Delta Green Without BRP: 3 Alt Systems

[00:00:01] Speaker A: 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. [00:00:19] Speaker B: Hey, Harrigan. [00:00:22] Speaker A: Good morning, Sean. How you doing? [00:00:24] Speaker B: Doing all right. Yourself? [00:00:27] Speaker A: Also all right. Just took my wife to the airport and I've got a. A week at home as a bachelor, so we'll. We'll see how that goes. [00:00:35] Speaker B: Oh, boy. [00:00:37] Speaker A: Yeah, it's not as good as it sounds. I got lots of work this week, but my son is actually living with me for a little while. He's back from where he was doing his thing up where he went to college. And so he and I will do some, you know, we'll eat badly this week and we'll watch some stuff on TV, etc. It'll be good. Sounds good. What about you? You have a new dog, right? [00:00:59] Speaker B: I do have a new dog, yeah. He's a spaz. [00:01:04] Speaker A: For now. [00:01:05] Speaker B: For now. He has his moments. Yeah. Well, Seamus, back in April, wife wanted to get another dog for Daisy because she felt Daisy was our other dog, was not overly happy and, you know, she needs a buddy. Well, I could tell you, I could speak on behalf of Daisy, she will say that she doesn't need a buddy. [00:01:26] Speaker A: Daisy was quite happy being the solo. [00:01:29] Speaker B: I was feeling a little bummed, but I didn't want this. [00:01:33] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. I missed Seamus, but I didn't want Max. [00:01:39] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. So he's a smaller dog that I could pick up without breaking my back should something happen to him. So he's a very eager to please dog, which I think will allow us to train him pretty well. He is a little trained already, so he was obviously somebody else's dog. We got him at a pound, literally the pound, like bringing him in off streets, you know, hundreds of dogs. [00:02:06] Speaker A: Dog catcher got him. [00:02:07] Speaker B: Yes, yes. And he's a bit of a mess because we gotta get him groomed. He's like, he's got maybe a little Lopsopsa or Havanese in him, which is. Can. Can be a. He looks like animal or. He looks like a couple things. It's like a miniature Wookiee of Ewok or animal. [00:02:32] Speaker A: He does have that, like, you've shown. I've seen the picture. He does have that, like long bangs and black eyes peering out through the bangs. [00:02:39] Speaker B: Right. He's got a big huge brown beard. So he's gonna need to get groomed, but they don't want to groom because he just got neutered so they got to wait till the stitches are done. But yeah, he's a, he's a handful, but he's, he's coming around. I mean, whenever this happens, it's always an ordeal and it eventually subsides and then everything kind of gets better and then you forget about how crazy it was in the beginning. [00:03:07] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure it'll get better. [00:03:09] Speaker B: You are going to hunt for a dog, I think. Right. [00:03:12] Speaker A: We put an application in just last night. [00:03:15] Speaker B: Well, good luck with that. Now Harrigan's going the whole opposite way as old Sean goes. [00:03:21] Speaker A: Yeah, well, we've, we have rescued dogs our whole marriage, my wife and I for, you know, 30 years, we have had one, one hard case after another. And we've had some amazing dogs and we've had some dogs that have. We've loved to death, but have really limited some things that we can do. Like our last guy, Al, who just died in November, had enough health issues that we couldn't have him boarded anywhere. The kids could barely look after him. So we were stuck here. We couldn't travel together because one of us had to look after this 95 pound mastiff who had health issues. [00:03:52] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:53] Speaker A: So we are, for the first time ever going to get a dog. You know, we're going to get a mastador, which is a mix of a master, an English mastiff and an English Labrador. And they're pretty cool dogs. This dog could end up being £120, something like that. My wife and I like big dogs. We've been out, you know, we've been no dog now for more than six months. We usually go a year, but my wife is just dying without having a. When I'm, you know, when I'm gone at work, the kids are busy doing their own things. She's lonely, so she wants a. Wants to have the big dog around. This has been pet talk with Sean and Harrigan and let's switch gears. [00:04:28] Speaker B: So they are going to become Delta Green agents? Eventually, yes. [00:04:36] Speaker A: Why don't you tell us what you've been up to this past week. In the world of COVID action, Delta Green, espionage, RPGs, et cetera, running Delta [00:04:45] Speaker B: Green played a back to back week because the holiday. Right now Harrigan and I are recording this during the holiday here in the U.S. our 250th Merc birthday for America. America. 250 years, [00:05:04] Speaker A: going strong. Nothing's wrong with this country. This just stuff there. [00:05:16] Speaker B: Wow, that is a lot. [00:05:17] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah. [00:05:19] Speaker B: And so we played back to back because we didn't. We Weren't going to play this weekend. [00:05:23] Speaker A: That's good. So you got a lot of gaming in then. [00:05:25] Speaker B: So we got. Yeah, a lot of gaming. The last, the last session they went back to the Dorchester house. [00:05:32] Speaker A: Oh, that's smart. After hours after not deciding to sleep there overnight like we did. [00:05:39] Speaker B: Yeah. Arrogant. I gotta word to the wise, I gotta say this. This is hilarious. You'll just die. You'll just die. Right? Okay. All right, so if you have not played impossible landscapes. Mute this. I'll put it in the chapters, if I can remember. I'll put it in the chapter notes. Start. Stop here. Start at this one. They go into the Dorchester house and of course, Joe is carrying his shotgun. Of course he is. What? Yeah. [00:06:06] Speaker A: What, the one you got from his shoulder. [00:06:08] Speaker B: From the neighbor, Right? Yeah, whatever. I don't even care. Doesn't even matter, dude. Jeff's like, I'm going to put a. I'm going to put my pistol in my ankle holster. I'm like, okay, sounds good. Now when they've been there before, they, they've checked in, they've checked weapons in. Like, oh, you're part of law enforcement. [00:06:24] Speaker A: I have to interrupt. [00:06:25] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:06:25] Speaker A: Were you running top secret? That would really matter. [00:06:28] Speaker B: I know it would, but no, I'm not. [00:06:30] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm sorry to interrupt. [00:06:31] Speaker B: So they go in, show up. [00:06:33] Speaker A: So people understand the context. You don't know impossible Landscapes. They're showing up at a sanitarium at a. And then, you know, a hospital for the criminally insane. Yes, basically, yes. Okay. And they're heavily armed. [00:06:46] Speaker B: Go on visit number two. Okay, so the first visit, they were asked to surrender their firesidearms. [00:06:53] Speaker A: Yeah, there's like an. If I remember correctly, there's like an X ray. Like there's a whole thing. [00:06:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, there's a room. And then security. Security, yeah. So they walk in this time, nobody's there. It's just. Nobody's there. And they go, okay, well we just go up and open the door. I go, the door's open. [00:07:12] Speaker A: Like, okay, yeah, you're playing, you're playing games. [00:07:14] Speaker B: Start walking down the hallway. Start walking down the hallway and going along. And then they come across an orderly. And an orderly is like, you get. [00:07:23] Speaker A: You go to your room, go to your room. [00:07:25] Speaker B: They're like, get out of here with that. Like, go to your room. [00:07:28] Speaker A: We're not patients. [00:07:29] Speaker B: And yeah, we're not patients. And he's like in your room scrutin at him. And he's a big dude. He's like, you know, six, five or Whatever. Big, big guy. And Joe goes to kneecap him with this shotgun, like, goes to shoot him in the. Shoot him in the kneecap or something, because he was gonna, like, muscle him, something. Something like that. And I go, all right, you take your shotgun. I go, you have your shotgun. [00:07:55] Speaker A: He goes, yeah, bro it in. [00:07:56] Speaker B: Of course. Like, why wouldn't I have asked that to begin with? [00:08:00] Speaker A: But. Well, with the exception. With the difference here being that you said it was empty, the place was vacant. [00:08:05] Speaker B: It was vacant, but I didn't think somebody would have got out of their [00:08:08] Speaker A: car and carried a long arm into the hospital. I had it in my pocket, Sean. [00:08:14] Speaker B: Of course you do. Of course you do. I'm like, okay, that's fine. And I said, you go ahead and you go. You go. You hit. You hit the trigger. And it goes. Poof. Goes. And he goes, what? I go, like, joe, you ever remember those BB guns we had when we were growing up that you'd like super compressed air? You're just, like, slamming that scissor closed. [00:08:39] Speaker A: A Crossman air rifle. You mean like, with a pneumatic pump where you would have to do it like, 10 times? [00:08:44] Speaker B: Yes. And like, the 10th time, you're just like, this is probably, like 100 times. [00:08:47] Speaker