Mayday Plays - Presence | The Dead Drop | June 2026

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

The Dead Drop is back! Moving forward, the show is going to focus on scenario discussions and breakdowns to help handlers run better Delta Green games at their tables. Each month, I'll invite a GM(s) from different podcasts to lend their insights. In this episode, I'm joined by Nathan and Alex from The RPG Reanimators. We have a great discussion and cover the scenario Presence by Shane Ivey. You can view Nathan's run of Presence here: https://youtu.be/pZJXM-VLuPc?si=sHcWofFf9-YzT-2u Enjoy Alex's one-shot version here: https://youtu.be/TrBUoqyxcPE?si=IyLZekWNRBCZdKQ4 For the full version with over an hour of ad-free extra discussion, more graphics from the scenario, and show notes with a detailed breakdown join our Patreon at any level: https://patreon.com/maydayrp Presence is part of the Dead Drops collection and can be purchased here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/432077/delta-green-presence-apu8165 -- 👕 MERCH: http://ko-fi.com/maydayrp & https://mayday-merch.printify.me/products 💵 Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/maydayrp 🎙 Listen to us: 🟣 Apple Podcasts : https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mayd…ys/id1537347277 🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5vdTgXoqpSpMssSP9Vka3Z?si=97a6a19d71cf4be0 🟠 Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/mayday-roleplay 🌟 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! #mayday #roleplay #deaddrop #horrorgaming #deltagreen #ttrpg 00:00 Intro 2:34 What is Presence? 3:56 The Briefing 06:09 Examining Robyn 08:46 In The Black 10:48 Interviewing Robyn 13:20 Officer Revett 15:34 Birmingham 17:30 Bham, Bell, & Shadow 19:06 The Hunt is on 22:19 Identifying Karen 24:49 Hatchett Hill 26:49 House of the Living & The Dead 29:30 Sidney Valdez 32:20 Sidney's Transformation 34:00 Final Thoughts 35:14 Outro

Hello and welcome to a new season of The Dead Drop, the show where I sit down with handlers who have run some of Delta Green's most brutal, horrifying, and deeply unhinged scenarios. And I ask the only question that matters, how bad did it get? In this episode, have you ever woken up somewhere you don't remember going? Maybe a rooftop that isn't yours? Maybe a strange town, two hours from home. Maybe the Vermont wilderness in a sundress at 7 in the morning, dehydrated, disoriented, and with a suspicious ache in your lower back. That's just unlucky, Nathan.

If so, pull up a chair. We've got some questions about your travel itinerary because you have found the dead drop. Joining me today are two handlers who have both taken their players deep into these particular woods. They run a fantastic YouTube channel and podcast. And much like Into the Darkness have built a lively community with plenty of games running on their Discord. Nathan and Alex from the RPG reanimators, welcome to the Dead Drop. Hey, thanks. Great to be here.

Sorry, glad to be here. For sure. Well, gentlemen, today you are helping us unpack a scenario from the Dead Drops collection. Astute listeners may have already pieced it together from that intro. We are talking about presence. You have both run it on stream, so let's get the plugs out of the way first. Where can people find your versions? Yeah, so you can head on over to our RPG Reanimator's channel on YouTube, where we run its live actual plays.

And then you can also check out our podcast, GM, tips and tricks as well as scenario views, wherever you get your podcasts. In this public episode, we are covering about half of the scenario. If you want to know everything there is to know about presence, head on over to patreon. com forward slash Mayday RP or support at any level gets you access to the extended full version of this episode, plus the show notes with tips from Nathan and Alex to help you prep your session. As a warning, this will be a spoiler-heavy discussion of presence, so players turn away now. Let's waste no more time. Nathan, take it away. What is presence? All right. Presence is a scenario written by Shane Ivy. you've already said, it's in the Dead Drops collection, and it covers a disappearance and

reappearance of a young woman named Robin Bullock, who goes from Alabama to Vermont, more or less instantaneously, which gets itself onto the radar, perhaps literally, of the program. Now, this is, at least is written a program game, so your players should be ready to ask for acquisitions and work with the government here. The core, though, is a woman whose daughter is dying to cancer. And the woman, Karen, this is a great Karen story. She decides that she's not going to let this happen. She's going to reach out to these Eldridge forces and make her daughter live.

