New OOTS products from CafePress
New OOTS t-shirts, ornaments, mugs, bags, and more
Page 2 of 3 FirstFirst 123 LastLast
Results 31 to 60 of 64
  1. - Top - End - #31
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: Broken Shield
    Show
    Andrea Shield revealed herself to be Decarabia in one of her "covers", and went on to answer the party's questions about the God Machine as best as she could. She had an insider view of what it was, as she admitted to being a fallen angel who was once in the service of the God Machine but was now one of the "Unchained". She didn't know what the God Machine's ultimate aim was or where it had come from, but she knew it wanted to maintain the global status quo for as long as possible, and it had hijacked the worship of other gods on the world in order to minimize or eliminate their influence. To top it all off, the Duchess of Solingrahv was an archangel in disguise. This information granted the party 5 points of Mythos, and Aurelie went temporarily insane (again).

    Convinced of Decarabia's intentions to bring down the God Machine, Magda helped her escape before the Prime Minister showed up. When he did arrive, he glad-handed Colonel Natter and Carmilla Rojas, then ordered Magda to make him tea while his two identical bodyguards searched the estate. The search turned up nothing, and the Prime Minister left disappointed but not surprised.

    After the Prime Minister was gone, the party made plans to head to Broken Shield to help Tobias with an investigation into an annual murder. He had only agreed to work Delta Green if they agreed to help with the October Killings, and now it was time for Delta Green to pay up. Thanks to Aurelie's mental breakdown that morning, she once again got benched to partake of therapy, so the party consisted of the PCs plus Carmilla (played by Aurelie's player) and Elspeth.

    The party made the road trip out to Broken Shield and met with the other members of Toby's werewolf pack. The pack leader, Harmon, was the most normal of the bunch. The others (Shiloh, Zehava, Jared, and Avella) were all damaged in one way or the other, just like Toby was. However, they were all fiercely loyal to Harmon and to protecting Broken Shield from supernatural threats. A long absent friend of the party, Chloe Parson, was at the pack's flophouse and had somehow managed to fall asleep despite the rowdiness of the pack. Once awake, she was delighted to see the PCs again. She had spent her free time putting together everything she could about the October Killings.

    The session ended with the party getting some hotel rooms and going over what their next move would be.

    Info, character growth, and setup for the next adventure.

  2. - Top - End - #32
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    My apologies in advance to all the die hard Call of Cthulhu fans out there, but I made a few minor tweaks to one of the most popular modules ever printed.

    Spoiler: The Haunting
    Show
    The party began their investigation into Walter Sullivan, a serial killer who seemingly kept murdering even after his execution. This case weighed heavily on Tobias in a very literal sense, as he was haunted by the ghosts of all of Sullivan's victims. Thanks to a lot of hard work in dusty archives, Chloe had been able to track down Sullivan's address and a few other tidbits of information. It was enough to get the party started on a proper investigation. They hit up the local library, the newspaper archives, and the police records for anything they could get on Sullivan and his house.

    The estate had been built by Sullivan's father, Mr. Walter Sullivan Esquire (I'll be using Esq. and Jr. to differentiate them from now on). Esq. had been involved with a church dedicated to the Lord of Secrets, and had not been well liked by the townsfolk. He had been buried in the basement of the house. Keeping with family tradition, Jr. had also been buried beneath the family estate. Ever since his interment there, people who had tried to live in the house had either gone mad or suffered crippling/fatal accidents.

    After uncovering what they could about Esq. and the estate, the party did some digging into the Church of Secrets. A police raid had occurred several years ago, resulting in fourteen dead cultists and three dead police officers. In addition, the church had burned down. The ruins of it still stood in the old part of town, so the agents headed there to see what they could find. After a bit of an accident with a collapsing floor, they found an evil eye symbol which (according to a couple of good Mythos checks) drew spiritual energy toward the location. They also found a copy of the Book of Eibon, a tome containing rituals designed to protect oneself from the servants of Nyarlathotep (a notorious dark god of secrets). The party was finally connecting the dots.

