Mayday Plays - 🕳️The Dead Drop | "A Rookie's Guide to a Night at the Opera" | September 2024

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

Are you new to Delta Green but have no idea where to begin? The Dead Drop has got you covered. Join Vince and Sergio as they cover the top 10 most frequently asked questions from new handlers and agents. After watching this, we know you'll walk away confident to run your first game of Delta Green. The boys also interview Caleb Stokes, the Ennie award-winning author of God's Teeth. They discuss Caleb's inspirations for the campaign, his life now as an Arc Dream contributor, and advice for aspiring game designers and writers. The Patreon version of this episode contains over 50 minutes of bonus advice from the FAQ and more answers from Caleb. You can watch the extended episodes of every Dead Drop by joining us at the $5 tier over @ http://patreon.com/maydayrp --- 👕 MERCH: http://ko-fi.com/maydayrp & https://mayday-merch.printify.me/products 💵 Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/maydayrp 📰 Join our newsletter: eepurl.com/iIVUjo 🎙 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/maydayrp/ 🔴 Website: http://maydayroleplay.com/ 🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@maydayroleplay 👾 Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/maydayroleplay 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maydayrp Thanks for your support! 00:00 Intro 01:38 A Rookie's Guide to a Night at the Opera 2:06 1. What books do I need? 5:48 2. Session/Campaign length? 7:59 3. Where can I find a group to play? 8:58 4. How to play Delta Green? 14:00 5. How do I manage NPC's? 17:08 6. Should I run a Session 0? 20:44 Media Inspirations that feel like DG 22:05 7. How to mitigate failed rolls? 22:44 8. How much backstory does my agent need? 25:09 9. Which scenarios should I NOT start with? 25:56 The ideal party size? 28:20 10. Running Program vs Outlaws? 30:31 Caleb Stokes intro 31:25 Ennie awards experience 32:24 How did Caleb discover Delta Green? 33:13 Caleb's involvement with RPPR 35:59 What is Delta Green to Caleb? 38:04 Caleb's tips for new handlers 41:29 Writing God's Teeth 44:24 How to pitch GT to your table 46:00 What inspired so much work from Caleb? 48:46 Caleb's favorite scenario from God's Hunt 49:50 Working with Arc Dream 51:43 Caleb's advice for aspiring game designers 53:42 Caleb's future projects 55:29 Patron questions answered 58:14 Thanks to Caleb Stokes! 59:20 Outro

Welcome everyone, I'm Sergio, the handler for Mayday's Doomed to Repeat campaign, and with me as always is my brother in Cthulhu, Black Project Gaming's Vince. Good to see you brother. Good to be seeing you my friend. In this September edition of the Dead Drop, we have assembled a frequently asked questions for Delta Green, a must watch for new players and handlers alike, packed with everything you need to know to run your first night at the Opera. We're also thrilled to feature an interview with Caleb Stokes, this year's Any Award Winner for Best Long Form Adventure with God's Teeth. We dive into his early career as a game author, his

work with Art Dream, and what's next for him after God's Teeth. If you enjoy the show, make sure to like and subscribe, leave a review for us on Spotify or Apple podcasts, or leave a comment below. Doom to Repeat 3 has come to a close. Episode 29 was released the weekend of this recording. So if you haven't had a chance to check out the award-winning AP, now is the perfect time to catch up.

If you've been looking for a run of God's teeth, Vince is running it for his Black Project Gaming team, and the first five episodes are available by joining our Patreon at any level. Time to get out those D-hundreds, brush up on those lethality rules, and pretend you know how law enforcement works, because you have found the Dead Drop.

Here at the Dead Drop, we are always looking for ways to be helpful to agents and handlers alike. And recently we noticed a collection of posts on the Delta Green subreddit asking some beginner questions about how to get into the game. So we thought it'd be a good idea to assemble an FAQ that answers all of them at once. Yeah. So the next time someone posts in your Discord or Reddit asking, what books do I need?

Or how do the rules work? You can send them this link to this video and all will be made clear. Vince, where should we begin? You know, I really want to start with hands down one of the most common questions I see, which is what books do I need to run Delta Green? Full stop, the first one you should start with is Really Need to Know because it's free. It has a condensed, concise

version of the rules. It doesn't have all the professions and a lot of the other details that are in the agent's handbook, but it is more than enough to get you started, get your roll and dice, get you playing, and getting you used to the game. Now with Need to Know, if you decide you want to throw some pre-generated characters your way, again, because not all the professions and not all the details are included in the Need to Know guide versus the Agent's Handbook, there are free pre-gens available on the Delta Green website. So feel free to head on over there, download them all, share them with your players, let them pick, and then there you go. You are more than ready to begin running your first game. And we'll be sure to include that link

in the description for those pre-gens. One thing I did fail to mention is the briefing documents. This is a free PDF you can download on DriveThruRPG that kind of supplements the need-to-know guide. The one area I've used the briefing documents the most is using their incursion generator. There is a D100 table that you can use to generate a random incursion. And what I've done is I've often provided that to my players if they've been having a difficult time coming up with, you know, how did my agent join Delta Breed? What was their inciting incident? That's usually what I'll throw their way so they can maybe get some ideas flowing, get those juices flowing, and figure out how it was they came to be

in the program or the outlaws. Now, once you've decided you're ready to invest in Delta Green, go ahead and pick up that agent's handbook. That is really going to be your core rulebook for the world of Delta Green. It's going to have everything you need to know to get running, to get playing and more. It's going to have some basic lore, some basic information on your various federal law enforcement, department of defense, agencies and organizations. But if you really want to take it to the next level, really dive into the lore and the meta-narrative surrounding Delta Green, you're going to need to pick up the Handler's Guide. Now keep in mind, it is not essential to run Delta Green. It is not an essential component. There are some nice to haves in there, specifically with regards to a natural rituals, entities, artifacts, that sort of thing, but it's not a make or break component of being able to

run the game for your table or even play it. In fact, if you're a player, I would stay away from the Handler's Guide entirely. You don't need it. If you're going to run it though, and you really want to dive into what makes Delta Green, Delta Green, its history, its future, the Handler's Guide is a must buy. I think it's worth it because like you mentioned earlier, you have the unnatural tomes, you have spells or hypergeometry in this case, you have the stat blocks for monsters and the unnatural. I think as a handler, it is definitely essential. And I think the reading the lore just gives you so much inspiration for your own games.

