thanks.
Hey, I'm Patrick G.
I was the handler for Demnatia Memoriae for the fine people from Hands on the Door and uh Dead Letter Bureau.
I also helped uh edit and made some of the handouts for Demnatia Memoriae.
Is it cool?
Sam, I played mole and I'm from hand on the door also.
I'm the game mom.
And then I popcorned to Jimmy.
doubt.
uh
Yeah, I'm Jordan from Dead Letter Bureau and I was Agent Magpie today.
And I am Nick, I played Miles, and I'm from Dead Little Bureau as well, and I edit the show.
Over to you, Hank.
Hi, I'm Hank.
I wrote the campaign with lot of help from Patrick and yeah, just very excited that you guys uh got to play it.
Yeah, it was a blast.
Yeah, dude, it was really fun.
There were a bunch of times where I was like, fuck yeah, when stuff was happening.
So I was very stoked most.
I don't want to hype it too much, but I've played a lot of the scenarios, not necessarily campaigns, like the Delta Green official ones, and this was so much more fun.
The writing and stuff was much more interesting, and the twists and turns, I felt like it didn't follow that.
that like, hey, investigate, kind of fight a monster cover up, right?
Like the structure of this was really cool.
And I know it's kind of a, you can only do it once type of thing, but it's super cool.
So thank you.
Yeah.
yeah, definitely the takeaway when writing this was like go for the big swing because it started out as a single scenario adventure and then basically it after Yeah, well then it
was like well, you know if you get to do this twist once um What's the biggest what's the biggest swing you can take with that?
Yeah, that's cool.
Sam, did you have question?
Yeah, I mean, I could kind of see the breakdown of that because the structure was this nice, ah you know, three part.
eh And then you're obviously playing with expectations because I know when Patrick was like, oh, now you go in the past.
I was like, book.
Yeah.
Which I guess spoilers and.
Don't listen to this before you've listened to the show.
Or fuck it, listen to this before you listen to the show, whatever.
Fuck it, man.
You got free will.
Yeah, yeah, what?
Why?
I had a couple questions about that actually, like thinking through that.
think my first big one, and you know, maybe everybody writes differently.
I know when I write for our show or when I write for any of the stuff, you know, we do, there's always something.
that I'm basing it around.
Sometimes it's based around like a personal experience that I'm like working some shit through.
Sometimes it's based around something really weird that sits with me for a while.
You know, we do a lot of improv games on our show and that's usually how I come up with stuff.
Seems like that there could be something there or what was, was there anything like that, I guess, underlying this or how did that inspiration happen?
Hank, you're on air.
What's your trauma?
Yeah, ready to hear the drama dump.
And we've got a therapist here, so this is actually a patient-client relationship.
uh
Yeah, so.
have to roll psychotherapy.
Yeah, correct.
Oh yeah, and two doctors, man.
This is going to be expensive.
god.
I'm dealing with, I'm going through a braces treatment right now and a whole insurance problem so I got enough going on with that.
But no, the actual trauma is that um when I was in high school there was uh what we thought was a very real school shooter situation.
um Pretty much everyone hiding in the, um I was hiding in a dark room.
um
basically thinking about like did I not send enough text to my family and Then it kind of happened to a lesser extent again when I was in college And then the other so that's kind
of the mass violence Aspect of it which just kind of started I started noticing that I got kind of anxious around just being in crowds and Just like oh gosh, what what if something
happens?
And the other thing was that the memory loss, which I've been scared of for ages, I used to be scared of Groundhog Day, where it was like, they're just forgetting every loop, But
no, that's kind of from my great grandmother and um my grandfather, who uh recently passed, of Parkinson's.
And ah he basically is Roger Douglas in this campaign.
um So this is kind of my...
to him I guess even though he would not approve of this work.
um
appreciate it as Roger Douglas doesn't get a super great light in the...
No.
Well, it's a tribute anyways.
That's good, that's good.
Yeah, but that's kind of where the intersection kind of happened was trying to think about, um you know, that thinking of, you know, so many, you know, terrible mass violent
things happen in the United States, at least right now.
And um I definitely can't remember them all.
So.
that's what I was gonna say just to that comment is that it, that's what it struck me as is like this idea that we have so many things coming at us at once.
And then, uh yeah, yeah.
This idea that like the mytho stuff or the weird stuff is just a reflection of the awful things that we deal with every day.
It really struck me with that.
So good job on that.
Yeah.
you.
I forgot to send you guys, now you can download it and look at it, which you might think is fun.
yeah, that'd be great.
drop your link.
interesting.
ah Just to see all the beats.
Yeah, I am kind of interested in some of those things potentially.
I feel like there's a lot of.
to even understand just the corners that we didn't look at.
Yeah.
guys covered a lot of ground.
um I think there's a very scant handful of things you guys didn't do.
um I think the only clue I worked on that you guys didn't follow up on was you never translated the chant because you hated the chant and avoided the chant at all costs.
I think that may have been because I saw the geometric shapes and I was like don't tell me this I don't want to know it because I get the sense that if I see the shapes and then I
hear the chant I'm gonna turn into a worm god.
Okay oh yeah.
For sure.
think for Moll it's because he started with 40 sanity.
So it wasn't exactly the best starting, but it was actually 30 technically.
thought narratively that was like one of the most fun components was just like knowing that he was the powder keg that we had to kind of like work around because also like we
did depend on you for an awful lot.
em Yeah.
em
ahead, Mack, bye.
Or Jordan.
I'm gonna.
Yeah, yeah, right.
That's just me now.
