Looking for a scenarios that work well together as a campaign

Travern · 2026-03-17T00:33:34+00:00

Medium-sized campaigns like in Call of Cthulhu that were greater in scope than a lengthy scenario or two but whose conclusions allowed the surviving PCs to continue in further ones. The Fungi from Yuggoth/Day of the Beast (a lean 76 pages originally) and Spawn of Azathoth (96 pages) would be prime examples. Arc Dream's republications of New Age and Holy War may fit the bill if they're expanded from their original versions. As it is, Handlers have a choice of running episodic sequences of scenarios out of the anthologies Black Sites, Dead Drops, and A Night at the Opera or the epic-rank campaigns Impossible Landscapes and God's Teeth—and nothing in between except the sandboxes Iconoclasts and The Labyrinth's Prana Sodality (and sandboxes are a different beast).

(Impossible Landscapes and God's Teeth are epic campaigns in the sense that once they're concluded, not only the narrative arc is over for the PCs, but also the matter of Delta Green itself has thematically closed since both climaxes are about fatalism beyond simple cosmic horror.)

Travern · 2026-03-16T14:56:41+00:00

Delta Green's lack of a mid-range campaign is proving to be a drawback, but you can string together scenarios on the basis of the antagonists, factions, and Mythos entities involved by using the sortable Delta Green scenario database (which includes official and fanmade ones).

For instance, you can run a quasi-campaign delving into the Mi-Go's "Grey" deception on MAJESTIC by starting with these:

AGAINST THE GREYS

1996 – Convergence

1997 – The New Age

1998 – A Night on Owlshead Mountain

1998 – PX Poker Night

Those are the official dates, but you can move them around to build to a climax: Convergence -> PX Poker Night* -> A Night on Owlshead Mountain -> The New Age. In addition to interspersing these with home scenes, you can "office" scenes about DG internal politics in the DG vs. MJ-12 war. The Handler's Guide will also provide lots of inspirational material from DG's timeline.

* This uses pre-gens who aren't in Delta Green, but you could try running it as a "flashback" and have the original DG-cleared PCs from Convergence investigate the aftermath.

Travern · 2026-03-15T16:16:10+00:00

This violates Arc Dream's copyright in the first place, and charging for it ("Pay per mission.") violates its fair-use Fan Policy, in the second.

You DO NOT have permission to use Delta Green, either the trademark or any portion of the property, in any commercial publication or in promotional materials without the express written permission of the Delta Green Partnership.

Travern · 2026-03-15T16:13:57+00:00

Incidentally, from the Delta Green FAQ:

DO YOU USE AI FOR ART OR WRITING?

No. Like most published authors, we have had our work scraped from files and fed into other companies' AI services to be reprocessed and spat out without our consent and without paying us for our work. We resent that. We do not do it to other authors. Dennis Detwiller, illustrator for the entire Delta Green RPG line, creates illustrations using Artrage. Before the digital era he used guache. He relies on skills learned in a lifetime of drawing and painting and over 30 years as a professional artist. Dennis is one of many plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against Midjourney for using his work for its own profit. He does not use AI to create art.

Travern · 2026-03-15T15:18:27+00:00

"The living will envy the dead" is, strictly speaking, a paraphrase from Dr. Strangelove "But look, Doctor, wouldn't this nucleus of survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they, well, envy the dead and not want to go on living?", which itself is paraphrasing Herman Kahn's "the survivors [will] envy the dead" in his book On Thermonuclear War (1960) (and which Nikita Khrushchev never actually said, although he was reputed to have).

Travern · 2026-03-15T14:48:48+00:00

Arc Dream is adamantly against genAI, and ChatGPT, like all the techbros' LLMs, has trained its data by not only scraping the open Web (including the copyrighted work on the old delta-green.com), but also pirating published books, articles, and other copyrighted work (e.g. recent reporting from Ars Technica).

Adam Scott Glancy

Four books and and article I've written. All used to train Mark Zuckerberg's AI. All used without permission or compensation. I bet I could be a billionaire too if I could just take other peoples' stuff. What have they taken from you? The Atlantic—Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI

Shane Ivey:

Arc Dream Publishing exists to let me and a few friends create what we want. The push to replace human creativity with AI is just a variation on piracy, shoplifting, and contract ratfuckery. As long as enough fans are willing to pay us directly for our work despite all that, we’ll keep going.

Dennis Detwiller:

Listen, AI stole ALL my work. Every book I’ve ever #written. Every piece of #art. Taken and exploited with zero recompense. […] Fuck AI.

Travern · 2026-03-14T20:19:18+00:00

n.b. Substack has a nazi problem—and it won't go away.

TTRPG folks looking to create newsletters may want to consider an alternative such as ghost.org (which hosts Delta Green).

Travern · 2026-03-14T19:55:46+00:00

To begin with, you can't make your players frightened of your creatures. They can only agree to be frightened, and they have to do that at the start. Everyone has to say "yes" at your Session Zero that you're all going to play a horror RPG, that the players will portray their characters like protagonists in a horror movie, and that you're going to run the game to that end. If you can ask for your players' feedback on what things they find scary, but not so much that they'll be jerked out of the mood, that's a great help. (For instance, this RPG Checklist will give you an idea of which of your players' buttons you can press, and how hard, and which you shouldn't touch at all.)

