Mayday Plays - How to run Lover In The Ice | The Dead Drop | August 2026

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

An apocalyptic ice storm has crippled Lafontaine, Missouri. The Agents must secure a forgotten storage facility packed with artifacts of past Delta Green operations. They soon confront a horror that gruesomely invades and mutilates its victims. In this episode, I'm joined by Thom Raley from Into The Darkness. We lube up to discuss the horniest Delta Green scenario, Lover In The Ice by Caleb Stokes. For the full version with over an hour of ad-free uncensored discussion plus show notes (a detailed breakdown of the scenario) join our Patreon at any level: https://patreon.com/maydayrp You can view Thom's run(s) of Lover In The Ice here: https://youtu.be/gfMEWRsaI3A?si=jRDfZtFTfGxkF7Ou Thom's handouts (PDF + Phone messages): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EQjq4sXi-bGRDdG2symtTpnd1toft0Ci/view?usp=drive_link Handouts by u/Nelog: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XLvjo5GRc7T4nEaoWRDKWKu7D0iLA2w9XZa6PB9eUmI/edit?usp=sharing Voice recording of "Escaping Altamira" by RiQ at the Miskatonic University Podcast forums: https://soundcloud.com/tyson-fultz/sets/escaping-altamira-voice Lover In The Ice is part of the Black Sites collection and can be purchased here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/335869/delta-green-black-sites Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this podcast are © Mayday Roleplay, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property. -- 👕 MERCH: http://ko-fi.com/maydayrp & https://mayday-merch.printify.me/products 🌟 Other Socials 🌟 🐦 Twitter: http://twitter.com/maydayroleplay 📸 Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/mdrp.gram/ 🔴 Website: http://maydayroleplay.com/ 🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@maydayroleplay 👾 Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/maydayroleplay Thanks for your support! 00:00 opening 03:30 The Briefing 04:58 Handling the Cold 06:01 The Backstory 08:00 The Threat 14:35 The Lover's Weakness 15:55 Consent and Session 0 18:17 City Utilities HQ 21:25 The Motor Pool 22:23 Earl's Rent-A-Space 23:50 The Contents of GB224 31:40 Continuing The Investigation 33:36 1824 West Ambrosia St 36:14 The Decature Home 37:55 McFillion Hall 39:00 Final Advice

Hello and welcome to the Dead Drop, where I invite a different handler each month to discuss Delta Green's coldest scenarios. And I ask the only question that matters, do your agents now wipe down every desk they sit at? In this episode, we're covering a scenario where the cold is the least of your problems and the monster is quite literally a mouthful. Let's hope we don't get to monetize for this one because you have found the dead drop. Tom, it's great to have you back on the dead drop. You know, it is hot out this summer. So what better way to cool down than to talk about the hornyest Delta Green scenario ever written? Lover in the Ice.

Well, this scenario can be found at the Black Sites Collection. I've run it three different times with my friends over at Into the Darkness. And you can watch all of them on our YouTube channel. The playlist is linked in the description below. Tom also runs a very active discord where you can jump in and play games with him and his friends, so I highly recommend checking out Into the Darkness. You can also support them on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash into the darkness. Since I've seen the amazing handouts that he's made for this game,

I asked if we could share them with you our audience, and Tom has kindly agreed. A PDF and some audio files are available in the description below, but more on those in a minute. This public episode covers about half of the scenario, but if you want a completely unedited, uncensored discussion, head over to our Patreon where support at any level gets you access to all of our full discussions. A quick heads up before we dive in, spoilers ahead for Lover in the Ice. And a general content warning for sexually explicit material, if you are squeamish, now is your chance to turn back. Tom, I think we've stalled for time long enough as to not receive a YouTube strike for what may come. I think it's okay to bust out the big kid words, and please help us understand what is Lover in the Ice.