Last but not least, if you are a completionist as either a handler or a player, you'll want to pick up The Complex. The Complex is a great little book that has even more federal agencies, even more organizations, including clear defense contractors like I believe CACI is in there, C-A-C-I. That's a great resource to provide to your players if they are not 100% satisfied with the organizations and agencies that are included in the agent's handbook. All the other books are either scenarios or supplements meant to add more content to your game, but they're ultimately unnecessary. Scenario collections are really going to be the best bang for your buck.

These are A Night at the Opera, Dead Drops, Control Group, and Black Sites. So another question that I see often is asking about session or campaign length. How long should a scenario be? How long should I run my campaign? And this really kind of depends on a couple of different factors. On average, I find, and Vince, let me know your opinion. The average scenario can usually be completed in two to three sessions. I agree with that. Yeah. When we ran through a night at the opera for Black Project,

that was typically what we were averaging about three to four episodes per scenario in the collection. A campaign is going to be a little bit different, obviously, right? And I think that it's similar to other TTRPG campaigns. You can expect several months to probably a year of time required to complete a campaign. Now there's something unique to Delta Green, which are the shotgun scenarios.

These are usually fan created or user created scenarios that are short and sweet. Sometimes they are created for contests, but typically they can be completed in one session. And I've run several shotgun scenarios and almost always it can be completed in one session. So if you just want a taste of Delta Green, maybe go to the shotgun scenario database,

which we will include in the description for a link. But like I said a little bit earlier, the mileage kind of varies depending on your group. You can expect a group that is obsessed with looking up every clue, turning over every rock, it's going to add considerable amount of time. But if you have a group, kind of like how Black Project was with Impossible Landscapes, where they just kind of want to barrel through something,

you're going to get through it a lot faster. I think what's nice about Delta Green is that handlers can speed up and slow down the game according to these constraints. If your players are floundering, you can speed things up and feed them clues or introduce NPCs that are going to tell them things, they're going to move things along. So I think the handler has a lot of control over how fast or slow things go. I'd agree with that. Yeah, the handler handler fiat rules the day and you can include complications or help grace the skids, so to speak, to get things moving in the right direction. But one thing that bears mentioning is not everyone

has a local group or even an online group in order to play. What's good is that you can find games by looking in very specific places. You can look for games as either a handler or an agent on the various discords that are available. There's the Impossible Landscapes Discord, there's the Night at the Opera Discord, the old Iba Goodie, you've got Reddit, either for Delta Green itself or the LFG subreddit. You can check out local stores, you can head over to start playing if you're not afraid to put down a little money to get the handler to run a game for you. But there are with the advent of things like roll 20 with forums, with discords, there are plenty of options to get out there to try to find like-minded individuals to either want to run or play this game.

My advice personally, I would start with the discords and then I would hit up the Delta green Reddit and those are going to be usually your best bets. If you haven't found something by that point, I would be genuinely surprised. I think it's important that we cover some of the basic mechanics of the game because while I do think the book does a good job of explaining the mechanics, sometimes some folks, myself included, it just requires a different perspective to fully grok the rules, you know, to fully understand what they're trying to tell you. If I can begin and Vince, feel free to kind of jump

in when you have your thoughts about this. The first obvious thing is that Delta Green works on a percentile dice system. You'll have a D100 and a D10 that you roll for most roles, specifically your skills that you have. With these kinds of percentile dice systems, you wanna roll under your skill rate. So let's say you have a 70 in firearms. You, yes, a success is rolling under 70. But I feel like in Delta Green, you really wanna have the attitude of rolling

as close to the skill rating number as possible, because it becomes important when contested roles come into play. If you are wrestling a weapon out of a cultist's hands and your handler asks you to make a contested skill roll to get it from them, if they roll a 60 and you roll a 50, guess what? They're keeping that weapon. And the opposite is true, is if you roll higher. So I think it's important to think of the game in the sense of, I want to get as close to my target numbers possible, because it will always guarantee that I succeed if I'm in a contest with someone else. Do you feel like that's a good way of looking at it?

Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. At the end of the day, I think I heard somebody describe it as blackjack rules. You want to roll as high as possible under your rating because even when it comes to a contested role, like you said, that's gonna guarantee success every time. There are no degrees of success, like there are in Call of Cthulhu, which I think is worth mentioning. You either succeed or you don't, which I kind of enjoy.

You don't have to do any math on the fly with, is it this much over the difficulty? Like none of that. It's either black and white, either succeed or you don't. It really just comes into play with those contestant rules. I understand the Call of Cthulhu rules, but I think sometimes there are certain mechanics that just add complexity that isn't necessary. And I do prefer the more streamlined version of Delta Green. There are critical successes and critical failures though in Delta Green. So if you roll doubles,

which I believe is the same rule in Call of Cthulhu, and you are under your skill rating, that is considered a crit. But if you roll doubles above your skill rating, that is considered a critical failure. So that's the distinction there. I think another very important rule that takes some time to understand is

lethality. I learned this the hard way, even in recording Doom to Repeat, there were moments where I kind of fumbled around lethality. So Vince, hold my hand as we go through this, but I'm going to talk it out. You tell me where I'm wrong, if I am. The first thing to understand about

lethality is that's specific for certain weapons and the idea is that it's a way of making it clear that this weapon is probably going to kill somebody, but there's always this degree of chance that it might not. We had Dennis Detwiller on and he explained that he had a professional in the military say, I need a rule system that a missile can be dropped on somebody and there's still a chance of them walking out alive because I've seen it with my own eyes. Right? So that's the philosophy behind the lethality rating.