and boy, it's not pretty for anybody else. Yeah, she needs, like, psychic juice in order to keep her daughter alive. And she reaches out to old Shub Nicarath for some help. It's nice to see Shub getting a little bit of playtime because I think sweetness and maybe the pranosodality is the only other time we've seen them in Delta Green. Yeah, so the players are involved as part of the program. They're called by their handler.

and the one important thing that the GM should keep in mind is that this is a program game. They would have all these resources to just like hint at what they have, like access to an NSA database, FBI face scans. They should have the weaponry and squads at their disposal. But yeah, they're called by their case handler, and they're given the brief that, hey, our NSA scans have flagged a smartwatch that showed that someone teleported from Alabama to Vermont in like one hour. So let's say they've asked all the questions that they're going to ask Agent Grunner, their case officer.

Where do they go from there? Almost always they're just going to go straight to the hospital, at least in my experience, because that is the time sensitive thing. Robin Bullock, the girl who went from one place to another quite quickly. She is under sedation. She is hanging out at the hospital, but her sister's on the way to come pick her up. So it really is not a lot of time before she's in among her family again, which any good secret agent knows, it's not so good to question people when they're at home. All right.

And this is the Grace Cottage Hospital in towns in Vermont, where Robin was discovered just wandering on the edges of a golf course by a police officer. And this introduction with going to the hospital too is covered a fair bit in the book and should be if you're really getting your players into the program mindset, this is a good example to start asking them things like, are you bringing a warrant? Are you going to pretend to be a friend of the family? What's your cover?

What documentation, right? because this, if you come up with something, you have the resources to make it. This is not the cowboys. You've got to think a little bit more. There's a couple of things we find once we're talking to Robin. She's obviously very disoriented and dazed, probably dehydrated, but there's some things chemically wrong with her as well. Yes, she's been dosed with a bio, let's see, benzodiazepine,

basically a powerful sedative that knocks you out for a few hours and prevents memories from forming. So she has no memory past a certain point last night after she was at the hunt, a club that she was abducted from, entranced from. I don't know exactly the phrase we want to use, but kind of her memory ends there and picks back up at the hospital. There's a few ways of kind of finding out her story. Obviously, you can talk to her, which is going to require a role or two to persuade, although they say it can be done relatively easily if you just pretend you're part of the staff. But kind of learning where she is from and what happened to her, there's a few different clues here.

One of them is the actual watch, the smart watch, that the nurse Kylie Hoffman found on her, and she was able to use that to call her sister. Right. Karen is smart enough to have not brought her cell phone along with her. Like, if you're going to steal somebody and abduct them, don't bring the GPS tracker that they have on them, right? Like, she's smart, but she doesn't notice the watch.

She thinks it's just a mechanical watch. She leaves it. So this is a great way to get that GPS signal. And I believe you can narrow it down to like a six-mile radius, which is going to be a big help later when players are trying to figure out where the heck she got abducted to. Yeah. Once again, boomers are just foiled by modern technology. So there's some really great clues as well that you're just given from the get-go from the case officer. you do get access to license and the social media accounts of Robin.

So like while there is a chance that they use the social media lead to go right to Birmingham, Alabama, it's not likely. Strictly because Robbins in the hospital in Vermont. Players are going to gravitate towards that choice because of that ticking time bomb. When they succeed at talking to her, some very interesting things can be revealed, including that, This is not the first time this has happened to her. I believe the reveal, at least in when I was taking my notes, is that she's psychic. And that's like a whole mic drop-in moment, a whole revelation that the players slash agents go through. That, yeah, psychics do exist in this world, in this lore.

Yeah, and if they get too, if they're really looking at her and she can basically infect other players, that are sensitive, right, like psychic sensitive, and basically pass-along powers, which for a one-shot, I always do, right? Somebody gets a power out of the list. Something important I want to point out is that Nathan, your version was about four parts, you know, four episodes, and then Alex ran it more as a one-shot. So I think the different perspectives we're going to get is how to speed it up and how to slow it down. because I could see presence being a longer campaign,

or it could be a one shot the way Alex proves it to be. Yeah, you can spend a lot of time in that middle area after the hospital, but before you get to Karen's house, the finale. There's a lot of ground to play, especially depending how difficult you make her to find online. Turns out, stocking is difficult when people are trying to hide. but I do think what I've found generally is that unless your players are really like gruff and mean they tend to approach this kindly and Robin tends to be receptive to that right she's she's drugged she's not completely in her right mind I generally don't try and hold too much back unless there be a real pain and the nurses want to shoe them out.