So Lover in the Ice is a scenario by Caleb Stokes, and it deals with some pretty horrifying topics. not dissimilar to some in large franchise movies. I would argue Lover in the Ice takes it farther than you even than was ever done in a movie like Alien or something like that. Yeah, indeed. But it starts out very much like a Delta Green. It has a preamble. The preamble is that there is a terrible catastrophic ice storm

that takes place in La Fontaine, Missouri, and it's pretty much sealed down the city under four inches of ice. The players get a phone call telling them to meet at the airport at 11 something in the evening. And there they meet each other, and they meet the handler. DHS, Special Agent Patrick Hill. And I'll tell you, he is an extremely fun character to play for the five minutes that he's in the game. Yeah, it's explained that he's a little heavy, visibly exhausted, probably been up for two days arranging their right in. So yeah, he's probably a little cranky.

And the only, he makes it clear that the only reason that these particular agents, have been called is because they happen to be nearby, and he admits that he can't find any reason to actually put the group of them together into a single room, but they're in an emergency, and that's what he has. He explains that the emergency has nothing at all to do with the ice storm, that there's no extradimensional creature that's casting spells or anything like that. It's simply is that the storm has probably caused a tree to fall down and a green box has been exposed to the outside. I love the way the scenario just isolates the agents. They are in the middle of Missouri, in the middle of us ice storm with no help whatsoever. I did want to ask you, before we get too deep into the scenario, you know, a big antagonistic force in the scenario is the weather.

And I'm curious how you thought about it, handled it, use it as an obstacle as you played the game or ran it. What I did was I treated it like something that's going to cause difficulty in time and getting places quickly. So it mentioned shortly after their briefing, they get on an army, a military convoy going into La Fontaine. and that normally it would take them an hour and it takes them like seven hours to get in because of the terrain, the ice, and the damage. I describe it as like almost pretty the way the ice hangs on everything

and makes it into a kind of frosty Never Never Land, but at the same time it's deadly. So the scenario starts first by going backwards and kind of explaining some of what's going on in our story. And it starts with the story of Ryan Whitehead, who is a Southern Gothic novelist from Alabama, and he has a strange but interesting story that is integral to all of this.

In his notes, he talks about a trip that he takes to Brazil in 1967. He's commissioned by San Francisco's magazine Plamo to cover the trans-Amazon. highway and its traveling shadow called Little Alta-Mirah, a mobile camp, as he says it, with drugs and sex and vice, trailing after the work crews to sort of keep them happy as they're going. So then when he returns the next year, he's 50 pounds lighter. He's got uncontrollable tremors and he refuses to explain what happened to Kapshka or Laurentinos, said everything would be cleared up when he wrote his big novel.

I think what's important to pull from this document that the players eventually get is that there was public drunk ravings about monsters in the jungle, this domestic abuse issue, rampant drug and alcohol abuse. It gives clues to the players. years as to how to think about this monster and how it operates. Yeah. What he's talking about is a completely indulgent camp, you know, with prostitutes and everything else that the men would need to keep them happy.

And he and his friend jump right in, which as we learn later is not a great idea to be doing. So we have that big clue that. shows up that they discuss in the scenario, and then they get into discussing the threat itself, talking about the chain of infection. To me, what is the shocker, the first big shocker of this, is they get there, they're supposed to look for Skip Mills. And we paint a picture of Skip Mills as a true-blooded American, very patriotic, has a picture of his mother on his desk, the kind of person that Delta Green would use as a friendly, and give him some story about national security and all that.

So he's dedicated. Everything seems to be that he's been dedicated to making sure that nobody gets into the green box, and that he probably has not a clue what's in the green box. box. We find out that with surveillance cameras, that he went to the green box when he found out that it was breached, he must have gotten the signal as well when it was breached. And he goes, they can see on the surveillance camera, he goes into the green box and doesn't come out for, I think it was 45 minutes or so, and that he immediately vomits when he comes out. and then at some point the characters are going to go to his house and see what's going on.

He's told at the utilities company that he went home sick that he was acting very strangely for skip melts. What they don't realize is that he's been infected by this creature. They call the thing that infects you the cedar. And there's a dormant cedar that was in an ammo box. The cedar, right. Think if, yeah, think along the lines of the alien throat f***er. So his story is, we find this out, the players will find this out slowly.