And it basically works where you make an attack role, you then roll the lethality rating and it basically works where you make an attack roll you then roll the lethality roll. If the lethality roll succeeds and usually it's a pretty low number like a 10% 15% if you roll under that number whatever you're shooting at or bombing just dies. Now there's a little bit of a spoiler here in the Handler's Guide there are many unnatural entities that either mitigate or are completely unaffected by lethality rolls. But the typical human is going to immediately die if you succeed on that lethality roll. But even if you don't succeed on that lethality roll, you look at the D100 roll that you made

and you count both the D100 and the D10 as D10s basically so the D10 if the D100 rolled a 20 and your D10 rolled a 5 You count it as a 2 and a 5 you add those together and that's the the final damage score the only thing I would point out is that the Attack roll does have to hit and then you make the lethality roll where you roll those the two the 1d100 or the 2d10 and then if it succeeds the human target immediately drops to zero if it fails you just like you said add those two dice together and that's usually going to be a that's going to be a significant amount of HP for sure as well yeah so yeah that's one of the

benefits of a lethality roll yeah Yeah, so it still feels lethal. There's still a very high chance of killing somebody, but it's not like a guaranteed death. One particular thread was about, you know, how do I portray an NPC? I'm someone who's not used to portraying other characters, especially more than one at any given time. What do I need to keep in mind? What are some good quick reference tidbits I can use to really help simplify the process of both keeping track of and portraying multiple different people? And I saw a lot of fantastic suggestions. One of the ones that stood out to me was coming up with these flashcards or flashcard equivalents with names, mannerisms, motivations, and maybe a specific clue that they're going to hand out.

And I thought that was genius. I, and I apologize if you're watching, I couldn't find the username who left that particular comment, there was more than one, but that was great advice. I really enjoyed that. I really loved that. That's something I'll probably take with me and use in the future as well.

I really liked the clue aspect specifically, because I think that there are so many situations and scenarios where one NPC does have a very important clue or something that they need to get across to the players. And so I think this is good advice for RPGs in general, but for Delta Green specifically, this is great. Something I would also keep in mind is the NPC doesn't necessarily need to have a clue something to give, but they can also help rule something out You know, they can also provide that that that negative that you know

No, this didn't happen or I didn't see this and that helps either Rule something out for the agents push them in a different direction or either confirm or refute something that they previously suspected But a good a good thing to keep in mind with NPCs is have a couple descriptors on hand. You know, how do they look? How do they, what's their voice sound like? You don't have to be a professional voice actor. I suck at voices. I'll never do it. Every now and again, I'll whip out an accent and it's terrible. But, you know, what does their voice sound like? What are their mannerisms? What are they dressed like? Stuff like that to really help ground

and paint that picture to your players is gonna be great. And anything you can use as a quick reference is gonna be even better because as the handler, you're processing and tracking and storing a lot of information. And sometimes, you know, sometimes I'm terrible at this. I just won't describe an NPC. I'll just give a name and then we're off to the races.

And you know, don't be afraid to take a moment when the agents meet a new NPC, look at the flashcard, read it, process what it's telling you and try to memorize a couple of those things as you read it and then go into it. I think so often when we have the spotlight on us, you don't want to break that verisimilitude. You don't want to say, hold on guys, let me look at this flash card. But it's okay, let that tension build. You know, if I'm on the other side of that screen and my handler looks

down at a card, reads it, thinks for a second, and then goes into it, I know that he's now prepared and I know that maybe there's something important to this person. That's one of the great things about APs that does not translate to table play is that we can edit out all the times we say, hold on a second guys, I need to look that up because I completely forgot. So let's talk about session zeros. We at Mayday demand session zeros for all of our games. It's vital and we've seen the proof is in the pudding at how they really help shape and improve our games. Let's talk about some of the important things.

If you have a group that has never played an RPG before, first of all, congratulations on running them in Delta Green. But you should definitely have an intro to this RPG. Explain what it is, explain the game, explain how the basics of the mechanics work. A lot of times it's good to do it in the session zero where you both explain the rules and you create the characters. Do it all at once so that everybody has that chance at the table to ask all the questions that they need, depending on the skills and the experience of the players.

Character creation in Delta Green is something you can definitely do together as a group. You don't necessarily have to go over player backgrounds or backstories together because as my group is want to do, they love to keep secrets from each other and have different surprises that come up in people's backgrounds. So you don't necessarily have to get into the nitty gritty of who this character is,

but sometimes it's great to just sit down and create these characters together so you can see where gaps and skill sets are and decide where you want to fit in. You know, well, okay, we've got the shooter, we've got the face, you know, not that these are traditional rules that, you know, Delta Green typically has. Don't get stuck in that trap. Overlap is not a bad thing in Delta Green. It is not something to shy away from. It is not something to be afraid of, but that's where, you know, doing character

creation as a group can be really useful because you can see how these skills are lining up and where you could fit in and maybe you know stand out a little bit more. And Vince you turn me on to a very interesting kind of way of summarizing a session zero. Someone named Patrick O'Leary created the CATS breakdown. C stands for concept, aim, tone, and subject. Let's talk about those a little bit. Yeah I really like this. This is essentially a really concise way of thinking about how to pitch a game, campaign, scenario, whatever to your players. You start with the concept, you know, which is like at the thousand foot,

you know, very high level. What is this game about? Then specifically you go into the aim, you know, what are you as the players trying to accomplish? Is victory possible? Can everyone lose? Are we trying to tell a very specific type of story? Then you've got tone, which when it comes to Delta Green is critically important, especially for groups that are coming from something like D&D, right? Where it's very heroic fantasy, it's a power fantasy, you know, it is night and day compared to Delta Green. You really want to hammer home the tone. Have a quick conversation about what that is, what is the default, are there different options for gameplay, and then more importantly, come to a consensus on what the group wants. Do they want to play a deadly series?

