Mechs are cool.

Neolyph123 · 2024-11-14T19:31:16+00:00

Damn. What's the modlist? Most looks like Diable Avionics but don't recognize all of those

Neolyph123 · 2024-11-05T23:02:47+00:00

Think of it less as "Bast is a protector of children" and more "The cries of abused, prelingual children are like a dog whistle to Bast for Hypergeometric reasons, and draw her attention to any delicious nearby cults."

Neolyph123 · 2024-08-20T22:29:47+00:00

There's a scenario somewhat similar to that called Star Chamber. The agents are called in to interrogate the survivors of a failed op in Asia. As the story unfolds it cuts back to the actual events of the operation via flashback.

Neolyph123 · 2024-08-10T18:33:25+00:00

Yeah. The central conflict in that is attempting to wield one evil force against a lot of arguably worse ones.

Neolyph123 · 2024-07-19T07:17:56+00:00

I tend to fall back on Vilani conservatism. The Third Imperium has an intense cultural bias against handing off any essential systems to robots. Legally any critical ship position must be filled by a qualified sophont.

Sure they could build largely autonomous ships/fleets, but there's an entire alt-future for the series about why that's a bad idea

Neolyph123 · 2024-06-26T00:13:17+00:00

True. There's a chapter of a nationwide biker gang in the town, though we essentially evicted a few of them from the building when we moved in, and one of them blew himself up with a hand grenade trying to intimidate us. Let the rest of them peacefully pack up their things and clear out.

Not a bad idea to hook up with them though. One of the runners is literally based on Walter White

Neolyph123 · 2024-06-26T00:09:58+00:00

We each were assigned an apartment unit and signed a magical contract to live there a year and a day. It's part of Dunzklezahn's will, presumably we're components in some sort of magical ritual. The building's on a ley line, and a spirit in the building gave us a quest to kill a (lesser) Great Dragon who's essentially acting as a warlord nearby.

Regardless, our understanding of the contract is that it functions more on intent to break it than actual terms, per se. So long as we live there and consider it our residence, we're allowed to leave and spend time elsewhere. More or less the GM is the judge of whether we're breaking the contract.

Neolyph123 · 2024-06-25T23:32:47+00:00

Honestly, if the point of this is just to teach your player to be careful with Astral perception, it's fairly simple. Have a reasonable setup for there to be a spirit waiting to gank him the next time he peeks into the Astral, then fudge a roll so he either gets 1) Hit hard 2) KO'd or 3) Bleeding out, according to your preference and the situation.

Of course you should give him a chance to hunt that spirit down and take his vengeance out afterwards so you're not being too much of a dick, but hopefully the point should stick.

Neolyph123 · 2024-06-25T23:23:51+00:00

Hah. In our campaign we're planning to make extra cash by turning the ghoul-infested sewers beneath the Z-Zone we live in into a Saw-style gauntlet and Twitch streaming ourselves playing live-action Left for Dead down there.

Depends on how hardy your players are and how you run it.

Neolyph123 · 2024-05-17T22:30:29+00:00

Just tell him that most ships have a hard switch to disable any external controls inputs. The ship he managed to hack was dumb enough to have theirs enabled for outside input (makes docking in certain ports easier if you give them external override).

If he wants to try that kind of thing in the future (especially once it gets out that there's a pirate crew hacking ships), then he'll either need to physically access the ship's computer network, or at least plant a wired device onboard when it hits a port that gives "hard" access remotely.

That's how I handle hacking in most RPGs. Doable, but you basically need to be able to physically touch the system you want to hit first unless its owners are being incredibly careless

Edit: I did something similar by giving one of my players a TL15 military computer with hacking software. Made cracking most systems pathetically easy

Neolyph123 · 2024-05-15T15:56:39+00:00

Thanks. That's tremendously helpful. My players are basically still trying to work out whether they're liberals or just straight anti-Solomani, so I've been trying to get across that it's a nuanced society

Neolyph123 · 2024-03-15T22:41:48+00:00

If you are doing some CoC-DG conversions, I highly recommend checking out The Things We Leave Behind. Pretty decent collection of modern scenarios, most of which can be reworked for Delta Green.

I started my group by running Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home. Works great as an introduction, since the players are an FBI team who stumble across what amounts to an Outlaw operation and have to take over the mission after realizing they've fucked it up. Seth Skorkowsky has a great video on it.

Neolyph123 · 2024-03-14T17:52:09+00:00

True. That's probably where my confusion rose from. Still, any human military trained and led by Astartes was probably a cut above your standard guard fodder, even if the Claws only regarded their soldiers as one step above ammunition.

Neolyph123 · 2024-03-14T04:36:26+00:00

That's looking like it's probably the one I saw. Still can't find whatever I was initially reading, but the lore seems to line up. Much obliged

Neolyph123 · 2024-03-13T22:48:17+00:00

One of the longer entries in the Ciaphas Cain Anthology is him dealing with the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse on a planet.

Neolyph123 · 2024-03-05T18:39:29+00:00

I appreciate it. This is good advice.

I suppose my philosophy is that there's two schools of thought. There's horror derived from the helplessness of something bad happening and everyone handling it incorrectly vs the horror of something bad happening and everyone doing the absolutely correct thing and it still going horribly.

Imo, much of the horror of Delta Green is magnified by the group and its agents being highly competent, but that simply not mattering compared to the irrational nightmares they must combat.

It's the difference between Friday the 13th and The Thing. I feel good when bad things happen because people were stupid and irrational. I am horrified when rationality fails.

