Delta Green: Anatomy of an Operation

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Catch the live side of the community. Join me, Sean, for between sessions. It's a solo live stream with the chat as my guest. We discuss player dynamics, lore, mechanics, and everything that makes tabletop gaming great. Every Saturday at 8am Central, 1pm GMT on the RPG Sean YouTube channel. Head over to PG Sean on YouTube. Subscribe and I'll see you in the chat. [00:00:26] Speaker B: Strap in operatives. This is go back your all access pass to modern day RPGs loaded with bullets, backstories, and a whole lot of bad decisions. And here are your mission leaders, Sean and Harrigan. [00:00:47] Speaker A: Hey, Harrigan. [00:00:49] Speaker B: What's up, buddy? Goodness. Extra long little pause there at the start. [00:00:54] Speaker A: I was looking at the levels to make sure that things were coming through and I was like looking at it as it was trickling off. So I just wanted to make sure that when you and I talk it actually we recorded something. [00:01:04] Speaker B: So it's. It's such a smooth show, this one, you know. [00:01:08] Speaker A: Get what you pay for, folks. That's all I gotta say. [00:01:12] Speaker B: Careful, there are patrons. [00:01:13] Speaker A: There are. [00:01:14] Speaker B: We have to up our game. [00:01:15] Speaker A: We do, we do. [00:01:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'm good. Sean, how are you? How are you doing, buddy? [00:01:19] Speaker A: I'm doing all right, man. Doing all right. Real life is always interesting sometimes. Harrigan and I, for those of you, we. We get on the. We'll get on the mics and then he and I will play catch up on what' going on in our lives. And then that could take 30 minutes or an hour, so more. And then we hit record and then it's like all that is swept aside, but everything is great. Hunky dory. How are things with you, sir? [00:01:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that th. Those bitching sessions are a big like. And now we can talk about games. [00:01:53] Speaker A: Yes, now we can. We can talk about non life stuff. Yes. [00:01:56] Speaker B: Everything's great. I have no stress with my kids. Twitch. Twitch. No stress with my job. Twitch like everything's good. [00:02:05] Speaker A: It's all good. Yeah. You guys don't need to be burdened with our real life complexities, if you will, because everybody's going through something. [00:02:13] Speaker B: We should talk about make believe. Disintegration of characters, not real disintegration. [00:02:19] Speaker A: I like to harness this stuff for gaming, especially Delta Green. [00:02:25] Speaker B: Right? That vein is rich. [00:02:34] Speaker A: Yes. [00:02:35] Speaker B: Yeah. What have you been doing in the world of COVID action espionage and Delta Green? [00:02:42] Speaker A: I have been toying around with. Trying to get my Cold war scenario a little bit more solidified as far as what that looks like. And so I started putting things together and kind of running things through because One of the things I think with this particular scenario is, you know, there's not going to be a lot of combat. The skills aren't really going to be a huge ordeal. Like, if you are kind of a communications person, you're going to just be able to operate a radio. Like, I'm not worried about things like that, but it is the nuances of the questions that may come about, like, well, what if we did this? Or what happens this? Or what if things just come to a lull? What can I inject to move things like, what happens? And I started piecing things together and, wow, who are they a part of? And kind of running through things so that I can tie up loose ends. And there's. I don't need to have the answers to everything. And neither do the players, actually. I do. Players don't. But some of those details. And so I started putting that together. And then, of course, I'm like, well, I want to probably run this at a convention or online. And so I want handouts and graphics. And I'm, you know, when does it take place? Well, let's see. Let's do 1963, Berlin. All right, what's going on in Berlin in 1963? And there's a. You know, there's old archive images and photos that are online through certain websites that show Checkpoint Charlie in the Berlin Wall. And I want to get a map of Berlin because in the scenario, I want to put in actual places that ex. In, you know, specific streets and things of that nature. So they know. So I started doing that, and I. I'll put this link in the. It's in sitrep. There was a video that they had recorded, and I don't know how old it is. 19. It might have been before the wall went up in Berlin. And it was like a US army puff piece interviewing a lieutenant at Checkpoint Charlie. But the wall wasn't up, like. And so right here's America. [00:04:55] Speaker B: Exactly. Our freedom. [00:04:57] Speaker A: Pretty much. Pretty much. And then it was here, you know, troop movements and tanks right on the street, pointing right over the other side of the street where there are other Russian, you know, East German tanks pointing. [00:05:11] Speaker B: The German foe vanquished. We now turn our attention to right, Communist Russia and watch the video. [00:05:18] Speaker A: Yeah, it's pretty. It's like. I don't know if it's like, 15 minutes long, but it was an interesting one because then you can see, you know, the era. And, you know, I never got to Checkpoint Charlie. They had ripped it out by the time I had gotten to Berlin. And so it wasn't like. It's just like a frickin. It's just a shack, man. It's crazy. And it was the only way in to East Berlin, and it was supposed to be where that road was supposed to be kind of open. They're. They're supposed to allow people, and it's the only. Let me correct myself. It's the only avenue for us, I think probably the Allies to go through. There were other entries into East Berlin and East Germany that were allowed by Germans, but. Or they allowed Germans into. But not like foreigners specifically. So I don't know. It was a little kooky and crazy, and I think maybe at some. No, I don't think the video even went into. So it was shot before the wall was constructed, which I think was in 61, if I'm not mistaken. But, yeah. So, yeah, I was looking at that and looking at pictures and trying to like, get the. The feel of it and. Crazy, crazy time. [00:06:37] Speaker B: Yeah. I always marvel. We talk, you know, currently about how much technology is changing and culture is changing and just, you know, the economy and everything else. Right. I always fall back to the 60s and think about, like, look what the world was like. Look what the US was like 1961 versus, like 1968. Like, huge changes. You go through all kinds of social revolutions. You go look at the music that's changed, the drug scene. I mean, 1961 may as well be 1955 in terms of culturally, what it's like, for sure. And 68 and 69, like Woodstock and all that sort of stuff. What a enormous change in a very short period of time through that mid-60s period. It's pretty crazy. [00:07:20] Speaker A: And when I said it, I know I'm like, well, when. When would be a good time to set this? And, you know, you could do it Cold War. I mean, it's a pretty. It's a pretty wide 50, 55 to, like 90, basically, you know, and it was, you know, 63 was when the height of operatives were going in and out of East Germany. I mean, it was right after I been Berliner. [00:07:50] Speaker B: Right. [00:07:50] Speaker A: With Kennedy is where I'm placing it. So that happened in the summer, I think, of 63, and then I'll put it in the autumn of 63. And then, you know, in November, he's gone. But anyways, that's where I'm gonna. If I have my timelines correct, what it's gonna look like, and then there'll be part of. You know, then it's like, what's Their cover identities and what does that look like? And I thought, well, I'll have them as part of a corporate team, which I could still do fictionally, but why not adhere to what was coming in and out of that area on a rather frequent basis and why. And just lumping that in. So if historians might actually appreciate some of the nuances of that. So we'll see. [00:08:38] Speaker B: Sweet. Are you hoping to run this at, say, Game Hole in October? [00:08:42] Speaker A: I was gonna put it on the grid. I don't know. Or I could run it off grid. So I. The answer is I'm not sure. And with Game Hole's demand, I don't know if they're going to end up, like, they cut off event submission at one point because they had too many, like, which is kind of crazy. So I don't know if I'll get it in on time. I want to make sure I kind of run it. I may run it for patrons and just say, hey, interested in running. [00:09:05] Speaker B: Run it for patrons or run it off book, man. Some. Some evening during Game Hole when you got a. You got a crowd in there you can trust and you can make all the mistakes because it's the first time you run it and. [00:09:14] Speaker A: Right. [00:09:15] Speaker B: Take your lumps. Learn the lessons. [00:09:17] Speaker A: Yeah. What about you, sir? [00:09:20] Speaker B: Well, before I. Before I crack open that little can of goodness, what are. What system are you planning on running? [00:09:28] Speaker A: Well, that has not been decided. [00:09:30] Speaker B: Okay. [00:09:30] Speaker A: That has not been decided. I don't know. I don't know. I mean. [00:09:35] Speaker B: All right, well, you don't have to answer that now, but you. You did say something along to the effect of skills will matter less. So that's driving it towards a certain. Either type of game or a modification of other games. [00:09:46] Speaker A: Right, right, right. I don't want to. I mean, it's not gonna be outgunned, Right. [00:09:55] Speaker B: Well, it's Cold War, right. I would slap you if it was Right. [00:10:00] Speaker A: So maybe it's like. Just maybe it's. It's like White Box or White Lies, and it's set in that time. [00:10:10] Speaker B: White Lies could totally do it. Yeah. [00:10:12] Speaker A: So it might be something as simple as that. [00:10:15] Speaker B: So could Asian Provocateur. [00:10:17] Speaker A: It could. It could. That is not escape to me. But I also want to make sure, because that starts getting into. It's not high octane, because you and I. [00:10:28] Speaker B: No, you're right. But you're. But it has the whole Bond reputation thing, which you've talked about before, where. Yeah, I gotcha. It's meant. It's meant to be a little lower to the ground than that. Maybe I'll get you spool up on gurps, get you to run it in gurps. [00:10:42] Speaker A: I could do Gurps. I mean, I was also thinking like, it's not Delta Green, but I would run it similar to Delta Green. Like if you have a score and it's high enough, you just get it done. [00:10:52] Speaker B: You could pick up and use the Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green chassis, [00:10:55] Speaker A: easily BRP or something. Like, not over complicate things. Like, what skills do you have? You have three. [00:11:03] Speaker B: Maybe we should do an episode on analyzing which system you should use for this. Let's do that. [00:11:08] Speaker A: Okay. [00:11:10] Speaker B: Doesn't have to be this season, but we should do it before. Before October. [00:11:13] Speaker A: We'll probably have to look at quite a few more systems, I'm guessing. [00:11:17] Speaker B: That's what I mean. Like we could. With your use case in mind, we could look at some things. That's what I'm getting at. I think there's a few dedicated Cold War games we haven't even looked at yet. Haven't even cracked yet. Right. [00:11:31] Speaker A: That is true. Yeah. [00:11:33] Speaker B: So maybe you should just hold your horses on developing this, buddy. [00:11:37] Speaker A: I could. I mean, I want to. I want to get it. [00:11:39] Speaker B: I'm kidding. [00:11:39] Speaker A: Yeah. I could flesh it out and frankly could. Right now there's no mechanics in it at all. So it's just a matter of like connecting. [00:11:47] Speaker B: You're developing the timelines and the. [00:11:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:11:50] Speaker B: What happened? And the scenario. Yeah, I got you. All right. For me, the I've got three things that are sort of business as usual for the last number of weeks or months even. I am running a Delta Green solo game for somebody. This is play by post. I am playing in one and we're just kind of getting that going. And I'm running the COVID Ops game as well. Covert Ops game, I think is coming to a head soon. We have a pretty neat scene right now where it's basically a shootout in a crowded Prague street snarled with traffic, akin to something like Heat, where there are people moving from car to car. There's a long arm involved. So it's. Yeah, it's full on. And you know what? It was kind of cool. I don't love the system, but there is a cool like metacurrency in that game thing called