I honestly had to work really hard not to ask my characters or my questions in character here, too.
If there's anything else about that other topic, I was just going to launch into a trio of questions.
um So I do have to roll relatively soon, but I had three questions that are all kind of centered around the um the big bad lady in the center of this.
um So I'm curious, first and foremost, how how Mother Hydra chose her victims?
Yes, so that is basically reaching out to people who were already kind of susceptible to this kind of on-the-short voice in your ear um telling you again and again and again for
ages to do terrible things until eventually just kind of broke you down.
Yeah, enough sleepless nights.
If your willpower hits zero, you become Mother Hydra's killer.
I don't remember if we actually wrote that in or if that's just how I'm running it.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because it's maybe mean.
Hmm.
Yeah, so some of the killers are definitely um sympathetic, but some of them are also just, you know, they did not need a lot of encouragement.
Which that's a pretty cool underlying like mirror of the whole like intrusive thoughts like I can't you know it's like I don't want to do this but like my brain like why do I
keep having this thought and then eventually it becomes a plague and yeah but anyway keep going Jordan
Yeah, I'm writing down comments.
Yeah.
a groove like a wheelbarrow.
I'm writing down some comments cause Jordan, I want you to get your questions, but this is like, there's a couple things about.
Yeah, for sure.
Believe me, I would not have three questions if I had more time, I would have many more.
um yeah, what?
Yeah, yeah.
What, from like a game timeline perspective, what if we pussyfooted around the Bon Marché and we didn't get there until Anthony Hayden's timeline progressed?
So, January 2nd, a woman with a bomb vest detonates it on the ferry to Bainbridge Island.
um If that happens and you do nothing about it, you could theoretically fuck around for another 66 days before another mass casualty event, but Mother Hydra is like
growing pretty slowly down in that basement actually.
I don't think there's an exponential growth here at all.
um The killings happen in accelerating and decelerating waves and I think you could potentially leave Hydra in that basement for years and just let her kill...
I don't know.
Ten...
five, 10 people every couple of months and it will never resolve itself.
It will expand in area, but it won't, and it might expand in like consequences, like, I don't know, airliners start going down or something.
But I think it's all very small.
It's not an apocalypse, you know, it's into.
to become an epicenter, right?
So it's, well, right, but she wouldn't want to be known for that, right?
And so it's escalating, but in a malignant way, not in, like you said, not an exponential way.
right.
And I do think that she wants to be here too.
Like it's an intrusion that this is some way of pulling herself into reality while obliterating the parts of it that are a threat to her.
Yeah, when you read the text, it's not super spelled out, but there is kind of some implication that the dimension that she comes from is pretty awful and...
question is what was the inspiration or what did that mean to you, to her, to everything?
Yeah, so this started off as a game based off of the Labyrinth source book.
um So there is, does everyone know that?
um
actually have not read it.
Yes, yes I do.
Okay, well it's not spoilers to say that one of the factions in that game is centered on the town of Stanton.
And Stanton is just Chelan.
um And I read that and I grew up around or going to Chelan a lot.
And I was like, this is bullshit.
Like, they got all this wrong.
um And so, sorry, I'm trying to remember the question now.
It's really just about Mother Hydra's home plane and what that represented metaphorically or what it meant to her also.
Yeah, so the main villains from those, uh from that, are very nihilistic in nature.
yeah, ah so drawing on that was kind of the idea of, yeah, a place that is just so terrible, you feel so terrible, and then breaking into this reality is almost her uh
spreading that uh misery and nihilism and just...
tearing down other people.
um The actual inspiration for it, like the other dimension and everything, I think Patrick came up with a lot of the stuff that you guys saw.
um I was drawing from uh the short story Hydra by Henry Kuttner.
I should have read that.
It's hard to find.
I could only find an audio version.
Really?
What?
Interesting.
mean, to make it unsearchable in today's terms means that like, you know, your creative juices are safe, which is, that's pretty fun.
eh Sick.
Thank you so much for entertaining me.
I do got a skedaddle, but thank you guys.
This was phenomenal.
thank you.
It was delight to play with you.
Same, same, same.
Many more times.
Bye.
Thanks.
I also gotta run at 6.30 because I'm also playing this campaign.
I'm trying to wrap it up.
You're good.
Yeah.
lined this right up.
Where's your team?
Are they about to go in?
Are you hoping they are about to go in?
guys experienced the attack on your families.
um They are dealing with that right now.
One of them...
Jimmy's wife.
I, oh, I meant to tell you this.
No, actually Sam did.
will.
No, I did.
And I know I did.
You killed the mood.
I killed my wife.
And I think.
Well, so this is what's interesting is you're like, do you want to do anything?
And we had I've been thinking over this, which I think is a credit to like a good.
No, I think it's a credit to like a good game when you leave and you're like.
shit, I should have done this differently.
And you there's one point where like, what do you want to do?
Because essentially, I'm like playing my wife as like a proxy.
And I'm like, I should have just told her to run.
And we even talked about it before.
But I got invested in the situation.
And I didn't.
And one, like, that's not what I should have done.
And especially at playing like a character with a search and rescue kind of crisis management background.
That's what I should have done.
But
even like the best of the best of like crisis management, like emergency response people, they're gonna make bad fucking calls when it's their family involved, which is why as a
doctor, when people are like, my family, they're like, hey, what should I do?
And I'm like, I'll give you some general advice, but I don't wanna be your doctor, cause I have blind spots when it comes to my family.
I should have told her to run and I didn't and she died because I didn't tell her to run.
