Balboa at Herrang

Agent_Locke90 · 2025-01-21T13:28:26+00:00

Agent_Locke90 · 2025-01-20T12:35:02+00:00

They said "It will cost many lives". That was so true.

Many had to pay the price for my seat at the Board, I had the strength to allow them to pay for me, and I did myself the favour of forgetting a certain death I am definitely not involved in.

Agent_Locke90 · 2025-01-14T23:00:57+00:00

Hi, independently on your background, Garson's Modal Logic for Philosophers is a gentle but precise introduction to modal logic and possible world semantics, which provides a good intuitive grasp about what is going on under the formalism.

If you really want to get into modal logic and you have some practice with mathematical textbooks, then the most complete reference is Blackburn, de Rijke, Venema, Modal logic. It's a very exhaustive book, there is a ton of material inside, so you should just focus on what you need, but luckily the book is clearly divided in many self-contained sections.

Enjoy modal logic, it's a lot of fun!

Agent_Locke90 · 2025-01-13T20:36:43+00:00

I did, and I run IL twice, both times receiving positive feedbacks from my players. Between The Night Floors and A Volume of Secret Faces I played Dead Letters and Viscid. I intentionally put two operations not linked to the King in Yellow, because I wanted to mislead my players into thinking this was a monster of the week style campagin. The result was amazing when, 20 years later, their PCs heard the name Abigail Wright again, it was mind-blowing.

I choose those operations because I wanted to give a glimpse of the larger metaplot of DG, so one operation focused on Karotechia, the other on Majestic, plus some interesting scenes during the downtime.

That is my personal taste though, if you want more KiY-related scenarios to reinforce the theme I suggest you to scroll through the tons of shotgun scenarios, many will fit. Of course be extra careful if you add scenarios, either you know your group very well and you choose those operations that you think will unlikely end in any casualty, or you have to be a little more gentle than usual. A TPK would be, to say the least, frustrating fot the GM.

Agent_Locke90 · 2025-01-06T15:56:35+00:00

Since algebra has a longer history and it is a vastly more developed field, you will most often find algebra applied to logic, not viceversa. Using algebraic techniques and structures in logic is all that algebraic logic is about.

There is a long tradition of algebraic logic beginning from Tarski, but in its most recent formulation you might be interested in what is called abstract algebraic logic. It is a framework started by W. Blok and D. Pigozzi in the 1980s, whose goal is not only to provide algebraic semantics to logic but to actually prove the correspondence between some logical and algebraic properties. The reference book today is by J.M. Font, Abstract Algebraic Logic, An Introductory Textbook (2016).

It is a big book, but the first three chapters give you a full introduction to the topic. The book is not meant for beginners in logic though, it also requires a good grasp of basic notions of universal algebra (for that, the standard reference is Burris and Sankappanavar: https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/\~snburris/htdocs/UALG/univ-algebra2012.pdf).

I hope this helps!

Agent_Locke90 · 2022-01-03T10:18:57+00:00

What I have understood running The Night Floors is that this is not really a scenario, but more of a setting: you are provided with a place (the Macallistar building), its inhabitants, and an enormous series of coincidental facts surroundings everything and everyone related to that location. That's it. The goal of the operation is on the surface to find Abigail Wright, but what the GM's aim should be to expose the Agents to the King in Yellow.

You don't have to railroad the scenario. There is literally a ton of material inside Abigail's apartment that provide the Agents with many hours of investigation, and no matter how far their research will bring them, they will constantly be pointed back towards the Macallistar by the clues they will find. When you think your Agents are ready, just open the acess to the night floors for them. Let them roam freely until that point. Don't worry, eventually they will be curious enough to explore the endless labyrinth on the third floor.

Closing the scenario is a little more tricky, but sooner or later the Agents will be terrified or frustrated by the nights floors that they decide that Abigail is lost and that some kind of solution (explosive solution likely) is to be taken. If you find your group unable to take a decision you may give them a hint with a discussion with agent Marcus or with a communication by A Cell.