Bones. You can toss some bones to either re roll or do some, you know, do some cool stuff. Right. One of them is to automatically succeed at what's called a. I'm going to get this wrong. It's like a Reaction roll or a defensive check. I forget. It's basically the equivalent in this game of a saving throw. And whenever someone shoots at you, you have this ability to like, make a. Make a. A reaction save and go to ground kind of thing. And the guy failed, but he was able to use the bone and it would have killed him outright. The burst of gunfire would have, like, put him on the. On the deck and he was able to use the bone. It's kind of cool. It's kind of cool. But the biggest thing I. I've actually. I have resumed my read of Ian Fleming's works. So I've cracked open Diamonds Are Forever. And you know, when I say read, I'm using the 2026 equivalent, which is. Listen, it's the fourth book in the series, written in 1956. Just a couple of little takeaways from it so far. I'm only about a third of the way into it. Quite liking it so far. I think Fleming gets a little better as he goes, maybe. There is so much tradecraft in the book. It's pretty sweet, the whole conceit. It's quite different from the movie, I think, which I think will be good because the movie's trash, frankly. It's the one, that one that they lure Connery back with after Lazenby. They bring Connery back. It's not a great movie. But long story short, am I or the. The British. The crown is losing money because there's these mines that the British government owns and someone's stealing diamonds, right? So MI6 gets on the case. Bond goes to try to break up the diamond smuggling ring kind of thing because they're basically losing tax money. They don't like it, so it's. It's kind of funny. But there's so much tradecraft that is described in kind of loving detail from Fleming. I really enjoy it. So the concept of cutouts, which are basically people who move information or materials or whatever from one location, one person to another, without knowing anything else about the operation. So there's this sort of cool unwinding of the diamond smuggling for all these cutouts and they basically nab one and they substitute old James as the cutout. And since people don't. The cutouts change all the time. They don't know who these people are, so they don't know that he's not the guy. It's kind of cool with the hilarious. The hilarious anecdote being the moment he meets with his contact in the hotel, like, hello, I'm the. You know, I'm the. I'm the courier taking the diamonds from London to New York, basically. And she. The. The person he's talking with questions him, like, in, like, maybe two different. Two different ways. And he's like, all right, my name is James Bond. It's. That's my. The other one's an alias. He gives up his name immediately. Immediately in the scene. So he's got an alias and he gives it up and then travels under his real name. It's hilarious. So it's not just the movies that have that, like, you know, happy to be a secret agent when you give everybody your name. You know the bit where I think it's Laramie Wall, a friend of ours, that it's always like, bond's not a spy. Those aren't spy movies. Well, it's in the books as well. It's pretty funny. There's one really cool moment where he telegraphs a code back home. I think you know this, Sean. There's a company called Universal Exports in the books and in the movies, which is basically a front for MI6. And it's a way to, like, move materials around, pass information. He sends a telegraph code, and it's just this neat little, like, throwaway comment where Bon uses what he calls a transposition code, which means he's changing each letter in the word. He's counting up on the Alphabet, down the Alphabet, and he uses the number of the day of the week. So a Monday would be a 2, right? Sunday being 1. He uses the week number and the month number as these transposition codes. Just really kind of neat little, selling a telegraph that way to Universal, like, pretty hard to intercept regardless, since it's a telegraph, right, to, you know, across the Atlantic kind of thing. But even if you get it, he's got this code kind of baked in there, and it's. It's pretty sweet. Fleming continues to disparage American dining in the book, as he does in all of his other ones, where quite often he describes things like Bonds, like, I retired to the hotel and I had an attic where I had an adequate steak. [00:16:58] Speaker A: Stuff like that. [00:16:59] Speaker B: And then. And then, you know, wounding me being. Considering where I'm from. He disparages Nova Scotia smoked salmon, why that even comes up. But he's, like, nowhere near as good as the real stuff in Scotland kind of thing. Really, really pretty funny. But anyway, I'll keep reporting back on that. It's a. It's a. It's been a fun read so far. I'm gonna dig back in. It's good that's all I've been up to. [00:17:22] Speaker A: Well, that's good amount, I would imagine. [00:17:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:17:25] Speaker A: All right, let's get into sit rep. Quick, give me the sit rep. All right, sit rep. Not a ton, but there was one that I wanted to bring up, which is James. The search for the next James Bond is underway as of two days ago from this recording. [00:17:46] Speaker B: Nice. [00:17:47] Speaker A: So I wrote in to the casting person and said, harrigan, [00:17:53] Speaker B: yeah, I'll do it. Maybe. Maybe 30 years ago, I would have been rejected outright. Now I can't even get on the table. [00:18:04] Speaker A: And it's. And it's Pierce Brosnan's birthday as we record this, I believe. [00:18:08] Speaker B: Oh, really? [00:18:08] Speaker A: Yeah. So there you go. Yeah. [00:18:10] Speaker B: Happy birthday. One good Bond movie, I think. You know, go back. [00:18:15] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:18:15] Speaker B: Revisit them. [00:18:16] Speaker A: I mean, being tortured in North Korea for 14 months and just walking to a hotel is a little odd to me, but whatever. Yeah, yeah. But anyways, if you want to learn more about that, I'll post a link to the Variety magazine article. [00:18:33] Speaker B: They've got the producer. And do they have the director locked down, too? [00:18:36] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, they have the director locked down for the next movie. [00:18:39] Speaker B: That's right. [00:18:40] Speaker A: The casting person, which. I think she won the first Academy Award for casting because they just created that category in 2025. [00:18:51] Speaker B: Oh, really? [00:18:51] Speaker A: And it lists some of her credentials. Like, I think she staffed all of Game of Thrones and was just going [00:18:57] Speaker B: to say kind of near and dear to your heart in the professional sense. The casting award category. [00:19:04] Speaker A: Ah, yes. [00:19:05] Speaker B: You work in recruiting, my friend. [00:19:07] Speaker A: Yes, that is true. Right. I mean, I really. I could find the next James Bond, I would imagine. Just give me the. Just give me the details. [00:19:14] Speaker B: Your first choice was me. Well, no, sir. You fail, sir. [00:19:18] Speaker A: That's. Well, see, you gotta pat it. Yeah, it's the deal. See, you gotta know the art of this, Harrigan. When you go and look for a professional for a job and you find somebody that's really good, you gotta have a bunch of people that are. [00:19:30] Speaker B: I need three candidates. Sean, who's this guy? You just need him up. Take him off the list. [00:19:35] Speaker A: You need one good one and then a two couple that are like me. [00:19:39] Speaker B: Ooh, ouch. [00:19:40] Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah. I mean. I mean, you would be the shoe in my man, is what I'm trying to say. Now I gotta go and find some of the ones that aren't so good. [00:19:48] Speaker B: We should move on to encrypted. [00:19:50] Speaker A: We should go to encrypted comms. We have one. Let's do it. [00:19:55] Speaker B: Sir, we have an Incoming encrypted transmission. [00:19:59] Speaker A: Are you ready for this? [00:20:01] Speaker B: No, but do it. [00:20:05] Speaker C: Hey, gents. Who's here? Good start to the new season. A couple of media recommendations for the genre. One of my favorite espionage movies is the Saint with Val Kimmere. There's a lot of spy and tradecraft in there, and those disguises are top notch. And then getting more Delta Green specific True Detective Season 1 is my media touchstone for the game. You can see the two main characters disintegrating, losing their humanity as the story progresses. I'm very impressed with the latter half of the episode when you really get into Delta Green. That deep dive into the history and background was fantastic. Great job on the research. Sean. The game is beautiful. The underbelly of secrecy and deceit, the slow grinding away of the PC's humanity are definitely my favorite parts of the game. Those layers are so good. Harrigan. There are monsters in the game in every session. They are called player characters. So for future episodes, I would love to hear Sean talk and Harrigan pontificate on how to indoctrinate players to buy in to the whole thing, how to set, maybe beat the players to keep the tone. And I'm beginning to have thoughts about player psyche. I think too many players focus on the PC as an avatar of themselves as opposed to the PC as a character in a story they want to explore. I'm quite excited for the rest of the season. Keep up the good work. Thanks. [00:21:41] Speaker A: Agent Huse, writing in. Love it, love it, love it, love it. Thanks for. Thanks for writing in. Who's who's personal friend of Harrigan and I's. We played with him and thanks, man. Much appreciated. And he brings up a huge point like it's the avatar of oneself. Which is the drawback, I think, for running a contemporary or a game set in contemporary era. Time frame being one of them. You could say the same way. We would argue, hey, it's grounded. It's. You go out your front door. It can be easy to say the opposite of if you're playing a fantasy game. Like, I'm not the elf that's wandering around the countryside, but I could see a lot of people going, oh, okay, so I'm like playing myself in Delta Green. You're not. But I see where the. The disconnect could come in. No. [00:22:33] Speaker B: Yeah, No. A hundred percent. But I. You know, this would require some unpacking. So let's go back to who's Carl? Thank you for. For the call. Awesome call. I think the first time he's called Us, Right. [00:22:47] Speaker A: Yes. [00:22:48] Speaker B: Maybe. [00:22:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:22:48] Speaker B: Okay. He mentions the Saint and I forget. I've talked with Hus about the Saint before and I forget if it was him or someone else who was unaware it was a Roger Moore vehicle in the 70s. Yes. It was like that's a British spy show. It's not great. It's not terrible, but it's not great. I remember the Val Kilmer movie. I remember liking big parts of it. I'd have to revisit. I haven't seen it probably since it came out. [00:23:12] Speaker A: It might have been his like second movie since Top Gun. Honestly, I don't know. [00:23:18] Speaker B: Oh no. I think it's kind of more early mid career kind of thing. [00:23:21] Speaker A: I think so. [00:23:23] Speaker B: I don't know. [00:23:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I'd have to look it up. [00:23:25] Speaker B: Yeah. I think Willow was before that. [00:23:28] Speaker A: Oh, that might have been. [00:23:30] Speaker B: I think I used the name by that time. [00:23:32] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. [00:23:32] Speaker B: And who was with him? Elizabeth Shoe. Is that right? [00:23:35] Speaker A: Was she in there? [00:23:35] Speaker B: Maybe. Maybe. [00:23:37] Speaker A: I don't know. [00:23:39] Speaker B: If only. [00:23:39] Speaker A: She's a darling. I'll say to check these things. She's a darling in my 80s actress book. [00:23:46] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. 