I mean, maybe she would have died anyway, but running would have been the smart choice and I didn't make that call.
Um, and that's, that's on me and realistic.
I was aghast.
I was not trying to kill your bond.
I was actively trying not to.
And you guys kept calling for rolls.
You're like, okay, can she roll to sneak away?
I'm like, yeah, I guess.
She's not gonna succeed and then she'd bomb it.
And can I roll to take the knife from him?
It's like, yeah, sure.
You
And then you like crit failed twice in a row, like trying to run.
I'm like, yeah, she's dead.
I'm so sorry.
And I think even in...
time I should just tell you instead of rolling anything my wife gets away safely And I should just say that
It was supposed to make you nervous and be like, get out of there, honey.
Get out of there and call the police.
Yeah, Patrick, I watched this all go down as somebody who has played with Jimmy now for a third of my life.
And I was like, A, don't do that because he's going to be like, I'll roll this and do that and do this.
And then when you called on me, I was like, second mistake.
was like, you are second strike here to play the.
it's intense.
of like permission to do thicc.
I don't know.
I I think like as a player I want to like and you're great as a handler and so I don't want to I've played games that go badly where players don't understand what's happening
and they're like I do that you know you're playing a D &D game and the wizards like I cast kill all the enemies and you're like that's not a thing
Yeah, you gotta respect the fiction.
uh Sam, can you give Hank here a preview of the voice you did for Morrison's wife?
In what I believe is the most...
like The Simpsons.
Yeah, what was your first name?
What was Agent Morrison's first name?
well, it was his name is chase Brown.
That's his real name
like, oh, Jace, Jace!
I didn't know we were going for a serious moment, so I went real fucked up on it.
And then it landed, but didn't land.
Yeah.
And she was like, oh no, oh no!
Yep.
Yeah, I did.
Yeah, I really hit the tone perfectly.
mean, it was great.
Like I, you know, I, I think that one of the things that makes Delta Green good, or one of the things that I think we all appreciate about Delta Green, Call of Cthulhu, as opposed
to D &D or other systems is like people you care about die.
Like it's, that's a thing.
And I think that's some of the catharsis to like writing these things and playing them out as people.
It's like, there's something real about this or at least
mirroring reality.
And I do feel attacking or going after bonds is a really good uh thing.
It's something that doesn't get done a lot, I think, em but it's a very good,
made me want to run this scenario, is in Home Sweet Home, you get two calls.
The first is like a shooting threat.
And the second is, I'm outside of your bond's house.
In five minutes, I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna kill them.
I'm like, holy shit, that's so cool.
Cause if I think back to like the published scenarios, there's probably only, there's like one I can think about that does that um in any form.
And it's a lot more magical.
You know what I mean?
At least that's okay.
I won't say anything, but it just in general is a lot, this was a lot more grounded.
Do you know I mean?
And I feel like fucking with bonds in a grounded manner is really good because when it becomes this whole like,
uh, you know, some monster, yeah, like shoots a laser or something.
Then it's like, yeah, this sucks.
But like, but when it's like something that you can actually see, it just drives home.
It's like it forces a good scene between you and your bond.
And even somebody who maybe doesn't want to do the acting part, who isn't as comfortable, um, not that we did any acting there, but like who's less comfortable, you know, role
playing out.
It still kind of forces some of that.
Yeah, it's.
wild.
Yeah.
I will say like two quick thoughts on that one.
I feel like for a lot of our games and I think for a lot of people's games, bonds just become like a sanity sink.
And yeah, and yeah, it's not enjoyable.
I think this forced bonds to be what I think bonds should be.
And especially because there was a point afterward where you're like, do you guys want to project on your bonds?
And I was like, well, one of mine's dead.
And you're like, yeah, shit.
So.
You know, it, becomes also like a reminder.
Um, so I just loved, I think it was, I like that use of bonds as like a weak point more than I like bonds being used as a San Los sink.
Um, and then
better as like a narrative device that you that the player has given the DM I think
And then also Hank, when you said, Hank, when you said you have to leave at six 30, did you mean like in three minutes?
in a few minutes that I'm joining a discord call so I'm sure it'll take I'm sure it'll take five minutes for everyone to actually show up 15 minutes to actually get playing
Yeah.
All right, Nick, do you got any questions?
Yeah, I mean, I have more than I can ask.
I would say to distill it down, I, sorry I wrote it down.
Whoops, I had like four, so.
Happy to answer questions in Discord as well.
also fine.
And I'll stick around for a couple minutes.
Do you have anything specifically for Hank, who wrote?
yeah.
So Hank, um you you talked about the trauma that led up to writing this.
uh How long did it take to write?
And then how did Patrick interface with you?
Was it mostly you?
Was it both of you?
What was the process like behind it?
I this over kind of like the week of Christmas and I want to say I wrote the first draft in
maybe even 2022.
And that went nowhere and it sat there for a year.
And then I rewrote it after thinking about it for a year.
And Patrick randomly responded when I shared it in the reanimators discord like, yeah, I'd run this.
And then I learned that he was running it.
And just having one person actually like run something that...
I was like working on basically encouraged me to actually take it seriously and try to push it extremely, extremely hard towards making it look like a finished product.
And I couldn't have done that without Patrick, who's also offering a bunch of, you know, great feedback and uh additional writing even, I would say, and just great editing all
around and providing scans of props.
So
I think it is, think truly like Patrick kind of got it to the finish line.
Awesome, that's great.
Yeah, yeah, I love it.
And I'm excited to read it look at the layout and stuff.
I haven't opened it yet.