A: Getting harder and harder and harder. [00:08:49] Speaker B: Yeah. I said, it's just like that. He goes, what? And I go, yeah. And now I go, it's on. So then Jeff pulls out his pistol and he goes, ah, that's it. He pulls out his pistol. [00:09:02] Speaker A: Oh, no. [00:09:03] Speaker B: Points the pistol and he goes, oh, no. And he squeezes the pistol, and I go, Water comes out of it. [00:09:12] Speaker A: I thought you were going to have him shoot the guy dead. No, no. Back to reality. [00:09:17] Speaker B: Not in this adventure. Not in this scenario. [00:09:20] Speaker A: Oh, my. [00:09:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:09:22] Speaker A: Yeah. You are messing with them hard. [00:09:24] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, it wasn't like. It wasn't like a little banner that came out and said, bang. [00:09:29] Speaker A: Just a bed said bang. [00:09:31] Speaker B: Yeah. I didn't want it to go that far, but I was like, sure, okay. They're like, what the. Yeah. [00:09:37] Speaker A: So they had the whole thing with the guy with a duffel bag. [00:09:41] Speaker B: They had that. The first weirdest parts of that game. They did that in the. I, like, mentioned this before, where they were in the parking lot and they decided to just pull this guy aside because he was talking to himself. [00:09:52] Speaker A: That's right. And then it's like, they're a little more murder. Murder, hoboy. Than we were. [00:09:58] Speaker B: Right, Right. And I'm like, what are you doing, dude? Yeah, they. Yeah, it went a little south pretty Quick. But now it doesn't matter. Now they're. Now they're in rooms. Now they're in rooms. They've been escorted to the room. [00:10:12] Speaker A: Really? [00:10:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Joe, actually at Joe. Like, I think the guy was like, tail. Like the guy was going and everything, and one ran off or. I don't know how it ended up happening, but Joe's character ended up in the security room because that's where they were going. And I said, okay, you're in the security room. He's like, then I barricade the room. I barricade the door, put all kinds of stuff up against it. And I said, okay. He goes, now I look at the monitors and I go, they're all dead. He's like, what the hell? And I go, do you. Do you know, like, what button to push is. I start pushing buttons. I said, okay, you know, whatever. But he's in there and he's futzing around, and it's just. I think it. Coast is. I don't remember if we stopped there or what, but Jeff ended up going into a room and he's like, okay, I'll go into. I'll go into a room. [00:10:59] Speaker A: They're going to spend the night. They're going to spend the night. Ah, cool. Anything else you've been doing or just the. Just the DG stuff. [00:11:09] Speaker B: Just the Delta Green stuff. Yeah. [00:11:11] Speaker A: You similar. I've still got the two Delta Green games running, Play by Post. I'm playing in one. I'm running one. But nothing of. Of note has happened in the last week or so. But I will say that unfortunately, pour one out. My covert ops game also Play by Post, has been formally shut down. Oh. I let it sit for a while, and then one of the players came back, was like, hey, you know what, Is this still moving? And I'm like, I can't tell if there's enough interest or if I have enough interest. I might just shut her down. He's like, yeah, you should shut her. So. So I don't know if I'll get that crew to play something else now or what. But, yeah, covert ops is no more. What else did I have? A couple of weeks ago, we talked about it, came up in our exploration, I think, of running a Delta Green operation, like running the actual op kind of thing, about how whether or not you could, you know, people could be afraid at the game table and you could actually scare players and all that sort of stuff. And I thought about it a little bit more this week because I think I didn't quite get across. The point I looking to make in that show and I'm. I like. It was simply this. I thought about it a little bit more. It's simply this, like you're not going to jump, scare people, you're not going to terrify people at the, at an RPG table, whether it's play by post or at the table. But you can instill in them a sense of dread. And that's what I'm really after. The whole like you're afraid quote unquote of what's coming. You can, you are anticipating something unpleasant and you're not liking it. That part you can get into these games in spades, which is what I was trying to exploit really kind of get to. I even did a little bit of research on like the nature of fear and most sorts of things and quite frankly it gets quite complex. There's a lot of different ways to look at it. A lot of different, like I don't know even scientific and quasi scientific ways to break it down. So I'm not going to go into any of that. I will simply simply say it's. It's that sensation of not looking forward to something that's happening, like being afraid of what's, what's coming because you've either experienced it before or you can imagine what's going to happen. That kind of thing. Anyway, that was, that was it for me this week. Didn't get, didn't resume my bond reading or didn't watch any spy stuff or anything like that. That was it. [00:13:24] Speaker B: All right then. Fit rep, sit rep. We add something in there. Give me the sit rep. [00:13:33] Speaker A: I don't know if we do have anything in here. [00:13:35] Speaker B: We don't have anything for sitrep. [00:13:36] Speaker A: It looks pretty empty to me. [00:13:38] Speaker B: It does. We could skip that. Let's get into encrypted comms. [00:13:47] Speaker A: Sir, we have an incoming encrypted transmission [00:13:52] Speaker B: and here we are. [00:13:54] Speaker A: Yeah, so for this I don't think we had an official call or email, but I did get Sean and I, you know, a number of the folks who have either called or written to the show so far are kind of personal contacts of ours. Right. So they, there's different ways they, they'll reach out to us over discord, over email, whatever. Runslinger Anthony, who has both called I think and written at times the last, you know, last year or so, reached out a little while ago about something and he just reminded me of it recently. So I wanted to kind of just address that here. So in season one, when we were going through kind of game after game kind of thing, looking at different systems and all that sort of stuff. At one point towards the end of the season, runeslinger put his hand in the air and said, hey, I'd be happy to run World War Cthulhu for you guys, which is a BRP based third party take on sort of. It has some spy and espionage elements, I think, based on all of the subterfuge and, and all of the, you know, things going on around World War I. Tons and tons of political machinations and all the rest right on top of a horror element, a Cthulhuian element, etc. What he had said in his most recent reach out is, hey, this might fit pretty well right now because it would be. You'd be able to compare and contrast a different BRP system, basic role playing system, doing this kind of like espionage tinged horror with the Delta Green stuff. But it's also, I think, more of a Cold War kind of feel. So what I have said to him, Sean, you and I have talked about it off camera, is basically season three, we're going to do Cold War after we wrap up Delta Green, we're going to move into, into the Cold War RPGs and I think maybe we'll get back into doing some actual plays and whatnot at that point and maybe we could have Anthony run something for us. Run World War Cthulhu for us. So thank you for the, for the invitation, Anthony. We will take you up on it. I don't know if we're going to get to it this season. They'll probably be at the beginning of season three or close to the front end, so. But Delta Green is still fresh Delta and we can do that sort of comparison you're talking about between arc dreams, BRP for modern Delta Green versus the World War Cthulhu on. And then I have one other comment I wanted to make to Anthony since I've got him on the line here. Not really, but hey, he and Jason Connelly recorded the Casting Shadows podcast that we talked about on our last show around some potential inspirations for Delta Green. In other words, older RPGs that may have led the creators of the game down the path of creating Delta Green. Right. And Anthony, at one point, I think he's addressing something, you know, some criticism I have that I often level at Call of Cthulhu and other games that have this like, randomized insanity or, you know, Quirk or Tick that you pick up where, you know, you see a monster and then you're afraid of cats. You know, that that kind of thing. He rightly points out that even in the early. Early versions of Call of Cthulhu, I think there's advice to keepers to say these things that happen to the players should relate to what happened in the game. You know, you don't have to roll on these tables. And my only response to that is, great, but it's not clear in the books. And no keeper I ever ran with back in the, like, 80s 90s, early aughts ever ran it that way. They were doing the roll on this table, and here's. Here's the phobia that you picked up randomly. So maybe the pro ones were doing it the right way, where they were, like, applying the context of what had happened. But the rule books were, at least in the older ones, were written in more of a way that, you