He goes to work and he suddenly is completely overcome by sexual thought. of a violent nature. And the big, shocking moment is when the players realize that sitting at his computer, under his desk has been pretty much bathed in shton. He's been masturbating furiously. And, I mean, the players all just react with horror when they realize it. And they usually don't realize it until after they themselves, notice the sticky keyboard and stuff.

Right. Yeah. I always liked describing white icicles under the desk or stalactites. I always point out the very distinct thing that probably only men will understand, but the two-day-old smell of it, too, is pretty rancid. Yeah. But that's the whole. Right. They eventually go to his home and, well, they encounter him.

We'll get to that in a minute. Yeah. What I want to point out is that we're detecting the life cycle here, right? So he gets the cedar, which was dormant in the ammo box. It starts giving him these violent sexual thoughts. He then goes home and he basically uses his mother as a host. and that's what starts. He murders his mother. He murders his mother and starts the next part of this life cycle for the Amante,

which is making his mother a, I believe it's called an incubus. Yeah. Not in the case of like a demon, but as an incubator for the thing. And it starts to grow inside of her, ultimately producing the adult form of this creature, the amante, which, the description of which is pretty horrifying. It is horrifying, and I wanted to bring it up with you because you mentioned something interesting to me, which is that you like to change the description a little bit. In the scenario, it's described as a hairless, pallid, leathery primate-shaped creature,

basically with no legs, these big bat-like ears, no face except this disgusting almost like lampri, lamprey eel mouth, but no legs, where instead there are legs, there's just gigantic reproductive organ. And you have some issues with that. I'm curious as to why you changed the description of the creature. Well, it says no legs, but it does have arms.

So it's still able to grab a hold of somebody. But I just kept, I couldn't get past. the impractic... You don't usually find animals that could be mobile in that sort of configuration. So all I did was add back legs onto it

so that it does seem very much more like an ape and that its tail is recurved around with the cedar on the end. I would argue the reason I like the monster the way it is is that it doesn't make any sense. I think the unnatural is often best described in a way that doesn't make sense. And so while I do appreciate your take on it, because it does physically make more sense, I do also understand why maybe it doesn't make sense for our physical world, but it might not be from

our physical world ultimately. We don't know it's true origin. True. I mean, it could be, there's no indication of whether it's a natural creature living in the Amazon or an alien from another planet. I like to think of it as maybe something from the dream world or something. That could be exactly correct. So, I mean, I understand your argument, and that is just me. Sure. Yeah, absolutely.

I think what's important also to note about the Amante is that it has a weakness that the scenario mentions. Overwhelming noise imposes a minus 20% to all of its roles. And I'm curious if any of your players ever caught on to that, or if that ever played a big thing. Hmm. You know, I don't remember if anybody played onto that. I really tried in my runs to telegraph that to the players,

but it never really caught on. And I don't know if it was me or the players or what the case is. But I definitely ran this game three times like you. And in those three times, never really had the players take advantage of this weakness. Well, one of the sort of clues that I put in indirectly was, the players kept hearing chainsaws, or at least what they thought were chainsaws in the distance. And I thought that the creature,

because of its large ears and the fact that it is using echolocation, that maybe that chainsaw noise, in some cases, was merely the bouncing, you know, of the signals. We would hear it as a clicking sound, a rapid clicking sound. That's a creepy. way of describing the way it sounds. I was going to mention the handler should not immediately strip the player of control

when it comes to infecting the agents. This is something I wanted to talk to you about in terms of consent and understanding so the players understand what they're getting into. Let's talk a little bit about on this topic. How did you prepare your players? How did you learn

from maybe past mistakes regarding how to handle this situation? The scenario, I mean. Yeah. In the beginning, in the beginning I didn't give them any warnings. I told them, look, it's a horror game and it's Delta Green, so it's going to be pretty intense.