But um yeah, I have a last question, unless somebody else has a question for Hank.
maybe one other thing, so go for it, Nick.
Well, I just want to say, are you writing anything like now?
Like, are you going to release anything soon?
Like what's coming up?
Yeah, so I'm going to try to do a like re layout version of this for kind of a Final draft and especially like incorporating any feedback that you guys have like very seriously um
So now that it's actually been and Just keep learning them where people keep playtesting this and says like my gosh, like we can actually do something here um Right now I'm
writing a Hawaii uh
kind of one shot for Delta Green uh for the Night of the Opera contest.
I'm trying to finish a Puerto Rico scenario.
I have family from both places, trying to touch on that.
then I would like to, the other campaign idea I actually have would be a Cthulhu campaign in the modern day.
um And, because I feel like no one has really given a good shot at uh mirroring the three acts of
Yeah, the three acts of the Call of Cthulhu into a Delta Green campaign.
And then after that, I hope to never write for this game again.
move to a different game yeah
You just wrote something for, um, what's that system called?
Arkham Herald.
It's an upcoming system for uh like, Brindlewood Bay, if you know that card from Brindlewood.
So they're doing a game where you play as journalists in the 70s investigating Cthulhu mythos stories basically as reporters.
That's cool.
Yeah, I may have been talking with you on Discord actually, uh and maybe 9mm someplace about that, because that sounds very familiar.
Yeah, hey!
How's it going?
Small world.
Yeah, I was like, I was like, yeah, I I this person enjoys it.
Yeah.
That's so funny.
Yeah, that was going to be my question is what you're doing next with it.
um I guess where you're.
Where things are, how'd you feel about doing this from a taking something of yourself that is so personal and kind of, um again, I mean, it sounds lame kind of, but like drama,
which I totally get and turning it into that, was that cathartic for you or does it make you not want to run it again, do something like this again?
Does it make you want to do something more surface level or more like involved in like the Delta green, like reading through the labyrinth and running something?
Cause I could kind of see either way, especially with it being put out there and people like playing through it, you know?
So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
I know, guess, I don't feel any, um, like, self, um...
I don't feel any hesitation about that just because it feels like, um
I know, it felt like important to share in some sense.
Like this was, uh...
I just was a part of me and it was, uh...
I'm always, like as a poorer writer, trying to think of like, okay, well what am I scared of?
What am I scared of?
Yeah, we had that conversation and you're like, what are you afraid of?
I'm like the ocean.
Fuck the ocean.
you
Yeah, same.
I feel that.
that's interesting to me.
Would you consider, I haven't read through it obviously, would you consider adding any part about your own personal, what the horror means for you kind of, even if it's somewhat
small?
The reason I ask that is that I know when I run things, it's helpful for me to get into the head space of what the writer was doing when they wrote it for like where the horror
came from.
Cause you could pick up on a lot of different things from this.
You could pick up on memory loss.
You could pick up on mass shooting.
You could pick up on, I mean, there's probably even ways you could go about this with it becomes more of like the governmental conspiracy side of things, you know?
um But, you know, to me, I like hearing those things because even if it's small, it gives me that sense of like, this is what they were going for.
These are the themes.
Yeah, that was in the first draft.
I hope to include that in the final draft.
Yeah, you should.
love that.
do like kind of a jump off to that question, which is one I've been thinking for a second, you can totally answer this on Discord if you need to for time.
Is there something that you would hope the players would get out of it?
Not just like, I had a good time, but like on Sam's note, like themes, it's like, cause we talk about themes a lot when we're working on stuff.
And it's like, if you wanted someone to take away something from this as like a, sticks with me, what would that be?
And that's a heavy question, so don't feel like you have to answer that now.
Yeah, no, I I think I know exactly what that is and I think what I'm going to plan for my own group Is that you know in epilogues, you know, let's say they stopped the bad guy
Later on they'll just see a another mass shooting on TV not cause my mother hydra or anything.
It's just still happening
Right, yeah, that's excellent.
the sign into you gives you early onset dementia.
Oh yeah, no that would- that's the other thing.
One of my players has done that and so their ending is going to be finding sticky notes around their house.
Um, much like Roger.
Oh no!
yeah, we were.
that downside warning we wouldn't have, but...
Uh, there's no warning.
That's a trap.
so.
Yeah.
So just very briefly, that is what you just said is really the idea of, how do I put this together?
The idea that you have uh these mass shootings that are happening and you almost have something that comes in and alleviates you of that pain of the mass shootings of mass
casualties of violence.
And then you take it away only for people to realize that,
They didn't change the actual real world, right?
That just changed that we were missing out on stuff.
In some ways, it's almost a worse world for people that Mother Hydra is not there because you are seeing all of these terrible things.
Maybe you forget all of that stuff.
Maybe you feel more safe, kind of.
uh
of the questions or comments I wrote down is like population health standpoint question mark at what level is like the therapeutic index of like removing mother Hydra versus like
the damage humans are doing by their own mass shootings because it's like I mean, I don't remember the number.
I think you said a number earlier, Patrick, but you're like, I don't know.
five to 10 people a year and then maybe like once every year or two there's like 35, 50 people who die in like a mass casualty event and I'm like that's pretty well within the
statistical norms so like
yeah.
Yeah.
But she's only hiding her own associations.
She's not hiding all of them.
She's only hiding things that she personally influenced that maybe wouldn't have happened otherwise.
But still, and not to keep you, Hank, you can totally sit down, but still, there is something to be said that if she is preventing those things from people from remembering
them and feeling that pain, and we're not doing anything to stop mass casualties, we're not doing anything as a society to fix this.
then your next step is like, well then forget about it.