know, they. They led the GM down the path of, oh, cool, I'll just roll on these tables kind of thing. That would be my counterpoint. Anyway, that's. That's all I had. Thank you, Anthony, for. For reaching out and. And kind of re upping on your offer to run World War Cthulhu. We will absolutely take you up on it. And, Sean, do you want to talk a little bit at all about, like, we even have mused about doing a Delta Green vignette or two before we close this season out? Any further thoughts on that? [00:17:59] Speaker B: No, no further thoughts, but I do think that it would be. I think it would be something to put on the docket. Yeah, we could do that. [00:18:08] Speaker A: We haven't. We haven't really gotten to the bottom of what we would do yet. Right. Whether it be a couple of people on the. Who are playing versus just the one on one that we've done for most of our vignettes. Would we have someone else run? Would you or I run? So we'll give it some thought. I do think those vignettes, they're some of my favorite things to do on the show, and I think they do provide some value. And maybe we could focus it in the right way so that we're including some of the things that we've droned on and on about this season around the home scenes and the bonds and, you know, using. Using Locked in certain ways. Some of the. Some of the thematic elements that have kind of come to the top on a couple of different shows might be good. [00:18:45] Speaker B: And Delta Green, and at one shot, if we were to focus in on covering a lot of the concepts, you could do it pretty quickly. You could, like, okay, you have a character, you know, They've already suffered X amount of sanity already. They're true five away from their breaking point. So there's that. They've. Prior to the scene they're in, they've already done X or Y or experience this, and then the rest is just automatically going to come into play. [00:19:14] Speaker A: Put a couple of bonds at like two. [00:19:16] Speaker B: Right, Right. Yes. [00:19:18] Speaker A: Yeah, you're right. We could explore it that way to see how it kind of how it plays out. Might be kind of cool. [00:19:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:19:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Give it some thought. [00:19:26] Speaker B: Let us know if you're interested in hearing Harrigan and I run the. Run the Delta's greens. You could write in and let us know by grenade gobagpod.com or phone in to 929big dice. Harry loves that phone number. He just does. Every time he. Every time I read it off, he looks at me and just makes me smile. Yes. [00:19:52] Speaker A: Yeah. 99 big dice. All right. We have a mission to get to today. It's one of our. Maybe our simpler ones. This might be a shorter show, actually. [00:20:00] Speaker B: Should we do the intro? [00:20:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:20:03] Speaker B: Let's do the mission brief. [00:20:05] Speaker A: Have a seat. Let's get on with the mission brief. [00:20:08] Speaker B: As you were saying, sir? [00:20:12] Speaker A: Yeah. And forgive me, folks, I've got a. I've got wicked allergies. So if you hear me sniffling and snorting and sneezing and all the rest wheezing in the background here, that's why. So not much I can do about it. [00:20:22] Speaker B: And it is Harrigan and not my dog Max. As my. [00:20:28] Speaker A: There are other reasons why I might blame the dog. [00:20:30] Speaker B: I have to do. Yes. [00:20:32] Speaker A: Yeah, it was the dog. When Sean and I first sat down to look at a season's worth of content for Delta Green. What would that look like? Right. And for those who have been listening along, you've already gotten the lion's share, I think, of what we really laid out as what we really wanted to dive into. But then there were some other topics that were like, well, what about these sort of things that are quasi related, et cetera? And one of those was, what if you don't like basic role playing? What if you don't like the Delta Green skill system? What if you want to play using a different engine? There's lots of ways. I'll talk about this. I think at the end. There's some stuff where I think you can use generic or universal systems pretty easily to run Delta Green. But there are actually a number of games that are pure imitators. They are aimed squarely at like, it's just A slightly different coat of paint. In other words, if Delta Green didn't exist, these games would not exist. It's not like a slightly different take. It is literally Delta Green. And in fact, for the first one, it is truly Delta Green. It's just a licensed version for a different system. Do you know much about Fall of Delta Green, Sean? [00:21:43] Speaker B: I have it. I've read part of it. I have the Borealis. I can't remember the Borealis, the mission. People are yelling at their podcatcher right now. I should look it up. [00:21:57] Speaker A: What is the Borealis mission? [00:21:59] Speaker B: I can enter it. It's the big campaign [00:22:03] Speaker A: you may be answering right now. A question that I have then. Oh, so let's do this. The first game, we're going to talk. We're going to talk about three different systems that you can use to play Delta Green. And when I say that, I mean they are so literally adaptations of the game. They are. You're working for the same. You're working for the A or the program. You go on the similar missions. You have similar home life and home scenes that get damaged. It's Lovecraftian horror that's behind everything. I mean, it's the same game. The first one we're going to cover is Fall of Delta green, published in 2018 by Pelgrain Press, written by Ken Haidt and officially licensed from Arc Dream. And if you look in the. In the credits of the book, half of the Arc Dream team is on there. They were, I think, pretty heavily involved in this. So before I get into what Fall of Delta Green the book is, it's a. Sean, it's a 376 page book. It's a big, big old beefy book. What did you just mention about the, the mission? [00:23:04] Speaker B: The Borelis connection? I keep saying Borealis, but it's the Bore Ellis connection. [00:23:10] Speaker A: Is the Borelis connection. Is that the actual incident that results in the program being shut down? Is that what that is? [00:23:16] Speaker B: That is a good question. I have not. I don't know. I don't know. It might be. [00:23:24] Speaker A: Okay, I'll have to peek at that. So here's what I thought Fall of Delta Green was, and I was wrong. So I haven't actually haven't read through Fall Delta Green until just recently for this show because I tend to not like gumshoe very much. And I'll reveal that bias of mine straight away. I mean, to reveal a few biases, actually. Pelgrains three column layouts makes me unhappy, cringe. Ken Haidt is a like a God in the RPG space. And I don't love his on and on writing and his inability to convey things concisely. Right. Sorry Ken, if you ever hear this somehow and the Gumshoe system to me is just sort of meh. There's not a lot of reason I would play it over anything else I will. I have already mentioned on this show a couple of times there are parts of RPGDM that Gumshu has emphasized that I love and steal. The whole idea of don't hoard the clues, give the clues to the characters who have the best skill. And I'm sure there are mechanics around that where you spend from a skill point for certain abilities you have that are better than anybody else has on the team. So you get to shine by spending some metacurrency, yada yada. But my takeaway from that is, and we talked about it ad nauseam by now, so I won't go into it in detail but basically the don't lock things behind rolls locations, you know, don't. Don't have only the mechanic be the only one who knows what happened in the, in the garage that night. And the characters don't know to talk to the mechanic. Don't do that. And Gumshoe like systemizes that and really emphasizes it in a great way. That's super portable to all other games. Right. So set all that aside. I thought, I thought that Follow Delta Green was Ken Height writing a mild conversion of the Delta Green rules into Gumshoe with, you know, let's add, let's add bonds kind of thing. Let's do this, let's do that, let's add a few things. And then I thought the other couple hundred pages were a really beefy campaign around the event in 69 or 70 in Cambodia, whatever it was the fall of Delta Green event that results in the program being shut down. And the book is not that at all, at all. Did you know that? [00:25:47] Speaker B: No. [00:25:51] Speaker A: So the book is a couple of hundred pages of Delta Green cum Gumshoe the system. So there are 50 plus pages of character design. There are 50 plus pages of how to do like the rules part of it like doing skill spins, tests, contests, combat, stability, sanity. There's tools of a trade, there's a whole chapter on the unnatural. There's a handler's handbook embedded in the game. So this is a big ass book that has dealt. It's literally all of Delta Green, the game that Sean and I have been talking about as a gumshoe game. So it's not like a 20 page treatise on. Here are some things to add to Trail of Cthulhu, which is the gumshoe Lovecraftian game, right? That's the, that's the horror game. This is a full on from the ground up even similar look and feel to like note board notes that are pinned and typewritten messages and hand scrawled things in the margins of the book. On first glance it looks like an arc dream