Mayday Plays - 🕳️The Dead Drop | "A Guide to Running Impossible Landscapes" | Episode 1

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

You've found the dead drop, your news source for all things Delta Green the roleplaying game. Join Sergio (Doomed To Repeat) and Vince (Black Project Gaming) to discuss the latest Delta Green news, scenario reviews, and more. This first episode kicks off the series with a bang as we talk about how to prepare for the epic DG campaign Impossible Landscapes. The first round of releases will cover every chapter of the campaign and how to prep and run it. Using Vince's first-hand knowledge we plan to empower every Handler with all the secrets needed to drive your players insane! Make sure to leave your comments and questions in the chat below or message us directly on X (twitter) @surgettrpg and @suddenlyvince We've got merch! https://ko-fi.com/maydayrp (t-shirts and stickers) We started as a podcast! Listen to us @: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mayday-plays/id1537347277 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5vdTgXoqpSpMssSP9Vka3Z?si=73ec867215744a01 Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/mayday-roleplay Here are some of our other socials; Twitter: https://twitter.com/maydayroleplay Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maydayrp/ Website: https://maydayroleplay.com/ Thanks for your support! 00:00 Intro 03:10 Describing the Impossible 05:21 Why run IL? 06:31 Understanding Corruption 09:30 Embrace Corruption? 10:31 The King's Motivation 13:16 From the beginning 14:43 Static Protocol 16:21 Timey Wimey Tips 17:41 Mastering One Note 19:40 Can the lazy DM run IL? 21:32 Musical Considerations 24:18 Managing Expectations 26:13 Safety Tools 27:39 Surreal vs Regular Horror 29:70 Campaign Length 30:47 Preferred PCs 35:41 Outro

Hello and welcome to the first in a new series that we here at Mayday are calling The Dead Drop, a guide to running impossible landscapes. My name is Sergio, and I am the handler for the award-winning Delta Green actual play doomed to repeat. With me is my co-host, my friend, and the handler for Black Project Gaming. Vince, how you doing, buddy? Hey, man, doing great. Very, very happy to be here.

Glad to have everyone tuning in. This is great. If this is your first time on our channel, welcome to you. We are part of May Day Roll Play. We play a number of different tabletop RPGs, including the award-winning Delta Green, doomed to repeat, which is an absolutely phenomenal Delta Green campaign run for our very own Sergio. We've also played Vampire the Masquerade 5E run by Caleb James Miller. Absolutely phenomenal campaign. We're running Orpheus, a whole lot more. There's something for everyone. So all of it's available in podcasts and video format. So please feel free to check it out. SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube, all the above. All the usual suspects.

That's right. Now, Vince, you hold a very special distinction amongst my friends, which is that you are one of the few handlers that I know who has run Delta Greens' Impossible Landscapes campaign from start to beginning. And that is no small task. If you folks at home want to listen to Vince's play-through, you need to check out Black Project Gaming wherever you get your podcast. It is extremely worth it.

I personally think that all handlers need to do is just listen to this running of impossible landscapes, and you will be ready for the game. However, with all of that said, we are a very giving bunch here at May Day, and we know that there is a whole lot more to this campaign than just, listening to you, as satisfying as it is, and we thought it would be super helpful to just pull Vince aside, sit them down, and actually talk to you about how you did it. You know, have Vince lead us on a journey to the court of the King and Yellow itself, guiding us through the infamous night floors in the McAllister building, to the Dorchester House Psychiatric Facility, and all of the horrors in between. Now, I have yet to run the campaign myself. I haven't even read it yet.

So I am hoping Vince's insight will help me and anyone out there who is listening and considering running this epic campaign for themselves at their table. And look, if you plan on playing an impossible landscapes game as a player, please turn away now as we will be discussing major spoilers about the campaign from here on out. But if you are a handler, you've come to the right place. All right. So we might as well start at the very beginning. Tell us what is Delta Green's impossible landscapes about? All right. So it is really the first cradle to grave beginning to end campaign that Delta Green has done, that Our Dream is published for Delta Green. It's written by Dennis Detwiller, who's written a bunch of phenomenal scenarios for the game like music from a darkened room, viscid, just a slew of others. One of those, one of the co-creators.

