnering a reputation as an ex-CIA mercenary with a commie ear collection. Valiant had fled St. Louis a few years back, suspected of dosing up a rival dealer on heroin and then burning him alive with homemade napalm.
This "Doug Walters" character appeared to be the deacon of St. Louis' Enolsis chapter. His listed residence was even the same building as their chapterhouse - he lived in an apartment upstairs. Curiously, Walters had a surprisingly sparse bureaucratic trail. Sure his SSN and birth certificate checked out, but he'd only applied for a drivers license a few years ago. Right after Valiant fled St. Louis...
The Agents and Friendlies of J-Cell were brought together by Delta Green into a secretive FBI taskforce. Their mission - investigating the bombing of a retired USAF Colonel.
Dragoleaf's Directory now has all of my work in one place. I'll be linking it under "My TTRPG Content", as well as on the N@TO Discord. If you're a player of mine and notice something is missing, let me know via a comment here or a direct message through Discord.
In addition to compiling all my content, I've also gone through and updated everything to the unified format I mention prior. I haven't revisited any unfinished scenarios yet, that's on the backburner until I complete the projects I'm currently working on.
Thanks for stopping by!
The blog is called "Federal Agent Make-Believe", yet it never posts Delta Green content.
How curious...
Agent TYSON's player kindly reminded me of some details I missed during my session write up.
Designing good play reports for investigatory games is much harder than doing the same for dungeoncrawlers. You have to balance recording all the clues so people know what's going on while avoiding an exhaustive blow-by-blow, because no one wants to read that.
I'll find the balance one of these days.
A half-empty section of a parking garage. JFK International Airport. Early January, 2025.
The three members of T-Cell stood around a rental car.
TULLY, being Cell Leader, relayed the briefing she'd received from A-Cell a day prior.
A team of American archaeologists dug up an old Roman estate in Tuscany, Italy. They shipped the artefacts to the Museum of Natural History for an exhibition. All their finds were digitally categorised prior to transport. Our people intercepted their communications and flagged several items as being potentially hazardous.
Broken pottery with furry toad-gods on them, papyri making reference to hypergeometric formulas, old glassware covered in exotic chemicals, the list goes on.
Homeland Security already has a man on scene, Special Agent Hassam Abdullah, due to reports of artefacts going missing. Some of the papyri scrolls and a fancy glass cup. This whole situation reeks of trouble. Get yourselves involved. Get us answers.
Choose rockbanger. Choose berrypicker. Choose black fur and matching war mask. Choose flint tool stolen from shaman with wide range of fucking attachments. Choose bang away at mind-numbing, sanity-crushing thing from beyond stars, wonder whether grug better off stuffing rock in own mouth. Choose Chieftain in Yellow and wake up wondering who grug are. Choose 9 kilogram retirement plan. Choose go out with rockbang at end of it all, PGP-encrypting last message down securely laid smoke signal as Rust Covered Arrowhead wetgrug bust into cave.
Choose one last Night at the Bunga.
Choose Moss Covered Arrowhead.
By Fee Fi Fo Fin, on Blogspot
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Fallout: New Vegas |
Four federal agents stood on the eastern side of Rogers Dry Lake, shivering in the freezing cold of the Mojave night. Agent Smith doled out freshly milled bullets of nickel and iron, a crude imitation of the “sky metal” their quarry was weak to. Allegedly.
Agent Deacon memorised the antiquated Japanese needed to summon the entity to their location, from wherever it was currently hunting hapless Californians. Meanwhile, Agent Thorn busied herself with a hastily assembled binding ritual, greedily hoping to establish control over whatever her coworker manifested from beyond the veil.
Finally, Agent Leon dug an entrenched position for the conspirators’ insurance policy - an M2 Browning he’d liberated from the base armory with bogus paperwork. As far as Edwards AFB knew, this was all just a live-fire exercise on the lakebed that they weren’t cleared for.
In my last post I gave some examples of additions to make to Baughman's apartment in Last Things Last. In this post, I'll be expanding on an oft-given piece of advice for LTL - to use the contents of the locker in Baughman's Cabin as an opportunity to seed future scenarios.
To this end, I ran the "Baughman Locker Jam" on the N@TO Discord to create items connected to published scenarios. I'm very pleased with how this Jam turned out; many thanks for those who contributed the 13 submissions! I'll be displaying them here for posterity, and putting your preferred online handles next to your respective entries.
I wouldn't recommend putting all entries in Baughman's locker - just those linking to scenarios you want to run in the future. For those you don't use, they can always pad out a Green Box the Agents stumble across in the future.
- Blanca Martinez de Rituerto, 'Yara-Ma-Yha-Who'
The Yara-Ma-Yha-Who, or at least the version reported in publicly available records, is a niche but relatively popular Australian cryptid. This creature was first recorded by Aboriginal-Australian preacher David Unaipon in “Legendary Tales Of The Australian Aborigines”, a compendium of various myths published in 1930 (albeit this text would be credited to its white editor W. Ramsay Smith, and Unaipon would not receive recognition for its creation until 2001).
Herein, it was described as a hunched, red-skinned humanoid bearing a loose resemblance to a frog, with sucker-tipped fingers, a toothless mouth and an oversized head. It would ambush lone travellers, especially children, exsanguinating their blood through its suckers to weaken them, before devouring its victim whole with its prodigious maw.
Mellonbread's ESPER is a fan-organisation for Delta Green - a private Australian corporation that secretly recruits psychic wizards, 'Talents', to fight the Mythos in the Land Down Under. As an Australian myself, I'm quite fond of ESPER and I'd like to run more scenarios using them.
While I'm working on my follow-up post to "Some Changes For Last Things Last", I thought I'd tide things over with a few rituals I've recently put together. These are recycled from a N@TO contest scenario I never got quite round to finishing, unfortunately.
Despite that, I'm quite pleased with how they turned out. I might put them in a standalone scenario sometime in the future. In the interim, here's the three rituals in question:
A common question from prospective Handlers is how to run Delta Green's quick-start scenario, Last Things Last ("LTL"). LTL is fine as-written, but here's some of the changes I've used:
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| An edited map of the IRL "Warren Island" |
I've wanted to run "Black Cod Island" from Delta Green's "Targets of Opportunity" for a while now, but wasn't sure how to make the write-up playable. However, I recently came up with the idea to steal the concept of Seth Skorkowsky's Call of Cthulhu scenario "A Mother's Love".