product. It looks like Delta Green, the agent's handbook and the handler's guide with the exception of once they get past some of the opening, opening sort of cool stuff around like the handwritten notes and the binder pages that have been pulled out and all that sort of stuff, you get into walls of three column text, page after page after page. Right. So it's not as I would say, it's not as well done as the arc dream stuff, but it's still maybe better than some of the like. I really struggled reading, trying to read Trail of Cthulhu Blue for a variety of reasons, but a lot of them had to do with like editing and layout. Like really made it tough. And that's where I think some of heights writing and his ideas I think I would like a lot more than I do because I struggle to get through them. I had the same problem with Kevin Crawford's stuff where I just like, man, get to the point, like cut to it. Don't, don't go on and on, please. And I just lose interest. You know, it's my, it's my aging, you know, weak sauce brain. I think there. I just can't, I can't, I can't do it. There are, I will say there's a section on tradecraft in the book and there are two operas in the back. So there are two missions and there are conversion notes for taking actual arc dream Delta Green scenarios and how you would port them into this game. So if you're a gumshoe person and you want to look at Lovecraftian horror or really Delta Green, this is your book. This is really what it is. So it's way less around the big momentous event. Oh, you know what, let me, let me frame one last thing before I turn it over to you for some commentary here. It is very much written in fact. Height comes out and says it like the arc dream stuff is about modern, the modern program. This is Delta green in the 1960s. So there's even a history section, but it stops in the 60s. It doesn't go on and cover any of the outlaw period. It doesn't Cover the. The cowboys. It doesn't cover the program being shut down. That's all. Post this. So this is very sort of, you know, dark jacket, narrow tie, sunglasses, FBI. Very, very empowered Delta green agents is what I would say. They're kind of like almost like big man on campus kind of vibe in a way. Like people are like, oh, it's the. It's the gman, it's the feds kind of thing. Right. More so than the modern program that Sean and I have been talking about. How much of that Sean is familiar to you versus a surprise or news to you? [00:29:22] Speaker B: I started reading it a while ago, but I didn't get very deep into it, honestly. And I was probably getting hung up on the system. Not that it's a bad system or that. That I wouldn't want to explore it. I've wanted to kind of get into Knight's black agents for quite some time. But, you know, it's. It is something that I want to get into a little bit. Excuse me. A little bit deeper. And then the Barelis campaign, I believe is the. If I'm not mistaken, I. I don't have it up in front of me, but I'm pretty sure that's the campaign that brings it to an end. Yeah. [00:29:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:29:56] Speaker B: And it's a big campaign and it's, you know, there's multiple locations and you end up in Vietnam, I'm pretty sure is where it ends. And there's the drug trade and all kinds of craziness that's going on that I don't know much about it, as much as I would like to, for sure. So. [00:30:16] Speaker A: 19. [00:30:17] Speaker B: 19. 19. Yeah. [00:30:19] Speaker A: Do you remember that song? [00:30:19] Speaker B: Yeah, man, of course. [00:30:23] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't know why, but I was. I wasn't. I was not taken aback, but I was surprised when I was like going through it. I'm like, whoa, There's a lot of. A lot of system stuff here. Whoa. It's still going well. They're going into professions, they're going into all this detail about the game, and that's what it is. It is the. I just didn't realize what it was. I was expecting something very different. [00:30:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Freestanding for sure. Yeah. Somebody could trip across the fall of Delta green and not know arc dream exists. [00:30:52] Speaker A: Correct. Correct. And there I will say this. I'll give a tip of the hat to height and company here. There are some sections on home scenes and on motivations especially that look to me like they might be better than what's in the arc dream. [00:31:05] Speaker B: Interesting. [00:31:06] Speaker A: Because. Yeah. Recall we have or I have criticized the. The arc dream books a little bit for saying, hey, this is a really critical part of the game. It's a little bit like last. It's the last thing on the page, especially motivations, where it's like the last thing you get to in the chapter on creating a character. Whereas it should be a little more front and center because those motivations eventually get replaced with. What do they get replaced with? Disorders. Right. So it's a whole like part of the transformation of the character that we've always talked about. And it's given a bit short shrift I think in the arc dream stuff. With the exception being, and we've talked about this, all the additional materials they produce after they put those two first two books out. So all of the need to know and the information papers, whatever they're called, like all that stuff kind of rounds it out a couple years later when this game comes out. Since the first game was in 16, this is in 18, I think maybe Height had the benefit of, you know, seeing a bit of a more mature product to base his system on. The last thing I would say, like, if you don't believe us on the three columns, detecting it doesn't make your eyes hurt. Like, there's Sean. There are sections of the book where they are listing statistics of creatures and whatnot. And they're in this format so you can picture it says things like, you know, actions with a colon. And then it lists out what the creature does in combat. And in a three column layout, it's like super long and there's like three words per column. It's not a good. I don't know what they're doing. It's not good. And it also. Just to make my point about sort of the walls of text, the table of contents is seven pages long. That's the table of contents. And there's an index. [00:32:46] Speaker B: I should get Jeff just to be like, hey man, can you make this at the most two columns, just put it. Yeah, just take it out, rip it out and then I'll get it reprinted. [00:32:56] Speaker A: It just makes the stuff so hard to consume for me. [00:32:58] Speaker B: It's the biggest pet peeve I have for. For anything Pelgran puts out. I don't know why. [00:33:03] Speaker A: Nice Knights, Black agents is better, but it still suffers. [00:33:06] Speaker B: So three column, it sucks still. [00:33:09] Speaker A: Yeah, you should read trailer Cthulhu, dude. [00:33:11] Speaker B: And I've got. I've had that. I don't know if I still have it, but I. I did have it. [00:33:15] Speaker A: I bet it got purged no, no. [00:33:17] Speaker B: I don't know because I had a few of the supplements. It's just kind of funny how Pelgren has done that for two of two games that are really kind of derived from brp. Right. Call Cthulhu, as well as Delta Green, which is also kind of stems from that. So. [00:33:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. So I tell you what, I have a thought here before I go on to the next game. So that's. That's all I've got on Follow Delta Green. But it is, you know, as I mentioned at the top of the section here, it is like this was licensed. Like, it's literally Delta Green. [00:33:54] Speaker B: They had permission. And Ken works with those guys pretty. I mean, on and off throughout the years. I think he's even look at the [00:34:02] Speaker A: credits in the book and it's like. It's like there's a lot of crossover. [00:34:05] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. [00:34:06] Speaker A: Robin Law. Some of the Robin Law stuff gets in here. There's a whole. There's a whole. There's a whole thing around it. [00:34:11] Speaker B: I've seen Ken beyond panels with the guys from Arc Dream. [00:34:15] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep, yep. And remember, there's this, like, Greg Stolzi is mentioned as well in this book. So there's the. There's the, you know, a bunch of designers that are getting together on this stuff. Whether it's unknown armies, which Stolzi had had a hand in. Right. As well as one of the other designers. I'm forgetting his name right now, but yeah, there's just a bunch of shared DNA across that stuff for sure. And this is another game that is a carbon copy in terms of the play style and the. The content. Although this one's not official. And quite frankly, I wonder how they got away with it. I know you can't copyright mechanics, but man. Black Light is a. A variant of Icy rpg Index Card RPG by. Whether you call him Runehammer or Hankeren Finale or he got, I think, two or three other names and never remember what to call that guy. He wrote icrpg, which is quite frankly a little gem. Right. It's a clean, elegant little D20 system where you. You have these target numbers that escalate as the tension rises. So in other words, doesn't matter what you're trying to do. You're trying to, like, chase someone down. And it's an early scene. Target numbers 8 for your D20 roll. Right. Trying to open a door and it's locked. It's a target number eight. And you meet some thugs outside. It's