Like if you can just forget about these things, and cause we're not gonna fix them, right?
As a society, we've said we accept gun violence, we accept mass casualties.
So really in some way, thoughts and prayers, right?
And this is like.
in the context of therapeutic index.
Yeah, no, it is.
It's like almost like a population health.
Yeah.
So sorry.
Yeah.
cool to have that kind of analysis, I guess.
m
a lot of stuff with that because I think a lot of the ways that you're talking about the hydropaying on praying on people who are susceptible to impulsivity, when you get
dementia, you end up being more impulsive.
There's these whole there's a whole thing that you tapped tapped into with this that is from our medical from Jimmy Nye's medical and Nick from your the medical kind of
therapeutic mindset.
You can like see those things occurring.
And so it's like it makes sense to me that when you say it's somebody who's impulsive.
is more likely to get this or that it's kind of that, because that is what you see with people who are losing memory anyways.
It's like a self-perpetuating thing.
like inhibitory stuff and it manifests in very specific ways.
Speaking of that, from the doctor uh point of view, from the therapist point of view, I would love some notes from all of you on like versimilitude because one of the first
things that happened is I was like, yeah, he looks like he's shaky.
And you started asking me about symptoms.
I was like, oh shit, I'm like right out of my depth.
I saw your eyes get wide and I was like, eh how much can I do with this right now?
I was like, I know him at least well enough that I could just keep asking some fucking questions here, so.
Yeah.
That's how you break any handler.
Yeah, that's right, right?
You're like, choose my thing that I know a lot about and I'm going to force it on you.
Yeah, so fuck you.
asshole.
not actual dementia.
Yeah
Yeah.
We looked at his brain scans.
They're normal.
It's hypergeometric dementia.
a Patrick original, think that improves the clue.
It was cool, yeah.
yeah, yeah, for sure.
Yes, and we will do that.
We should maybe have like just a discussion at some point, because I have, there's a lot of things I think that I've got Radin-Loran in my brain, so.
Mm-hmm.
will also say, I...
We sometimes on our show and in our games get bogged down in the medical stuff, and I feel like at some point just being like, fuck you, I'm the handler and this is hypergeometry.
Eat a dick.
what we did, but that's only because I didn't know enough about medicine.
And that's, I love that.
like, yeah, no, there, yeah.
And too many details.
I, this is a tangent, been rereading the Dune series and there's an entry, like an intro quote about like specialist will just like kill something with arguing over minutiae.
And it's, like, that's, that's us.
So.
As doctors, I hope you appreciated trying to make guns scary in this game.
Yes, yeah, yes, no, it is.
the fear of, uh it's guns and it's also the idea of random violence.
It's something that makes you, yes, it is scary to have these random acts of violence.
And I think it's a very terrifying idea to me to think about the loss of memory, uh specifically in regards to that, in regards to mass and how it affects, yeah.
to just like function on a basic level.
And also it was helped out by Magpie just like spraying everyone with gunfire.
I thought we might all just dive in in there.
That was a very close thing to ending the game.
That could have, yeah, stopped the game.
uh Somebody with a semi-automatic, a fully automatic SMG uh got fight and just unloaded on the room.
uh And uh I gave him a minus 20 for like spraying and that minus 20 was the difference between hitting and not hitting.
I also want to call out one thing about Patrick that you did that was very good with that.
When you had, um what's his face, kill that officer, just straight up shoot him, even though it was just like a miscommunication between our group, that was excellent.
Because what that drove home was the idea that like, we weren't fucking, like, and normally in our games we fuck around a whole lot.
And so like,
this was not as much of a fuck around game, but still we were like kind of fucking around like, what do we do about this?
And then you were just like pop and killed somebody and like exploded their head.
And I was like, this is great.
Like that is, it was a, it changed the tenor of things.
And I think you kind of maybe felt bad cause you didn't, you thought maybe you misunderstood us.
Even if there was a, yeah, no, it was beautiful.
would not, there was no way I would ever allow that to change because it immediately brought into things.
And one thing I would say is that having an agent
do something like that, having him do that in the midst of things was excellent for that.
It brought home that violence, that guns are real, that like, isn't just some superhero fantasy that we're playing, not that it really is that way, but you it really brought that
down.
And I think all four of us were like, fuck, you know?
So that was good.
Yeah.
And it, I think it mirrors.
Yeah.
No, I was gonna say, I think it mirrors the reality of like a high, um, a high risk situation where like, I mean, that happens sometimes in Sam and I's line of work where
like you tell somebody like, Hey, I want you to do this.
And they misunderstand you and they do what you didn't intend and
you know, nobody just shoots someone in our line of work, but translating that to Delta Green, it's like, I didn't want you to do X, I wanted you to do Y.
And they're like, I thought you meant X.
And in this situation, well, X means I kill this guy on the spot.
And you're like, well, fuck, there's no taking that back.
It's just very realistic and awesome.
pop quiz.
You are a Delta Green agent.
You have a gun.
A cop just saw a super awful unnatural thing and is fleeing the scene.
Your co-Delta Green agent points at the guy and shouts, him.
Yeah, it's so good.
does that mean to you?
He's gotta be recruiting to Friendly, No.
No, it's bad.
um Okay, I do really have to go right now.
Yeah, thank you.
Take care.
meeting you, man.
Appreciate it.
Yep.
Later.
Yeah.
I cause that was between Morrison and, uh, yeah, Liam.
And what I meant was tackle them.