Do they want that versimilitude? Or do they want to play it more gonzo, pulpy, you know, what have you? That's critical. And finally, the subject matter. You know, what ideas might be explored during a campaign, during a scenario? Do those, you know, does that subject matter make anyone uncomfortable? Discuss those boundaries. And that's where safety tools, content warnings are going to come into play. I know safety tools are for some reason controversial. They fucking shouldn't be. They are critical. Safety tools are great for building and engendering

trust with your table. I wanted to mention some media recommendations, especially for players and handlers that are new to Delta Green or just kind of trying to get a feel for what the game is like. Like we have mentioned many times before, True Detective is an excellent example of the tone and feel for it. The Outsider is a TV show that I cannot recommend enough. It's a 2020 film or TV show with Ben Mendelsohn in it. That is very creepy, very Delta Green. There's the obvious X-Files.

There is The Objective, a 2008 film that I've seen recommended a lot. Sicario even is very good at kind of showing what it's like to be part of a conspiracy where you have very little control and you don't understand what the bigger picture is. There is Natalie Portman's Annihilation, Fallen with Denzel Washington, which was actually an inspiration for me when it comes to Mallory's antics in Doom to Repeat 2. Her abilities and stuff I very much mimicked off of that film. There's also a film called The Changeling which is an older film. There is the episode The Autopsy from Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities which is pretty much a straight-up copy of

puppet shows and shadow plays. There is Archive 81, which is very reminiscent of Impossible Landscapes. So lots of stuff that you can check out. And I'm sure if you Google it, you'll find even more. One of the questions that came up recently on Reddit was how do we mitigate failed roles? At the end of the day, you only roll when failure is possible, but most importantly, interesting interesting and that was from ursysrex01 on reddit. That's absolutely it. You don't need to mitigate failed roles. Like there is no fail forward really with Delta Green. Failure is as much an important you know mode of storytelling as success is. Can it be frustrating? Yeah you don't want to

lock anybody out of a particular path. That's why there's multiple clues, or there should be multiple clues to help get you to some semblance of resolution. A common question we see also is questions regarding agent backstories. How much is too much? And for me as a handler, I have to say that I love to see players write a lot of backstory, but it doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to read it because unless you're running a very specific campaign where you want these backstories to come into play, really all that the handler needs to worry about are what are your bonds and who do you work for. I think that it's fine if players write a lot of backstory, I just don't think that it's fine if players write a lot of

backstory. I just don't think you should be offended if the handler doesn't necessarily read all of your backstory. And what I would recommend maybe more than anything is that your backstory should try to find ways to connect to the other agents. Yes granted there are probably a lot of working groups where they don't know each other outside of the situation. But if it's a working group that you want to establish has been working together for a little while, you should be creating connections between the other agents. We did this one job and this one thing happened. I remember when we ran, you ran for us observer effect kind of offline and me and Zakiya and Eli

just came up with this idea that we had some other scenario, some other opera that we were involved in that had that involved one of them pulling out a shotgun and I think somebody lost hearing due to that shotgun being used and so there was this kind of subtle interplay between the three of us where we were worried about that character pulling that shotgun out again. But it's that kind of stuff that really adds a lot to a character to where you could know nothing about that character, but you know that there's history between them and somebody else. And that is what

I would suggest players focus on. You know, we'll use impossible landscapes as an example, I wanted detailed backstoriesories because I wanted everyone that was in that campaign to have a connection to some form of art. You know, for example, you know, Cammie's character had connection to architecture. Jack had connection to street art. Doug's character had a connection to Doug's character had a connection to engineering design, and then Brett's character had a connection to like manifestos and writing and stuff like that. Not necessarily the King and Yellow play itself,

but writing in general. So it's gonna depend on the campaign and the scenario. Another very important question that I see asked very often is what scenario or campaigns should I not start with? There's the obvious ones to start with, last things last, and maybe some of the things from Night at the Opera as good starting sessions or campaigns. What are the things you should not start with? Well, it seems maybe kind of obvious to us, but all of the really big campaigns seem

like the most obvious. Impossible Landscapes, God's Teeth, Iconoclasts. I think these are the three maybe most popular and biggest of the ArchDream campaigns. And I think for good reason, waiting until you've got a couple scenarios under your belt is worth it, because there's just so much information to these campaigns. Here's a very basic question. How many players do we, do we play with? Yes. Me personally, three to four. I think three to four is a good number. Most, you know, named or lettered cells from the Cowboys and Outlaws era are going to be three members.

Four if you want to throw a Friendly in the mix, that's regularly assigned to them, right? Three to four is a good mix. I think you start hitting five and six and may start getting a little unwieldy, but it's perfectly possible, especially if you're playing a program campaign where larger working groups are maybe par for the course at that point. But I think, yeah, I think campaign, now that I think about it, campaign type, which you'll get into Surge in a little bit, may dictate how many players you want. Three to four for an outlaws game,

more than that if you wanna go program. That would be my advice. I like the justification that kind of in-game lore, three to four is the way that it works. So that is kind of the preferred method. But like you said, yeah, with Mayday, I had six players that I had to deal with and I mean, we were able to make it work because we kind of broke them up into groups.

You know, there's a research team and there's the security detail. So they felt like they had objectives and things to do. But the problem with those larger groups is that time becomes a factor. I mean, combat moves relatively fast in Delta Green, but I mean, six people in combat will take 20 minutes sometimes,

whereas three people will move a lot faster and smoother. And you know, you have to jump between perspectives a hell of a lot more when there's, you know, up to six people. So keeping it small is good and preferred, but I understand sometimes handlers might have a group of folks who are very excited to play and you kind of have to accommodate with a larger group. Just be aware that time is going to slow down when you have more people.

Absolutely, I agree with that. And I think if you are a handler who's trying to accommodate a larger group because everybody's super stoked to play, don't program, absolutely. But if you've got a smaller group, I think having less resources available to you and less people backing you up is kind of a cornerstone of an outlaws game. I think having less people really helps perpetuate that tone and that stress and that drama for an outlaws game because Because you've got when you've got less people watching your back.

That's a tough time for sure. And that leads us right to our next very common question, which is should I run the players or the agents under the program or should I run them under the outlaws? And really it's a question of do I want to run the game in easy mode or hard mode? Because if you think about the difference between the two, the program has access to money.