still target number eight because you're in this first scene and then as things kind of go on it's like, oh, now it's target number 12. Now it's target number 15. So things get like the tension mounts kind of thing. Right. And there's just a lot of little is an incredibly thoughtful design around how to distill down the D20 experience into some things that are much more, I will say universal. So it is not a game that has a bunch of different subsystems. It all kind of comes back to certain dice mean something like if you're barehanded you get a D6. If you have a weapon you get a D8. It's that kind of thing. Right. So I'm not going to. This isn't a review of icrpg, but what that game inspired was a lot of people to write their own hacks of other games for icrpg. And Blacklight is basically the Delta Green for that game. It's a 42 page book. There's no art. But I would say that it's a. It's got a pretty simple and easy and nice layout. It's really easy to read. It's pretty thematic. There's a lot of like looks like an old typewriter from the 30s with all the kind of half characters that aren't fully formed kind of thing. There's a little bit of that vibe going on. So it's. It's kind of good. And then it adds a bunch of custom rules for the Delta Green feel to icrpg. Are you familiar with this game at all or with icrpg? [00:36:52] Speaker B: I have looked at it. I do have ICE index card rpg. I don't. I did look at Blacklight. I don't know if I own it. I can't remember if I have the PDF. I think I do, but I know what you're talking about. The one thing that kind of I wasn't a fan of is I think it got into a little bit more of the ghosts and vampires than I would have preferred. I think in the setting itself. [00:37:12] Speaker A: But I could be wrong maybe when I was refreshing on this. I've had this game for years. In fact I had this game before I had Delta Green. Believe it or not. I don't know that I went through every random table. There's a lot of like how to create an op D20 random tables. One of the things ICRPG is well known for is loads of random tables. Whether it's for loot or locations or encounters, et cetera. And this game, like Sean is describing I think has some things that say like what's at the heart of the mystery? And there may certainly be some werewolf, vampire, ghost type action as opposed to just the pure cosmic horror that we are normally after. [00:37:53] Speaker B: I do not have that. I thought I picked it up, but either I picked it up and I didn't put it in the right directory or I just don't have it. But I think I perused it on Drive Thru and I was like, I [00:38:04] Speaker A: think it's cheap, it's worth getting. I had a moment where I was pretty into ICRPG and I did some Lulu prints of a lot of the third party and then the other stuff that like Runehammer put out himself around icrpg, different settings and whatnot. There's a lot like there's a cyberpunk one, there's a western, there's all kinds of stuff like that. Right. This is also before the master edition of ICRPG came out, which quite frankly I prefer the prior edition. And this is based on the prior edition. The master edition makes some little tweaks that I just, I'm not sure sure were needed. Long story short, I don't need to go into a lot of detail on this, but basically the author and I had the author's name, where was it? [00:38:46] Speaker B: Mark. Mark Eckenrode. [00:38:48] Speaker A: There it is. Mark Eckenrode published in 2020. So Mark has written this game that used what was then called ICRPG core, but he added professions, more player facing roles. So for example, In a classic ICRPG you can picture a charm. It's a D20 game. When an enemy shoots at you, the GM rolls a D20 and they have not the target number of the scene like I described. You have like an armor value or a defense value and they have to hit that. Well in this game. It's kind of an interesting take. It's basically the black hack version of D20 games which is make more of the roles player facing. If someone attacks Sean's character in combat, Sean rolls defense. They don't roll attack. So the attack is assumed to be a hit unless the player character can take action. So it's kind of a neat little tweak which makes it a little more like kind of a roll under kind of, you know, system where there's more on the player. Basically sanity and bonds were added as was something called Burning Out. There's a pretty cool piece on Public Exposure which is kind of neat, which might be even a little bit different than what Delta Green does, which I kind of like and then something I don't think is needed, there's a panic, panic system built in on top of the sanity system. So there's a more full fledged. Like in the moment you're scared. Like Delta Green has that. Like you run, you faint or you fight. It has that system. This does more with that. I don't know that it's better, but it does more with it certainly. And then there's actually a little bit, a little bit of a downtime system too. So this is a fully fledged game in 42 pages for Delta Green. What I would say though, there's some things that I don't think fit as well. And it has to do with ICRPG and D20 games kind of in general, like ICR, ICRPG always makes love loot. So items and equipment and gear a heavy focus of the game. One of the things you're always striving for in those games is better and better loot because they add to your ability scores and they give you new powers and new abilities and all that kind of stuff. And that continues in this game, which is a little weird where you need a certain pistol. Gets you a better bonus kind of thing. A certain book lets you. Lets you do some better translation. So there's just a weird vibe around questing for gear to get better at your Delta Green job, which does not strike me as particularly supportive of the genre. I don't know. What do you think, Sean? [00:41:13] Speaker B: Yeah, it would not be my jam. And I might be getting this mixed up with the other black light that was in the 80s or 90s. [00:41:24] Speaker A: The other black light that's out there right now is actually a shadow dark game. It might be called Operation Black Light. And it is a ripoff of. I never remember this because I didn't like the show. Unlike everybody other. Every other nerd I've ever met, I didn't like it. What was the. What was the movie with Kurt Russell and James Spader where they went through the pyramid portal? [00:41:48] Speaker B: Stargate. [00:41:49] Speaker A: Stargate. So I think the modern. So it's like it just kickstarted, I think like a little while ago. I think the modern Operation Blacklight is a Stargate ripoff written for shadowdark. Am I getting that right? [00:42:03] Speaker B: Possibly. Yes. I know which one you're talking about, but I thought Jason Connerly brought up Blacklight. There's another black light that was old, old school. And I think that's where I'm getting confused. Pretty sure. [00:42:17] Speaker A: Ah, I think you're mistaken. I think Jason was. I Think Jason was pointing to this game because Jason is a fan of icrpg and I think he was trying to mention to us. I could be wrong. Jason will have to write us if he listens to this. I think he was trying to say, hey, if you don't want to use brp, there's even a game for ICRPG and it's called Blacklight. [00:42:40] Speaker B: Interesting. [00:42:41] Speaker A: Not believing me at all. [00:42:42] Speaker B: It is and I do believe you. And you're right. The one that we. So yes, to clear things up. So, yes, the Blacklight compatible with shadowdark rpg, it's expansion for shadowdark. Right. [00:42:54] Speaker A: It's like a Stargate. [00:42:55] Speaker B: They take on the role of COVID agents battling extra dimensional horrors. [00:42:59] Speaker A: Bam. There you go. [00:43:00] Speaker B: Yes. So maybe I'm getting that mixed up with Blacklight, the supplement for index card rpg. There was one of them. I still think there was one that Jason was referring to. That still is an 80s piece, but maybe it's not. [00:43:18] Speaker A: Well, Jason believes that something like 18 different games all predated Delta Green and were better. [00:43:24] Speaker B: Right. [00:43:26] Speaker A: I'm not sure what to tell you. I can only tell you in private conversations I've had with him. I know he has played Blacklight, maybe with the author of this game. So he has pointed it out to me previously. Right. Years ago he had let me keep going on this. There's not a lot more to cover on it. Some of the other things that I think don't fit so well for what we're trying to do with Delta Green. Typically there's levels, there's classes, they're limited classes. There are random disorders. So there's that whole like roll on a table and you get a random thing that you know based on your. How insane you went. It is definitely more combat and action focused because that's what ICRPG is meant to be. A pick up your dice, let's get after it, let's start rolling and you know, roll them bones and kick ass and take names and have fun. Right. That kind of game. It has been modified in ways over the years to. To be less. Both less and more than that. Right. Different game experience, but it's this one still feels to me like you're still like, you know, kind of a shoot first, kind of like you're going to be heavily armed. You got this loot that's important to you and all that sort of stuff. Right. There's a decent section on how to be the handler on creating operations and it does include