    Once the agents were prepared to investigate the Sullivan estate itself, they called up the police and used Toby's contacts on the force (namely Detective Gabriela Macario) to cordon off the house from the prying eyes of nosy neighbors. None of the Delta Green agents wanted to be responsible for any poor local witnessing a supernatural horror from beyond the stars. The PCs brought Elspeth and Chloe with them, mainly to keep them safe from Edom and Dracula in case the party was followed out here, but also because Chloe was very sensitive to spiritual activity and could act as the party's canary in the metaphysical coalmine.

    The party did a thorough job of searching the place, and even found the journals of Sullivan Esq. hidden in a cabinet which had been nailed shut. They decided to investigate upstairs before going to the basement, just to cover their bases, and this led to the famous unused bedroom kicking into full gear. Mitsuya, Tobias, and Chloe got locked in the room. Nassim tried to chop his way through the door when he heard them screaming. Mitsuya was nearly hurled out the window by the flying bed, but he caught himself on the windowsill. After getting bashed by the flying bed, the poltergeist activity stopped and the trio baled out as fast as possible.

    At last, it was time for the basement. The agents made it safely past the collapsing stairs and eventually found some photographs Sullivan Jr. had taken of his victims, as well as those he intended to kill later as part of his ritual. The party also found a couple of old oil paintings - one was a landscape of Broken Shield, and the other was a portrait of a young lady with brilliant red hair. Through some quirk of old family genetics, Chloe looked almost identical to the woman in the portrait. The party decided to send Chloe and Elspeth upstairs to burn the creepy paintings while the rest of the team continued the investigation in the basement.

    Nassim and Mitsuya worked together to break through the false wall, and released hundreds of rats into the basement. Among the rats were half a dozen Beshilu (humanoid rat spirits who chew holes in the boundary between the mortal and spirit worlds), and they were none too happy about having their nest destroyed. The party got into a scuffle with the Beshilu, which prompted an attack from Sullivan's possessed knife as well. Upstairs, Sullivan also animated the hallway rug in an attempt to abduct Chloe. Because the party was tied up dealing with rat swarms, angry spirits, and a floating knife, Chloe and Elspeth had to fend for themselves against the animated rug, backed up only by Piper's pet wyrmling Winston. All in all, it was a chaotic fight, but it was a lot of fun.

    Once the Beshilu and animated objects were dealt with, the party smashed through the false wall and revealed Sullivan Jr.'s corpse lying in an open casket on a wooden pallet. He didn't appreciate having his dirt nap interrupted, so he got up and started clawing the crap out of Mitsuya. At one point during the fight, he summoned a Dimensional Shambler to harry the back lines of the party, but that thing was taken down with extreme prejudice. Eventually, the party managed to destroy Sullivan Jr., but by the end of the fight Mitsuya was critically injured and riddled with disease. Nassim used his clerical magic to remove the disease, but thanks to the Constitution damage Mitsuya had suffered, the poor thug was still likely to be out of action for several days.

    With Sullivan Jr. dealt with, the party split up to enjoy the rest of the day in a pleasant lakeside town before they had to go back to New Sierra. Magda and Marcella took some pictures by the lake at sunset, Piper and Carmilla went to the veteran's bar for a drink, Tobias went back to the pack house to sleep for ten hours, Elspeth and Chloe enthused over their shared destruction of the haunted rug, and Nassim spent the evening giving medical treatment to Mitsuya. The night passed quietly, and Tobias finally earned that much deserved peaceful night's rest. The next morning, everything was looking good for the team.

    Except for the fact that Mitsuya woke up covered in snake scales.

    This adventure was a lot of fun, and the players did a great job with piecing everything together pretty much on their own.