80s 90s. I'll go back and revisit that movie. And I think one thing that who isn't aware of because, you know, we're. We're in episode eight right now. Right. I think. And we've only released the first couple to patrons and one to the general, general audience. I think we talk about True Detective a little bit in one of those episodes where we talk about media influences and that sort of thing. First season of True Detective for sure has strong DG vibes. All right. So switching to this idea of like a player wanting an avatar versus playing a character. For me, it's a fundamental like 10 level. Does not compute. Like I do not want to play myself or have an avatar ever. I'm always playing a character and I don't mean that I want to do method acting and immerse it so that I'm never speaking out of character and all that sort of stuff. Anybody who's played with me knows that half the time what I really want to do is not just represent the character and roleplay as them, but also paint the picture around them a little bit. What people see of the character and describe their actions that maybe are not verbal and those. Those sorts of things. Right. Who's is right. If people arrived at Delta Green with that kind of mindset in mind, there's already a record scratch. There's a mismatch. You're in the. You're in the wrong lane, you know, for what. What the game's trying to do. The game is absolutely trying to drop you into the very. In a very character focused way. The game is about the characters as much as about anything frankly in this game. So you can't get there if it's just going to be a. I'm an action hero, you know, this avatar just gives me the ability to be a kick ass agent in this. In this world sort of thing as opposed to living in it, inhabiting it with your family and your friends that are all. It's all coming apart. [00:25:45] Speaker A: I do find it interesting that that is a. The point. One of the points that he had made. Right. When you look at Delta Green and you take all the, all of it and what we've gushed over for the last few episodes that we've recorded, we've mentioned that and grokking the tone of the setting and it's, you know, this is what it is, this is what it isn't and it is, it just highlights. It's just another tally on the. These are the things that I run into running Delta Green and it seems like a common theme. So I'm not sure why some individuals that go into it just don't understand it and miss the mark. And it could be just that they don't read like they don't read. Oddly enough, I've had a player that has not groked it well. They also didn't read any of the agent's handbook and so it was just me orating like hey, this is what it's about. This is the underlying tone and the theme of the game. And so it's not like many of the other games that you have taken on. Is everybody under. Does everybody understand that? Oh yeah, yeah, I understand. I'm like okay. And then that's not. They don't understand. [00:27:08] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:27:10] Speaker A: I don't know. [00:27:11] Speaker B: I think maybe my own background, you know this Sean. I think many or a few listeners know me well enough already to know that I don't have the same background as a lot of people in the industry or they're in the, in the gaming sphere that are our age or a little younger, say you know, 40s, 50s kind of thing. Right. I did not play 3 5. I did not play Pathfinder. I didn't play. There was a whole chunk, a 20 year chunk of very trad games where I think you run across more of a type of player that you. And who's you're talking about I haven't played with those guys a lot. Like my experiences are not with people where they. I really struggle to be this like, you know. What do you mean? You know, you're not role playing the character. And it's this avatar kind of concept. A token on a game board almost kind of thing. But I know it's out there. I just don't have a lot of personal experience with it. I'll tell you where I, I have seen some mismatching like expectations in a game like Delta Green specifically. Delta Green actually is. Some people will also take the mindset, they know enough about Call of Cthulhu and that kind of wider media you to know that this is not a game you're going to win typically right. There's going to be some sort of fail state. That's the end result. Not always but often the campaign grinds, grinds characters down, they go insane, they die. You bring in new PCs, et cetera. So they can see that it's not this zero to hero story. But that's like their only other frame of reference is the zero to hero kind of thing or the avatar. So when they drop into a horror game I will often see them behave in self destructive ways because they feel like they have to run to whatever the worst thing is to make. They've heard that there's this destruction of the PC or insanity or whatever. They've heard that and they try to facilitate it in ways they don't need to. And I've seen people instead of like, like no, no, like for Delta Green try to put yourself in the agent's shoes. Like there's a, there's there's almost like an EQ element of this, like a empathy part of it. Like how would the person feel if their wife just divorced them and now they got to go you the UK on this job and they can't repair the relationship, etc. How would that make you feel? Right. Rather than screw my wife and I don't care about my kids anymore and you know what I mean? Like there's kind of throwing elbows around the character's life and, and helping it kind of break down. I've seen that in games where people are just, they rush to the end, they rush to this. What they think is the end goal. The end goal is not to just destroy yourself, it's actually to play out. You should be resisting it. You're trying to keep everything together, trying to keep your arms around everything. And if you're not playing it that way I think you're Missing out. [00:29:48] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I agree. Holy. I. And I kind of smiled while you were explaining that. I'm thinking to myself, maybe some players just haven't gone through some of this stuff. Like, some of us. Some of us have a frame of reference. Like, it's. [00:30:02] Speaker B: There is that, but there's, you know, what. In 2026. There's also the concept of games like. Like Mark Borg and, you know, the games that are a little wilder in terms of the tone. And it's. It is meant to be more balls to the wall, like, let's. Let's see how crazy and terrible this can get, which is not the same thing. And I. And I like those games as one shots and whatnot. I actually like a lot of the board games. Like, the engine's great. And I think that you can actually play those games even with more nuance than many people do, as opposed to just making it, you know, just as disgusting and awful as it can be. Just. You don't have to do that either. But, yeah, I guess we spend enough time unpacking this. But it's a. It is a. A subtle point that he makes that I think there's a lot. There's a lot under that. And it may be that, you know, maybe his own group has some of that in it, which is why he's. He's thinking about it. In fact, he even said maybe we can spend some time on, you know, you and I on the show talking about how to get people onboarded. I think we've done some of that already in the past seven episodes. But what do you think he hasn't [00:31:04] Speaker A: also listened to those. So he may say, oh, you guys did cover it, right? Like, yes. So to. To your point, I think there are some things where we mentioned about, you know, axioms, rules and. And things. [00:31:16] Speaker B: Nature. [00:31:17] Speaker A: Right. [00:31:17] Speaker B: That's so listening. [00:31:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:19] Speaker B: Keep listening. Who's. [00:31:20] Speaker A: Well, I. When he gets this episode, he will hopefully have listened. [00:31:25] Speaker B: And unless he jumps ahead, if we [00:31:28] Speaker A: tell them to keep listening, there may only be three more after this one to listen to. So, yeah, it's good stuff. I. But it is. The struggle is real. And I think it's just. And it's not even Delta Green. It's any game, honestly. Like, it's. How do you want to run this particular game? What the. What's the tone? What are they playing? What are their. What are they achieve. Yeah. [00:31:50] Speaker B: Is particularly vulnerable. [00:31:51] Speaker A: I do agree with that. Yes. [00:31:53] Speaker B: Something like. Like if you're sitting down to play D or, you know, or whatever, it's a pretty wide gamut of styles, for sure, that can all go into the cauldron and mix together and still taste decent, you know? Yeah. Delta Green. You got one person who's like, nope, I'm a clown at kids parties and [00:32:10] Speaker A: I don't know what an FBI person does. [00:32:14] Speaker B: Yeah, right. You know, what was your inciting incident? I don't know. I'm here to report on. On the. The Unnatural from my blog. Like, that's not. It's not what this game is. [00:32:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm the UFO chaser in Oklahoma. Like a storm chaser, but with UFOs. I mean, okay, maybe you can work it in. [00:32:37] Speaker B: You can work when we shut down all the ideas, but if there's a preponderance of these and if that's the only thing you have at the table and you're lacking that, like getting caught in the inner workings of the government machine, which is also part of this game, you're missing out like a big part of it, you know? [00:32:54] Speaker A: Yeah. There is a game that I want to run for Delta Green that is a little bit more outside of what I've. I do want. I want to campaign, like in two people, nothing crazy. Like two, three, tops. Three players, tops. Maybe two, maybe two. That it's like two shades of green and it is like Dead in the freaking outlaw program. And sprinkle in a little bit of that weird horror stuff. But got to get into more green boxes. Really silly. Not silly, such simple. Like going to your point with the shotgun scenarios and something making it so simplistic like, yep, you got to go to a cabin in the woods we think is over here. There's something there. We've heard that like we came across some documentation where they had a cabin that was undocumented. We think something that they came across is there. Go and make sure it is or it isn't. Okay. Right. [00:33:50] Speaker B: It's my favorite way to initially interact with the game for people who don't know it. In fact, you know what we're going to talk today about? Our mission focus is going to be on the anatomy of an opera. Is that right? [00:34:04] Speaker A: It is. [00:34:06] Speaker B: And I had a point that I was going to make sort of after Sean, run lead here on this, but I had a point I was going to make about choose like your. Your operas wisely, because they. They go from. And I'll just. If you don't mind, Sean, I'll just [00:34:18] Speaker A: do it right here. [00:34:19] Speaker B: Then we can switch to the mission focus. They can go all the way from what Sean just described, which are these shotgun scenarios, some of which are actually could blossom into something much more. Right. But some of them are literally go check the trunk of a car, go check the cabin in the woods, this friendly has gone missing. And one I read just a couple nights ago that I think I'm going to run at some point is hey, there's an agent, you need to retire. Right? And then it kind of goes from there. But the cool part is that remember the shotgun scenarios are short form and it just gives you some basics of like, is this an unnatural thing? Did the outlaws get to this guy? Does he have gambling debts and he's having problems? Like he's behaving strangely and it's one of the most horrible things. This is classic Delta Green. One of the reasons I liked it so much, it goes into great detail about his family, great detail about how great his kids are doing and how it is like, it's pretty sweet. But it starts as simple as that, where they're like, hey, we got a thing for you to do. You got to go to Philadelphia and there's this guy, they lay it out by saying, we have another team working on the electronic records, so we're going to delete that stuff, we're going to take care of that stuff, but you need to go get rid of all the physical evidence, the dude. And it just goes from there. And it's. So for the context of what we're talking about today, that's a pretty simple scenario. Lots of moving parts potentially. But those are muscles that if you don't have them as a GM or a handler, you need to build those muscles around investigations, around connections that people make, their networks, their contacts. Like do you just go whack this guy or do you find out what his job is and his family and his home office and is he moonlighting somewhere? You know what I mean? And it's a simple little opera you're starting with, but it shows you large parts of the game all come to the fore, even though it's not other end of the spectrum, God's teeth, impossible landscapes which are these multi hundred page campaigns which are absolutely amazing and as you might expect, they're harder to run. There's, there's, you know, I guess you have more material to work with, but there's just much longer timelines, there's many more factions involved, etc. Yeah, keep it simple. I love that. [00:36:41] Speaker A: With that, let's get into the mission brief, shall we? [00:36:46] Speaker B: Have a seat. Let's get on with the mission. Brief. [00:36:50] Speaker A: All right, so this episode titled Anatomy of an Operation Scenario Design, most of this is going to come straight out of the Handler's Guide, so if you're familiar with that. Great. It's a brief outline, but I expect fully for Harrigan to chime