Yeah. So, long story short, the tagline is that Impossible Landscapes is a campaign of horror, wonder, and conspiracy. And all of that kind of is probably the best way to describe it. It's all about the players, the agents, and their interactions with this force called the King and Yellow. It all begins in 1995 with the night floors, when the agents are, and their cell is dispatched to the McAllister building in New York City, to investigate the disappearance of a local artist named Abigail Wright. The story then picks up 20 years later, so there's a significant time jump. We go from 1995 to 2015, and we pick up in Boston with a scenario called a volume of secret faces

when the agents are sent to this psychiatric facility called Dorchester House to locate missing patients who were committed by Delta Green a long time ago. We then move on to like a mat made of skin when the agent's are on the run. They've been declared unnatural vectors by Delta Green, and they are pushed both by Delta Green itself and the forces of the King and Yellow closer and closer to Carcosa. And then we have the end of the world of the end, the final scenario where the agents arrive in Carcosa itself and everything is brought full circle as they step into the court of the King and Yellow. Nice. That sounds like a lot of fun. It's very clear that there is a trajectory that your agents are

meant to kind of go down and I'm very interested to learn from you how this happens because, you know, when you look at the book itself, it is, I would say, as big if not bigger than the handler's guide. It's impressively big. So we are really hoping to, you know, break this down so that everybody feels like they can run it as well. So I have a question for you. Why should somebody run this campaign? What did you get out of running impossible landscapes? That's a really good question. It's definitely, it is different from anything I've ever run before. So one of the first campaigns I ever ran for Delta Green was all the scenarios in a night at the opera. They're collected scenarios.

And even moving from that to this is vastly different from anything I've ever read, anything I've ever run, anything I've ever played in. It is such a unique experience. That's one of those things you have to, you simply have to dive into it just to experience it. even reading the book is in and of itself an experience. It's just a lot of fun. It's just a great story. Especially if you feel like surreal horror, like horror that's not quite in your face,

but is disturbing and kind of it just sits with you in a much more surreal kind of way. It doesn't get, it does not get any better than this. It is absolutely just a phenomenal story from beginning to end, Delta Green or not. Hell yeah, that's awesome. So, okay, there is a new mechanic that comes with the campaign called corruption.

Can you talk a little bit about corruption? How does that differ from sanity loss and how do handlers use it in the campaign to improve the experience? Okay, great, yeah. So corruption really is unlike sanity, which is really a reflection of how the agents are affected, you know, by everything they experience, everything they see, and how that kind of translates to their home lives, their lives away from the program, from the outlaws, from everything. Corruption is itself a direct reflection of how much interaction an agent has had with the King and Yellow and its influence.

So, for example, agents who are actively investigating the King and Yellow, they're actively pursuing leads, they're kind of diving headfirst into the chaos, they're going to have a much higher corruption rating than agents who go out of their way to avoid it, who try to suppress it, who try to go out of the way to obscure the existence of this thing, kind of like, you know, as is Delta Green's edict, they're going to have a much lower corruption rating.

It really affects a number of different things in the campaign. You know, everything is kind of tied to a corruption rating in a lot of ways. So, for example, you've got manifestations. Manifestations are various things that the players could encounter in the night floors and Carcosa itself. The corruption rating will kind of dictate how volatile or how intense the manifestations you encounter are. Interesting. So great example, and I just saw to this, so music from a darkened dream, depending on your willpower. You know how you'd have different levels of hauntings that you'd experience.

It's almost kind of the same thing, but it's tied to corruption. Corruption also dictates how easily you can move to the night floors and to Carcosa itself. And then finally, at the end, a spoiler alert, once you get to Carcosa, the higher your corruption rating, the more you are actually able to influence an alter reality around you because of how much you have been affected by the King and Yellow in his influence. You pretty much gain and lose it any time throughout the campaign depending on what you do. There's not like set pieces that are going to determine whether or not you get a high corruption rating or a low one. It's really something as simple as we'll take the night floors, for example. Do the agents actively, you know, look into the night floors? Do they actively look into, you know, the yellow sign?