  3. - Top - End - #33
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    We had a short session this week, so there isn't much to report
    Spoiler: Medical Mishaps
    Show
    Nassim woke up to the sound of Mitsuya screaming. He broke down Mitsuya's hotel room door, and the spy girls (Piper, Magda, and Carmilla) swept the room for hostiles. When they determined the room was clear, they checked on Mitsuya, who was curled up in a blanket on his bed. Nassim and Piper struggled to get him out of his blanket burrito. After a while, Carmilla used her hunting knife to cut the blanket open, and Mitsuya's new snakelike appearance was revealed. Nobody failed the Sanity check, including Mistuya! Nassim called Marcella into the room to help with the medical examination, while Piper and Magda headed down to the flophouse to pick up Tobias and Elspeth. Once the party was assembled, they loaded Mitsuya into the back of Toby's magic van, left an apology and a business card for the hotel manager, and hurried back to New Sierra.

    Meanwhile, Aurelie and Alexia had been busy in their own right, undergoing therapy after their last misadventures (physical for Alexia, and psychological for Aurelie). In between therapy sessions, they were tasked with making contact with Professor Joseph Camp, the former head of Delta Green who had cut ties with the organization after they entered what he called a "free-booting" phase. Colonel Natter hoped to bring him in from the cold, since Camp was an invaluable source of knowledge on the Mythos and the mole hunt back in '77. Aurelie and Alexia made a few attempts to contact him at the library where he worked, but he politely brushed them off with a vague offer to meet later on. Aurelie attempted to follow him home, but the old man still knew his tradecraft, and he shook off his untrained tail within minutes. The girls next leveraged Aurelie's connections with the telephone company in an attempt to get his home address, but the only address listed, even in the billing archives, was his office. They went to his office to break in, but backed out of the attempt when they realized Camp had dusted his doorknob with talcum powder. Eventually, Alexia rolled well enough on her tradecraft check to appeal to the old spy, and the girls got their meeting. However, he was unimpressed with Aurelie's reluctance to even be in the organization, and her punk attitude did nothing to win him over. The last straw was when Aurelie referred to Declan McBride as her real boss, from which Camp inferred that she wasn't a loyal agent. After that realization, Camp sent the girls packing, telling both of them to find something better to do with their lives.

    Back at the Natter Estate, Nassim and Marcella consulted with Cameron about what to do with Mitsuya. Cameron revealed his ties to Caduceus, and suggested trying the Hybridization Process on Mitsuya, since Restoration and Remove Curse had no effect. Cameron also confided in Marcella about the process itself. He revealed it was a magical treatment which infused the subject with serpent-person blood, utilizing their regenerative properties to cure the subject of almost any ailment. Cameron offered to schedule treatment for Mitsuya immediately, and the party reluctantly agreed. Marcella told the rest of the team what she had learned from Cameron, but wisely kept Mitsuya out of the conversation.

    The agents returned to Delta Green HQ and found things more or less back to normal. They arrived just in time to see the tail end of a huge argument between Colonel Natter and his adopted daughter Cordelia. She ended up storming out of the office, leaving a bewildered Colonel muttering at his desk. A short time later, Kenaz arrived at the Delta Green office to offer an apology to Mitsuya and his household (not knowing he was at Caduceus HQ). According to Kenaz, her superior officer Elvis had gone over her head and "utilized the agency's asset in a capacity which is a breech of etiquette". Piper and Magda cornered her privately, and they soon figured out Kenaz was terrified. She left soon thereafter, stating that the other Dukes of Edom would be suspicious if she spent too long away from her work.

    Once the office drama was dealt with, the agents held a meeting to discuss what to do about the "Scourge of God". They settled the matter by taking a vote. In a 5-2 split they decided to open the silver coffin to see what was inside. Colonel Natter and Villiers broke the seven puzzle locks open with crowbars while the rest of the party covered the coffin with guns and spells at the ready. Once the final seal was broken, the agents opened the coffin and looked inside.