Like in my mind, I'm like, get them.
meant now, but I'm just saying.
him.
I told you straight up moment kill him.
then the whole situation most like it fuck kill him.
Like let's move on from this.
Yeah.
isn't like...
Thank you.
imagined was we would grab him and have him prove to the other cops that we didn't kill this woman and that's what I wanted him to do.
I know, I know.
Yeah.
we're like, oh, let's like get them and then I'll roll persuade and be like, you got to tell the cops that this isn't real and we're going to do this.
And then so for somebody to just be like, pop, was like, okay, yes, this is yeah, it was good.
reaction to that uh interaction.
Like I, I could not have come up with anything better if I tried.
It was beautiful.
That was good.
guys have any favorite moments and or any things that you think didn't quite work?
The only thing I would say that I wanted to talk eventually with everybody about is more the playing mole, forgetting things was hard to do.
I don't feel like I did a very good job of it, or maybe I did like a middling job of it, I would say.
but like hiding that you've forgotten something was the mission I gave you and you did it because you had megalomania like
that's probably the only thing that I think would be hard to do with that is that if the options given to be able to do that, then what may be helpful with that is maybe even just
a couple examples of how that would look.
Do you know I mean?
Yeah, I think that's a good idea.
some like A, A, B, C.
Here's some examples.
Here's how you can demonstrate it.
This, that sort of thing.
That's what I do want to put that in.
I think that if you are at a table that's maybe new, not that I, I don't know, if you're at a newer table or newer or whatever, they may not know how to communicate that and it
may be kind of frustrating.
So if you check out the, we actually added a bunch of notes to this on how to run it as your first Delta Green campaign um with a bunch of notes for new handlers and stuff like
that.
Cause the Delta Green campaign jam had an optional uh make your first campaign for new handlers.
Yeah.
Cause that's a cool rule or a cool thing.
But I think it need, if you have examples for how that could land, it's hard.
Yeah.
first person who has taken that option.
Frankly, up till now, it has been a, like a fake option.
It's so that you feel like there's this really awful consequence of what's going on on a meta level.
It's a threat.
So you take the willpower loss every time, obviously, because the other thing is like too crazy to like even consider.
And then you did, and I was like, well, shit.
Yeah, you're like, now how do we do this?
Right.
And I think from the player perspective is that em you may not know how to interact with a story.
Cause it, I think the idea of doing it is excellent and playing it off is excellent.
But I think a couple examples of how to continue to interact with the story.
Cause I don't even know if you need to explain like how you should act and maybe give one example, but really it should be like the agents are doing this.
You want to participate.
Here is how you would.
participate in this manner kind of way.
that was what I, that's where I felt, not loss is way too strong, but that's where I was like, okay, how do I do something here?
You know what I mean?
Like do something now, but still also give off that I don't know what the fuck's going on.
Luckily, Mole didn't know what the fuck was going on.
So.
Speaking of almost detonating the campaign, almost as uh wild as gunning down everyone in the room was Miles pointing at Magpie and going, forget the investigation.
He was gonna kill us.
Man, like.
about that.
That's fucking yeah, that's fucking awesome.
Yeah
you were going with that, but I was along for the ride.
I was excited to see where that went.
sure.
You so what's really interesting about giving you a spell like that, which is based or the way I gave it to you as a ritual is very Loose right you assign a target and you say what
they forget and then it happens and you kept picking these crazy like like these huge wide but very hard to pick out things like
I would have imagined you could say something like, uh forget why you're angry.
Yeah, something more.
Yeah, I don't, just went big with it.
I wouldn't know, right?
demolishing like...
That's excellent to me though in the way that if somebody was given access to something that they don't understand what it is, but it carries a tremendous amount of power.
That is like, that's like Spider-Man trying to figure out is like webbing shit.
That's like the, you're like the baby Cole, like, or whatever, like trying to learn how to walk or whatever the fuck that is.
Like that truly, and like, you're just going to destroy people.
It's a nuclear weapon that you don't even really understand that you have, you know?
love that you didn't succeed at it until the boss fight, because yeah, that's what it does is you take the memories.
That's cool.
there.
That's interesting.
Yeah, and I don't know.
I mean, because Patrick, you've run this before, right?
Did you have anyone do?
I guess in that in that game, did anyone do the pinpoint like I'm going to do very because I feel like in, I mean, it's basically like launching a missile, right?
And missiles can be like carpet.
Well, missiles are bombs and you can do like carpet bombing or you can do targeted strikes, but targeted strikes are harder.
And I think most people are going to
just be like, let me carpet bomb this thing.
No, so the two other people I ran this for, um it's Majde and Wilder, they're credited as play testers in this scenario, and uh they're my core gaming group, and so we're super
familiar with each other, it's really easy, you know, and they used it exactly the way I imagined they would.
uh They used it to steal a car.
Hey.
forget that's your car.
And they use that to get out of shell and they
No, well, so I, I, I say-
in this like chat right now with you.
None of those people are people who would do something like that.
Yeah.
a fundamental and basic immediate level.
And they used it to solve low stakes problems with willpower loss.
And eventually the player who had access to it was like, oh, I'm in a dire threat now.
They had uh pissed off Teddy and Teddy's sister to the point where like Wilder was in the stairwell killing Teddy by smashing his head against like the stairs.
and his sister was in the truck with the other guy, like with a gun pressed to his forehead, and he was like, I need to tell her to forget, like, that she's here, but I only
have two willpower left, and it costs three.
do I do?
A, they need to go the Christian nationalist route that we went, which is always the correct option.
uh And then B,
No, that works right up his alley.