And I gave them only that. But in one of my later runs, I got criticized a little by one of the players because they weren't too happy with being surprised with a throat-raping monster. So since then, I've added, I've added a generalized warning at the beginning of all of our shows that, hey, there's going to be adult themes, there's going to be violence, possibly of a sexual

nature. I don't ever want to tell them directly what that horror is, but I do remind them that it's, you know, this is, you've seen movies with this sort of thing in it. I'm referring to alien. Yeah. So I've learned that I can only go so far. And I've also got criticism about the warning. Ah.

That people don't like the warnings too. I mean, obviously it kind of depends on... I'm going to do what I feel right in my... Yeah. It depends on the table. You know, obviously if you've played with these folks for a long time and they trust you, that's one thing. I think in general, though, you're in the right of, hey, guys, just to let you know, there's there's an extra wrinkle to the horror that is worth noting.

You obviously don't want to spoil things, which is difficult to balance, but I think something when it comes specifically to sexual violence, it's okay, I think, to spoil things a little bit, because it's still a big surprise. I think just players now have a chance to say, oh, okay, you know what, this is a step too far for me or whatever. So let's kind of go back a little bit to the beginning, kind of start going through some of the initial experiences

because from my runs, usually the agents arrive in the town and the first thing they go to is to the city utilities headquarters that is just a mess. I mean, everybody's there demanding help, but the players meet the woman who can help them out. Tanya Cambria greets the agents. Yeah. And she's a fun character to play.

Yeah, Tanya. Tanya is an old, well, she's not that old, but she's a good civil servant and she knows her job. And she is just flummoxed with all of this stuff that she's having to do right now. But she still manages to take the agents, what they need to, you know, get them some hot coffee, get them set up in the trailer next door. So once we get to the city utilities, this is what. when we have the big shocking moment that you described earlier about Mills's office. Once they get over the horror of what they see, they start digging through his computer, and that's when they start figuring out a couple of things about Mills, about what he has access to, and maybe what was going through his mind the last couple of days.

Yeah, indeed. Suddenly all of his, everything on his computer, all of his personal stuff is in order, and he seems like a good Christian church-going boy, and then there's suddenly the most violent pornography that you can imagine, suddenly all over, you know, all of his history. They make mention of a couple of different roles that you can make. For instance, a computer science or sagan role would show this web history of the extremely violent pornography.

Computer science might be able to figure out his emails and passwords, from the index card at the bottom of his desk drawer. Yeah, and then on the SIG-in-criminalogy, if he passes that, he'll find out that he has recently been contacting a pornography shop. It's an interesting thing in the game because it's odd to me that a pornography shop would be open in the middle of the disaster. But... You make a very good point.

But he has procured as much pornography as possible. We can actually change that nowadays and just say that he's been going to websites like Pornhub and all of that. Yeah, maybe his inbox and his email is just, you know, full of receipts. And then you'd have to go on to explain how his apartment is completely plastered in pornography. Because he would have had to have gotten that from somewhere. But maybe he's printing it out on his home printer. Yes, I think that's a great substitute. You could also argue that maybe some of the windows just have newspaper stuff,

but I think you make a very strong point that it kind of needs to be pornography because it plays up the heroic. I'm just kind of surrounding myself in it, so I can't escape it. So eventually after the city utilities, the players are going to want to get out there, and this is where the motor pool comes into play. They also usually get walkie-talkies at the utilities place, too. And generally, the scenario suggests that Deputy Filligree be here at the motor pool, asking around for help, asking about getting access to the power grid and kind of being blown off by everybody.

And if they don't find any interest in filigree at that moment, they will eventually find him lurking around the houses that they're lurking around trying to figure. your things out. So he comes in conveniently. And he's a good player character once the non-player, somebody dies. I was going to ask whether you ever used it. Oh yeah. Yeah. Usually because they start fiddling around with the Delta green box and make a mistake. The players go to what I think is probably my favorite chapter of the scenario, which is they go to Earl's Rent to Space. This is a typical green box-like situation, except that the powers out and this tree kind of smashed a part of the building. Yeah, it's in disarray.

They find the frozen vomit, which is a nice clue. They realize that there are surveillance cameras, which currently have no power, but they would have had power before the storm. and then they find an array of items. And then I use the 10-sided dice to decide which one they look at first or find first. Or I have them roll them. Yeah.