in with flavor on what this all entails. [00:37:09] Speaker B: Because we got the flavor. [00:37:10] Speaker A: Got the flavor, yes. [00:37:13] Speaker B: What band is that? [00:37:17] Speaker A: It's CNC Music Factory. No, no. [00:37:21] Speaker B: Maybe there's one. I'm thinking of the John Spencer Blues Explosion song Race to Win. [00:37:25] Speaker A: That may be the case is too. [00:37:26] Speaker B: I don't know. [00:37:26] Speaker A: Yeah, May I got the wrong. I don't know. The power. Oh, you know what? The power. That's different. Is it? No, it's not. Ct. I will attack. You don't want that snap or something. Snap. It's snap. Yes. I can't remember. Anyways, hey, nice call back. And, hey, great attempt at bringing some music into the podcast. I could appreciate that. [00:37:49] Speaker B: You're not the only singer. Here's a. Here's a quick side note. It's pretty funny. I'll keep it very short. I'm helping my wife yesterday. There's a local, like, botany, plant, insect group that she's part of. She's got like a. We have a pollinator garden and everything else. Man. My wife's got quite the green thumb. We are bringing plants to their sale. They have every. Every spring, summer for the rest of the community to raise money for their. For their organization. And it's a happy day. It's sunny. I'm. I'm feeling good. I'm walking down the street to my car and I'm singing. The guy. Guy across the street goes, keep on singing, dude. I didn't even realize I was doing this. This person calls over to me. I'm walking, you know, down the street, going to my car. [00:38:35] Speaker A: What were you. What were you singing, is the question. [00:38:38] Speaker B: I was singing When I'm 64. [00:38:40] Speaker A: Oh, when I'm 64. [00:38:41] Speaker B: By the Beatles and the Beatles. I love that song. And I'm getting close. So I'm, you know, do me the world. [00:38:49] Speaker A: The World According to Garp theme, if you've ever watched that movie. So there you go. [00:38:55] Speaker B: Give me your answer. Fill in a form. [00:38:57] Speaker A: Hilarious. [00:38:57] Speaker B: Mind Forevermore. [00:38:58] Speaker A: Yes. All right. [00:39:01] Speaker B: Yeah, sorry. Back on track. [00:39:03] Speaker A: So there is the. Hey, this is where you can start your scenario. And then it's usually a briefing, and then you're given some info. Then you go somewhere and then you investigate. And those are all elements of the an operation. But this moving from that to more of a game master outlining it a little bit more in detail. It's here is this. And then that you roll that into the things that you present to the players is what I kind of interpret their. Their outline in the Handler's Guide. So much of this you can find in the Handler's guide on page 332 is where I. It begins. And Harrigan, I don't know if you knew this. Did you see in the back of the Handler's Guide that they actually have like a three page templated worksheet that you can use? [00:39:53] Speaker B: Yes. [00:39:55] Speaker A: I'm kind of tired of posing those questions. And then you going, yep, I did, Sean. [00:40:00] Speaker B: Oh, sorry, no. What? Yeah, I've been looking for one of those forever. Oh, my gosh. Been there the whole time. Is that better? [00:40:10] Speaker A: I'll tell you what, I didn't expect it. Hey. And scene. Very, very, very well. Well done, sir. [00:40:19] Speaker B: So I will. It's further underscoring, though, to me that many people, you. You included, my friend. I remember you describing it to me this way. [00:40:27] Speaker A: Yes. [00:40:28] Speaker B: Describe the Handler's Guide as. It's a bunch of lore. [00:40:31] Speaker A: I do. And that is. [00:40:32] Speaker B: It is not a bunch of lore. [00:40:34] Speaker A: It's not. [00:40:35] Speaker B: It is half. About half. The book is like hardcore lore and timeline, but there are sections in it that are all about, like, better ways to run the game, how to run, how to understand the government conspiracy part of it. And then the operation part that Sean is talking about right now, including with templates. [00:40:52] Speaker A: Okay. Yes, okay, I got it. Okay. I was a bad Delta Green guy. I'm sorry. [00:40:57] Speaker B: Maybe we should. Maybe we should turn this around. Sean, were you aware that there were templates in the back of the book that helped handlers run operations? I did. [00:41:05] Speaker A: I was not. [00:41:08] Speaker B: There you go. Should have been me asking you that question. [00:41:10] Speaker A: You should have been. Yes. I mean, I. What? Okay, well, that makes sense. [00:41:16] Speaker B: Not to belabor it too much, but it's often described that the Agent's Handbook is the book you need to run the game, which is technically true. But if you are the Handler, get the Handler's Guide. [00:41:27] Speaker A: You got to have the Handler's Guide. So that is a shortcoming of me. But this, you know, through this podcast, Harrigan, it has been kind of an eye opener for some things. [00:41:38] Speaker B: Yeah, we're growing, man. We're growing. [00:41:40] Speaker A: Exactly. Old dog, new tricks. Just saying. All right, so the first thing that you mentioned is scope. So it's going to be dependent upon a little bit of what you're thinking as A handler on whether you want the long campaign, the one shot, and then based on that, how you actually want to start the game. Because if you're starting as a campaign, it might be different than a one shot. It doesn't necessarily have to be. One of the things that they mention is in media res. Media Ray for typically better for one shots, especially if you're running for con games, you have a mission that they're on and you just throw them into the mix. They're at the crime scene. Boom, period. Maybe they're part of Delta Green, maybe they're not. But then it goes from there. [00:42:30] Speaker B: The mystery. Can I, can I chime in before [00:42:32] Speaker A: you hit the mystery, I mean, I suppose. [00:42:34] Speaker B: Sure. So you're talking about basically the opener of the operation, right? [00:42:39] Speaker A: Yes. [00:42:39] Speaker B: So you're, you've had session zero. You're sitting down at the table or online or in my post, your first set of posts. And you're talking about how you get them engaged on the operation, have. Have them understand what it is and whatnot. [00:42:51] Speaker A: Right. [00:42:51] Speaker B: I'm sure you'll talk about the, the, the briefing they'll get from the case handler and all that sort of stuff. [00:42:57] Speaker A: Yeah, a little bit. A little bit, yes. [00:42:58] Speaker B: Okay. So that's typically a classic opening is that people are meeting with the, with the case. The case agent or case handler. But when my comment was going to be here is around in Media, in Media's rays and all that stuff I like to make. I think people should mix it up because I see there's. There's benefits from all the above in terms of where your characters start. Put them in their home scenes, put them in their home lives and ask them or work with them to develop. How did you get contacted? What are you doing? What do you now have to sacrifice to even attend the opening session, let alone the entire operation versus. Yeah. In Media's race, where the bullets are flying, the cars are driving, or you're just in the middle of things, you just drop them in the middle. Right. And then I also think there's things you can do by starting not with the home scene, but actually at the briefing. And it may be where you do or do not know these other agents. And I think that that starts to change the dynamic a bit. The first time they play, the PCs likely won't know each other or you'll have to assume they do. But if you're on your third or fourth opera, it's kind of a different vibe. I guess all I'm getting at is that you don't have to use the same mechanic every time to start the operation. That's it. [00:44:11] Speaker A: I will also go as far to say that in media, Ray does not have to be action. Yeah, right. It can be like you're at the crime scene. You are two federal marshals investigating FBI agents. Maybe one is a pathologist of the sciences and the other one is a field agent. And you're both going to investigate this thing that had, you know, maybe there was one in one state and another in another state and that's why it's called in the federal authorities. Right. [00:44:39] Speaker B: So great point. I mean, it means in the middle. Right. So I probably didn't misspeak. But the chances of bullets flying as you start the operation are incredibly low in a game like, however, the chances of two agents meeting for the first time and having cheeseburgers at a diner after they've had the briefing, you know, that's also in the middle. Like they're already at the location. Like Sean's describing, you know, tomorrow morning we got to go to the pharmaceutical plant and find out what's going on. And you start in the diner the night before. They're already on the road, you know, got their hotel rooms and all that stuff. Mix it up, I guess, is what I would say, so it doesn't get stale. [00:45:16] Speaker A: Well, and the other thing was like an ongoing threat. So that kind of goes to what you're saying Harrigan is. Well, they've been on a previous mission. It's fcel. They all know each other and they show up together and they're on another mission to deal with whatever is going to be coming up. [00:45:35] Speaker B: I interrupted you. Did you want to talk about the mystery before you talked about the ongoing threat? [00:45:39] Speaker A: Typically the mystery, the notes that I have, it's more longer term. They have more time to establish the setting before presented. So that goes to what Harrigan was mentioning with starting with the home scene or something along the way. It gives them time as a player and their player character to understand where they are in the world of things. I don't know how that really ties into specifically the mystery necessarily. [00:46:06] Speaker B: Well, here. Here's my takeaway. And it comes from my kind of separate brainstorming outside the scope of what is in the Handler's guide. [00:46:13] Speaker A: The. [00:46:14] Speaker B: The handler has to understand, like what's happening, what has happened, what will happen. And I'll hit on this again in a little while. I think when we start to talk about things like a timeline, I think it's very important for the handler to have A timeline that they're using for these operations so they can understand when various things may or may or may not go down based on what the players do and whatnot. And I think that all starts with a good understanding of, you know, the GM having a deep knowledge of the mystery itself. So that when the players start to do things that are outside the boundaries of what's either on the page in the adventure or, you know, they're just thinking about things differently than you do. If you have that sort of well rounded understanding of what happened and what is happening, you can easily react there. Delta Green's a thinking game, man. Like in many ways you have to sit there and one of the things I often do with this game is think through, like, what does it mean if that is true? Like if somebody has mind control powers in this game, some, some baddie, what does it mean? And you know, and it either wrecks or doesn't wreck the person whose mind they connect to. What does. What's the trail look like? What does it mean? Are they careful about how often they do it or they are they lackadaisical about it and they don't care about doing it all over the place because there's no sign of it. But if there is sign of it, you know what I mean, it makes it easy to track. So those are the sorts of things that just. You just have to use logic and kind of think it through. What does it mean? If this was the real world and these things were in place and they're. You're hiding something or trying to acquire something or whatever, what does it look like and what is it? How do the players get at it? I think this deeper understanding of the mystery and this well rounded understanding is really important one. [00:47:52] Speaker A: It also stipulates in the Handler's Guide, right before all of this outline, which I didn't really touch on, is it is Delta Green is a handler's game and it states, you know, in some games the players react, they do something and based on those actions there's a different outcome. And that can happen in Delta Green, but it's not the, it's not the prevailing backdrop. [00:48:17] Speaker B: There's not a lot of. Tell me what that looks like. You know, there's a guy here on the scene, tell me why he's here. Sean, there's not a lot of that going on. [00:48:27] Speaker A: No, no, it's not, it's not. Well, I can solve the problem and then based on the problem, we're done, it's finished. No, it's not. Like that. And things are always moving regardless of whether or not the players are going to be