They have access to the government. They can do things like give the players a private jet to fly around if they need it. Whereas the outlaws, it's basically saying, hey, we need you to do this thing and you need to do it on your own dime. And that presents a whole host of other challenges, which I think some groups would really thrive in, but I could see some beginning groups maybe really struggling with, you know, understanding what the hell

an FBI agent has access to in their own personal lives. You know, it's easy, easy, you know, Tilted Green is not an easy game, but easy mode versus hard mode. I love the way I hard mode. I love that analogy. If it were me, start with program. And if the outlaws is something you really wanna get into, tailor your campaign, your first campaign, in a way that'll introduce the schism between the Delta Greens, between the program and the outlaws.

So that way, when you do jump into an outlaws scenario or an outlaws campaign following whatever program game you're running, it's, you know, the players already maybe have some understanding of the world at large. Or if you just want to spring it on them, you know, you go from playing one game to the next where they're maybe playing older characters, more seasoned characters, and they're expecting all the resources of the program at their disposal because that's what they're used to. And then you pull the rug out from underneath them and they're getting contacted via signal sites

and dead drops and old school Cold War era trade craft. They're gonna learn real quick. Yeah, I like that. And I like that framing device of jumping between scenarios between the two different groups because the players get to experience what the difference is and they might start asking questions of,

well, why does this group get a bunch of resources and this group doesn't, and they start putting the pieces together, and they start understanding the meta-narrative. Hell yeah. Well, that's it for now. If you think we missed anything, please do not hesitate to let us know in the comments below,

and we will absolutely include them in an FAQ part two. Our special guest today is a writer, podcaster, and designer of tabletop games. He has contributed to numerous RPGs, including Delta Green, Eclipse Phase, and Rain. He was once best known as the creator of the Any nominated Red Markets, a game of economic horror, but now, in my opinion, he is best known as the writer of the any award winning Delta Green campaign, God's Teeth, the owner of heaven on games. It's Caleb Stokes. Welcome, sir. Hi, thanks for having me. I got jealous once you had Shane and Dennis on. That's how we get everybody from jealous. Well, they waited till I had

an any they've been there's a little slot in the door. You got to put the metal through and then you get the dead drop and invite. Absolutely. I love that. Seriously, congratulations on that innie award. We know you've been nominated once before for Red Markets. Can you detail the innie awards experience for us now that you're a winner? It's, the Any's are a land of contrast.

You know, when you work in RPGs, you know so many people who are brilliant and who have never like sold five books, not to mention been nominated in Any. And then you know people that like you loathe that are like flavor-flavaved with gold necklaces and then like so you're always at this point where you're just like it's political it doesn't matter it's basically a popularity contest you weren't sad when

you didn't win high school president what are you and then you get in the room and you're just like I'm having a panic attack I'm dying if they say my name I'm gonna fall over dead like've got to have both thoughts in your head at the same time. I'm immensely grateful for it and it's very awesome to receive one, yes. Now Caleb, in terms of the authors that have worked on Delta Green, you're relatively new to the scene. So I wanted to get a better sense of your history. You know, first of all, when did you first discover Delta Green and kind of what drew you to it?

I think it was the third role playing game I'd ever played. I didn't start role playing until I was 26. And as an impressionable young mid 20 year old, my first experience was Call of Cthulhu. Then it was a couple of sessions of D&D Fourth at Darksun before that fizzled out. And then the third one I think was a Delta Green scenario run by Ross and I've been hooked ever since. So that was my first experience with it. It was formative. Yeah What were the origins of your involvement with RPPR and eventually the God's Teeth AP campaign? Yeah, so My first involvement with RPPR was it was after my first year teaching and if you know anything about teaching high school

It was like 70 hour weeks Yeah, and then I woke up from my first year after college and realized I didn't have any friends because I worked 70 hour weeks. And so I had a guy that I went to college with that was still in town. He's like, hey, we're gonna go play a role playing game. I'm like, I tried to run those in high school before everyone called me a nerd and then show up to my house.

So I would like to get in on that. And then, so I go and it's Ross's house and he just puts out a bunch of microphones and says, it's a radio show now. I had no idea what we were doing. And we played through that and I just stuck around ever since, because it's that hard to find a gaming group. It's okay to sign away your likeness to the internet

if you can get it one that meets regularly. So I did that for RPPR and I did that for years. I ran my first game and it was popular and then I self-funded my first book, No Security, which was a Lovecraftian cosmic horror scenario set in the Great Depression. And then by then I did red markets and funded all of that and did the whole game line myself. And eventually God's Teeth campaign came about. I lost my job 2013-2014 teaching for a while because I taught books as an English teacher in Missouri, which is unforgivable. You got to fire people for that. And so I was unemployed and working part-time in a private mental health facility

that was mandated by state reporting for juvenile crimes. So like a mental institution for children focused on recovery, but court mandated. And spoiler alert, that sucked. And I had also lost my career and I was not in a great place and the new Delta Green RPG came out so I said guys I don't really like read a bunch of books do a bunch of research that seems you know nerd shit not gonna do that but I got some pretty horrific stuff that I see for 12 hours during a night shift and

while I'm not gonna write about those kids or their legitimate struggles it makes me feel things and let could we all just work through that together and I'll give you some tentacles to shoot at and they agreed and it became like the most popular thing that RPPR posted for a while there so that's awesome and and in the the grand tradition of role-playing games of working out your uh trauma through the through the game sounds like you followed that suit you just got to tell everybody upfront. You don't want to spring it on them. Now one question we kind of ask all of our interviewees. Now that you've written several scenarios for Delta Green and of course God's Teeth, what is and isn't Delta Green to you? It's not austere. That is what I think is my favorite part about Delta Green that I struggle

to put in the words a lot because I feel horror that is larger than me and larger than I can comprehend pretty typically. It may not be cosmic in terms of galactic in scale but I do feel like I have no handle, no agency to reach upon it. And what I love about Delta Green is that doesn't take place in my ancestral mance that I inherited from a weird uncle, and I'm not wandering around by candlelight looking my many leather-bound tomes and thinking about, oh, what a burden to own land. Like I don't like that. It makes me feel nothing. I just like it just like I can't get fear there.