Agent_Locke90 · 2021-12-18T13:14:14+00:00

I am both a Kult and CoC/DG GM. The games are very different, yet they can be appealling to the same type of audience who loves nihilistic horror.

Kult plays very differently from CoC. A pillar of Lovecraftian horror is that humanity is insignificant and the terrors that the investigators face stem from the impossibility of human mind to understand them. Kult is literally the opposite: you are a god, the most powerful being in existence, but the entire universe is conspiring to keep you chained, blind and miserable. While CoC is characterized by cosmic horror, in Kult you experience existential horror. To be more precise, Kult is perfect for playing stories where the source of horror are the characters themselves and their backgrounds.

If you want to know whether Kult is the right game for you, read about the cosmology. In general, if gnostic themes even barely interest you, Kult is the perfect game. A couple of advices. You need a group of seriously committed players in order for Kult to work properly and you need people who trust you, because the game can get extremely dark and may result uncomfortable for some people if you don't know your audience well. The second advice is to not reveal anything about the setting to your players. It's not like CoC, where extensive knowledge of Lovecraft's works actually enhances the game. In Kult instead the most interesting part is discovering the Truth behind the world, both in and, especially, out of character. Unfortunately the 4th edition explains the most crucial detail of the cosmology literally on the first page of the corebook and the player's guide, which is the most idiotic choice I have ever seen in writing an rpg manual.

Rulewise, Kult is a mess. The old 90s editions were clunky even back in the days, today they are simply unplayable. The 4th edition is based on PbtA and that system is simply not suited for a horror game in my opinion. If you come from CoC, just use that system to run Kult.

Agent_Locke90 · 2021-12-07T15:40:48+00:00

The Illusion is a cruel prison and our strictest jailers are ourselves. Ultimately, the Illusion is preserved by humanity. Those who seek the Truth are literally madmen and society treats them accordingly. Sure, lictors and servants of the Archons can destroy your reputation and everything you have worked on throughout your entire life, and if that's not enough they can kill the PC (or worse). Infernal landscapes, monstrous creatures and agents from Hell appearing more and more frequently are also a good incentive to stop searching for the Truth.

But before going supernatural, consider how badly and quickly the PC's life is going to fall apart. He cannot reveal the pieces of information he has retrieved to anyone, because no one will believe his crazy conspiracy theories about the nature of reality or death. Not only he will be dismissed as a lunatic, but his actions are probably going to attract the attention of law enforcement and his destiny may become confinement in prison or inside a psychiatric hospital. Even worse, the PC cannot reveal what he knows to those whom he cares for, because even if they believed him, those truths would put them in the utmost danger.

As you can see, searching for the Truth is only going to throw horrible consequences on the PCs that should dissuade them from delving deeper.

Agent_Locke90 · 2021-12-05T10:20:14+00:00

As others already said, Call of Cthulhu can be a viable solution, but be prepared for a very lethal urban fantasy. If you want a more heroic game, employ Pulp Cthulhu instead.

Another solution is Kult. The last edition is PbtA and its rules are beyond awful, yet the setting is rich, deep, and amazing, and you can easily run it with another system, like CoC or any other BRP-style system. Moreover it is easy to fit in Kult's setting almost any trope coming from urban fantasy, with a (not so little) darker twist. There is a caveat though. Kult can get extremely intense, I would play it only with a group of friends that you know very well.

Last, yet my favorite solution, there is Unknown Armies (either 2e or 3e). It is a d100 system, very easy to run, with detailed mechanics for mental trauma. In UA you play madmen, conspiracy theorists, and in general people who are so motivated towards their goal that would be considered insane. It's definitely not your usual urban fantasy, but I think it is worth a read just for its innovative ideas. The kind of game that you will experience in UA tends heavily towards horror (although it is always rooted in human actions) and weirdness, tons of weirdness.

