#355

Delta Green

I visited some friends this week and ran The Night Floors, the first part of Impossible Landscapes. We had a lot of fun, and in the end the players took the classic Call of Cthulhu strategy of setting the building on fire and hoping for the best. Unfortunately, they didn’t start a very big fire, and the fire brigade were able to put it out. But they arranged through their handler for it to be “dealt with”, and a few nights later a much more effective arson took place.

It took us around 9 hours, spread across two days, including some time for character creation.

One really cool thing about Delta Green is the bond system, where you can project sanity damage onto an important interpersonal relationship: reflecting taking out stress on, and lying to, your loved ones to keep yourself sane. You don’t really get to see the effects of that during a one-shot, so I made sure to bring in bonds when I could. One PC, a recovering alcoholic, lied to her husband that she’d fallen off the wagon and started drinking again, to cover up where she’d been all day. The husband reacted by blaming himself for not spending enough time with her, and immediately started doting on her: taking the next day off work so they could spend it together (she managed to talk him down from that), cooking her favourite meal even though their daughter hates it, agreeing to back up her lie to her colleages that she’d been sick… there was definitely some more strain in that relationship by the end.

We’ll probably meet up again in a few months time and play the second scenario, which takes place after a 20-year time skip.

The Halls of Arden Vul

The big battle has begun!

The players gathered all their forces and marched on the domain of the Cult of Set. They began by sending a diversionary force to cause a distraction at the Red Bridge, and divided the remainder of their forces into two groups to storm the Guild of Service simultaneously via the north and south, and from there press into the Forum of Set. The timings didn’t quite work out due to some snags along the way (no plan survived contact with the enemy), and the north group arrived a few turns before the south group. But they were able to recover and overall it went basically as planned.

Where the session ended, they’ve managed to take the Guild of Service entirely, and have started to pour out into the Forum. One squad is setting up a point-defense array, being defended by the PC squad and their two other best squads as that’ll take a little while. Marius Junienos, one of the High Priests of the Cult of Set, has entered the fight and instantly killed 3 squads with a well-placed fireball. The players are greatly confused as to how a cleric has arcane spells, but the simple truth is that he’s just a magic-user who’s also a priest. The other two High Priests are on their way.

The PCs pulled out all the stops: they’ve summoned a creature of Ardenia Tessaeron (I gave them basically a Greater Guardian of Thoth, but owl-headed and wielding a spear), a Water Elemental, and an Earth Elemental. They’re going to group those up and send them to wreak havoc.

My overall plan is that the Cult will do the best they can to win, but if the tide looks like it’s decisively turned against them, High Priestess Stephania will (try to) flee to her Kaliyani “allies” (she considers them allies, they consider her and the whole Cult of Set as a potentially useful resource to exploit) and then lead a guerilla movement against the PCs with what guardsmen and acolytes she can scrounge from those who weren’t on level 4 at the time.

Running the mass combat (we’re using By This Poleaxe) wasn’t actually that bad. There was definitely a lot of prep (both for me and the players)—grouping all the individual units into squads, deciding where those squads start, and making rulings on all the spells and magic items—but for actually running it, it was just a matter of noting on the map where each squad was, and updating our spreadsheets to for hits and spell usage.

Decorating

The painting is done! Irritatingly, I scuffed a bit of the living room while setting up bookcases, so I need to fix that (or just hide it behind some art); but at least I can set things up now.

The end is in sight: all that’s left is to fully furnish the guest bedroom (it needs some bedside tables, lamps, and a chest of drawers), and to choose all the art.