tackling it or not. And so that goes to knowing what everything the handler needs to know. [00:48:45] Speaker B: If your group is of that like more player agency, forward kind of thing where you're often playing PBTA games. There are games out there that have a similar Delta Green vibe and mystery and even a mystery or investigative vibe that do that better. But Delta Green is a pretty tried and true. There's a thing that happened and you have to understand it. Not we're creating it as we go and the GMs making major changes to the plot. It kind of like these things are in motion. It's a very traditional game in that way. Some people really like that because it makes things feel very concrete. Especially if the GM knows what they're doing and can make things so that they make sense in the world. There's not this dissonance between how things really would be because we've described the world as being close to our own. So if that's the case, you get this weird behavior from either the cops or from. I don't know, you name it. Somebody does something strange and they would get arrested and they don't. That. That tends to like kind of. That's the needle. Record the needle. Needle on the record. Skipping again. Like we talked about before. [00:49:47] Speaker A: Yes. The next one is the hook. And there's a way to approach the hook in Delta Green. One of many, I'm sure. Mundane and disturbing with an unnatural twist that is in it can be brought about when there is a mission brief. Typically this. That is when this takes place. So whenever they're called in and brought together. This is the. Hey. The weird thing. I really love how they position where it says it's mundane and disturbing with an unnatural twist. Because it is the. Well, there's, you know, the postal inspector found a package. Okay. That we want you to check out. Great. But the package has this in it. And you're like, oh, okay. You know, it's a dead body. Oh. As FBI or a law enforcement person or some type of agent in Delta Green. Okay. Dead body. But the dead body is found either in this particular place has these particular characteristics. [00:51:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Is it in this condition? Yes. [00:51:01] Speaker A: In this condition is in a place [00:51:04] Speaker B: where bodies can't get. Etc. [00:51:06] Speaker A: Right. Right. [00:51:07] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:51:07] Speaker A: And making those combinations like the one in the example in the Handler's Guide is the dead janitor but covered in fingerprints of a missing suicide victim. [00:51:18] Speaker B: Yeah. So I love this part of the game and the way they describe it in this section, which is the whole like, you know, on the surface it's mundane, but you have to kind of peer and understand, like, oh, oh, I didn't understand that. And I think the big difference here and this is again, if you're for those, you know, back to who's call, even for you trying to get people to understand what the game is, it is not a monster hunting game. It is not the, the mission is not go and find a Sasquatch that's running around the woods or go and find a vampire. That's never the case. It's always there's a kid who's missing or this person turned up and they're supposed to be dead. It's, you know, it's a, it's the real world with the little torsion and then the torsion. You'll talk about this. I think the torsion gets weirder and weirder as you uncover the mystery and pull on those threads and you wind up with that big lovely pile of like awful yarn in your, in your lap that you're trying to make sense of. [00:52:18] Speaker A: Yes. [00:52:19] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:52:20] Speaker A: Like the child that's missing but then miraculously just shows up in a campground after five years. [00:52:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:52:29] Speaker A: Unaged. [00:52:31] Speaker B: Yep. I'm playing that right now. That's fulminate. That's the game I'm playing on Play by Post. And I know the basics of it, but I don't know it well enough that it's going to ruin my enjoyment of it, I think. Yeah, it's, it's. Dude, it's like 25 years that the kid was missing. Yeah, it's crazy. [00:52:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Like it's like, oh, okay, yeah, no problem. But this little detail is. [00:52:54] Speaker B: Well, put it, put it this way. And this is where I think it becomes pretty easy to think about. It looks, it's mundane, but there's some factor. Someone picked up the phone and made a call, right. And said, hey, program, there's something you might want to look at here. In some cases it takes longer for that. So the local authorities might get involved first. They're going to find the thing, they're going to do the thing. Do the thing, do the thing. And at some point they're going to be like, oh, oh, what the, what am I, what am I looking at? And that's when the phone call is made, the program gets involved. And so it could be at the [00:53:23] Speaker A: outset or somebody gets the drop on it first before it goes to the big authorities and the authorities are on their way, and you got to get there quicker than they do to figure out what the hell's going on. [00:53:33] Speaker B: It's kind of another sliding scale, the same way I talked about complexity. Like, I could go all the way from like the simplest thing to a big grand campaign. You're right on, Sean. It might be, no authorities know about it yet, but someone has contacted the right people. Or it might be, oh, shit, this happened six months ago. And now we have to come in and do what we can, even though we're late to the game and a bunch of people already know about this and there's all sorts of space in between as well. [00:53:58] Speaker A: Well, you could even do. We could gush on this thing for a bit. You could even say, oh, it's during the Outlaws and the program. The Outlaws got the drop, the program is on their way. And then it. And if it's a longer campaign, as the Outlaws peel back the layers, they're always one step ahead of the program, and that's the deal. And they know that they're right on their heels. And then that becomes a part of the campaign. And then, yeah, it's a whole nother deal. [00:54:27] Speaker B: I think you're describing that golden state where you introduce the idea, if you're program agents, you introduce the idea of the Outlaws, who are these guys? And you start to learn more and more about them. And then suddenly in the third opera, you're head to head, like Sean's describing. Like, we went to the green box and it's empty, right? What's going, you know, what's going on, Right. And yeah, well, they got there first, right? That kind of thing. [00:54:49] Speaker A: Good stuff moving from there. Then you get into the non player characters that start taking shape in the game. And the more, you know, you flesh them out, the more realistic it can become. Like names, what's this? What's the person at the coffee shop's name? And it's probably not a big deal when Harrigan's character is getting coffee at the local coffee place, but, you know, can add just, just a little smidgen because who knows when they'll show up again in some weirder thing, like, I don't know, in a closet somewhere. Wouldn't that be crazy? But some of those NPCs that come into play that also contribute to the scenario to help move things along, divulge information, provide, you know, misinformation witnesses, the relatives of the victim, if there is one, friendlies with expertise in a specific field of study. So the program or the Outlaws have, you know, there's somebody that's tangential to the cell or your agent's mission that tips off somebody or they have a specialty because they have a particular background in academia that they've studied certain things. So the Delta Green faction leans on them for particular information and then they get involved. There's also the authorities, which I think is a no brainer whenever anything is in like law enforcement is involved. And also with all of these, you know, this will come in either in a briefing situation or as the scenario starts to evolve. Law enforcement may not even know you're there and then all of a sudden they find out you're there. Well, wait a minute, how come the FBI is here poking around in my backyard and I'm not even aware that they were. And I'm going to go and check them out like figure out who that is and who's asking questions around this place. And it's not even to foil their plans of the Delta Green agents. It's just another thing that they have [00:56:54] Speaker B: to deal with just to make it added complexity. [00:56:58] Speaker A: And one of the things I didn't mention and I wanted to bring up was also like bonds. And the point of these NPCs is to either make things easier, complicate things, add flavor, dynamics, all of those, all of the things. [00:57:19] Speaker B: Well again like this is not a game about dungeons. This is the game about or wilderness exploration. This is a game about modern society generally 20th century, 21st century. [00:57:29] Speaker A: It's filled with people. [00:57:31] Speaker B: Filled with people. So one of the reasons I think it's good to run, whether it's a shotgun scenario or one of the, one of the art dream adventures, the operas or one of the big ones is they pre populate all the character names, motivations, goals, all, you know, histories, backgrounds, damage that they've suffered psychologically over the years. And I think that if you're going to do your own work and you know, like I really like developing some of my own scenarios, I think having those characters handy is, is, is good for sure because the players are going to interact with them all over the place. Whether it's their, their bond or the waitress or the town clerk with the records or whatever, they're, they're kind of all over. One of the things I struggle with most in this game is like a, a sophisticated or maybe more better term is a believable rational way for the agents to interact with the law enforcement if they do or don't have covers. How well do the covers work? If they're not like Deep covers, where you've got a whole. You know, it's actually a fake identity, not just an id, but you actually have a different identity. It's one of the hardest parts of the game for me to really wrap my head around and get. And I think get right. Is that part of it? I think in many cases, the easiest thing to do is have, like, the FBI or the marshals or somebody show up as a task force and work with local law enforcement and say, hey, that's. In fact, that's what's happening in Operation Falminate right now in the game that I'm in, the local park rangers know what's going on with the kid has been returned. And, you know, we arrive as an. As an FBI team, basically, even though we are exactly one FBI agent and a bunch of other cats and dogs in my wake. Yeah, characters are important. Other, like, the supporting characters are really important in this game, indeed. [00:59:19] Speaker A: Leads. There's nothing worse than a mystery of some kind that just ends up having the players bash their heads against the wall and not having anything. Now, that's not to be confused with giving them the answer, because that's not the case. But some of the things that you want to keep in mind when you're talking about giving the player characters leads is starting. I say starting high from, like, a funnel perspective and then continuing down the funnel, which is pretty much many different mysteries that come about in Call of Cthulhu or some type of even covert action and espionage to some degree. It's very much. You get the players that show up. You give them the mission brief, and they. They ask good questions, and they come up with good questions, but you are brought in because the answers, they don't have the answers to your questions. Go get the answers. Like, all we know is a box showed up at the post office that has this thing in the box. Here's. Here's a contact there. This is who Trip, you know, tripped us up or provided us with the tip, but other than that, we don't know. It happened two days ago. We just got the call. Go and check it out, you know, and those. Some. Some of those things could be not only that piece of the briefing, but as you go and you have the body. Yep, the body is at a crime scene. It's got something weird on it. But then what does the details of the autopsy provide that's not even there at face value when your agents arrive? There's maybe some weird possessions that have been found either through a person's apartment complex or Just that they had on them that are odd. But what are those? Is there any relevancy? And sometimes there's not, and sometimes there is. And one of the things about even getting into the next component, which I kind of want to loop into this thing, is the dead ends part. Because if everything. If