And that's a, you know, players can really become their own biggest problem by trying to push too much leverage. Well, that's good advice. Be kind in the beginning and let Robin be honest so that the ball can get rolling. Yeah. Yeah. She talks about the vague memory that she does have of the evening being at the Hunt Club and speaking to a woman who she describes as being nice, artsy, but a little sad.

And this is kind of our first clue as to Karen and her origins. Yeah, this has been Karen's whole process this whole time because Robin's not the first girl that she's abducted and had stung, I assume. It's just that the others weren't quite as psychic as they needed to be. So her plan tends to be that she drugs them, uses a little bit of magic to fascinate them to basically drive to a parking lot where Karen makes them ditch their cell phone, ditch anything that can be traced, then Karen takes off with a drugged woman back to her home.

Sydney does her psychic mumbo-jumbo to say, hey, is this going to be a good body for me? Most of the time the answer is no, and Karen goes, okay, and drives the woman somewhere else and ditches them. Yeah. So you really have to put yourself into Karen's shoes here. This is a woman who has lost everything. Like her husband, her child, I believe.

And then all that she has left is Sydney. And she's like this mother who would do anything, anything to ensure the safety and survival of Sydney. So as soon as she finds Robin, who does, displace the psychic powers that Sidney needs to stay alive, then she realizes she hits a gold mine and she's going to do whatever it takes to recover Robin to feed her to Sydney. And that includes reattempting to kidnap Robin should enough time pass if the players don't do anything. The event gaining the psychic abilities usually is the kind of end point of our scene with

with Bullock. She starts screaming. The staff run in, sedate her and throw you guys out. So the agents are left to move on at this point. Yeah. And usually I find that this is about where they start following up on the path of where Robin has been in Vermont, right? They say, she walked out of the woods.

Where did she walk out of the woods? There's an officer Revit that can give some information. His body cam has a nice, kind of like a picture of this woman. walking out of the woods, saying very stereotypical, I would say, worship, Shubnigrath, whatever, and I think Greek maybe. So most of it seems to be in English, but what's interesting is one particular phrase she says called arachnoid mater or matter. And I think that should hopefully, the players should pick up on that.

And if they pursue it, there's obviously some info about that. Yeah. Revits also lead in into the location Indian rocks where those psychically attuned can basically just like link this basically layline and see into the past maybe get a glimpse of Sydney. And I mean this is like they always do this. I don't know about you. They always interact with the psychic rock. They're always like, we got to go to this rock.

And then you say, hey, it's kind of weird. You don't think it actually is. like originally human made. It's just this party site that's been thing. And all the agents are like, I got to check this out for a little bit. And of course, it's a kind of place of power that they explore.

They have another terrible vision. And now they have this Donnie Darko-esque, like spider web tube off to the south. Yeah, they can see a kind of light strength. that leads off to the south, like you said. Right, right. And I suppose you could just use that to go to the finale if the agents do decide to follow that

light string. There's a delicate balance with a couple of these aspects. Like you said, they could just use that string and go straight to the source. I wonder almost if the string comes and goes or maybe it's more visible in dreams. There might be something. Or in that place of power. Right. You could easily hand-wave it to be that.

That's a good point. So the next obvious place is to go to Birmingham. Hop on a plane. Or just trek through the woods after your little spider line. Yeah, it's a long walk. They eventually get there and the book describes the Bullocks, the family of Robbins, where they live. It describes a lot about who they are, the actual people in the family,

and kind of the approach to being able to talk to them. Yeah, so this is where you can get the information that Robin has had these psychic abilities from the sister, Emily. And alternatively, should they choose to stake out the house? Because they know that if they deduce that Robin is a target for the kidnapper, then eventually the kidnapper will come to the house. Yeah, but her family is like very normal, which is another kind of nice thing to deal with. They're very normal and they're smart enough to know that if federal agents come up, you get a lawyer. So it is tricky if you're causing trouble and maybe showing up as federal agents that can make this quite difficult.