    Held within was a skeleton draped in the holy symbols of long forgotten gods. A silver stake pierced its chest.

  4. - Top - End - #34
    Bugbear in the Playground
     
    Phhase's Avatar

    Join Date
    Sep 2010
    Location
    X/Z 12,550,821

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Wait, curing him of turning into a snake...by injecting him with more snake blood? That sounds more like what would've caused the problem in the first place.
    Sometimes, I have strong opinions on seemingly inconsequential matters.
    Quote Originally Posted by Crisis21 View Post
    Phhase he played four
    He played nick nack on my door
    With a nick nack paddy whack
    Give a dog a bone
    Phhase came rolling home.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ventruenox View Post
    You found a way to backstab... with a ballista...

    I want to play at your table.
    Spoiler: How to have a Good Idea
    Show
    Quote Originally Posted by Yunru View Post
    Buy a lava lamp, it more than doubles the rate of good ideas :p
    Better yet, buy this lava lamp.

  5. - Top - End - #35
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Quote Originally Posted by Phhase View Post
    Wait, curing him of turning into a snake...by injecting him with more snake blood? That sounds more like what would've caused the problem in the first place.
    The Hybridization process won't cure him at all. It's just going to suppress the symptoms for a while

    Caduceus is rather suspect, isn't it?

  6. - Top - End - #36
    Bugbear in the Playground
     
    Phhase's Avatar

    Join Date
    Sep 2010
    Location
    X/Z 12,550,821

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Quote Originally Posted by SleepyShadow View Post
    The Hybridization process won't cure him at all. It's just going to suppress the symptoms for a while

    Caduceus is rather suspect, isn't it?
    Snek cocainum, got it. Very sus indeed. Wonder what happened to those other two blokes that got it.
    Last edited by Phhase; 2022-09-14 at 07:32 PM.
    Sometimes, I have strong opinions on seemingly inconsequential matters.
    Quote Originally Posted by Crisis21 View Post
    Phhase he played four
    He played nick nack on my door
    With a nick nack paddy whack
    Give a dog a bone
    Phhase came rolling home.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ventruenox View Post
    You found a way to backstab... with a ballista...

    I want to play at your table.
    Spoiler: How to have a Good Idea
    Show
    Quote Originally Posted by Yunru View Post
    Buy a lava lamp, it more than doubles the rate of good ideas :p
    Better yet, buy this lava lamp.

  7. - Top - End - #37
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Quote Originally Posted by Phhase View Post
    Snek cocainum, got it. Very sus indeed. Wonder what happened to those other two blokes that got it.
    The players will get to find out in a few sessions

    Spoiler: Mansion of Madness: Part One
    Show
    Because a few players were going to miss the session, the remainder of the group opted to tackle a case they had put on the back-burner. Declan McBride's rival, Zeke "The Geek" Whelan, was on the hunt for a female thief who had robbed him during a house party. He had fallen violently ill, and spent more than a month recuperating in isolation. When he recovered, he made finding this thief his top priority. His bootlegging and drug manufacturing was kept to the bare minimum needed to sustain his gang, and his wild parties had ceased altogether. Declan thought Zeke's behavior to be suspicious, but the Delta Green agents often had more pressing matters to attend to, and so the case had fallen by the wayside. However, since players were missing and there was a lull in enemy activity, now was the perfect opportunity to put this case to bed.

    The session was spent entirely engaged in research and interviews. Of the many suspected thieves Colonel Natter and Declan McBride had uncovered, the agents thought four in particular were worth investigating. Those four were Laura Teague (a private eye), Andrea Pendragon (a runaway cult member), Mathilda Nordling (a psychic and bookstore owner), and Francesca Collins (a young vulcanologist). The group split into two teams to tackle the investigation more efficiently. Magda and Tobias went to interrogate Laura and Andrea, while Aurelie, Nassim, and Carmilla (being played by Mitsuya's player) tackled the other two suspects.