every clue that you provide or every lead that you provide to the agents is legit, it doesn't help with the suspense. [01:01:40] Speaker B: It's not very realistic either. You're talking like red. Red herrings and dead ends and that kind of thing. [01:01:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:01:48] Speaker B: I will say this about leads, clues, whatever Dr. Green's in this funny space, Call of Cthulhu, generally, they're very. When you trace it all the way back to, like, whatever it was for Call of Cthulhu, I Forget if it's 80 or 81 or whatever. It's an old game. Right. And it's a very traditional way of playing where the game. It's a conversation. The handler lays things out, the players ask questions, and they move about the scene by talking to the gm. Right. It's not very mechanical in nature in terms of them rolling things to move the fiction. The game is much more like an OSR game in some ways, which is that, like the roots of Call of Cthulhu, which is you have to ask the right questions. This gets into the fact that Delta Green has this skill system that says you don't need a role for everything. Some of these people are experts of things. So in other words, when you go to the coroner and you ask to see the body, just asking the right questions, you can reveal all kinds of things to the players because they're asking the right questions. And if there's something that's really hidden or they're not thinking of. Yeah, there could be a role that. That you make at that point. But I think that. I don't know. The danger there is that if the. This is the same thing as true in the osr, actually, if the. If the GM does not describe the scene adequately, they will not know what to ask. So in an OSR sense, if you don't describe that there are three drawers in that cabinet in the bedroom, they're not going to say, I open the drawers in the. In the dresser. And in a game like Delta Green, where you are not playing on a tabletop, there is generally no map. There might be a floor plan, there might be an overland big picture thing, map of Phoenix if you're there. But there's not going to be a virtual tabletop thing where someone points to and says, what's that? What's that rug? I look under that rug. So that means two things. It means the handler has to describe the scenes appropriately to surface the clues. But it also should mean that if you want to get around some of that and not have to worry about naming everything, you give them the things that they would. What that an investigative team would find if they spent 15 minutes in a room. So in other words, you look under the rug, you check behind the cabinet, you look behind the photograph. Assume if they have the right levels of skills, they're just going to get that stuff. We talked about the three clue rule before, Sean, and I've since found a more succinct. It's been stated more succinctly, which is basically don't lock anything in the game behind one role, one clue or one location. All of those are like a pitfall for that frustration in the play on the player's standpoint, saying, I don't know where to go next, John. I don't. You know, we've investigated everything we can and it's not making sense to me kind of thing. Right. Because they either didn't go somewhere, didn't talk to someone. So it's this whole like multiple avenue approach. So take those leads and look at them and figure out what are the different ways to get onto the lead and follow it. Make sense? [01:04:43] Speaker A: It does. Moving on. Creepy moments in Delta Green. [01:04:51] Speaker B: Weird. [01:04:54] Speaker A: The briefing could include some of those creepy moments. But then it's when you get into the weeds of unraveling what's going on that starts to take place. It can't be at every turn of the corner, but as the investigators or the agents start to look into those things, you know, again, it's a dead body, but it's not just a corpse. Or it's a corpse that was in the morgue and it's not there anymore. Okay, where did it go? They lost it. Somebody stole it maybe. Or they have video cameras that see the corpse walking out of the morgue. [01:05:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:05:34] Speaker A: Like those creepy things. So it's like starting again. We touched on it earlier. Mundane. And then not so much. [01:05:41] Speaker B: Yep. I had as I sat down last night to put like pen to paper on my thoughts on this. What I've called it is make horror horrifying. Like many. I don't know how many people I've heard say, I run, I run a horror game, but no one's scared or like, you know, no one. Or actually, usually it's the converse. It's Someone, it's a player saying, no horror game is going to scare me. Like I'm not going to be. And I understand what they're saying in a way, like, you know what, you're not going to fear for your life or something. But I will tell you one of my first experiences with Call of cthulhu in the 1990s. We played by candlelight in this amazing coastal house on the coast of Maine. At night, waves are crashing, candle lit, like six or eight friends gathered together, amazing environment. And the game kind of sucked. The game kind of was, yeah, the game was kind of like one of these, like you failed your driving role so you ran over a fruit cart and killed someone because you were, you know, just one of these like random roll all over the map. And the horror was, well, you failed your sanity rule. So you're afraid, stated, you know, cut and dried static, nothing of interest. Right. I came away from that game. It's one of the most formative games I've ever been part of because it made me think about how I would do things differently and it made me start to think about how to set scenes and how to drive horror and all that sort of stuff. And right after that, Sean, about two years later, I ran my first play by email game. Long story short, I started running this Call of Cthulhu play by email game with the intention being I want to make it scary, I want to make it horrifying. And I will tell you, by using body horror, by using truly weird. Can't put two and two together. Two and two together don't make four like impossible landscapes does. You can absolutely create the horror vibe in the game. Whether you're at the table, whether you're doing it in a written format like play by post. I had a scene in a morgue where the private investigator entered the morgue. And because of things that had happened earlier in the game, Eiley was able to scare him and make him run back out of the room because there was a single insect on the floor. Like he opened the door, there was cold concrete, there's drains on the floor, there's slabs. And in the middle of the floor is this one little bug and he's like f. That turns tail and runs. Because we had opened the game with a scene where these two cops come out of like immediate in media media threads as we talked about door to an apartment. It's like a brownstone. So you know, all these like, like doors next to each other, one big building, lots of, lots of units. These two Cops come boiling out. One of them is holding his stomach, like, oh, that dude ends up vomiting up like, like a hundred pounds of insects onto the, onto the ground in front of, in front of like the player characters and all the rest. And this guy had not forgotten. And these bugs turn out to be integral to what's going on. So this one little bug later in the game, he's like, nope, nope, nope, nope. Turns around and runs away. I love that part. I love doing that. But think about this. Is it cooler to say you lose two points of con or five points of sanity go down or do your fingernails come out? Are you losing your hair? Have you just has a tooth come out when you're eating and it's not blood behind it, it's this like blue, like, what the hell? Is there stuff in your blood, your urine, your semen, your stool. Like, there are so many things you can do that are not mechanical, that will really unnerve the characters and the players. There really are. So I think this horror thing, like, don't just take it at face value when people are like, I'm never scared, it'll never be scary. I know what they mean. And to some degree I agree. But I also know you can make things genuinely uncomfortable for the players by having certain things happen to their PCs. I've seen it. [01:09:51] Speaker A: Yes. [01:09:55] Speaker B: Lastly, a DCC thing. Don't name the monsters. Don't be talking about me. [01:10:03] Speaker A: Go. [01:10:04] Speaker B: And even ghouls. And like, don't. Don't name them. What the hell are they? Good question. And if you have a bunch of players who are very knowledgeable about the Lovecraft mythos, switch some things up so they don't look like they do normally or they have other abilities or they have other effects. There's lots you can do to keep keep them guessing. As soon as you have that level of comfort, you're sort of. You're losing the tableau you've set. You want this to be unease and uncertainty and mystery. Right. You don't want this to be at a troll burn it with fire. You don't want that. You're nodding. [01:10:39] Speaker A: I'm totally in agreement. I 100% agree with Harrigan there. It's in recording now for everybody to, to use, including yourself. [01:10:48] Speaker B: Yeah. And you know what? Last piece of this, it doesn't have to be body horror. It doesn't have to be that kind of gross out stuff. It can absolutely be the impossible landscape. You open the and you are in your bedroom from when you were a kid. Like what? Like you know, and you can hear your parents downstairs. And when you close the door and open it again, it's no, it's actually the furnace room of the hospital you're in. There's. That kind of thing will scare people in a certain way. Right. And I know there's these. There's a lot of analysis of fear and you know, the dread versus, you know, it's. Etc. I'm not a expert enough in that topic to go on about it, but I know that. I know in the game there's things you can do that will really get to people. That's what I would say. [01:11:32] Speaker A: Yeah. For sure. Right. Creepy moments covered. Check. And then the events. Things continue to happen. Things are still in motion just because they've discovered. They got the details from the autopsy. What is happening and continuing to happen. You know, are people still getting sick? Are people disappearing? Is there a sighting of something that shouldn't have a sighting of? And that continues. Again, it goes back to Delta Green, Handler's game in that things are still continuing in motion. [01:12:14] Speaker B: Yeah, the way I look at that is I mentioned timeline before. Call it a timeline, call it a clock, whatever. There are things that were set in motion before you got involved and there's things that happen as your players are doing, doing their thing, depending on what they. How they end up. There's things that will continue to happen. You see a lot of games do this with the whole like six months ago and they'll have an entry three months ago, two weeks ago, now. And then they'll. And then they'll go forward, you know, two weeks from now, a month from now. That stuff is gold for a game like Delta Green where, and you know, those things do not have to happen. This is not a railroad. This is just showing you if the players lay off, take action, how are things going to unfold. One of the things I like to do, if you are a little bit worried that this is just a static kind of, you know, rail that they're on. Delta Green has this amazing luck roll in the middle of it which can be used a lot like an OSR game does with like the die of fate. The single D6 roll that says low is good and high is bad or 1 and 6 is good or whatever, however you want to read your die. The luck roll can be used to say in two weeks there's a 50% chance that this will happen. And if it doesn't happen in three weeks, there's now a 70% chance you can use the plus minus 2040 modifiers. On the luck roll to make it from very likely or very unlikely to pretty likely to 5050 man. Not sure if it's going to happen or not. And you can sprinkle that stuff into these events to make them a little more random. If the GM also wants some surprise as well. Because part of this is about the handler having fun. And one of the things that people like about the OSR I'm referen a few times today for some reason is that sometimes there are some games where the GM is like, oh, look what's happening now. They're kind of getting surprised. That's not going to happen a lot in Delta Green. But you do have some mechanics that will help. Like do the cops arrive yet? Right. Did the, did the waitress see you guys pass the package Roll those luck dice, man. And you can keep it secret from the players if you want to do it in the open or you can keep it behind, behind closed doors, depending on the group is what I would say. [01:14:19] Speaker A: Yeah, good stuff. The trouble