a sample op. So it's a Neat little package, right? I would play it. I'd give it a shot. I don't think it'd be the first game that I. I reach for to run. And I think. I think I would run Delta Green instead is where I come down. But have you. Have you've never played a single ICRPG game? [00:44:50] Speaker B: I have not, but I've owned it and I've read it and I like some of the subtle nuances of what it does. It's kind of interesting, but. And it's I think pretty hackable as well. [00:45:01] Speaker A: Oh my heavens. It's super hackable. [00:45:04] Speaker B: So credit where credit is due for design and Runehammer and what he's probably one of his leading. I say one of his Magnus opuses. I would say. [00:45:15] Speaker A: Oh yeah. In fact, I would like to say I wish he would get back to it and develop it further because he's been doing some other things lately. But I should watch my tongue because I think someone has told me recently, maybe friend of friend of, maybe not the show because I don't think he listens to it. But friend of ours, Eric Salz Wheedle, I think has told me that he's planning on getting back to it or has gotten back to it. So maybe he'll be back around it. It took like multiple years of his life to develop this whole thing and there's a huge community built around it. So just to emphasize the point you're making, Sean, about it being hackable, man, there are a. There's a crap ton of stuff like on drive thru RPG and people do some really neat things with it. So for example, I did play, I think the cyber cyberpunk game is called Altered State and I. And it has fan fantastic art. Like some of the. My most favorite RPG art of all time is in that book drawn by Runehammer. Runehammer's a fantastic artist. Right. I played it in that game in a game of that at Gamehole like two, three years ago. And I think I complained about it on my blog. If I remember correctly, I'm kind of a complaining kind of guy. Right. It was a really fun. The GM did some weird things with the target number where they were kind of all over the map. And then he was like letting people succeed when they didn't hit the number because it was late in the the game. And some things that generally turn my stomach when I'm at a table. Right. Having said all that, the game has some really like. So Altered State is very much what's called like Pink Mohawk cyberpunk Right. Like cyber cycles balls out. Like, you know, you're like, you know, machine gun in the front of the front of the shop. So you can all your gang busts in and grabs all the valuables and off you go. And the cyber cops are chasing you down the highway like that. That kind of like mayhem is going on, right. And this game, one of the rules, this is actually a Runehammer game, but it has this meta currency which is you've got these four D8s in front of you and at any time you can pick up a D8 and add it to your roll. Right? So if you're a little short on your target number, pick up a D8. But they are represented in the game by these blue capsules you have to mash down and swallow. They're like drugs you're taking in the middle of the scene, like you're on your bike. I just love that kind of stuff. And the community that he has fostered all has that same like diy, like all out spirit. So you'll find some really creative stuff in this space. Akin even like to the creativity in the osr, I would say like people. It's a community of people who are pretty rabid about the game, or at least it was a few years ago when I was kind of interacting with them. It's cool stuff. Anyway, not my first choice for Delta Green, but hey, but speaking of my not first choice, let's look at our third game. So the third one, you know who Graham Walmsley is, right? [00:47:58] Speaker B: I do. I love his one book on, what is it? Play Unsafe. [00:48:06] Speaker A: Play Unsafe. [00:48:08] Speaker B: There you go. Yeah. So he, so he did play on Safe and I liked his, I liked that book as just a general GM book. And I think he's done a second version of it, if I'm not mistaken. [00:48:18] Speaker A: So Walmsley has done a lot in the community and he's, he's written some things that are kind of seminal pieces that have inspired a lot of other people. Right. He's a Brit. He wrote Cthulhu Dark way back, which started as like a two pager, which then turned into like a ten pager, which turned into a couple hundred page book. Because he basically stapled all these really cool settings into it, including, if I get, I may not get this right, Sean, but I'm thinking you can picture the classic, classic Call of Cthulhu from chaosium is the 20s, right? And then they were like, oh, what about gaslight Victorian England as well. And then what about Pope cthulhu in the 30s? And what about modern and like on. On. On from there. Right. So Wamsley, in looking at Call Cthulhu and being like, man, I think I can tell those stories with a much simpler system. He develops Cthulhu Dark, which I'll describe a little bit in a minute here. But then he adds all these settings. One of them, I think is like the Salem witch trials in like, New England in the 17th century. Pretty cool. Like, there's some really neat settings that he has developed, and he has more recently done some stuff around, like, space and cosmic horror. And he's like, he's been quite active lately. In fact, I have a couple of his Kickstarters that have just come in. I haven't read the damn things yet. I haven't really cracked the books yet. I really, really need to. Long story short, Graham. Graham Walmsley writes Cthulhu Dark. And I don't know when that dates back to probably the mid teens or something is when it first came out. And then he iterated many times over it. Right. 2e is the version that the author of. Hopefully I have his name down. Yes. So there's a book, A book, a role playing book called Cthulhu Dark. Excuse me, Cthulhu Deep Green. Cthulhu Deep Green was written by Justin Ford from Mothlands, is the publisher, and he credits Walmsley's Cthulhu Dark 2e as the inspiration for basically taking the. The guts of Cthulhu Dark and then adding a bunch of stuff to make it like Delta Green. So it's another one of these unauthorized I've got. You know, someone else took a. Did a lightweight Call Cthulhu engine. What if I wrapped some things around it, made a. Made a lightweight Delta Green engine. I'll spoil my own message here or my. I'll cut to the chase here. I think in doing that, what I see is that we kind of ruin the elegance that Wamsley came up with for Cthulhu Dark. So what that is in Cthulhu Dark, get this, your characters have a name, they have an occupation, and they have a score called Insight. Insight starts as one, and you roll a D6 whenever you see something that you shouldn't. And every time you, I think, roll the number or lower, it goes up by one. So you become more and more insightful, you know, more and more and more. And things basically end because you learn too much. Right. I won't go into all the guts of it, but it's a super elegant, very streamlined, like, there's a lot of things you don't even roll for in the game. But when you're just trying to do something simple like it basically says is what you're trying to do within the realm of human capability. Thumbs up. It is a human could do this. You get a D6. Does it relate to your occupation? Remember I said they have a name and an occupation. If it does, you get another D6. Cool. And then this one's cool. If you're willing to risk your understanding or insight, you can add another die as well. But it's a different color. And whether or not your insight die comes up higher than your other dice matters in the game in terms of like how stable you are. There's a whole little mechanic around that. So very simple mechanics. But there's a lot that Wansley does with them and they're just. I don't know, they're pretty cool. Basically you roll that little pool of dice which is all you can picture. If it's not in your occupation and you're not willing to risk your sanity, you're all in one die. Right? Because you. It's something that a person can do. And you basically read the top die of anything, anything that's in the pool kind of thing. And there's a whole like. I think it's like I don't remember anymore, actually. I think it's whether it's five or six succeed and four is partial kind of thing. I wish I refreshed on that, but I. But I didn't. Long story short, it's a very simple D6 system for most things. Unless you are fighting the unnatural. Do you know that rule, Sean? [00:52:39] Speaker B: No. [00:52:40] Speaker A: You probably do. No. In Cthulhu Dark, if you come across some deep ones or you know, a hunter in the dark or whatever, any of the truly big bad things, if you decide to fight it, you die. Oh, okay. Y. The scene is described as as to how you die horribly. And Wamsley instead says the players should be focused on hiding or escaping or you know, living to fleeing to live another day type of thing. Modeling the fiction. Right. Like if you read the Lovecraft stories, generally people are not like get em boys, you know, with the dummy guns kind of thing. With the exception being of course the raid on Innsmouth from the FBI. Right. And the Navy. [00:53:20] Speaker B: Right. [00:53:20] Speaker A: Yep. But generally speaking for the, you know, the lone investigators or the small team of investigators, you don't. You don't go head to head with that stuff. And Walmsley sets it up so that you cannot do that. And that's one of the places