Things like that. And it's okay, so your corruption rating goes up. They could also lose it at any given time. So I used one note pretty extensively for this entire campaign. And so I had a spreadsheet kind of built out where I had everybody's various skill ratings. So I quickly refer to them for, you know, conflict resolution where we didn't need roles, per se. and at the very top I had their corruption rating so I can see at a given time where they were at

at that particular scale. And it was really helpful. And would you say corruption is almost always bad? Is there any kind of positive to it? I suppose if you want to go deeper in the carcores, it's a positive. Yeah. So that's the thing. There's nothing that's really a negative or a net negative or net positive with this campaign. It's really just how much do you witness and how much do you experience? I see. So, yeah, and I'll tell you, as long as there's one person in the group in the cell who's going to have that absolutely bonkers corruption rating, everybody else is kind of along for the ride. Oh, great. That's perfect.

Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds like you were also, you know, keeping track of the score and just a lot of the things in general with a spreadsheet or a one note was really vital, which we'll definitely get into more a little bit later. Okay. Yeah. You've given us the basic overview of the campaign, which helps us understand what to expect, but we also know that every good campaign lives and dies on its main antagonist. For Impossible Landscapes, that is the enigmatic king in yellow.

And I got to be honest, the dude is creepy, but I don't really get what he's all about. What does he want? What are his motives? Do you think you can explain what the king is so we can get a better sense of the antagonist's overall motives? That's a tough one. That's like, you know, is a hurricane an antagonist? Is a black hole an antagonist? Or is it just contrary to our need for survival and sanity?

What the King and Yellow is, who he is, is all something that Detwiller has kind of kept pretty vague. The bottom line is that no one really knows what the King and Yellow's true nature and motivations are. There have been some arguments that the King and Yellow is. is entropy itself, while others are kind of describe him as like a thought form on a more cosmic scale. The book describes him as a manifestation of a great old one called Haster, a psychological disease of human consciousness, or an n-dimensional memetic entity living inside language. The book specifically says that the King of Yellow is all of those things, yet none of those things, and has this vague and ever-changing nature.

All that's known for sure is that, again, kind of quoting, is that his very presence reshapes reality, and when he is near, nothing is impossible. So that's definitely the influence he has over the campaign. But for the purposes, the campaign itself, the motives are pretty simple. Drive the agents to Carcosa itself, where they have to give a writer named J.C. Linz,

what's called a soul bottle, which will directly, caused the creation of the play that we know is the King and Yellow. Ah. Okay, see, that helps because, you know, when you have a very vague antagonist, like the King and Yellow can be, you know, it sounds like he is filling many roles and can be both unknown and known, it's nice to at least have a very clear motive. You know, in the end, he's basically perpetuating his own story by giving, you know,

by having the agents give the soul bottle over. So it becomes a lot clear as to, okay, at least I know what the king and yellow ultimately wants. Even if it's, you know, kind of like Nyarlathotep where you just don't understand why he's doing this. But that helps a lot. What I like about your explanation of the king and yellow is that I'm already thinking of ways of peppering in and foreshadowing that moment when they hand over the soul bottle. So it's already getting the gears going. So we know the overall story. we understand our villain.

It's time to start diving in and just prepping our game. Let's just get to it. Where do we begin tackling impossible landscapes? Honestly, the best advice I can give is to read it and then read it again. This is a massive book. It's 370 pages, so it's a lot. But what I did is I kind of, I kind of just gave it a very brief, like, read-through. and then I went back through and started taking copious notes.

That's where OneNote came in. I essentially broke down each scenario, kind of like it's broken down in the book with the various headers and sections and subsections. And that helped me definitely provide a quick reference. Hyperlinking, like just OneNote really was the key to making it, not only more accessible in the moment, but helping keep things flowing without me having to stop

and constantly refer back to the book itself. because, I mean, as we know, going back and navigating through a PDF of a 370-page book is probably not easy. So, one note was absolutely critical. The other piece is that Impossible Landscapes does a lot with time. Time is kind of inconsequential in a lot of ways. And sometimes what happens later, happens before, happens now, and vice versa. It's all over the place. And there is a very, very in-depth history tied to the King and Yellow, both as an

entity and as a play. So to make sense of that, they, they, Archdream released something called static protocol, which is an aid that essentially gives you rules for how your players can research various avenues of investigation, various leads that'll come up throughout the game, how long it'll take to get certain pieces of information depending on what avenue they take, how well they roll. And that it really just makes it a quick reference by topic. So if I want to find out more about Asa Darabondi, the child serial killer from the 1900s, 1920s, I can go in and I now have an avenue to quickly reference that information and figure out how my agents would find it. I mean, who can forget him?