But really, it's the best option because if you come in with no credentials, they could even throw a restraining order against you. Oh my God, a lawyer president for every interview is crazy for for Opsack. It's like, okay. But it's a good time to once they're going to Birmingham. I always seem to have agents on the plane go. Well, we have all this program information, right? We know all of our socials and everything. Let's look into that.

And that's another really good point to go into what is going on Birmingham. How was Robin found? And it all comes down to the Bam, Bell, and Shadow. Or bomb? I don't know. How would you guys say that? I would say Beham because it's Birmingham. Yeah.

Oh, interesting. I never even thought about it that way. Yeah, that's why it says Beham because it's for Birmingham. Yeah, it's this social media group very focused on New Age, Wiccan, astrology. and this is where Robin shared a lot of her information about psychic history. It's where Karen is hunting these people. And it also is moderated by a real creep who runs a local store. Yeah, it's not great.

Yeah, it's not great. The dude is 57 and he's like sleeping with some of his customers who are like 19. I'm like, come on, man. We'll get to him in a second, read Miles. But the challenge is that Bambell and Shadow is kind of restricted to users who can prove their access. So this is maybe where a hacker or someone clever to get access to the Facebook page. But in the Facebook page, they start noticing the pattern of there are other victims as well. Right.

There's, I believe, three other women that have all had that same sort of element of, They talk about some psychic phenomenon they've had. They disappear for a bit. And then they pop back up and all of a sudden they're real hesitant to talk about any psychic history, which is completely fair. So, you know, they're in Birmingham. The Hunt is on and there's a couple other places that they can visit. Yeah, they can visit all the locations that the previous victims have been to. They can visit The Hunt, which is the club that,

Robin was last seen at and they're owned, the club is owned by a couple that does pretty much clam up unless they have you have the right credentials. And then we get to the

the man you mentioned earlier everybody's favorite creep read Miles at Bell and Shadow. What a fucking loser. I'm sorry. I'm using my one F bomb. Yeah, he's he's basically, he's 57, he runs this Facebook group and he really only lets women in. He just plays on his customers. It's awful.

Yeah, he's a real creep. And he's another one. You come in and as a federal agent, he's going to clam up. But he's pretty talkative to people, especially if you have a female agent, he is a creep. That is a really good angle to get him talking and show him. him pictures of people you may want to find. Right, right. And he does have very strong clue in his shop. And that's the donation like can with helping Sydney fight cancer, which was set up by Karen. That is such a strong clue. What is the way that you would kind of signal to the agents that this is important? Well, I would have it right near the cash register.

Right. So it's like right there, I would, it's just meta-wise, I would describe that and put that to the forefront of my player's imagination. You know, past all the crystals for sale, past all the Wiccan products on the shelves. But yeah, there's nothing stronger than, hey, you notice this. Right, right. And at this point, they've probably, if you go with a vision sort of thing, they've seen Sydney. So they have seen her. They know what she looks like.

She doesn't tell them names or anything. She might claim that her mom's trying to help her or something like that. Be as creepy and vague as you can. It's great, great fun. But then you see this, you can see this girl and that's a really handy, like, wait a second. I need to follow up on this little. Yeah. I could also see a situation where maybe Reid talks too much.

maybe he feels really bad about the situation because he mentions that Karen is a genuine believer and I think that is a bit of a clue where he talks about her really believing in magic but knowing that it's especially difficult when it comes to healing injuries and serious illnesses. Miles, you could just follow him

and find out how much of a creep he truly is but eventually we have to move on and through all of these different interactions the agents will get some clue as to the identification of Karen through different options. They say there's the Clay County tag and title where you can find out more information about her car

or where it's registered. So they do get the county of where Valdez resides, but not exactly the address where she lives. So that information can be gotten from like the county records, right? or you could even ask like the mail person who delivers the mail and apparently avoids all of the bombs. They have a really windy path to the mailbox. The mailbox is at the bottom of the hill.