where Cthulhu Deep Green trips. So Ford 52 pages. I've called it here a complete pantomime of DG. I mean, it is again, it's the same game with a different coat of paint. Like, literally, you're working for the same type of group of people. You have home life, you have all kinds of stuff. It adds what's called a dark dye. It adds stress, it adds harm, injury, wounds and disorders. You can tell from the tone of my voice, like, I think it's just like, that's just baggage you're loading on top of this. This little Cthulhu or Cthulhu dark engine that does so much with so little. And now you packed a whole bunch of stuff around it and you have a whole bunch of other stuff you're tracking. And not all combat kills you with. With the. With the. The forces of darkness or the, you know, the unnatural. Now you can actually be. You could be successful if you roll more than the four on your dice. It just makes it a different game to me. It just, you know, I've never played it, so I shouldn't be too hard on it. But I will just say that when I first got this game, I was very much in kind of an indie story game mindset. It's when I was exploring a lot of stuff after my fate days. PBTA is not for me, but I looked at a lot of other story games kind of thing, came across Cthulhu Dark and started sort of searching. And this one always struck me as just like, oh man, for taking such a lean chassis. You. You've added all this, like, other stuff that has that. That matters. And it really kind of changes what I think Wamsy was, was after with it. So there are some weird combat mechanics where if you don't. This is very, very story game. If you don't like the outcome of the action, there's like a rewind tool the player can use to take a more measured course of action. So I. I don't know. There's parts of this game I just don't have my head wrapped fully around. But if you are in the, you know, if you love Cthulhu Dark, if you were in the story game mindset, and the thought of. Of, you know, playing a BRP game like Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green gives you like eggy burps and you can like little. Little don't. You don't like the taste in your mouth? Yes. You don't like. That's actually a SCTV Reference, apparently. Yeah. So if. If the thought of playing such a trad game just turns you off. Right. There's a. There's a little story game out here for you that involves some different types of mechanics that are way more player forward and all that kind of. Of stuff. Right. There are home scenes, there are these anchors, which are basically the bonds. And this is one of the places where the game feels unfinished to me. So you could picture what a lot of these indie games were like in the teens and into the early 20s kind of thing, where it was a passion project for somebody for a little while. They never quite put the final edge on the blade kind of thing. Right. So there are some things that get mentioned, like when anchors pop up, they're in the home scenes. The game has not talked about what an anchor is. So if you don't know Delta Green, if you don't know the background, you have no idea what the game's even talking about. I did a pretty thorough search last night to say when does this concept first get introduced? It's like in the last part of the book where they talk about home scenes. So there's a little bit of that going on as well. Where. And again, that's kind of a major contrast with Graham Walmsley's work, which is like nicely written, nicely conveyed. It's pretty funny. Like there's. There's one really funny part of the first. The first, I think it's 2e version of Cthulhu Dark where the rules are like half a page long. Sean. Like for not very long. And then if you look at the table of contents, it's like a 10 page PDF or something. The table of contents says, okay, now let's deep dive on the rules. And the deep dive is like two sentences long. Like purposefully, he's like, stop it. There's no more to the game. You know, it's. It's really kind of funny. So this game's just a little off base from that, is what I would say. You've never even heard of this game, I take it? [00:57:22] Speaker B: I've heard of Cthulhu Dark. I have not looked into it. I know Graham was on Craig's podcast recently, Third Floor Wars. I don't know about recently, but yeah, last few years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so. And I think he had re. Kick started or crowdfunded Cthulhu Dark, another edition or something along those lines. Or was that what I was. [00:57:43] Speaker A: That's what I was just talking about. I had those books behind me. I haven't looked at them yet. Yeah, he. He redid and rebound New art, etc. Cthulu Dark. And it's a. A multi. Like, it's a. It's a thick, hard cover. Most of that setting, like I was saying before, like, cool setting and lots of. He writes, like, articles or pieces about, like, Lovecraftian horror and how to be effective in conveying it kind of thing. Dude is good. Like, he's. He's pretty solid, but he also did a space. Cosmic horror, like a space game. And I've got that and I haven't read it. [00:58:15] Speaker B: I think it's interesting when guys like Graham. Not to go out on a tangent, but, you know, he wrote that Robin D. Laws did Hamlet's hit points. I have over there. I haven't read it, but it is interesting with. With Graham's. It was a kind of a quick read. [00:58:29] Speaker A: It's like 100 pages, man. Something like that. [00:58:31] Speaker B: To get that and then read that and then get into a game that he's designed, it would be interesting because it really does give you an insight into what their thought process is on running games or what game experience should be. Yeah. And that's funny because I don't know, I might have bought a supplement for something that he. I don't know if it was Hanrahan or Walmsley that did a Trail of Cthulhu scenario, but that was kind of my exposure to Graham before Play Unsafe. I don't even know how I tripped across Play Unsafe. I'm like, what's this about? And then I listened to it. I'm like, this is pretty cool. [00:59:12] Speaker A: But anyways, so for listeners who are unfamiliar with that book, it's basically a lightweight treatise on how to run games off the cuff. So improvisational, taking things the players say and weaving them into the game in real time. A little bit of that whole, like, improv theater. Yes. And kind of like that kind of style of game. But he gets into. It's kind of neat. He gets into some descriptions of how he transformed himself from someone who fretted about prep and about being ready for game night into this. What if I leaned into these other things and developed some other habits? And the book kind of describes some of that stuff. It's a light read. It's a quick read. And that same. That same thought process Sean has weaved woven all through Cthulhu Dark. [00:59:59] Speaker B: Right. [00:59:59] Speaker A: It's like a, you know, just kind of. Just kind of go with it. You know, this is the set of mechanics and see what happens kind of thing. I'd like to play Cthulhu Dark? Actually, I've never. I've never actually gotten into a game. I'd love to play it. [01:00:10] Speaker B: All right. [01:00:10] Speaker A: Anything else you want to talk about on Cthulhu Deep Green? [01:00:13] Speaker B: No, I don't think so. [01:00:15] Speaker A: All right, then. I just have a couple little things to close out here was a couple of what I would call, like, honorable mentions. Those. Like, there's a lot of games that can run Delta Green, the most obvious ones being just to pick up seventh edition's Call of Cthulhu and make some tweaks, add some bonds. It's. They're 90 compatible out of the box if you want to do that. And you could, quite frankly, do that with any of the other knockoff Cthulhu games that are out there. The Eldrick Tales. Eldrick Horror, Rats in the Walls. There's. There's. So what's the. I mentioned them already. Kevin Crawford, it's called Silent Legions. It's one of his old. It's one of his older books, but it's the same OSR ish 2 d6 for skills, d20 for attacks, kind of kind of thing. But like any Kevin Crawford game, like loads of sign nominee, whatever that company is, all those books, loads of tables, Loads and loads of tables. Really cool. So set all that aside, right? Like, if you could take any Cthulhu game and I think you could do, you know, make sure there's some love, there's some tradecraft, make sure there's some lethal firearms. Back to Gumshoe. There's some interesting things that height does in Gumshoe to make it more like Delta Green. And one of them is that he increases. He introduces lethality ratings for firearms in the Gumshoe game. So complete nod to the, you know, to the core game kind of thing. But back on track here, pick up your favorite Cthulhu esque game of the moment and add in tradecraft, add in home scenes, lethal combats, and that kind of stuff, and you could run the thing. Any of those games will do it. But the ones that honorable mentions I want to make are things like liminal horror, if you know that game. So liminal horror. Have you played that, Sean? [01:02:01] Speaker B: I have not played liminal horror, but I know of it. [01:02:05] Speaker A: Yeah. So that is in the family of into the odd, what they would call consider a mark of the odd game. So there's, you know, it's the whole, like, you don't roll to attempt something. The only rolls in the game are saves. You don't roll the hit. You have hit points that