But like Delta Green, the veil gets poked through like behind a Denny's parking lot or in a trailer park or in holding at your local county jet. Like, and that's that's what I love about it. It just makes everything feel more real to me because any problem that huge is going to be a problem for everyone, including people who don't have all the benefits of, like, a trust fund or being descended from nobility or whatever the hell Lovecraft is on about. So I really love Delta Green and that it's, like, the people's nightmarish galactic horror. At least that's how I envision it. So I would say it's not austere, and I would say it is,

if not nihilistic, fatalistic. You need to acknowledge that you're not gonna win this. This is, hey, somebody wrote a poem once about raging against the dying of the light. You wanna try, that's Delta Green. Like, you're not gonna make it, but you're gonna give it a shot. And the way you do that is going to be an intensely defining character arc, which is the other thing I love about the game.

So one of the segments we're going to do in this episode is we're going to talk about tips for new handlers, folks who may be new to Delta Green, who maybe haven't run it before because you go on Reddit and every day there's sometimes the same questions, but usually a lot of questions about what scenario do I run, how do I run it. What would be your tips for handlers who may be new to Delta Green? I would do that, like asking the questions. I've seen the community be very responsive to that and there's of course creators like

yourself and hopefully I am providing an example on dead channels So that's sort of online. Hey, could someone help me out research? I think has been remarkably fruitful and Numbers of discords and numbers of social media So I think that's a good start. The other thing I would say is don't go big One spell one little creature don't go big. One spell, one little creature, maybe they never even see it. That is more than enough as long as you deal with the fact that human contact with even the acknowledgement that something like that can exist, not to mention like learning how it works or to summon it or to control it, is

anathema to a healthy normal brain. Like, so the horror is going to come from people and just accept that you just need a little drop of that unnatural. And the whole, the whole bowl is going to curdle. Um, and you're going to have a very horrific experience for your players. So don't like bring in the a cell, hella carrier and the war between four different governments, unnatural institutions and like, don't, no, no, no, not that. Go smaller. Whatever small you think it needs to be, go smaller than that.

Because that is all it really takes. And that keeps the horror fresh and the stakes high, rather than numbing a group of people with, here's the new thing you recognize. Here's the new thing from your, yeah, I read the stats for this. You know what I mean? Oh yeah. That's good advice. Keep it simple. That's how it works. I can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but one of my biggest takeaways from Delta Green and

the years I've been running it is, you know, it's not the unnatural itself that's evil. It's, I mean, the defining characteristic of it is that you know, it's not the unnatural itself that's evil. It's I mean, the defining characteristic of it is that it's indifferent. It's people and its use of it and its exploitation of it that's quote unquote, evil. Would you would you agree with that? Yeah, yeah. And I wouldn't even say you like need to use it. Like, imagine what happens if like I know that aspects of the United States government have been infiltrated and paper clipped scientists from a Nazi organization that built literal zombies. Like, what is a capitalist realism or like liberal appeal to me gonna do?

I should obey your parking laws now? Like that's something I should be concerned about. I didn't tithe enough at church. That's a problem Disneyland was run by a guy who made zombies, but you're cool with that like it would just it would poison Every aspect of your life like just the the mere context of knowing that shit would make you so Alienated from your fellow man that like you wouldn't even need to be like I will become a mortal and achieve Ultimate power for it to completely ruin you

So that that's basically my thesis just show the variety of ways a human mind is gonna spin off when it comes in contact this stuff Well speaking of let's get into God's teeth. So yeah Caleb you have explained elsewhere in other interviews kind of your inspiration behind God's teeth. You mentioned your time in this young adults institution and some of the themes that you got from working there. I am really interested to know how long from working at that place thinking, oh, this might make an interesting campaign or inspired something to create a campaign before going from your mind to paper, before you started running it for RPPR, before you thought, oh, maybe I should actually turn this into something. Yeah, so I had that job at like 2014 and it was night shift,

so I wrote most of it like on top of the washing machine where I was doing all the laundry and the dishes then I ran it for RPPR around 2015 and it really kind of took off because I Was using the basically the released at gen con beta of the Delta green RPG rules So we lucked out and now I was we posted it around the same time that the big you know book kickstarter was coming out for the new system. So we did that from but it only ever was like a thing I was writing with my friends but then it got popular rppr. I'm like you know what maybe they'll accept this. I know Shane I've worked with them on better angels before maybe we can pitch. So I wrote a big pitch document out and I gave it to them and they turned me down flat and then 2018 rolled around and the

labyrinth Kickstarter came out and Delta Green needed stretch goals and there were like hundreds of people being like do God's teeth, do God's teeth. There's just a professionally annoying Shane and Dennis. And Shane contacts me, he's like, look, I like it, but like, I don't think you get it. I don't think you get it. Like, you know, you should never get super powers from this stuff. We don't want to be world of darkness.

And I'm just like, yeah, it's not a super, it's a curse. Like being a protagonist in a story, if you're like the real Knights Templar and God says, no, you don't get a life anymore. You fight demons now That is not like you win like that is nightmarish That destroys all of it. No one wants to be a protagonist It's just you become a protagonist in a very horrible specific way and it's going to ruin your whole life It's like okay, you get it. You can write this for us.

And we're like, okay, cool, yeah. So it didn't become like a thing I was going to write out until 2018 in the Labyrinth Kickstarter. Before that, it was just a weird game I ran with my friends. I wanted a monster of the week framework and I wanted something that was going to carry you through hell, you know, easy company style for the unnatural. And Delta Green wouldn't do that as an organization because it's bad HR,

but Bass doesn't care. Bass don't care. On another note, any advice for pitching this campaign to a table as a handler? I mean, is there a table that absolutely should not play God's Teeth? I think most tables shouldn't play God's Teeth, just like most tables shouldn't play most campaigns. That's fair. That's fair.

