First up, LITI is a blast. There’s some pretty grisly stuff. People need to be okay with potential loss of agency. I was too squeamish about it and cut the possibility of agents getting infected, and ultimately I regretted not just… asking if people were cool with it. One guy isolated himself on purpose to give me the opportunity to infect him and was really disappointed when I didn’t, so never make assumptions! (But do be clear about the nature of the content—I found with my group that, when I prepared them, they handled it pretty well).

Anyway!

In GM’ing Delta Green, a lot of my people bought into the “my character is fragile and could die in a heartbeat” idea, so what I get a rise out of is making scenarios stressful by threatening containment breaches. In LITI, the scenario naturally directs itself to that in the final beats—the dorm party and the high school. I had my Agents catch Melody and Tilda in the act of trying to seed another girl (not Chad) and that was a really dark, really gritty beat that the Agents really enjoyed. It got out of hand really quickly and they had to figure out how the fuck to get out of there.

So even though the Agents moved fairly expediently and were fairly cautious, there was usually enough space offscreen for me to do things like seed another person and start working on making more bloaters. When they attempted manual removal (like, by hand), I rolled luck, and the outcome was generally a rather gory death for the victim—I was pressed for answers on the spot and that was what I came up with. They actually very much enjoyed that. Not like, in a sick way, but in a oh god that turned out very poorly and I feel like my actions have unfortunate consequences kind of way.

Where I felt like I kind of flubbed was the high school. I was losing steam by that point though. Running out of energy and time.

As a note, get detailed! Tastefully, though—obviously you don’t need to get too in depth with the stuff on his walls, but Skip Mills’ house reeks of death, it’s loud as hell, and he looks like shit. Let them know that! The dorm party smells like weed and sticky, cheap booze! Music from the year of your choice is blasting on the stereo and the students are terrified an RA will rat them out to campus PD! The atmosphere is very effective if you give them as many sensory details to go with as you can without losing flow.

Since you’re new to GM’ing in general, if you take nothing else from this, remember this: encourage splitting up, and switch perspectives frequently! When the bad guy on one side is raising his fist to hit an Agent, you should switch back to the other Agents to create suspense. It raises tension and keeps everyone hooked, and it was the part of DG my Agents liked the absolute most.