and interruptions are next and I kind of hinted at them when I talked about NPCs because they're usually the trouble and the interruptions are the source of them. How do the NPCs interact with the player characters and what they're doing? And depending on what state of mind those non player characters are can directly impact how they interact with the agents. And then of course you have the bonds that may play or run interference given an operation, which is a delicate balance, as we've covered in past episodes, on what that involvement looks like in real time versus forward in the story, in a home scene or even a flashback. But you know, coroner takes in another body similar to the first victim. What does that look like? And so it's not only just interruptions, but what trouble starts to continue to brew even outside of just the NPCs and how the agents come about, those, those milestone events, if you will. [01:15:30] Speaker B: What I like about, about this section and this stuff, this, I think this can make it quite different from like a static like picture, like a 5e adventure where they're a bunch of set piece combats, right? You're gonna, you're gonna have that combat somehow. You're gonna follow the trailer, you're gonna kind of get there. These interruptions that Sean's talking about can largely be based off what the players do. So if they have a great relationship with the local authorities, they're going to leave them alone, they're going to support them if they get off on the wrong foot. Or they don't know who they are. They don't have the right cover story. Those authorities are going to come back around at some point, and the GM just has to be the lookout. Like, what's the question? Either what's the, you know, randomize it like we talked about with luck, or what's the. What's the dramatic moment for the authorities to kind of come back in and make themselves a problem? And you can even link that in with, you know, the whole. If you've rolled doubles and you have a critical failure, what does that introduce? That could be an interruption of some kind as well. You can build some of these into. If you're using this concept of a timeline or a clock where things are counting down, you can have those interruptions baked into that as well. But I prefer the ones that are a little more emergent. Be on the lookout for your opportunities to hit the players with that stuff. [01:16:40] Speaker A: Yeah, and a perfect example that comes to mind is whenever there's an interaction with an npc, and it's usually with the local authorities, not always. And then it's like, well, what approach are you taking? Are you taking a hard line? I'm the boss FBI guy in town. Or is it, hey, can you help us out? I just want to get your take on this. And being very cordial and professional. Two different approaches with two different types of interactions that are. Two different reaction types that. That can encounter. I've had them both go one way or the other. And it's like, okay, you want to play hardball with the local sheriff. Got it. Understood. Succeed. Or, you know, if you have roll success or failure, then if it's a critical fumble, what does that look like? [01:17:29] Speaker B: Yeah, that turns into interruptions later, right? [01:17:31] Speaker A: Yes, yes. And sometimes that is directly on the players. Right. It's not going to Harrigan's point. It's not. Well, I've got this written out and this is how it's going to kind of unfold. But now, because they did X or Y, that directly comes back to benefit them or hinder them. [01:17:50] Speaker B: You know what? I've just had a penny drop. I think we referenced this obliquely at least before, but maybe not directly. Those who are listening to this whole series will. Will recollect that we've talked about how, like, when do you manifest the bond damage? Because the player decides to reduce the incoming sanity damage and redirect it onto the bond and the bond gets lowered. And we talked about how that manifests in the home scene. Well, what Sean just said was you could get a phone call. Right. It's the next day and hey, there's been an accident. Timmy's in the hospital now. Right. Like there's all kinds of things you can do around these interruptions based on the decisions that the players make to put it onto the bond in that case. Right. Or the role that they made or whatever it might be. The more you lower yourself into this stuff, the more, the more it opens up. Sean, the sky is full of stars. [01:18:45] Speaker A: Yeah. All right. Then there's the resolution. Like what is the ultimate potential solution that they come up with? And it could be anything. Delta Green can often be a joke about blowing something up or burning something. Or burning something. Yes. [01:19:05] Speaker B: Those are the two options really that most players seem to gravitate to. [01:19:09] Speaker A: So if it is, if it is some anomaly, how do they deal with it? And is there necessarily a wrong or right answer? But it is an answer that they come up with. And depending on going back to like step one, is this a long term campaign or is it just a one shot? And if it's a one shot, do they take care of it? Who knows? And then it stops because then, you know, it fades to black. Or is it a longer term campaign and they do something. But does it carry over to the next session or not? Or four sessions later? [01:19:50] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, yeah. [01:19:51] Speaker A: Right. [01:19:53] Speaker B: So last things last. For those who haven't played it. Maybe cover your ears. Spoilers. But is it Marlene who's in the outback? [01:20:02] Speaker A: Marlene Bauman. [01:20:03] Speaker B: Yep. In one of the games I've run, Marlene gets away. She gets away. So it's kind of, it's kind of cool. That becomes a campaign thing for sure. Yeah. The resolution does not have to be. And you know what, this also harkens back to what I mentioned a little while ago around people having kind of a defeatist attitude about this game. And it doesn't have to be that way. Like you don't have to all be dead by the end of a Delta Green game or insane. You don't, you know, you're not necessarily going to be triumphant, you're not necessarily all going to be wiped out. But somewhere in the middle is the more likely outcome the resolution that Sean's talking about. Where, ooh, that could have gone better. And. Or we, we stop the thing for now. But here's all the things we had to sacrifice to do it. Whether it's your job or your sanity or whatever. Right. [01:20:48] Speaker A: Or. Or they did it. Yeah, they did it. Hey, they did it. Congratulations. Until you find out you really Didn't. [01:21:01] Speaker B: That was a Dora the Explorer joke. [01:21:04] Speaker A: Oh, we did it. [01:21:06] Speaker B: We did it. Yeah. Anybody who has kids from their early, early 2000s will know that. [01:21:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:21:13] Speaker B: The resolutions. Yeah. Is a, is a key, a key part of it. And you know what the most key part of it of all is? It's not the end. What's next, John? [01:21:22] Speaker A: It's the COVID up. [01:21:24] Speaker B: The COVID up. [01:21:25] Speaker A: The COVID up. [01:21:26] Speaker B: The part that I think many people blow past, me included, I forget to focus on the COVID up. What's the COVID up about? [01:21:34] Speaker A: What does that look like? I don't, I don't even think I finished my thought with the COVID up on the outline, honestly. But what is, you know, it's the, you know, think of any real news item that is maybe a natural catastrophe or something. A missing person, a flight deck disappears or crashes and of course it's chalked up to, you know, what, what is the forced force majeure. Right. [01:22:08] Speaker B: For sure. That we live Malaysian. The Malaysian airliner that disappeared. [01:22:12] Speaker A: Yes. [01:22:12] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:22:13] Speaker A: You know, but Delta Green, those things don't just happen. Right. There is something that's going on and occurring and that's probably due to a cover up of something of some kind. Maybe that airline was full of something that should not exist. [01:22:31] Speaker B: Right. They had to erase. [01:22:33] Speaker A: They had to erase it. So to those things, as you keep in mind, because it is part of the conspiracy and exacerbating that and it's [01:22:45] Speaker B: not always like plane crashes and big news stories that will cover up some giant, very visible event. Two, two things here. One is it's up to the current team to do the COVID up. There is no, and we think we've hinted at this before, there's no separate cleanup crew who comes in. You don't call Leon the professional who come in. I will take care of this. You know, I'll clean the scene and wipe the fingerprints up and all that sort of stuff. If there are fingerprints and blood, you have to do it. You know, there are businesses that do that in that murder scenes. It's quite something. There's a whole, whole little underbelly of society there. [01:23:23] Speaker A: You kind of, you gotta call somebody to get them out of the carpet. [01:23:27] Speaker B: So. [01:23:27] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:23:27] Speaker B: So in fact, in your Delta Green game, maybe you do call those guys. Maybe. Hey, I got a guy and he won't say anything. You know, you got to clean up all this blood. I don't know how there's 6,000 gallons of blood in the gymnasium, but there is. So, so you got to clean it up. Got to get A sewer truck to come in and get that. But that. But this is all the point. It's not just the big, big, like, you know, grand things. It is. You got to go to the records office at the county and pull that deed and get rid of it. You have to talk to this person and say, you have to keep this quiet or, like, some bad things will happen. Right? Like, there's all these little tendrils, all of the loose ends all have to be tidied up. And I don't think in general, people, me included, do a. Do justice to that. When they play Delta Green, the resolution tends to be the, you know, wipe your, you know, let's get to the home scenes. The thing is done. Well, let's think this through. I think it needs more attention, frankly. [01:24:23] Speaker A: I think of some of the things that have happened in real life. These. These crimes and these situations and how they've tracked people and arrested them in, like, two days time. Like, and what that all involves, you know, credit cards, somebody of a friend or family saying, hey, my son or daughter's missing. Like, they left and got an airline ticket to New York City. And then they track them and one, they put them on blast throughout the television networks. You know, a person at McDonald's is like, wait a minute, I think I've seen this person. Like, there is a lot of, you know, if you. Jeff and I think about it like, you know, Sean, if we would have [01:25:08] Speaker B: done it, we would have gone, oh, yeah, the whole. The whole. [01:25:11] Speaker A: We would have gotten away with it. [01:25:12] Speaker B: Turns out most criminals aren't that smart. [01:25:14] Speaker A: No, they're not that. [01:25:16] Speaker B: And if they were right, well, you know what? There are smart criminals, and they do get away with it, and we don't catch them. That's the problem. [01:25:24] Speaker A: And that's Delta Green, hopefully, ideally. And that's going back to criminology, right. As the skill. [01:25:31] Speaker B: You know what I would have done? [01:25:32] Speaker A: Well, and criminology may be like, oh, criminology. I can just look up records and. And find out about the felons and stuff like that, or I know who the bad guys are on the street. Yeah, but you also know how to apply criminal. This, the study of being a criminal and applying it to the things that [01:25:51] Speaker B: you tell you what I tell you what. One of the thoughts I had last night, ruminating on this topic and neglected to write down. So I'm glad that we are talking about it. Delta Green is a game, maybe more than most others, for RPGs, where the handler needs to keep a side notebook about things that they want to track long term. Things that if you don't cover them up, they will bite you. And you mentioned Sean, in a recent game you're running for Jeff and company where they took some action. You were like, do you guys really want to. You really want to do that? They're like, yep, gung ho. Let's do it. [01:26:24] Speaker A: Right. [01:26:25] Speaker B: And it may be that, you know, they can either intimidate the local sheriff or they get away with the thing. But does it, does it linger? Did some reporter find out about it? Does it come back around? So the handler does need to keep this side note, these running tally of like people who got away, things that didn't get looked after, people who saw something. Like there's just tons of that. And