    From the interviews, the party learned a few crucial pieces of information. Laura Teague was under the thumb of ROSE (a foreign intelligence agency). She was being forced to work for them because they had captured one of her contacts, and would execute the contact if she did not comply. The contact was a 15-year-old arms dealer named Natalia. ROSE had Laura investigating Zeke Whelan in the hopes of finding a way to leverage him against the RSA. Tobias and Magda immediately started coming up with a plan to rescue Natalia from prison.

    Andrea Pendragon (under witness protection by the city police) was terrified to talk about her involvement with a splinter group of the Inner Night led by Josephine Garsetti, who was kicked out of the main Inner Night cult because she was "too extreme and violent", which is really saying something given that the Inner Night is led by a bunch of serpent-people with ambiguous but nefarious goals. Andrea confirmed that she and Josephine had attended several parties hosted by Zeke Whelan, where they had seen him bite the heads off chickens and pour the blood on a black stone he always wore around his neck. After attending a few parties, Josephine received Zeke's necklace "as a gift", and started her own splinter cult. She murdered six people as sacrifices to the stone. Andrea fled the cult and reported it to the police, who conducted a raid on the cult's compound. Unfortunately, Josephine escaped from custody, and now Andrea fears for her life. The agents smuggled her out of the police safe house and brought her back to the new Delta Green safe house.

    Mathilda proved to be a bit of a nutjob, but she kept meticulous records of all her sales. Aurelie pilfered these records while Nassim kept Mathilda distracted with "cleansing his aura". According to the records, Zeke had purchased a book entitled The Kingdom of the Shadows, a Mythos tome connected to The Book of Eibon (which the agents had found a copy of out in Broken Shield). It turned out Mathilda was also hosting a mailing list for psychics and other sensitive types to communicate with each other, interpret each other's dreams, etc. Knowing what they did about Dracula's influence on psychics and dreams, the agents wondered if they could perhaps use the mailing list to track the Count's movements in the city.

    Francesca was a happy-go-lucky young lady fresh out of the university whom Zeke had hired on a part-time basis to help locate onyx deposits out in the countryside. She also had a part-time job working for Martin Creasy, the petroleum executive who was connected to Ventaja and the death of at least one diplomat from Costa Luna. Her job with him was studying the cold mud volcanoes in the mountains of Troesia. Francesca was very enthusiastic about her work, and Nassim was happy to talk shop with her (his dwarven stonecunning came in handy during the conversation). The agents pieced together that Zeke was likely trying to replicate his dark stone if the original couldn't be found.

    Since it was a relatively short session, gathering clues and conducting interviews took up pretty much the entire time. Nothing wrong with that. It is an investigation game, after all. We ended the session with the agents getting back together to discuss their next move.

  8. - Top - End - #38
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: Mansion of Madness: Part Two
    Show
    It was another shorter session, so not too much happened. However...

    The party decided to infiltrate Zeke Whelan's nightclub to gather intel on Josephine Garsetti, the crazy lady who sacrificed six people in her murder cult. All the ladies in the party got dolled up, while the guys settled for their usual rumpled suits. Things started off well enough. They learned from the jazz band that Josephine and her boyfriend stopped showing up two weeks ago. They learned from the flapper girls that Josephine had some friends that always pretended not to know her when she brought her boyfriend with her. They even learned that Rhea Greenwood, a local PI/witch, was looking for Larau Teague, since the latter was "butting into" the former's business as a private detective.

    During the evening, Marcella, Eva, and Carmilla managed to persuade the bartender to let them see Whelan directly. The mob boss was studying a magical tome when they entered, but he quickly put it away. He had learned the young ladies were looking for Garsetti and thus was willing to speak with them. He cautiously offered some advice on where to find Garsetti, including suggesting they search her old hometown of Muskrat Rapids. The trio of young ladies behaved themselves well, but during the conversation Eva came to the horrific realization that Whelan was a human-insect hybrid. She kept this revelation to herself until after the trio was out of his office.