It's not up by the house. Oh, yeah, of course. Shoot. Yeah, and that's actually a fun setting sort of thing to have this Alabama because you might have players that go, we know her car. we can find her. This is so easy. We know her address. Good luck. You know, like this is not a mapped area. You're going to have to go there and sweet talk somebody into telling you how to get to Karen's house. Or now that you know what her car looks like, this is a good place to stake out. Really clever agents may just wait for Karen and shoot her while she's driving. That is a very easy way to get. get her out of her element. That hasn't happened like the times I've run this scenario. It's always, the finale's always been at the house.

And it's important if they start digging around. That's where they start to see a lot of clues about the dangers that are coming in. Because this is rural Alabama. First of all, it's not safe to be a federal agent there. Not from an obsec side this time. More of a, you might get shot just out of the blue. and there are some very colorful characters that you can find out about that are important signposts if you want to hint that Karen's house is filled with explosives.

Speaking of signs, this Jimmy Slopes person would definitely have the sign of trespassers will be shot, survivors will be shot again. Like, that's totally on brand for this character. Yeah, yeah, Jimmy Swope. He's the person that helps Karen kind of set up her home. as a little fortress. Yeah. So eventually all of this leads to getting to Hatchet Hill,

which has a couple of strange anomalous elements to it. Gravity's wrong. That's a really fun one as they notice rocks rolling uphill, which is another reason I kind of like at this point to maybe make it obvious like this is another Indian rocks situation, right? like there might be more of these, not statues, but like stones that they

recognize as being similar and they can go, oh, we're in danger again. Yeah, you could easily say this is another lay line, this is another point of power for Shub. So they notice that there's something wrong here. The, you know, even setting the car into neutral,

it starts rolling uphill. But there is now the issue of the approach. How do we talk to Karen? How do we get into that house? And you have both through your actual place shown different ways of doing that. So I actually want to take a second. Alex, how many of these traps do you use? Because she like Jimmy has laid this place out with what? Bombs in the yard. Oh yeah. A flash grenade on the front door. Fish hooks inside the front door. So when you're flashed in the walls. Yep, bombs in the

walls, that's the first floor. And then upstairs is safe except for the monster child. I would hate to get a glass of water at night, honestly. Yeah, half asleep. I don't, okay. So let me preface this with, I do provide a tactical squad should the agents request it because they realize, hey, we don't want to go in there. We're not professionals.

I'm a lawyer and you're a paramedic. Let's call the program up and get the big guns to do a raid. And if they get another set of PCs to control in this raid, I don't hold back. Because who in their right mind is going to do that? Right. So they can approach a couple of different ways, but I think the key thing to understand is that really the safest approach is to come in through the side door,

which leads into the kitchen. But it doesn't seem like a lot of players ever noticed that, and I wonder how much we as handlers should signal that, or we should just let them discover it. I imagine you could signal that with, like, marks from walking the same path over time in the grass. I think the truly safest way is just waiting for Karen to return from getting groceries

and just shooting her in a vehicle. But... I know you can find online. maps that don't have all the booby traps with little red dots, which I would recommend, obviously, that's a little unhelpful to give your players. But just giving them that map so they can say, oh, front door, side door, yeah, I can just see it working there. Let's assume that the players, at least some of the agents, do get into the house.

Like we said, there are further hazards inside. There's the wheelchair flashbang, unassuming wheelchair, that if you push to the side, it sets off a flashbang. There are bombs in the wall, like you said. It's like all alone, just gone crazy. Home alone, Delta Green style. Are I think all of our collective favorite hazard, the fish hooks at face and neck level.

Yeah, I had an agent that died pretty much in one shot to one of these explosives. So they went through the window into the fish hooks and were hanging around when the others showed up and went like, oh, yeah, this is a problem. This is a bad house. So the dining room has these trip wires that are connected to the explosives in the walls. And then the hall has some motion sensors with little flashing red lights the agents might pick up on. But if they can do it and get upstairs, that's where the real meat of this situation comes into play. You can go find Sydney's sister, Sylvia.

She's tucked into bed. She's super dead. And her mom has apparently just put her back in there. And yeah, that's just a nice room to go into and go, oh, this is not a healthy woman. And the book suggests that if Robin is captured, this is where she might be. It's a really good, creepy image to have. I like putting that in the visions as well. Is that like body under the blanket is just super creepy.