then you enrich in the game by calling back to all that stuff many sessions later. Right. [01:26:53] Speaker A: I would keep track of. It's silly and it's strange and you have to be careful as a handler. And this gets into some of the hand handler advice that we really haven't gotten into because it's very situational to Harrigan's point. You have to have a log or some way to trace track that. And it can be hard from one session to the other because there's such minute details. But they can be so monumental in the game because, for example, we're gonna blow it up, Sean. We're gonna burn it down. Amen. [01:27:24] Speaker B: Well, man, the whole fertilizer thing that that team did. Yeah. How many times do those people who buy fertilizer get caught? [01:27:31] Speaker A: Right? [01:27:31] Speaker B: They get caught, Right. [01:27:34] Speaker A: How did they pay for it? Right. Just start with that. Tell me what, like exactly what you're doing. Oh, we pull up to. We look for, you know, a co op, a cynics co op in your [01:27:45] Speaker B: rental car that's in your name. [01:27:46] Speaker A: The rental car that's in your name. No, no, no, not that. Okay. Like there's just these. Because you're probably talking with like somebody that has a decent criminology background that. So they would know some of this. But I think as handlers, you have to feed them this stuff that, hey, just so you're aware, if you do this, you just, you plop those things. Because in the hotel room, as they're plotting this out, they are probably coming up with some of these details and going, well, we can't do it with this car because it's rented and it's going to trace the back to this. I don't want that to happen. So we need to steal a car. All right, sounds good. And then, you know, and it goes back to even your bonds. So if you use a personal credit card and you're burning a bond and [01:28:28] Speaker B: yours, your wife looks at the bond, [01:28:30] Speaker A: looks like at the credit card bill, and wonders why there is a $5,000 charge on it. [01:28:35] Speaker B: And confirm. [01:28:35] Speaker A: This happens for fertilizer. You know, your spouse better be like, it was a present for you because you're a pollinator of plants. Harrigan. [01:28:48] Speaker B: Yes. [01:28:48] Speaker A: Yes. [01:28:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Yes. Or why did you pull three grand out of the. Out of the ATMs over the course of three days? Or, like, all those sorts of things. I will say this. It's not always obvious in the moment when there's these little, like, gems that drop. So review your notes at the end of a session and create the short version, the bullet. The bullet list of. Carry those things forward. So six months from now, when you're not even thinking about that opera, you still have your little. Your file or you have a little notebook, which is like the short form of, this is the ship that's lingering. This is the stuff that didn't get resolved. Right. All around this cover stuff. [01:29:23] Speaker A: The art of some of this, too, I think, is handlers is. There's a lot of RPGs that we get into that just. We kind of hand wave stuff. We don't need to know. Like, how many times has any player character ever gone to the bathroom in a role playing game? [01:29:38] Speaker B: Zero. [01:29:38] Speaker A: But nonetheless, if you say, you know, not true. [01:29:41] Speaker B: I have. I have done that blood in the semen thing in the Call of Cthulhu. So I'm just saying. [01:29:47] Speaker A: Yes, but not often. [01:29:50] Speaker B: No, not often. You're right. [01:29:52] Speaker A: But also when you go to ask, because you know the underlying answer, right? You're. But. And if you. By saying this or asking, like, okay, Harrigan, you go into the coffee shop, and just curious, how do you pay for it? Then it triggers Harrigan to go, oh, cash, cash, cash, of course, Sean. Or you just simply say the tenant, like, the person behind the counter is just staring at you for payment. Oh, okay, well, I pay for it. Okay. So you just give her your card. I tap to pay. Okay, got it. Write that down and make a note of it versus asking them. So it sounds very silly or mundane or, you know, rather routine, but that. That can be tracked. [01:30:40] Speaker B: That whole world of, like, skip tracer, PI stuff is something that players have to learn to do themselves. Like, this is part of the game too. Like, you got to find somebody, well, pull their credit card records, talk to their phone Company. The stuff that Jeff used to do in real life. Right. That you're your buddy, all that stuff. Yeah, there's a. There's a lot to this part of the game and it often gets neglected. [01:31:01] Speaker A: Yeah. The COVID up itself could be two or three sessions if you really wanted to play it out. But I think it's also like, well, give me a roll, give me a roll, give me a roll. And then that could be one way to try to resolve some of those loose. [01:31:13] Speaker B: That's true. I mean, people. People might be a little bit burned out on the, on the opera. Like, oh, man, to. Thank God that's over. That was terrible. You could, you could boil it down to almost like some downtime type roles. As long as they can come up with, what are you doing? What are you trying to accomplish before you leave town? You don't have to play out every single scene, especially if people are aching to get to the home scenes and really see what the. Some of these impacts are. But you should address it. You should address it. [01:31:38] Speaker A: It could be a skill challenge. Okay. [01:31:40] Speaker B: That's what I'm getting at. It might just be a, you know, role. Bureaucracy. You got, you. You figured out how to, you know, remove that from your file. [01:31:47] Speaker A: Five things. Give me some rolls. Check, check. Okay. They got three out of five. Not all of them. So it's not completely covered up, but it buys them two years. [01:31:59] Speaker B: I mean, you could, I mean, do the math. Like you can. You can also bribe people, you can threaten people. Like, there's all kinds of things you can do here for keeping people quiet is one of the most important parts of the game. And it can also. This is where you can start to recruit friendlies and say, remember that doctor we worked with, you know, two operas ago? Maybe he kept quiet then. Maybe he'll keep quiet now if we can get him. This thing. [01:32:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:32:25] Speaker B: Becomes the whole campaign world kind of thing. [01:32:27] Speaker A: It does. [01:32:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:32:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it's good. That's all I had. [01:32:32] Speaker B: All right. I got just a couple more. We've covered, I think, three quarters of what I wrote, you know, in an offline fashion. I scammed the book. Then I just thought about it kind of on my own. Interestingly, just to hammer home this whole idea for handlers to get this handler's guide there. And I think, I think I referenced this briefly before page 258, thereabouts. There's a whole chapter on the schism, and the schism is the whole program versus the outlaws. So buried. You wouldn't think that a chapter called the schism actually gets into the guts of how Delta Green, the program, actually operates, what its goals are, where it has facilities, what the org structure is, the fact that they're agents and specialists, how they recruit people, how they run the operations that we've just described. So go to that section of the book and where's the two different, like the program versus the outlaws? And read that part. There's all kinds of information about how Delta Green actually works in a day to day sense, which I think flows into the operation stuff that Sean has been, has been leading the way on here. I would also say since Delta Green is a game where you can move your time period around, do some research. If you're going to run a game in 1955 versus 93 versus 2010, what's the local news, what were the politics of the day, what's happening? Drench yourself in that a little bit. So you can kind of do some callbacks to the. Whether it's the music or political figures or whatever it might be. So kind of give it some, give it some gravitas. I think I would. In running operations, look at how you're using factions. So the factions episode that Sean and I went through previously, they're trying to pull some of that stuff into the right. The right operations to get them into characters introduced to those factions. So you're not just flooding them with the. Here's this, here's this group that you're, you know, suddenly in front of front and center and have to deal with instead of like this breadcrumb trail we've talked about before where you're introducing them gradually. The operations are where you do that. I would as a handler, before every operation, familiarize yourself with your PC's skills, key skills at least, bonds and motivations. Make some crib notes about the bonds that are either at risk, the motivations that they'll be sacrificing if they get a disorder. Just have an understanding of who's in the party. Again, I referenced this a few minutes ago, but just to re. Emphasize it, this being as close as it is to the real world, think through what the repercussions of these things are. Whether it's the result of something unnatural happened or what Sean and I just talked about, which is the whole idea of if the PCs don't cover something up, what happens if that loose end is dangling out there? Think it through. What in the real world, what would happen with that? Maybe nothing. Maybe there's a very rare chance that someone's going to Find something in which case use that luck roll. Use the modified luck roll to do that. And from there, all I've got is a couple of what I would consider kind of best practices around BRP generally. So just be aware when you're running an operation, if you don't want the system to get become a stumbling block, don't ask for too many skill checks. You know, if this happened, if that happens, if those who have been around the block on call Cthulhu and Delta Green, they start to become meaningless because one failure after another with a percentile system, you're going to get those. The GMs often get into that lane where they're like, okay, well, even though it was a. You have a 55, a 60s, close enough, you still made it. Why the hell did you ask for that skill check if that's the case, Just let them succeed. So just be aware of some of the pitfalls around skill piling as well. Where if you've, you're asking, you're setting the scene and you want someone to roll like forensics, right? Is you're going to have that situation where one person rolls forensics and they're like, they got like a 60, but they blow it. Someone comes along and says, I've got a five. And they succeed. And that is that like you've taken a hammer to the reality of it. You know, it's a crystal ball, this reality. It's fragile. And now you're saying the person who knows almost nothing about this subject knows more than the expert does. So just be careful when relying on those skill systems because quite frankly, it's the most old. Old in a bad way. Crufty. Not, not very sophisticated, not very nuanced part of the game. It's. They give you all kinds of tools to work with it and make it, make it work. It sings if you get it right. But it also, for the uninitiated, if you've not run BRP before you can come in and run. It's like running, you know, put your head down, run, run into a brick wall because of the skill failures. You'll see if you ask for too many skill checks. I think that does it. Great discussion, Sean. I love, I love the topics we get into today. [01:37:21] Speaker A: Yeah, it's good stuff. That's all we have for this episode of Go Bag. Thanks for tuning in. Hope to check you on the next one on behalf of Harrigan and I see you this episode of Go Bag, produced with help from the following following friendlies, field operatives, special agents, and Black Ops directors Joe Swick, Roger French, Merkel Froehlich, Tony Sugarloaf, Baker, Polish Ogre, hus, Carl Farty, McButterpants, Laramie Wall, Eileen Barnes, Heptolima Aaron Raila, Wayne Peacock, Jeff Walken, Jorcus Rex, Eric Salzwedle, Phil McClory, Jason Hobbs, Michael Holland, Remy Billido, Crystal Eggstad, Eric Avia Fornak, Brian Kurtz, Chad Glamen, Jim Ingram Orchestra Chris Shorb, Brian Rumble, Victor Wyatt, Kevin Kenneally, Andy Hall, Jason Weitzel, Salt Hart, Tad Lechman, Nicholas Abruzzo, Matthew Catron, Curtis Takahashi, Angela Murray, Mr. White 20 Jason Connerly, Shannon Olson, Ryan West, Kristen McLean, Larry Hollis, Glenn Seal, Jake at Faded Quill Grink Jake at Faded Quill Gaming Test Drive Trekkie Tim Jensen, Nubis Christopher Lang, Kwalog, Peter Skaines, Wendy Forcon, James Fraser, Ronald Dirigible, Chaplain Grimaldis and Mark Mequez thank you, Operative.