    The agents got together outside the bar to discuss what their next move would be. They decided to take down the drug peddling mob boss here and now, rather than wait for him to become a problem for them later. A somewhat convoluted plan was concocted. Aurelie, Tobias, and Magda were supposed to go around to the back of the bar to search for a back entrance to Whelan's office. Piper was to convince the bartender to let her into the back. Marcella, Eva, and Carmilla were supposed to get into Whelan's office while Piper was back there. Nassim would stay in the main area of the bar to distract the mob goons and safely evacuate the civilians if things went poorly. The idea was to enact a pincer maneuver and corner Whelan in his office, hopefully to arrest him without a fight.

    The plan was sunk by the agents' first move. The trio who went around to the back of the bar found a secret door which led directly into Whelan's office. Aurelie jumped the gun, so to speak, and decided to open the door before notifying the rest of team or consulting the agents with her. She and Tobias were Invisible, but Magda was caught out in the open and off-guard when Whelan turned around at the sound of his back door being opened.

    The mob boss was none too pleased at the sight of someone trying to break in.

    I hope the party figures this one out.

  9. - Top - End - #39
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: Mansion of Madness: Part Three
    Show
    Zeke Whelan took Magda hostage and handcuffed her to a chair. She was savvy enough to keep him talking while Aurelie and Tobias warned the others about what was going on. While Piper and the others formulated a plan of rescue, Nassim was approached by a pretty blonde lady who gave him a spiked drink. The players *immediately* suspected this was Osprey in disguise, but Nassim couldn't roll an Insight check higher than 9, so nobody caught on. Of course, Nassim is a dwarf with a high Constitution, so the poisoned drink was only a mild inconvenience. The lady her getaway when she realized Nassim wasn't poisoned, which was just before the fight broke out.

    Piper and Marcella got into a close-range gunfight with the bartender, Nassim kept the lobby goons at bay, while Carmilla and Eva had a knife fight against the bouncer Mr. Wriggles. Meanwhile, Tobias and Aurelie broke into Zeke's office through the back door. During the scrum, Magda was able to slip her cuffs and knife Zeke with her hidden stiletto. During the fight, Zeke revealed his monstrous true form, lashing out at Magda and Aurelie with his whiplike claws while fending off Tobias with magic. Zeke was pretty resistant to physical attacks, but Aurelie whacked him with two upcast Inflict Wounds spells, which both did over 30 damage to him. So hats off to the sorceress.

    The gangsters were taken down, and the party reveled in their victory. They loaded up Zeke's body and all of his occult books in the trunk of their car and hauled it all back to headquarters. Once done, the party split up and went home for the night (except for Magda, who met up with Vic at a hotel). The next day, Colonel Natter congratulated them on a job well done, and the party began to plan for a quick trip to Muskrat Rapids to take care of Josephine Garsetti. After all, it's against Delta Green's code of ethics to let a crazy serial killer keep an unidentified Mythos artifact. As they were planning, Central Command, a.k.a. Lord Godalming, called Aurelie and Tobias into his office.

    Word had gotten to him about Edom bombing the Delta Green safe house, and he was none too pleased. He encouraged interdepartmental rivalries, but he drew the line at destroying government property. He told them he was going to be restructuring the departments by way of merging Delta Green and Edom into a single organization. Since Tobias and Aurelie were the only locals on the Delta Green team, and since Godalming hated Natter, he was offering them top positions in the new agency once the merger was finalized. He admitted he would have to clean house in both departments before he could bring Delta Green and Edom together, but he was certain it was for the best. Tobias and Aurelie thanked him for his consideration, and immediately went back to HQ to tell the Colonel and the rest of the agents what was coming down the pipeline.