Yeah. And then there is actually Sydney's room. Yeah, I just don't get the point why there had to be a dead child in the room. It isn't explained at all, but if you want to stay true to that being there, you could tied into the child's corpse being used for ingredients for the witchcraft that Karen uses. That would give it a little more believability for being there. It's the most obvious reason, at least to me, about why that's there. But I like the way that it's described as a kind of pagan altar fused with an ICU because Karen is trying to keep Sydney alive.

Yeah, and it's a good callback to, I mean, she is an accomplished nurse. That's part of how she kept her child alive this long. And so she's been using all these magics, hypergeometries to keep her around along with actual medicine. And yeah, this is another one of, I like to steal the. I don't know what you call it, like the little plastic enclosures that they'll put people into in these medical places and really go with like the, it's humid, it's steamy in there. Like there's obviously something wrong inside this little medical tent gives a nice moment where they have to decide to cross that threshold. There is a final room that I think is important. That's Karen's room.

She uses it a bit as like a command center where there's monitors and obviously all her cell phones that she uses to set off the bombs. But there's a couple of interesting bits of lore and also some tomes that can be found in this room. Yes, the Mother of Moons is one of the things that they can get. You can really get into the Shub lore, maybe hang out with some Migo again. column down. Why not? Yeah, and then you get the motivations that pretty much outlined out for you

about her wanting to transfer Sydney into a new host. The way the scenario describes it, if you go into Karen's room and you haven't really rattled the nest, she has found singing softly over a ritual circle of sigils and wax figures. She's obviously trying to complete the ritual.

Maybe she is aware of the agents and that's why she's trying to complete the ritual as quickly as possible. Here is an interesting point where she does have a gun, and I think that she will probably do the motherly thing and protect Sydney as much as possible, but there is mention that if the agents just get the upper hand, she probably wouldn't be afraid to turn that gun on herself just to guarantee that Sydney has her transformation.

Yeah, really good. It's funny she has 19 sanity, which frankly seems pretty high for all of the stuff she's done. But yeah, that's great if she realizes the cause is lost. She might just end it, and that's where you break out the ultraviolet weird spider thing that Sydney transforms into. And this is really probably the biggest loss condition, I would say, for agents in this scenario is if you, awaken the god spider that then crawls into the woods, I would say that operation did not successfully complete. I mean, it just seems as written like on page 28, pretty much no matter what you do, Sidney's going to transform. I don't know if this is an oversight, but yeah,

it says if Sidney San hits here, or if she or her mother are physically attacked, so that's going to happen. Or if her mother enacts the whispers of the dead ritual, she transforms. So to me, it's like she's going to transform no matter what. Yeah, the description of this like being that pops out is very fun. The art is worth showing the players because it's this like acid trippy kind of spider. Well, that's a good note. If your players don't like spiders, this is a good thing to think about before you run this. Great point.

Explicitly spider-based, but by the end it's pretty, it's pretty in your face. There's a lot of arachnid bug imagery for sure. Yeah. Any other tips, thoughts, last comments about the scenario before we close things out? Yeah, I would say I would just flesh out that connection that Sydney has with the player more, that string-like connection. Really set the rules and define how those mechanics work because that really will make it easier or harder for the play. layers down the line. Yeah, and I would say make sure that by the time the agents are to Alabama, they are finding the

house, that they have a pretty clear vision of Sydney and Karen in their mind as not some mastermind supervillains, right? These are just people trying to survive. I find that makes the ending a lot tougher for them to do. and then afterwards ask the question because once they're done with this, they destroy the house. They're not really done.

They have to decide, what do we do with Robin? What do we do with these other women? What do we do with ourselves and out with powers? Precisely, like how far do you go? And yeah, that would be great fodder for a long-term campaign or some good epilogue scenes if you're doing a one-shot. It was so fun talking to you guys about this scenario.

I really haven't read a lot of the newer stuff, so it was wonderful to sit down with you and kind of really sink my teeth into presence with you all. So I appreciate your time. We have reached the bloody end. Everyone, please make sure to go check out Nathan and Alex at the RPG reanimators, and we will see you next time.

Later. Bye.