I had an experience in at least two of my runs where the players started to just kind of linger at the green box. And so I added elements of, guys, it's below 20. You know, your fingers start to numb. You know, just little things to push them out of the green box so that they can enjoy their time investigating these items in the hotel or whatever the case is. Yes. I also made it a point to them that they were supposed to secure the items and they're not secure there. So they eventually, at least in every run, they've taken them back to the hotel. I would argue that these 10 items that are in the green box, really only one of them is relevant.

the personal documents of Ryan Whitehead. But I find these 10 items, they exist to very purposefully distract the agents. And it's a bit of a tightrope because at the same time, you don't want to sell that these are so important that the players completely drop the Amante lead. But at the same time, there is some fun in them realizing, holy shit, we've wasted an entire night doing this.

there's some monster out in the streets, you know? Well, there's two items that are important. Yes, the yellow pads, but also the ammo box that the thing was inside. It's open on the floor. And it definitely looks like there was something sticky and gooey inside of it. So, yeah, I honestly, I have to hold back and make sure they go through most of the other items first and then get to those because then they'll just they'll have no fun with all of these crazy things that are in the box and they're all mostly just creepy they're not the only one

that's really dangerous is the the puzzle box i want to make mention of some of the handouts that you have that again you've provided for us you have some really wonderful uh illustrations and drawings and renditions of some of these things that folks watching can use. But let's start with number one, the carving, a mannequin head. Yeah. And it's really crude. It's carved and it's been painted in a very crude manner. Obviously, it looks like a lunatic, you know, made it.

And then somebody buried an axe in its head. they'll bring it back to their hotel, they'll set it on something, and you don't know whether they're going to pull the axe out of it or whether the axe is just going to fall out in the middle of the night. But the result is that the head starts to roll by itself, and it'll roll off the counter onto the floor, and it'll roll over to the wall where the nearest window is, and it'll roll up the wall and try to get out the window. And I believe the scenario says that if it gets outside, it'll just fall into the sky with no explanation for what the fuck is going on.

But it's enough and it's uncanny enough that it freaks everyone out. I think the second item is, to me, even freaker, because it just makes even less sense the list of hands, thousands of pages of computer paper describing people's hands. And I believe it says that someone, one of the agents can find a description of their own hands under the right search role. And that some of the hands are deceased and some of them were burned. And some of them and it's like, what the hell? And they're current, and they all have glove sizes, which is really,

Why? Why did they care? What glove sizes? And apparently they update themselves when... Oh, that's interesting. Ah, that'd be a fun thing to see if the agents try to put gloves on and see what changes. Or if they try to cut, I think they've tried to cut themselves. And then see if the text now says a small cut on the index finger. Before speaking with you, I spoke with Ross Payton from RPPR, and he made mention that he was in the one of the original runs of Lover in the Ice with Caleb running it.

And he said that Caleb got a lot of these ideas from the green box generator. I don't know if you've ever used that app. It's a website. I have. But it was cool to learn that he used a lot of them or got a lot of the inspiration from that app. It definitely feels like things from that app. I have used that. It's a lot of fun.

It's very helpful. But you kind of have to curate it because some of the things are really too over the top. And some of the things are very mild. Plus, you can make up a lot of them yourself. They're very clever. True. Yeah, I highly recommend Delta Green users, GMs using that site. They can also find the archival documents.

These are interesting, too. It's a file of obsessive Chicago cartographer Abner Liebowitz, and he's looking for something in Chicago. He's looking for a meat packing plant that he can find records of it existing. He can find pictures of it from apartment buildings across down the street looking at it. But trying to get to it, there seems to be no. no physical way to actually get to it. And he's tried every street and every alley. And he's tried every which way.

And he's become completely obsessed with it. And to the point of losing his job. And it's driven him insane in the process. And then he disappears. And we don't know. I get Carcosa vibes from this. I don't know about you. What do you think is the ultimate explanation?