are really hit protection. So in other words, they're very come and go. Like as soon as the scene's over. If you lost some hit points, they come back because you're back on your feet and you're back. Like the real wounds come when you take damage to your strength kind of thing. Right. And that, like, it's. It's that sort of thing. Karen's one of these games. Mouse Rider is one of these games, et cetera. Liminal horror has a big following. So it was. It's one of the bigger names. It's one of those things. Poor. Forget his name now. Chris McDow, jeez. The author of into the Odd and of Electric Bastion Land and Mythic Bastion Land and you know, and on and on is in some cases less known than some of the people who have developed games that have gone on to be more successful, like Y Gall with Karen and like the Liminal Horror Gang. Like, there's a lot of material out for liminal horror now because whole community pumping out adventures and whatnot. One of those is called the Bureau. I don't know a ton about it, but I do know it is a paranormal fighting. There's. There's some bureaucracy behind the scenes. And I've read that there's. There's some elements that could make it very Delta Green, like if you kind of bent it a little bit. There's a couple of mechanics inside liminal Horror that would not work very well for Delta Green. But all you would have to do, and this is based on my reading Liminal Horror like a year ago or more, is replace a couple of. Of random tables with some things that would happen that are a little more in Delta Green. Let me. Let me give it just an example. It's basically when you have like a. Like a break in the game, like a mental break kind of thing. Some really weird stuff can happen to you in Liminal Horror. Like you grow an ear, an extra ear. And like there's some. Yeah, there's some really weird stuff that kind of like it takes the game in a certain direction. Right. But it's really easy to rewrite those random tables so that it can instead be a Bond takes damage. You see something from your past that you don't understand. It'd be pretty easy to do, man. I think you could use liminal horror as a basis for doing this. For those who are Aktol Cthulhu fans, even as Modiphius distance itself from that property. I think they're all done with It. It's not very hard to imagine using that game for Call of Cthulhu. Right. It's got all the. It's got all the things it has. It's basically a second World War Cthulhu, you know, fighting game. It's probably less tradecraft, espionage. It's not modern, but it's not very far away from, you know, just a Cthulu game. And again, like we talked about before, easy to turn that into Delta Green. Have you played Octun Cthulhu? [01:04:46] Speaker B: I have not. [01:04:47] Speaker A: For a modern 2D20 game, it's one of the crunchier ones. [01:04:51] Speaker B: Huh. [01:04:52] Speaker A: It still uses the action dice or whatever they're called those. Those D6s that you roll if you succeed. As opposed to the more modern games like Star Trek Adventures, which you're running right now. Right. Star Trek Adventures 2e is a lot lighter than. Than Achtung Cthulhu. And just to the callback to the top of the show, I think games like Fate games like Savage Worlds and then lighter weight games like Rises and Freeform Universal, those are all pretty easy games to run Delta Green in. But there's some elbow gre, right. There's some diy. How do the home scenes work? How does downtime work? Bonds make sure the weapons are pretty. Pretty deadly. Like there's some pieces that you have to add to them, but I think all those can absolutely do it for sure. That's all I got. Sean, for running Delta Green with other systems, did anything else occur to you either in our run up to this week or based on the blathering I've been doing for the last X number of minutes? [01:05:49] Speaker B: No, I don't think so. I was kind of curious about some of these and I'd known there were a couple out there and I think Blacklight was. Got some looks okay as far as like the trade dress and what it kind of conveys. It's cool, so. And not opposed to checking out other Delta Greenish games because sometimes I think some of them may run better as like one shots, for example, without. Without huge learning curves or maybe. Oh well, Bonds really don't come into one shots anyway. So why don't you just run something that doesn't have them right or something like that? I don't know. But I do enjoy. I don't think the Arc Dream system is hard. It's percentile. [01:06:33] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean it really says something about it for me personally, because I do not generally like. Well, quite frankly, I don't like D20 or percentile systems are not My favorite types of games, I'm much more of a 2d6, 3d6d6 die pool. Less swingy. That's for you, Jim. Less swingy. Jim doesn't listen to the show. [01:06:56] Speaker B: Says the guy who doesn't like gumshoe. [01:07:00] Speaker A: Correct. But there's other reasons I don't like Gumshoe. [01:07:02] Speaker B: Fair. That's fine. [01:07:05] Speaker A: Point being the guts of Delta Green are built for me to go, ooh. Like I don't, I don't love those BRP games where there's too many skills. Why is the. The strength the old D and D scale of 3 to 18 and not a number like it is in the seventh edition? Like there's a bunch of stuff that would typically put me off and I think I've described other times during this season. It's so good. I easily overcome my putoffedness and today's episode. And looking at these games just really reinforces Sean. Like I've got options for running Delta Green and none of them approach what Arc Dream has done with that game. I don't think it's easier to run. It's just more. There's more to it. There's more support. There's way more people who play it. All those, all those reasons, you know, I would never, I would never see how any of these games now even though I own all of them, I will look at Cthulhu. Cthulhu Dark. But that's a different. That's a different conversation. Right. But I'm not going to play Cthulhu Deep Dream. I don't know. None of these approach what the kind of original game can do. I don't think there are all different ways to do it. But yeah, I don't know. [01:08:12] Speaker B: Yeah. The only thing that would really interest me is the Gumshoe system. Just to see what it's about and look at that campaign. I think I could probably curtail the campaign to modern day Arc Dream system. But I don't know. We'll see. [01:08:29] Speaker A: I shouldn't beat on Gumshoe too badly. I have played the game and when I play with somebody who knows what they're doing and they can kind of explain some things, I like it. Like when Wayne ran Swords of the Serpentine. [01:08:41] Speaker B: Right. [01:08:41] Speaker A: For our Thursday night group. That great. Had a great time. Still. Still not a game that I'm like gonna. And I, I own that hardcover, in fact. Oh, this is a funny story. Wayne was with me, so I, I owned that game before he did. He was with me when at Gamehole. We Seeked out swords of a serpentine at Pell Grain's booth. And it was sold to me by Ken Haidt. We walked away, I was like, I finally found this. This book. I've been looking for this book for a year. Where he's like, that was good night. I'm like, eh, so fast forward a year thing for us. And it was fun. [01:09:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Well, that's good stuff. Thanks for doing the. The legwork on this one. [01:09:24] Speaker A: No worries. You did the last couple, so I figured it was time. [01:09:26] Speaker B: Fair enough. All right, well, if you've tried any of these games, let us know. We'd be interested in hearing more about [01:09:33] Speaker A: it or if we've missed. Like, folks, this is just mine, you know, limited knowledge of what's out there now. You know, I've. [01:09:40] Speaker B: I was. [01:09:40] Speaker A: I've always been surprised that people are able to do such direct copies of the game, with the exception of the gumshoe one, which is licensed. But the other ones, I'm like, come on, man, like this. You've only filed off one serial number of 10. You know, the rest of them are the same. How'd you get away with this? But there may be. My point is, there may be other games out. Out there that are direct riffs, or there may even be one that you have in mind, dear listeners, that you're like, oh, this would be perfect. And you guys don't know about it. Write in, call us. [01:10:09] Speaker B: Yeah. Otherwise, on behalf of Harrigan, thanks for listening to Gobang. We'll check you on the next one. See ya. This episode of Go Bag, produced with help from the following friendlies. Field out operatives, special agents and black ops directors. Joe Swick, Roger French, Merkel Froilich, Tony Sugarloaf, Baker, Polish Ogre Who's Carl Farty McMutterpants, Laramie Wall, Eileen Barnes, Hepto Lima, Aaron Railia, Wayne Peacock, Jeff Walken, Yorkus Rex Eric Salzweedle, Phil McClory, Jason Hobbs, Michael Holland, Remy Billido, Crystal Egstead, Eric Avia Fornak, Brian Kurtz, Chad Glenn Layman, Jim Ingram, Orcus Dorcas, Chris Shorb, Brian Rumble, Victor Wyatt, Kevin Keneally, Andy Hall, Jason Weitzel, Salt Hart, Tad Lechtman, 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 Great Jake at Faded Quill Gaming Tess Trekkie, Tim Jensen Nubis Christopher Lang Karlag, Peter Skaines, Wendy Forcon, James Fraser, Ronald Dirigible, Chaplain Grimaldis and Mark Mequez. Thank you, operatives.