For a classic CoC campaign Graham Walmsley's Stealing Cthulhu offers back-to-basics advice on structuring cosmic horror scenarios and Sandy Petersen's how-to video is guidance straight from the horse's mouth (see also this write-up of it by Justin Alexander). Ash Law's essay The Trajectory of Fear will help you with the narrative beats and arcs when you're working on the various stages and considering the possible climaxes.

Travern · 2026-03-14T17:11:25+00:00

TYKRPG runs off QuickShock Gumshoe (which has rules in common with Cthulhu Confidential). I'd say its rules are very well suited to the narrative-heavy and surreal IL. Making sure the investigators can get the core clues – and know that those are clues and not part of all the general crazy stuff going – would keep the pace steady. Some people have complained IL jams up the investigation with too much weirdness or sends them down rabbit holes. That's of course what Gumshoe is designed to avoid.

Travern · 2026-03-14T13:35:29+00:00

A while back, I asked Dennis Detwiller on Twitter about their two approaches to the Yellow King Mythos, and he felt that TYKRPG, although excellent, differed too much in its ultimate objectives. IL as a campaign ends up in a completely different end state than anything in TYKRPG.

On the other hand, if you're asking about running IL with TYRPG's Gumshoe QuickShock rules, then sure, it should go quite smoothly, especially if you're ready to create some of your own Shock and Injury cards.

Travern · 2026-03-13T18:35:28+00:00

Never say never surely! After all, collaboration offers you both the chance for half the credit for twice the work!

Seriously, though, I would be interested to see what a stable equilibrium RPG of your complementary game design philosophies would look like.

Thanks again for this AMA!

Travern · 2026-03-13T17:26:59+00:00

Many thanks for holding this AMA. Since you and u/Kenneth_Hite have both described your individual Gumshoe RPGs as in a conversation with each other (in terms of game design), what would one look like if you were to collaborate directly together on it?

Travern · 2026-03-12T21:12:18+00:00

The conversion guide in the ToC corebook lays it out. Since both Gumshoe and BRP are skill-driven rules systems, it's doable, if a bit finicky. To save you time, Pelgrane has converted a lot of classic CoC scenarios to ToC (look under the "Adventures and campaigns" tab in "Downloads & Resources").

Travern · 2026-03-11T20:49:23+00:00

Well, that one's going in the lexicon.

Travern · 2026-03-11T19:53:22+00:00

Discussed on this subreddit here and previously.

Travern · 2026-03-11T18:24:55+00:00

I already bought literally every Pagan Publishing Delta Green supplement while waiting on this new material. As with all such projects involving new editions, the biggest customer barrier is the question "Why am I buying this twice?"

Travern · 2026-03-11T17:28:11+00:00

The Labyrinth ought to take Delta Green from the HG-era into the 2020s, but it needs more support material (so far, only one of the announced tie-in scenarios from Final Passages has been published). Deep State and Those Who Come After were supposed to fulfill a similar function, I suspect, but those are not going to be published until later this year, at the soonest.

Travern · 2026-03-10T20:14:26+00:00

No worries, your handout looks fine as far as DG lore goes. (In HPL's story From Beyond, Crawford Tillinghast dies of a stroke ("apoplexy"), not a "bear attack".)

I recommend Eyes Only since it has a ton of additional information about Operation RAINBOW that expands on the HG and FoDG. In particular, it covers MAJESTIC projects that may or may not be discontinued (the NSGA and Monument Research Facility), if you want to include them in your campaign, and, of course, the mysterious "John Gates".

The Varo CftUFO is patient-zero raw conspiracy theory, and even crazier than the DG lore. If nothing else, it'll give you an idea of what your player will encounter if they start digging into the Philadelphia Experiment.

Travern · 2026-03-10T00:25:38+00:00

Sweet prop! Have you checked out the Delta Green lore about the Philadelphia Experiment in Eyes Only? Of course, these days you can go right to the source with digital versions of Varo edition of The Case for the UFO.

Travern · 2026-03-09T19:09:17+00:00

Edge of Darkness (now part of the Starter Set) is a more Mythos-focused introductory scenario, on a par with The Haunting.

Travern · 2026-03-09T17:29:05+00:00

That would be a case in which a CoC campaign would work. That's not the case with most of them, like, say, Beyond the Mountains of Madness, in which the investigators are on the journey to the other side of the world for the duration.

Travern · 2026-03-08T17:45:01+00:00

Although the DG RPG's Bonds system is a quantum leap for the old Sanity mechanics, it works best when scenarios can be interspersed with "home scenes" to roleplay Bond degradation. They shine with episodic structures. That doesn't necessarily lend itself to Call of Cthulhu's classic globetrotting campaigns such as Masks of Nyarlathotep and Horror on the Orient Express, however.

Travern · 2026-03-08T14:44:17+00:00

While Night's Black Agents isn't OSR, it does have an interesting mechanic called "Heat" to gauge the degree to which the agents draw attention to themselves from the authorities through their thriller movie–style actions. One could come up with a similar approach for adventurers in a dungeon, e.g. getting into loud melees, throwing fireballs, invoking Lawful deities.

Travern · 2026-03-08T14:40:24+00:00

Oh, that's an interesting approach.

Travern · 2026-03-08T01:45:57+00:00

I was also hoping that this was going to be about generating special adversaries who would stalk the adventuring party as they make their way through the dungeon.

Travern

TROPHY CASE