I get, I get ghoulish vibes that the ghouls are doing something. And they've maybe used some sort of glamour to block their meat processing plants. That's a very strong clue. You're right about the meat packing specifically. So maybe you're right. It is about the ghouls. Then we get to the decorative box, an eight, eight nested, or a eight nested, nine-sided puzzle box. Am I saying that correctly?

Yeah, so imagine a geometric form with nine sides on it and covered in mathematical formula of a fairly simple style. And if a character looks at it, they begin to realize, oh, these are easily solvable equations. and if they solve the equation, they learn how to open up the box. And when they do, there is now another nine-sided polyhedra inside of it, which has more complex. Now, part of this I add to it in the story, just because I like my little after story that goes with it. but as they begin to solve it, they become obsessed with solving the math.

And if they get all the way down to the last cube and solve it, they vanish out of existence. Boom, they're gone. And the box reissed. The box goes with them, I believe. So they go through all these things. Obviously, did you find that players would often break into different groups or kind of break the party up so that one, pays attention to all these things while the others kind of pursue the amante? There was usually more than one person in each group when they did it.

But yes, this scenario, I think every time I've run it, they have broken into separate groups. They'll figure there's no need for all of us to go to Skip Mills House. There's no need for all of us to go investigate this or look at these things. So usually they don't start coming back together until they realize the real horror and have to stop it. The next logical step, as we've discussed, is going to Skip Mills's house. And to get from Skip Mills's house into Tanya and Melody Farthing's place, I'm not sure that the scenario is very explicit about it.

I've seen you run it where the Amante escapes Skip Mills's house. house and they kind of give chase and they eventually find Tanya and Melody's house. I'm curious as to how it generally ran for you. Like how did they get to the next home? I think that they find Skip Mill's mother and realize that something hideous has as hatched. They can see that it goes out the window and they can follow mostly a snow trail. Now, the snow trail, I think that Tanya and Melody's house is on the other block. Right. It's not far away.

So I usually have it. They'll see that the trail goes up to that there's an old tree, there's a fence, and somehow it gets over the fence. So they can eventually be led to Tanya and Melody's house. They'll also note on the grid that that house is still warm. But it gets away. You want it to get away. Yes. Yes, for sure. So one way or another, they get to Melody and Tanya's house. And this is where things start ramping up in terms of how bad they can get. And this is a home that is owned by Pamela Decatur, but is being rented by Tilda and Melody.

And Jonah Washington. Thank you. Jonah Washington also is a roommate there, yes. Well, they usually get there. They followed it there. but of course Tilda and Melody and Washington Jonah are missing wait a second

know how Jonah is there isn't he Jonah is dead he is believed by Phil Gre that's right to be a homeless person but there's actually a homeless

person in the house that the girls had picked up that they have done horrible things too so they begin to find clues they find they find that

they find a homeless person that's been murdered. They find, I think, a videotape of them murdering him, find evidence that the girls are also indulging themselves sexually, sort of thing. They find, what do they call them, telephone answering machine stuff from Pamela, Deccature, who says that she's going to come over and fix their pipes. The house is full of two incubi, so two potential moments for the agents to bust down a door, and there's a chest bursting scene down in the basement and one upstairs where the homeless man is. I definitely had players recklessly run into both those spaces, so twice in a row they had something jumping out at them.

But generally, the scenario describes it as kind of weak, and so it should die within one or two gunshots. Sure. Yeah, it's definitely not fully formed, not completely ready, but they're now seeing that this thing is spreading and it's infecting others and whatever the mother one is out. The father one is out. You make mention of the voicemails and you did a wonderful rendition of your own version of the voicemails, which again are in the description. Those voicemails are the big lead to the next step, the next place you have to go because they're talking to Pamela Decatur and eventually they make mention of a big party happen at McPhillian Hall. Yeah, Chad calls. Yeah, good old Chad. Chad calls. Hey, girls.