Don't throw a pre-generated D&D campaign to my table. We shouldn't play it. It's for different reasons, but you got to cater to your taste. I would say if you're going to pitch it to people, I would put the safety information up first. That is on the front pages of the book and on the front page when you buy a DT RPG. I'd be very honest about what it entails. I would say that I'm not going to be explicit about directly viewing the things, but much like movies, we're gonna cut away.

But I would also say, we're gonna try and be serious. And while I'm gonna cut away from the specific thing, it's not gonna be something pleasant. Like, it's gonna be a horror game. Respect the tone. Respect that this is an unnatural side story in a bigger real horror that happens every day. And what if we approach it as we're gonna occupy characters that are gonna go through something terrible and we're gonna see what happens to them. And then I would say that doesn't mean we're not gonna have fun,

that doesn't mean Rachel can't bring her muffins to game night, it doesn't mean something can't happen and we break character and have a laugh about it and go off the side. It just means that when the dice are out and when we're in the setting, we're gonna treat it seriously. That's all I would say, yeah.

And if somebody doesn't wanna do's all I would say. Yeah. And if nobody, if somebody doesn't want to do it, do something else. Yeah. Great advice. Yeah. So with God's hunt now out, it's very clear to me that the ideas just really kind of flowed out of you regarding this whole God's teeth concept. What is it about the concept of the campaign that has inspired so much work out of you? Well, using it to pay my rent is very inspiring.

I wake up every day, fired up to remain housed. Yeah, but in addition to that, I like the framework that I use in God's Teeth and the sort of narrative frame of, you're going to see more than your boss would necessarily desire you to for your longevity, just because you have a bigger boss now. And it let me tell some other stories about stuff that, like, are unrelated in terms of the, you know, Lovecraftian mythos explanation for where it comes from. But that's not how you find things. In Delta Green, you find things by going over the tripwires of the US bureaucracy and security state. And the variety of ways you can fuck that up are just endless. And so that's what God's Hunt really was. Like, what do you do when you've made something illegal for literal decades and then decide it's not anymore to the point where you actually can't enforce

it if something goes wrong? Like, what do you do when you spy on all of your own citizens and suddenly discover shit you didn't want to see? Like, what do you do when the internet becomes real as everyone's trying to make happen? Like, and I was I just want to write about those things in God's... like, what do you do when your co-workers are trying to kill you for God's law? So I just wanted to write about all those things but you can't really get the mythos team together without doing the, you know, thing I said too many many, too many unnatural things in the cook. So using the bass as sort of the frame device to get to these various one shots was what really inspired God's Hunt.

Gotcha. So you were, you just saw, oh there's so many things I can do with this concept of this God influencing them and that's where all this came from. Yeah, the original RPPR run was like 12 sessions, and there's like four scenarios. And you might get 12 sessions out of that in your own group, but there's like four scenarios in just God's teeth. But other than the 2001 scenario, the 16-year time jump, and then the ending at 2020, nothing else is really prescribed in the game. It's all vignettes and home scenes. Unless you buy God's Hunt and then you see like, what's your average day for working group Masticate? And it's never, never a good time.

Yeah. Do you have a personal favorite scenario in that collection that's coming out that you really enjoyed working on? I didn't enjoy working on it because it was a pain in the butt to write, but every time I run God's Light, it freaks people out so hard.

Because there's a way to do it with parallel narrative where you go fast enough that you get an unreliable narrator from the handler, basically, but it never gets to the point where people question that. And we're like, well, how do we keep playing at all? If everything you say to me is a lie, but they just get the unsettling thing of just like, he's not answering any of my questions correctly or maybe he is now or maybe

like did the rules of the game change? And then by then you're onto the next scene. And it just sort of, I've run that a couple of times and it's sort of like, by the end of it, the characters are like so ragged and insane from having gone through it that they they role play it pretty well by the end of it because it's sort of a discombobulating experience especially if you're a experienced delta green player. Interesting. Love that. With regards to our dream in general, after speaking with with some of the other folks and our dream with Dennis, with Shane,

it's become clear that you really are now part of a special circle of game writers and developers who have had their work published by Art Dream. Can you give us some perspective on going from being such a fan of the game to now producing content for them? Is it everything you thought it would be? Yeah, it's great. I love writing for the game and I love it. Is it everything you thought it would be? Yeah, it's great. I love writing for the game and I love it. Is it everything I thought it would be? No, because like, but like at the same time, what's your expectation of an RPG company? I've never seen one, I've never seen RPG company A that's run like RPG company B. It's not really a standardized experience. It can be a

little lonely sometimes, because like you'll turn it in and it'll take them two months to read it and they'll be like, it sucks, do it again. That can be hard, but I grew up in workshops, I went all the way through on a creative writing degree. I've been torn apart before, I've heard worse. The benefit to that is that they create work that is still yours. It is part of the game line, but God's Teeth is my book. You know, Shane and Dennis added things and made it much better, but it's still a thing that I would have written and nobody

else would have. And I think that's definitely true of Impossible Landscapes. I think that's absolutely true of Iconoclasts, which I hate having edited because now I can't play in it and I was so excited to read it. So I think you get, you know, the individual aesthetic of the artist and you still get the Delta Green line. And I think that finding a compatibility, like finding a Venn diagram that's a circle there of like things I want to say and things that this game is designed to say. That can be the tricky part of fitting new people into the group. I think your story inspires a lot of folks who might be interested in game design or getting into writing and producing RPGs.