If you wanted to, oh think, um emphasize that more as a tool, if you gave even one example of somebody using it, even talking about it as a tool, like quite clearly, where they used
it in some small way, I think that would have primed us.
But if you don't, then meh.
Yeah.
I just thought it was two super different ways of using it.
and it
thought to use it on mole so he wouldn't lose so much sanity at the beginning.
I was gonna say, maybe I can negate all of his sand loss by telling him to forget it all happened.
But then magpie and I'm just like, all right, I'm gonna use it for that.
Here's the question.
the spell?
Forget your sand loss?
yeah.
I wasn't going to let that work for housekeeping reasons.
Because we already had trouble with timey-wimey sand loss and being able to forget sand losses means we have to dig back and figure out what that was and how much it was.
Should we include a note that says, hey, they might use it this way, track sand loss on paper?
Yeah, I think two parts for that are that yes, second part is I would give an example for how it moves from act one to act two to act three for maybe two player sanity so that it's
directly spelled out what you want them to do.
So like they lose this amount, so then it starts over and then they lose this amount and this is what it is.
Yeah.
And I think that's one point when you ask like, are there any like points that were unclear that you'd add clarification?
Honestly, the only point where I think from like a, like a, the, glance briefly at the PDF.
The only thing I would add is like, try to make it.
And I didn't read it.
So maybe it's more clear in the PDF.
I just flipped through it, but going from the like flashback and then back to current time.
make that a little bit more clear because I'm still not sure that I did it right.
If I'm being honest.
not in person, where we can't hold up our sheets to each other and say, oh, this is what we're doing.
and I did also have the thought that I'm like, this may be a problem of playing remotely.
And you know, that is what it is.
Because you guys shouldn't A.
Have to know the mechanic or B.
Know the mechanic.
Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with that.
I think it's better as a secret.
And I think the way you do that is to give a couple examples and say, this is what it is, exactly how we have it.
And so that way, all you have to do is be like, what was your sanity?
What was your sanity?
And then boom, it's like done, you know?
I'm a moderately lazy handler, so I don't like track that sort of thing in a way that I could.
And in a way that I know other people do.
uh That's, yes.
But...
problem with the players tracking it is that if, if they don't know the mechanics and they get something wrong or something happens, then it becomes the storm of now you have to
kind of give the mechanic.
Yeah, exactly.
Whereas if you just had here is how it works and give the example or even give like, if it's this, then this, then all you have to do is be like, what's your sand?
Okay.
And then we move on.
You know I mean?
What, what is it?
Now it's this.
that we screwed up malls and somewhere in the middle
If you want players to track it, I would maybe put in a note to the handler that like at the end of Act 1, tell the players like on your sheet or if you make a new sheet, make
very clear what you're saying is at the end of Act 1.
Like you have to know that number.
Yeah, and I failed at it because I suck.
all of you at the end.
Yeah, that's okay.
Yeah, whatever.
No, I think that those are the only two things that popped out is any part of uh bottlenecks for just like doing stuff.
Otherwise there was no, otherwise it was like fun as hell.
So uh yeah, there's, yeah.
like, it was, even that was fun as hell.
The whole thing was excellent.
Oh yeah, that was like not a problem at all.
felt like it was anything.
I do think the communication of themes is excellent.
What I personally, when I read through things and when we play stuff, when I feel most satisfied is when we walk away and somebody is like, oh, you did this maybe because of
this.
And I'm like, yeah, you know what I mean?
And not like, oh, the guy shot this guy because his wife was cheating on him.
Like not the story beats.
mean, like they were like, oh, I picked up on the theme of like modern surveillance with this and like that's.
like perfect so
So that's hilarious and that all goes to Hank because I don't do themes.
really?
uh
do, um like, I am much better at, like, visual set pieces.
And, like, I can imagine a scene and then tell you what I think it's going to look like, but I can't, I don't, I'm not good at putting together a themed story like that.
um Like, I was really happy with the red star place where Hydra lives.
Yeah.
I noticed consistently throughout is I very much enjoyed your like physical description of scenes.
It was good.
I liked it.
Yeah, I'm really glad that Hank's themes can come through even with that.
That's really cool.
the argument that maybe you don't feel good at it, like you probably, mean, you're, you, you're able to take this and, and the themes come through even with all that, you know?
So, yeah.
So.
I'm glad you took the themes away with you.
A technical question, uh what if we'd gotten to Hydra earlier?
Because I know somebody, think maybe Jordan asked like, what if we didn't address it and got to it later?
And that made me think like, what if we got to it earlier?
Very hard to, very, very hard to.
You did, yeah.
Gunning it straight from, um you could have, I don't know, cheated and gotten there straight from Chelan without stopping at Hayden's house.
I think you did find a record that he worked at Valerie's Coffee somewhere, but I think the, I think we do kind of maybe need a stronger hint.
Yeah.
for towards the Bon Marché from Anthony Hayden's apartment.
um Hayden's apartment, yeah.
Yeah, that sucks.
That's not a...
I know what you mean.
maybe this is just me and I don't, maybe something about the verbiage of what you said at the time, but like in Act Two, when we were investigating the people who showed up to the
retreat, you know, we talked to whatever name was the lady whose head imploded with worms.
ah We talked to her about her past.
We looked into Anthony's past.
And maybe this is just my investigative style, but it's...
very history focused, like personal history focused.
And so I was like, we had information even back during Operation Hilo Legacy that he worked there.
And so even as far back as that, that was on my list.
But again, I don't know if that's something the average person would do.
we need to do a better job of flagging that information, I think.