Right, yeah. You're not going to forget Asa Darabondi. When it comes to that, like a lot of, there have been some arguments like, yeah, it's not really essential. And it's not, like, if you want to really go through and go through that timeline yourself and pick at it and do that on your own, like go for you. go nuts, but it is a massive time saver. It is just an absolute treasure trove of information. I think it's kind of also the reason why we're

here talking about it. It's something that is going to make our life as a handler a lot easier. You know, some kind of handout or guide for the handler that goes into detail like that where it's already procured all the information is going to be super helpful. It really was. It saves

it really saves so much time in the long run. No, but that's just like Oh, go ahead. I do have a question about this whole thing about, you know, you mentioned time is irrelevant in a way where things from the past might happen in the future or the present. That's what my biggest concern is when making, you know, a campaign for impossible landscapes is how do you weave that stuff in? Like, when do I know that something that is going to happen in the future maybe needs to pop up in the present or the past? That seems like a daunting challenge. It is. A lot of that is actually, there are little seeds peppered in throughout the campaign to where you can introduce that.

For example, I forget exactly where it is in the campaign, but there's one instance where the players, you know, they look down a laundry shoot or some kind of shoot, and they see like an indistinguishable figure at the bottom and they can shout down at it and, of course, it never responds. Then later on in the campaign, they're walking through, I think, the hotel brothel bin, and they look up through the shaft and they hear those. same words that they shouted down 20 years ago, now shouting down at themselves. Okay. It's little things like that. Like for another example is, well, we'll get to that. I guess what I'm also realizing is once you've played a session or two with the players, you're probably going to get ideas of, oh, this is something maybe I can sprinkle in later

from the past or from the future, et cetera. So, oh, 800%. They will, they will, especially if you've got full player buy-in early on, like, Like, they're going to give you all the material you need to work with. It's going to be, it's phenomenal. Okay, so you said OneNote is very important. Any tips or tricks about OneNote that we should be thinking about? I like your suggestion of kind of organizing your notes the way that the book is organized,

because then it's obviously easy to just find that same headline and go from there. No, yeah. I mean, that's really, it's a great point. It's a matter of just picking out the key details, like kind of, And this comes with being an experience, depending on how experienced you or as a handler or as a GM, sometimes you can just take the notes and annotate the most important things and leave enough room for you to kind of ad lib and improvise and be flexible. So it's really depending on your own comfort zone for how much information you feel you need

to be prepared that you need to populate it with. But I'll tell you right now, hyperlink, save my ass, like more times than I can count. You know, being able to, so if they go to a specific section and meet a specific NPC, I can click on a hyperlink and go to that NPCs like description, the critical information he provides, what he provides based on certain roles, that kind of thing. And is that hyperlink going to the Impossible Landscapes book that you've saved or something online? Or is it a... No.

Yeah. So I'll just create another section in the notebook itself. And so it'll automatically take me to that section in the notebook. Gotcha. So as long as I've got it populated, I've got it calling back to something, I click on that link. NPC profile comes up or location profile comes up. You're referencing your own notes. Gotcha.

Gotcha. All right. So any other comments on notes or note taking? Not so much. I've always kind of been on the side of the spectrum where like I want the most information at hand as possible. Some don't like that. They prefer to keep it very tailored. So that way they've got more, they feel like they have more room to be flexible.