Can you offer any advice for those who might be wanting to follow in your footsteps as a game author and designer? What have you learned that maybe you could share? Yeah, I will... I'm gonna parrot Robin Laws here. It's kind of cartoony, like when you bash through the brick wall, it leaves the shape of your exact body, and if somebody wants to come through that wall, they better be shaped exactly like me. exact body and if somebody wants to come through that wall they better be shaped exactly like me. So it's kind of hard to give like a prescription there because like I started in actual plays but the thing I do which I call actual plays now 90% of the people who listen to actual plays no longer regard our actual plays. Like the genre I started in has been redefined to the point

where I've been like excised out of it or into like a weird subcategory of it and like it's not something I did by choice it's just shuffling on the internet of culture so like any advice I give you now would probably be obsolete by the time this is posted. I would say in general you're gonna have to do some stuff for free. That sucks. You should own whatever you can and make sure you paid what you're worth and if not you should go try and do it yourself with crowdfunding tools of some sort. And you should be professional. Like, getting things done

will get you so far. It'll get you so far before you even need talent to kick in. And if you got talent on top of that, you're going to go miles and miles. But being reliable in a world of artists is you are the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. It is a superpower. If you say you're going to get it done on time and you get it done on time, or if you're not going to get it on time and you communicate that two weeks ahead with an email you are going to be light years ahead of most other applicants. Are there any future projects you're working on either for Hebenon or for

Art Dream that that you're excited about and able to discuss? Yeah so we are currently consolidating all of the Delta Green Patreons into DeltaGreen at Ghost.io and that is going to be also where we mirror the main Delta Green site. So I'm pivoting my entire backlog of audio catalog and all my PDFs over there. I will continue running Delta Green Dead channels for everyone who wants to say but with the recent Patreon billing changes, we've decided to try and over promise and get some more backers in there. So at $6 levels, you get everything I do, everything Dennis does and everything Shane does all in one place. So that is my current project is

migrating by hand three and a half years of podcasts, episodes to a different host. But you will get everything I make if you back Ghost.io for six a month. And you'll keep getting it if you stay on my Patreon. The other thing I'm currently working on is Final Passages, which is another stretch goal for the Labyrinth. These are the tie in starter one shot scenarios. You can work into any labyrinth campaign that deal with the different protagonists.

A lot like The Good Life by John Scott Stein, which has already been released. I don't know if you've read that yet. Yeah, we reviewed it. It's a great scenario. Yes, I am. I've written one based off New Life Fertility called Rejection that's currently up on the Patreon. And I am writing, you know, additional ones.

I'm writing about the wolves of Eric, the Viking bikers. Yeah. So I'm just gonna keep working through that until I have scenarios for all those little weirdos ready to go. And that'll be collected in the hardback whenever I finish it up. Hell yeah.

Let's get to some of the patron questions. We've got two of them. Vince, I'll take the first one if you wanna take the second. You got it. One of our patrons named Kirby's Double asks, Hi Caleb, long time Mayday role play and RPPR fan. My question for you is, do you feel driven to outdo yourself with each new project or do you focus more on scratching whatever creative it is at the time that is in your mind at

the time that is in your mind at the time? Definitely the latter Focus on whatever I'm obsessed with and can't work on anything else until I get it out is probably more my rationale In terms of outdoing myself I'm building the ship as it sails So, I've learned new skills since the last time I did it, because I'm not well educated or prepared. So the next one is usually ends up being better than the last one just by sheer dent of cussed repetition.

So yeah, that's my answer. Kirby's double, what happens if Kirby eats Kirby's double? Does he become himself? Oh, that's a great question. Yeah, that's a great question. That's a nightmare. Like I have to eat myself to maintain my identity. See, there we go. There's a scenario. There we go. Or a Boris right there.

Kirby. Snake eating its own tail. Kirby eating its own double. You heard it here first. We just inspired Caleb's next campaign. This next question is from Jason Krause and he writes, Hi Caleb and congratulations on your Any Award, may it be the first of many. Question, how did writing God's Teeth compare to your experience with Red Markets and your other published works? Was it more challenging in any way?

Yes. Yeah, significantly so. I probably wrote God's Teeth front to back like four times. Damn. I'm not saying I didn't revise my other stuff by any means, but I didn't go full like Joseph Heller Catch-22 on it, which appears to be the typical Arc Dream revision plan. So that's in the style guide. So it was more difficult than that in that I've

I've worked for another company, but I've never had them pay me to a point where I would do that many revisions. It's you know, you know, Arc Dream is very generous and if they like what you want, they're gonna have it and they're gonna support you while you make it. And that is great. So I've never had that support to do something that long before because I'm a podcast You know, you know the content machine like you can take you can take four months to edit this episode I think not like I think you're gonna I think it's gonna feed the beast a little sooner than that and that's typically where I'm at So that was the difference for God's teeth. Yeah, that's awesome of that well for God's Teeth. That's awesome.

Love that. Well, Caleb, we do plan on running a God's Teeth walkthrough like we did for Impossible Landscapes once Vince has completed his run for Black Project. And we'd love to invite you back. Would you be willing to return to us for us to ask some more campaign specific questions? Yeah, that'd be a great time.

Awesome. Well, thank you for your time so much. It's really been a pleasure to meet you. And just were so excited to see what more you're gonna produce For Delta green because everything's been so wonderful so far Thanks so much for having me. I love you guys. I love the the guns of Delta green thing. That was super helpful I just watched that oh, yeah This is the first Content creator for Delta green that was like I I watched something of yours and I liked it.

So that's awesome. Thank you. No, the number of times I've gotten things wrong about guns and then just it's the ninth. It's like the first 12 comments on whatever I post. You're doing the Lord's work out there helping us with our firearm verisimilitude. Oh man. Thank you so much. That's huge. I appreciate that. All right, Kayla. Well, that. Oh man, thank you so much. That's huge. I appreciate that. All right, Caleb, well thanks again. Yep, thank you.

Thanks for having me. Vince, it was so much fun talking to Caleb. I really think he brings a new fresh perspective to the game and he's just very funny. Yeah, he was funny as hell to talk to. I was a great interview, had a blast. But that's it for this episode. If you've got any questions or topics

you want to hear us talk about, let us know in the comments below. And also don't forget to check out our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash maydayrp, where you can get access to extended versions of every Dead Drop episode. If you read Vince's gun handout from the last episode, you'll notice that we didn't cover every single page about the high caliber rifles,

the body armor, the stances, and a lot more, including even more in-depth questions with Shane Ivey. So if you ever like an episode and you want to hear more about a certain subject, join the Patreon at the $5 level and you can get access to those extended videos. But until next time, stay safe everyone, and we'll see you next month. Be seeing you folks.