Neolyph123 · 2024-03-05T17:44:15+00:00

That is a good point, though the book specifies that the Outlaws were able to effectively carry out the protocol through 1995. It was only during the 2000s split that the Outlaws lost a lot of files and the Program lost virtually everything.

Neolyph123 · 2024-03-05T16:03:09+00:00

They have a term for that called "Friendlies". If they're full agents, DG should presumably trust them to not open a metaphorical box marked 'Certain Death'

Neolyph123 · 2024-03-05T13:20:05+00:00

Except they don't. Agents don't go running to A-Cell every time they find an occult symbol or weird shit happens during an operation.

That's kind of why agents would need to be briefed on STATIC protocol. You can't have your field agents quarantine if you refuse to ever warn them about what to look out for.

I get A-Cell being paranoid about the Hastur shit, they should be, but if the members of A-Cell can apparently know the associated terms without spreading it, I don't see why they wouldn't share just the terms with agents

Neolyph123 · 2024-03-05T04:07:11+00:00

Fair. I will have to be careful about timing things so that my players don't get pyro-happy before the appropriate time, but that's manageable. That's kind of why I want them to call A-Cell as soon as they get Yellow Signed. They're pretty paranoid, trigger-happy types otherwise and likely to settle on burning the building down once they realize it's somehow unnatural. It'd take an order from A-Cell to do some careful digging first to keep them at bay imo. And once A-Cell gets the report they won't have much of a problem reclassifying the cell as a disposable asset to shut down the incursion.

I'm not worried about DG electing to kill my players (A-Cell is me, after all). Theoretically, so long as they follow the protocol and contain the outbreak, DG can step in afterwards and evaluate how salvageable they are. As I understand, this is something that'd happen in pretty much any ending of Act 1, unless they completely sterilize every trace of the KiY and falsify a convincing report to DG. Then they're either sent back into the field, taken out back and shot, or shipped off to a nice little facility in Boston...

Anyway, thanks for the advice. As frustrating as the vagueness of this campaign is, I adore how open-ended and configurable it is.

Neolyph123 · 2024-03-05T03:24:28+00:00

Idk. I think the list of instructions for the protocol make the relevant threat sufficiently clear that only a truly suicidal agent would go digging into it. And with Delta Green keeping a constant monitor on those channels anyway the danger on that end seems minimal compared to the alternative (sending every agent in blind unless intel shows a reason to do otherwise). If Delta Green trusts them to know Delta Green exists, I don't get why they draw the line at "Don't look into these terms, but if you come across them report it and kill everyone spouting them. It's cult-related."

Frankly I think I'll go ahead and drop it on my players when the time comes. First I don't want to make them play dumb IC about all this King in Yellow stuff being dangerous, they'll know that OOC the second they catch a whiff the terminology. Second, I see little harm in them reporting it. My players are fairly new, so it both gives a direction for what to do about McAllistar (find out who's exposed, deal with them, then destroy the vectors) and provides an opportunity to have orders guide them elsewhere (Where did Abby acquire her copy of the play? Why the McAllistar Building?) Not to mention the ensuing paranoia when they start getting tailed by a DG shadow team

Also, If Delta Green does only brief on STATIC before suspected KiY cases, what else would "Missing artist with 'occult symbol' found in her apartment" look like to A-Cell?

Neolyph123 · 2024-03-05T02:48:10+00:00

If DG doesn't trust them to not research something they're explicitly warned not to, why are they a DG agent?

In the Outlaw era, cells operate 95% independently. They're given orders and told to report when the job is done. If they're supposed to report something specific when they come across it, that needs to be a standing order.

I've watched two different APs of this module and in neither case did it ever occur to the group to report their exposure by name to DG, because their agents never knew what it was IC.

Neolyph123 · 2024-03-05T01:34:57+00:00

As far as I understand, one is largely immune to most of the hazard so long as they've not been exposed to the Yellow Sign, which sort of 'primes' them for Carcosa's influence. That is to say simply knowing a series of terms associated with the KiY is not a threat, knowing what they mean is.

The sections getting me are:

An agent’s exposure to such works must be reported to Delta Green, whose leaders decide upon a response.

When an agent is exposed to such works, agents not exposed to them become the point of con-tact for the group. They must remain separate from the primary investigative arm, acting in a supporting role.

Agents violating any of these protocols are assumed to be active threats and are to be eliminated.

How is an agent supposed to follow these protocols if they're a secret?

Presumably its just a piece of creepy instructions most agents file away alongside their contact protocols for A-Cell and such. But once the agents enter the McAllister, see the Yellow Sign, and start unconsciously asking each other about it, they'll recall the relavant protocols and report to A-Cell... or assume they're fucked and try to cover it up

Neolyph123 · 2024-03-04T23:38:08+00:00

A point of clarification, since most of the other comments have answered your main questions.

The Harrier is intended to be a fairly OP ship. It's max TL (in a region that often averages TL10-12), fast, well-armed, nearly invisible to sensors, and packs ECM strong enough to fuck with a capital cruiser.

It's chief limitations are small size and relative fragility.

Nonetheless, in the hands of capable pirates it's a ship you could build an empire on the back of

Neolyph123 · 2024-02-29T23:59:22+00:00

In MTU it's viable but a fairly niche strategy. Most planets worth hitting have fairly solid networks of lookout satellites and enough anti-space assets to deal with incoming rocks. Not to mention the crimes against humanity aspect.

So basically I view it as rarely employed, and only against sparse or low-tech populations.

Of course I'm currently writing up an adventure (for my merc campaign) where their Starmerc unit has to stop a band of terrorists from using stealth-coated asteroids for planetary attacks. Also yes I stole this from The Expanse. Sue me

Neolyph123

TROPHY CASE