It's dealer's choice, really. but with something as massive as this with as many sources of information, you're going to need a quick reference to be able to get it on the fly. You actually make me think of another question. What if I am the type of handler who is a little bit more on the fly, who maybe will read the campaign once, maybe twice, but then isn't as thorough with their notes as maybe you might be? I wonder if this is just not the campaign for them,

Or is it okay to just kind of go with what your players are doing and maybe improvise a little bit or is important to follow what's happening? That is a very good question. There's my personal answer, which is run the campaign as written. It is a work of art. It really, it is. But with that being said, I think if you have a general idea of where each operation is supposed to go in conjunction with the other, others and then where the overarching meta plot from beginning to end is supposed to go. I think if you ultimately know the destination, then you've got a lot of flexibility to kind of

how you get there. There's also, I mean, there's any number of ways to approach and complete a given scenario in this campaign. Like, we'll use VISID as an example. You've got that whole storage space scenario where the agents could investigate Anseil Incorporated and Justin Croft even more than most do. Dennis Detweiler is really good about giving a lot of information for side tangents that the players may not even get to.

Embossable landscapes is no exception to that. So you are given a lot of information up front. So as long as you give it a good wag, you're going to have a good opportunity to kind of figure out, okay, I can mess with this. I can massage this and go this direction. Let's talk about something a little different. You know, something that gets my juices flowing when I'm thinking about a campaign or running a campaign are musical considerations. Yes.

We could find just kind of modern action music, maybe pull from our favorite movies, but is there any musical considerations you'd recommend specifically for this campaign? 100%. Yeah, absolutely. Everybody who's probably listened to my stuff before knows I love Cryochamber and everything, everything, you know, literally. everything they do. Maybe he loves Cryochamber. We use all their stuff. Yep.

Yeah. They're absolutely phenomenal for just general ambient background for when things get, you know, start getting spooky. One album that I used extensively when, with the home game before

I started kind of editing and adding our own, you know, royalty-free music and all that, was an album by the Caretaker, everything everywhere at the end of time, especially when the players got to the night floors.

The Caretaker, is this ambient sort of artist that did this haunted ballroom style music. And it's a very haunting album. It's very haunting in that, especially when you know the message behind it, which is it's reflecting an older individual's descent into dementia until they ultimately forget who they are and where they came from. And so it begins with very, you know, nostalgic. music from, you know, a bygone era, 1920s, 1930s, and begins to kind of devolve over the course

of the album until it's just almost a tonal version of white noise. And very subtle, too. I mean, you'll listen to it for 10, 15 minutes and just think it's just regular music, but then little things will start popping up that are like, oh, this makes it sound very uncomfortable. Absolutely. Yeah, it's unsettling in a lot of ways. And so that was, I think, key to sit and maybe not necessarily set players on edge, but at least let them know that, okay, you've crossed over into something else now.

And there is reason to be on edge. There is reason to be nervous and aware of your surroundings because the laws that you've lived your life by no longer apply here. Yeah. I love the, you know, just the idea of use whatever music you want that is kind of fitting, whether, be the 70s or modern day kind of music when the agents are doing, they're investigating. But yeah, when that music begins to play, it should be something where the players almost start to have a reaction to it every time they hear like, uh-oh, we're back. Yep.

You know, that kind of thing. Absolutely. Bring that bell. Something I love about Delta Green is the psychological horror aspect to it. And it sounds like impossible landscapes really turns it up to 11. What do we need to discuss with our players? to kind of manage their expectations? Yeah, that's a great question.

It's definitely not a sandboxed campaign. There is a very clear beginning, middle, and end. And if you're not careful, you know, some players may walk away with the feeling or the impression that they're on a railroad. And in a lot of ways, they are. They're on the tracks that the King and Yellow has said before them. But if you're doing your job well,

they're invested in seeing where, those tracks take them. And so that's the thing. It's, it's, it's, it's kind of foreshadowed in the book with the quote, uh, the, there is no way out but through kind of, um, you know, nothing else is true. There is no way out but through. Um, so you've got to complete it. You've got to complete the ride. You've got to go to where these tracks take you. Um, so communicating out up front, like, like there will be the illusion of agency. There will be moments where, of course, you can make your own decisions and you can go various places, but, um, so, you can go various places, but there is a clear beginning, middle, and end.