There's a party. They also probably, they don't necessarily have to investigate Pamela's house. But they usually do. I'm starting to realize as I talk with you that maybe a good function of these three houses, skips, the girls and then eventually Pamela's, is that if you are unable to reveal something about the monster in the last house, you can do it in the next house because there's mention of the orange blood. There's obviously a complicated life cycle. if handlers find themselves like,

ah, dang it, I forgot to mention this, or I forgot the monster to do this, it can do it in the next house. The next house can be swelteringly hot if you forgot to, you know, make skips too hot, that kind of stuff. One of the things that I do like about this scenario very much is that it does give the players a lot of agency.

There are ways to stop the creature better than other ways. And the players really have to kind of put clues together and figure out that they can do this. It's not just a monster hunt. It's, they can get clever with the monster hunt, you know. Plus, they've also got to be careful that they don't go around telling everybody that there's a horrible dick monster running around, you know. When they kind of bring filigree in, they have to be really careful. about what they tell him until he sees these horrors.

We get finally to McPhillian Hall or what I like to call Schrodinger's McPhillian Hall because for me it's always down to how much did the agents let slip. If they were not on the ball, if they were just getting all the time in the world to the monster, I like to fill McPhillian Hall up with a bunch of incubus. I don't know how you feel about that.

The thing that's interesting, too, about Delta Green is even if you're overwhelmed with monsters and even if they have to use dramatic means to stop them. And even if people see the things and live to tell about it, nobody's ever going to believe them. So they can orchestrate some pretty wild things, gas explosion, whatever, to, burn down the building or blow up the building or something like that. Horrible tragedy, but nobody's going to believe that it's giant dick monsters. We're here finally at the end of the scenario. Tom, do you have any thoughts of any last bits of advice or general advice regarding

lover in the ice? I think really my only thing is I'm concerned, make sure that the players know it's going to be intense. and there's a lot of taboo sort of subjects in it that will come up. If you feel at all, you can always use the X card, which we've occasionally done. For those of you who don't know if that is, everybody takes a piece of paper and puts a big black X on it. And if it starts to get into a triggering area or something that's bothering them, they can hold up the X card. and then the GM will sort of steer it around the subject. We've used that before,

but honestly, when you're playing a game like Lover in the Ice, everybody should be, they should know they're getting into a really intense game. If you left out all the giant dicks, it wouldn't be anywhere near as fun. Having also run it myself, I would add to your great advice that the, Both the Green Box and the Truman High School and the numerous other things that can distract and confuse the players should be used like a dial. We often talk on the dead drop about how Delta Green scenarios are full of dials of difficulty.

You know what I mean? If the players are breezing through one element, you dial it up on the other element, maybe Philigree gets the jump on them or any number of things start complicating it. I think it's very important, especially in a scenario like this, you always want to be ratcheting up that tension, especially as they learn that this is worse and worse than they could have imagined. So you can't let up once it becomes clear that there is an infection going on in this town. There's a lot of setups. You're going to set up as you go along. I would advise go online and look up terrible ice storms and what things look like during that. And you'll see trees torn down. You'll see houses covered in giant, you know, icicles.

And you can imagine, you know, if there's four inches of ice on top of your car, you're not going anywhere. And very likely, if there's four inches on top of your roof, it could collapse. So there's a lot of that. It's cold. It's quiet, except for that buzzing the sound that you hear occasionally. And you can ramp that up as you go along, especially if there's more and more and more of these. Lamontas out there.

Exactly. Yeah. Well, Tom, I want to thank you again for sharing your experience and your insights into running lover in the ice. I hope it could have been a lot of help to GMs out there. Yeah, I think it will be. I remember thoroughly enjoying watching it and your version is what inspired me to be like I want to run Delta Green

and I want to run this scenario in particular because it sounds batshit insane so thanks for your hard work and everyone over at Into the Darkness. Be sure to check out Into the Darkness watch Tom's runs of Lover in the Ice and be sure to support them on Patreon. If you have any interesting stories

of running Lover in the Ice let us know in the comments, drop them. We also would love to hear any scenarios that you think I should cover. If you have a good idea of a handler or somebody from a podcast that has run the scenario that would be a good guest, let us know. Our ears are always open when it comes to new folks here and coming onto the dead drop. But Tom, thanks again. You're welcome. It's been a lot of fun.

All right, guys. We will see you next time.