And that is the big key at Hayden's apartment is the $0, zero cents paychecks.
Yeah.
No, it keyed me in immediately that I was like, we should go there because something weird is happening, AKA in memory stuff is going on.
hadn't fully put together that he was there, but I definitely keyed in on the idea that like something's happening there repeatedly and this happens only in repeated situations.
I think even something as small as it being repeated in each aspect of meaning each chapter would be enough to key a player in.
where it's like there's one clue that points to Valerie there in first one, one clue in the second, and then bring it up again in the third, then it's not just you saying
Valerie's coffee shop, Valerie's coffee shop.
Maybe.
know how to put it in the first act without giving that information to Roger.
And I don't want that to be information that Roger personally has.
it's already, Roger is an info dump.
He's got a lot going on.
so you could make the Bon Marché personal to Anthony, right?
Like in the investigation, there could be something, details that like, maybe when he caught that first charge, he was doing drugs at the Bon Marché, or maybe he worked there
before it was shut down, or maybe his mom worked there.
You can add like a personal hook where it's like, why?
down.
He's sad.
That really perfect.
There it is.
like worming her way in.
She's like, oh, he has these memories of the Bon Marché.
Like, I'm gonna keep him there, right?
Yeah.
Oh, by the way, ah the name of the thing that is in Anthony, it killed me the first time I read it because it is only referenced in the ah enemy block.
What do you call that?
ah Yeah, in the stat block.
He has it called the Avatar of Worms.
Avatar of Worms, aka Mother Hydra.
card.
fucking yeah.
I was like, that's the only place it's mentioned and I like got to him like, oh that guy, I know exactly who that is.
What the hell.
Metal.
it's very layered, barren.
It's excellent.
Yeah, it is very learn-bearing.
question for you, Nick, I think because you and Jordan have like a lot of personal knowledge and history, just, we write a lot of our games or I don't know, Sam and I have
talked about games around like Kansas city, St.
Louis, Missouri.
And I feel like there's something to that, that eases the cognitive burden of an investigative game in the sense of like Bon Marché.
and the coffee shop, do you think that like it being a setting you're familiar or even like where the fuck is Chelan?
Like I didn't know.
And so that's like, I'm having to like try and like orient myself to a space that you just have a natural orientation of.
I guess, Patrick, in the game that you ran before, did the people have an intuitive knowledge of that?
And do you think that playing it with people from that geographic area had any influence?
Yes, um without the knowledge of the geographical area, there was a lot of very easy, like everybody had Google Maps open all the time.
yeah, and that's totally OK.
And having people super familiar with the area was also super easy and super clean.
And it felt like gliding.
And it was a little tough having half and half.
uh
because I didn't have a way to like slow it down for the people who have to Google map it.
At that point, you think it would be worth including, again, maybe you did, but like including a very like basic map of the geographic area?
And maybe not even...
of scenarios that have like, is here, this is here, like in it.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
Alright.
Yep.
Fair enough.
San Juan Island, and I made you all pull up a Google map of it.
But we could.
matter.
It's just like, you just need to know it's about three and a half hours away and that's about it.
Yeah.
I'll say I'm someone who is very like heavily space oriented.
And so maybe that's why I'm fixating on it.
Because I'm like, wait, where the fuck are we going when it doesn't really matter?
Like you said, Nick, it's three and a half hours away.
It doesn't matter if it's north, south, east, west.
But in my mind, I'm like, it does matter.
Am I driving into the ocean or am I not?
Yeah, I do like that it is oriented so that you can Google map it the whole time.
And the Google maps do matter.
I'm really upset that the location list I gave you didn't plot the spiral, because that was a very fun moment for one of my players.
Yeah, and that may-
about that though, because I had the spiral plotted out, but there was, I don't know what happened with that, but I had that spiral plotted out.
Cause I remember that on, when we were all in discord talking, I was like, there's a spiral or there was some moment where I was like, this is a spiral.
Yeah.
did a weird like jaggedy, it wasn't in the date order to make the spiral.
Something odd, I gotta check up on that.
No, it was cool though, that was a cool moment.
Yeah, it was.
And like very key to the investigation because that's like, that's how we knew to go to Valerie's coffee shop.
That is the second way of figuring out where you should be going.
Well, should we cut it guys?
Yeah, sounds good.
Cool.
got no more questions.
I'm sure I have a bunch.
I have to like sit and ponder for a little bit because I have more about the themes in writing too, but yeah.
I'd say is like as a comment, um playing like 90 % of the games that I have with Sam, Patrick, your style is different.
And I think there were some miscommunications that resulted in some awesome like missteps and I fucking loved it.
Like I know, I know you were like, I'm not a detail oriented person, but compared to how we play, I'm like, shit, he's asking me for an updated character sheet.
I you are tragically the only person that did not track failures.
I'm so sorry.
intended to every time and then I didn't.
It's like I'm going to keep track of it this time.
And then you're like, what were your failures?
And I'm like, I don't know.
we don't even like update our character sheets on things.
They don't want to get better.
They want to fail.
That's what their whole goal in this game is, is just fail forward.
So it is, no.
last time we played with our group and it was let's not update our character sheets too often so that we our characters don't get too strong
Oh, I don't know that you have to worry about that.
Y'all were at the bottom of the barrel.
yeah
no thank you very much it was
I hope to play with all of you again.
This was a ton of fun.
Yeah, thank you guys.
Appreciate all of this.
I love it so much.
So yeah, this is a blast.
Cool.
See you guys later.
Yep.