And as long as they're along for that ride and you're nailing the tone, you're nailing the subject matter. And your players are, you know, kind of signed on from the beginning. It's got, it's going to be a non-issue. They're going to be all about it. So, you know, my players, they were, their main thing was wanting to see how fucked up it got. And so, like, from minute one, they were like, let's just crank, like you said, crank

this to 11 and see where it takes us. So they wanted to see how far the rabbit hole goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's where seeding some of those, you know, manifestations, some of that imagery really comes into play. And just it is the proverbial carrot, you know, for opposite the stick. If you had to think about it, is there a particular bit of horror or type of horror besides the obvious going crazy and you know paranoia that kind of stuff is there

I guess what I'm getting at is there a particular trigger that a handler should be aware of maybe a particular kind of imagery or something that might be more sensitive for certain players that you know comes up in the game oh yeah no great point definitely safety tools are going to be critical for this

especially if you're playing with a group that you haven't played with much together before like you don't know what makes them tick as individuals. Safety tools are always just a go-to. So that means talk about, you know, what are the big things that players might expect and maybe ask them if they have any particular things they want to avoid? Absolutely.

Yeah. And I think you can get into some of the areas they'll encounter without spoiling too much. Like you can discuss, you know, emulation, you know, death by fire, burning. You can discuss gaslighting to an extent, right? like making a sane person feel as if they're insane. You can discuss questioning reality, being made to question what's real and what's not, which could be triggering, understandably, for some folks.

Surreal horror is definitely, it's different from kind of the in-your-face horror that we've come to expect, especially like in the modern era, right? So, like, some of the examples they list, it's horrific to see a dead friend shambled back to life. Surreal horror is when that dead friend sits down to lunch and everyone acts as if everything is fine. Another example, it's horrific to be shot. It's surreal horror when you realize that despite the pain of the wound,

you're not bleeding, and red tissue paper rolls out like some stage version of blood. So things like that. It's interesting because if anything, it might actually be okay to sanitize certain things to add to the surreality of it. So, yeah, if you do have players that are maybe sensitive or have mentioned before in previous session zeros that they're concerned about something or they're sensitive about something, you could flip it on its head. And if it happens, it's not what they expect or it's a more sanitized, surreal version of it. 100%. Cool.

And you can definitely, like, child death features heavily into it. Okay, that's a good one. Okay. Yeah, suicide is big. I mean, and you can obviously shape those, you know, to your player base. Like, you know, make it a natural, you know, an unusual natural death vice, a suicide. The children death is kind of a key thing, but you don't have to, like, graphically, you know, dive into the gory details.

Yeah, yeah. I think somebody who's approaching a game like Impossible Landscapes is probably already interested in kind of cold case files and CSI. and, you know, unfortunately, child murder and things like that and kind of are part for the course and that kind of media. Yeah, yeah, you're not playing my little pony when you sign on for a Delta Green game. It's going to, you're going to explore some dark subject matter. Here's an interesting question that kind of is bringing us closer to the end of our discussion. How long do you think a handler should expect to run impossible landscapes?

How many days or weeks or months or years will this take? So for me and my players, we went, I think, 11 or 12 episodes. So 11 or 12, full three hours, three to four hour sessions. But it can go longer. It can absolutely go longer depending on what routes they decide to go. Some scenarios, they were like, they hard charge their way through beginning to end with no deviation. So we got through it pretty quick. but there are various rabbit holes they can kind of lose themselves in that could prolong a given scenario at any given time.

So I suppose if a handler knows that their agents like inspecting everything and asking every NPC, every question, you can obviously expect more than just 12 sessions. 100%. 12 isn't bad, though. I mean, to run a campaign of this size in 12 sessions is really not that bad. Yeah, we were, it was, again, it was a, fortunate side effect of having freaking chaos gremlins for players like let's go let's do this do your word

yeah so we've got the players buy in but what sort of agents should they play or what type should they expect to play? That's a very very good question I would say so my particular group I feel like

four players is the perfect size I don't think you want to go anymore. I think in general Delta Green works best at four players. It really does. The guy that runs like six or seven of them. Yeah. I think especially for this one, four is a perfect size.