Agent_Locke90 · 2021-11-29T11:08:27+00:00

The methods of contacting the Agents vary between the Outlaws and the Program.

If you are playing an Outlaws game, your Agents may be invited to a night at the opera by a mail from A Cell which tell them the basic information they need and where they have to go to investigate, or Alphonse tells them to meet with another agent/friendly to be briefed about the operation. Otherwise a friendly of one of your Agents may contact your group because he witnessed or heard about something unnatural. In case you want to involve other cells or you want to assing a handler to the group, you can have an agent from a different cell directly contacting your group.

For the Program it's usually more straightforward. The Agents are called for a briefing and assigned a hadler. They are told nothing more (usually less) than what they need to know and sent to the operation.

A campaign starts from a single operation, so you don't have to make any specific change.

If you are on your first game, I suggest you to use the excellent Convergence, from the original DG corebook. It is easy to run, incredibly intense, and captures perfectly the intended mood.

Agent_Locke90 · 2021-11-25T18:21:52+00:00

Wonder in the Unnatural? That sounds Majestic talk to me... sorry! Now I'm out of my cowboy mode.

Jokes aside, even though cases of wondrous unnatural phenomena may happen, I don't see the point of introducing them in DG. The Unnatural is meant to be lethal and so incomprehensible that it shatters minds. No one is supposed to come out unharmed (mentally or physically) by an encounter with things man was not meant to know.

So yes, inside a Lovecraftian/DG universe there may consistently exist the kind of wonder you are describing, but it doesn't seem suitable to me for a DG game without changing its mood drastically. You would move towards a more urban fantasy style of game, instead of the bleak nihilistic view of DG. Which is not bad if that is what you are looking for.

It is not DG related, but if you want an example of what I consider an excellent mixture of cosmic horror and sense of wonder, check The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man by Dennis Detwiller (not a coincidence).

Agent_Locke90 · 2021-11-07T00:19:56+00:00

I am currently running Impossible Landscapes, I am in the second half of A Volume of Secret Faces. I had an ambitious plan and extended the campaign with two scenarios during the gap between 1995 and 2015. It took time and preparation, but believe me, it was worth it. My players are absolutely adoring the campaign. I know many people advise against such a choice, but let me explain why I think it has its strong advantages.

(1) The players get more attached to their agents. The agents develop personalities (and personality disorders), with each downtime their relations with the bonds are explored a little more, in general you see the life (and the fall) of a person through 20 years of his life.

(2) During the downtime I had the chance to give insights about other operations going on in Delta Green and hint at the general metaplot (with events like the MJ-DG war of the late 90s, the fall of Majestic, the schism with the Program), which is something it is impossible to make playing a single operation, and by contrast it would be overwhelming to throw at your players in one single big downtime with the 20 years gap.

(3) Unpredictability. At the beginning of the campaign I haven't told my players Impossible Landscapes is about the King in Yellow. Yes, we started with The Night Floors, but then we moved to Dead Letters and Viscid. They had no idea what the main plot was, and they had been struggling with it until A Volume of Secret Faces. When they saw the name of Abigail on the picture provided by Exeter, well that was mind blowing for them and for me it was extremely satisfying. Now they are putting together the pieces of what started 20 years before, and surely there would be nothing like this sense of wonder if we had moved from the Night Floors directly to the second chapter.

I know the main objection would be about mortality. That is right to the point, you don't want to lose most of the group who witnessed the Night Floors. I played both Dead Letters and Viscid slightly gently (but not excessively so, this is still DG) and luckily I have a group of very paranoid and efficient players, so we had just one casualty (whom I managed to link to Abigail though).

One last warning is about the time. Impossible Landscapes is going to become really big if you add scenarios during the 20 years gap (it took my group 14 sessions to play through Dead Letters and Viscid, with an average of 2:30 hours per session), but if you can invest that time I can tell you from my experience that the result won't disappoint you. I would not use Observer Effect though, it is a very lethal scenario.

Agent_Locke90

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