    Colonel Natter boiled it down to two options: the agents could stay with Delta Green, maintain a steady paycheck and the security of the government, or they could follow him into exile to continue trying to stop Dracula and his minions from enacting whatever plan the Count had in store. It did not take long for the agents to decide that it was time for Delta Green to go rogue.

    Time to enter the cowboy era!

  10. - Top - End - #40
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Okay, here we go...
    Spoiler: The Fall of Delta Green
    Show
    In between sessions, Aurelie decided to change her mind about the offer from Lord Godalming. Before the start of the session, she went back to Godalming and told him what the agents were doing. She specifically pinned the blame on Tobias for telling Vic about the under-the-table promotion offers. She accepted the new position of Hound with Edom, and furthermore was put in charge of whatever remained of Delta Green after Godalming was finished "cleaning house." Aurelie had two conditions for working under Godalming - no execution of Delta Green agents, and blanket protection for her parents. Godalming agreed, sent her back to the Delta Green office, and picked up the telephone.

    "Close the net."

    Tobias and Aurelie went to Joseph Camp, trying to recruit him one last time. They were tailed by Elvis (the top agent of Edom) and a pair of RSA gunmen. After making contact with Camp, Elvis arrested Tobias and brought him back to HQ, while the two RSA agents took Camp out for one last meal on the crown before his execution. Aurelie then collected all of his Mythos-related documents.

    Nassim, Marcella, Eva, and Geerd went to Caduceus to rescue Mitsuya. Eva got taken to the first sub-basement to visit Mitsuya, while the others loitered in the lobby. While waiting for Mitsuya's release, Nassim and Geerd spotted one of the cleaning crew carrying a suspicious briefcase. When they went to talk to him, the man ran for it. They chased him down in a fun little chase scene, and caught him trying to make a break for it in the parking garage. After a bit of Intimidation, he fessed up that he was carrying a bomb, and that he was one of ten bombers hired by Philip to enact a plan drawn up by Fort (another duke of Edom). Geerd stole a car out of the garage and drove the bomb to the harbor, while Nassim searched the building for more bombs. The fire alarm was pulled, and the building was evacuated in only five minutes. Nassim knew he didn't have time to get all of the bombs out of the building, so he carried them up as high up in the building as he could with just barely enough time to escape. He failed the Dexterity save when the bombs went off, and avoided death by 1 point of damage. Because he had redirected the blast to the upper floors, he managed to take out the Yig offices without killing any civilians. It was a huge Sanity reward for pulling that off. Unfortunately, an Edom kill team showed up instead of the police. They rounded up Mitsuya and Eva, and Nassim was left for dead on the steps of the ruined building. Marcella managed to hide from the team, and escaped with Nassim and Geerd in the stolen car.

    Magda took Carmilla and Alexia with her during her attempt to recruit Kenaz (whose real name is Ekatarina "Katie" Lobanova) and Oakes. The initial meeting in the RSA archives went well enough, but a trio of RSA agents accompanied by an Edom Jack showed up to capture all of them. Magda took one for the team by engaging in combat with the Jack, allowing Alexia to escape through a window and Carmilla to get the two former Edom dukes out of the building. Magda was knocked around by the Jack before he handcuffed her and dragged her back to Godalming's office.

    Piper was back at the Delta Green office, organizing the destruction of paperwork and the removal of the silver coffin containing the Scourge of God. Vic was out of the office trying to track down Cordelia, who hadn't been seen in several days. Piper heard the gunfire from the archives, and everyone heard the destruction of the Caduceus building. Sensing trouble, she went straight to Godalming's office to find out what was going on. Elspeth, Villiers, and Lygon stole an ambulance to escape with the silver coffin, while Martinez stayed behind to shovel paperwork into the furnace. Piper was cordially received by Godalming, who expressed his disapproval with Delta Green's attempt to go rogue. Piper was surprised he knew about that, but she did a great job turning the interrogation back on him. Toward the end of the conversation, Magda and Tobias were dragged into the office, and a short time later the kill team with Mitsuya and Eva arrived. Mitsuya took the opportunity to headbutt Elvis right in the nose.