So the way I did it was I had three like traditional law enforcement federal types and then one friendly. So I had, let's see, I had two FBI agents, one who kind of was more on the evidence collection side, one who was more of like a straight-legged investigator. I had one who was kind of the special operator, architect. type, who's like with the FBI hostage rescue team, and then my friendly, who was an anthropologist. So I feel like, you know, you get your, because we're, the other thing I failed to mention was that this takes place in the, kind of the cowboy era, or at least it begins in the era of the

90s, where cells were essentially three agents all operating under a given letter. So in this case, it's M-cell. So my agents were Morgan, Mishak, Madison, yeah, and those were the three. And then our friendly. So with that, I think you definitely want your three like agent types. So maybe, you know, honestly, like all other things in Delta Green, having a trigger puller is not always going to save your skin. But, you know, definitely, you know, you want your traditional good at investigating,

good at talking to people. I mean, easy mode for Delta Green is have somebody who's really good at human, really good at persuasion and really good at the psychotherapy, psychoanalysis stuff. And then, you know, tech on your search skills. History is always a good one, so that's where your friendly can come into play. But as long as you've got your bases covered that way, your three agents, then you're friendly, I think you're golden. I think that's the perfect group.

And would you say that there are parts of the game where it is good to have a trigger boy, a trigger happy person? Or is it really more about investigating and unerping and talking? You know, it depends on how many bears the agents go around poking, so to speak. You know, hey, listen, it certainly could hurt. I guess a better question is, you know, how much do you direct the players in the sense of saying, okay, guys, you know, right now it feels like we're a little bit too heavy on the fighting side and we need more thinkers. you know, should handlers try and direct players to have the best game experience possible?

I think so. I think always start with, I think once you've communicated the expectations, you can kind of sit down, you can kind of just begin to solicit what they would like to play and then shape it from there. It's typically my approach. It's like, you tell me what you want to play first, and then we can work together to figure out and make it fit. And so sometimes that requires compromise on both parts, obviously, because you still want your players to have a time without locking them into something that they may not necessarily feel that personal connection to. So for for me it was like okay this is what we need up front you tell me what you think you could enjoy playing and then we'll shape will shape from there. So I only had one person

who wanted to play like kind of the the no bullshit straight to the point trigger puller who's there to keep everybody else safe. I had the you know the one you know evidence forensics focused type who charged headfirst and into the chaos and then we had the you know the real like good old boy straight leg FBI agent who you know left his Boy Scout uniform at home

as we all know and love about the FBI and Delta Green is they're kind of just good at everything so it's kind of a good general character to make I'm glad that you tell us about the era in which the game takes place because that is something that we didn't really go into much detail with

and we will go into later Like you said, the 90s were cells. I remember when I ran a 1984 scenario, or at least I said it in 1984, that's how I followed it, where there was three actual Delta Green agents and, in my case, three friendlies. So if you do have more than four folks, the other two could be friendlies in some way that kind of get wrangled up into it. But I suppose if you aren't obsessed with being true to the lore of Delta Green, it's not a big deal of you have. four or five agents. Absolutely. Definitely not. Yeah.

Do, you know, the fun factor is what you make it. So do whatever you're comfortable with doing as a handler or whatever your players are going to get the most enjoyment out of, for sure. Well, I don't know. After all this talk about the campaign so far, I feel a lot more confident in just like even approaching it. We know the basic outline. We have a basic understanding of our enemy.

We know how to start taking notes properly when we read this. So thanks for the tips so far. Absolutely. Yeah, anytime. Now, however, the crazy train cannot stop here. If you at home have enjoyed today's episode, please stay tuned because we will be releasing more episodes that go into even more detail about each specific chapter of the campaign, more tips and tricks on how to drive your players insane.

There is so much left to discuss, and I can't wait to get to it. Now, here's a special thing. Every week, we are going to release two versions of the show. There will be a public episode similar to this that gives a broad overview and kind of a basic rundown of what you should expect. Then, there will be a Patreon exclusive episode that you can get only on our Patreon, Made ARP, that goes into the real nitty-gritty. A lot more detail. We're going to use visuals. We're going to go over scenario-specific advice and a lot more.

If you aren't already a patron of Mayday Rollplay, head over to patreon.com forward slash Mayday RP to sign up where at any patron level you can get access to these exclusive episodes. I hope you enjoyed yourself. I hope you got something useful out of this video. Everyone, thank you so much for listening and for supporting us. We hope to see you again. Be seeing you all.