    Piper was given an ultimatum - round up the missing members of Delta Green and bring them back in, or have the entire squad declared traitors to the Duchy. She agreed to bring them in under the condition they weren't to be harmed, and offered to stay behind at the office while Magda and Tobias were put in charge of gathering up the rest of the team. Godalming agreed, but kept Eva as a hostage just in case they tried anything funny.

    Obviously this was a ploy on Piper's end, and she's spent all of her free time since this session trying to come up with a way to get herself and Eva out of this situation.

    Magda, Tobias, and Mitsuya had the team gather together at their favorite cafe, all under the watchful eye of Tyler, a martial arts expert and another Duke of Edom. It didn't take long for the party to piece together that someone had betrayed them to Godalming, but because Aurelie's betrayal had happened before the rest of the players had arrived, they didn't specifically know it was her.

    After learning about the death of Joseph Camp, and Godalming's threats to abduct Chloe, the agents decided to split up and go check on Elspeth's father, and Alexia's grandfather. This move would serve two purposes - splitting up would make it harder for Edom to track them, and they might be able to bring in additional assets for their inevitable escape attempt.

    Yikes...

  11. - Top - End - #41
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: Falling Out
    Show
    The session started with the PCs trying to puzzle out who the mole was. After a few accusations were thrown around the table, Aurelie eventually confessed. She claimed she was doing it to protect the agents from themselves. She believed Delta Green had zero chance of standing up to Edom, so the best way to save the agents was to bring as many of them into the fold as possible.

    This was not well received.

    Aurelie handed over the books she had collected from Dr. Camp, warned the party about the RSA agents watching the café, then hightailed it out of there before anyone in the party decided to attack her (the player took over as Geerd and Carmilla for the rest of the session, so she wasn't out of the game). Armed with this new intel, the plan to rescue the Hunter and Irving families remained largely unchanged, just with the added complication of needing a new place to rendezvous. Since Villiers had already stolen an ambulance, the agents decided to meet up at Westbridge Hospital after their extraction missions. During the planning, Magda had kept Colonel Natter in the loop by keeping her radio switched on. He never spoke, but he would occasionally click the receiver to indicate he copied.

    The agents split up into three teams. Magda, Marcella, and Geerd took Alexia to the 300 block, while Tobias, Nassim, and Carmilla went with Elspeth to her parents' home. That left Villiers and Ekaterina in charge of getting Dr. Lygon and Allan to the hospital without the waiting RSA agents catching them. Villiers and Ekaterina proved quite capable. The former Hound ventilated one of the RSA goons, while Villiers ran another one over in the ambulance. The other two goons started shooting at the ambulance, but that drew the attention of the nearby team of firefighters who were with the Union of Regulars. With axe and crowbar in hand, they finished the job.

    First up, the 300 block. The agents arrived to the newly crime-ridden neighborhood and noticed the lights were all off at "Cushing's" apartment. They could not keep Alexia from sprinting up the stairs. The other three raced after her, but the young agent was very fast. Thankfully, a good Persuasion check from Marcella kept her from rushing into the apartment without backup. The door was broken in, and when Magda peered inside she saw a beautiful clockwork angel covered in blood. It spotted her, and rushed to attack with its twin sabers. The battle was short but brutal, with high damage output on both sides of the fight. The agents triumphed in the end. After the fight, they discovered the angel had butchered Alexia's grandfather and the nurse Holly Clay. It had also shredded every loose document it could find. The team guessed (correctly) it had been looking for Alexia's copy of the Dracula Dossier. They hurried to Alexia's mother's house, but the situation there was the same. An angel of the God Machine had been set loose upon the house, slaughtering her mother and stepfather. The party dealt with the angel here as well, and Magda had to keep a weeping Alexia from calling her biological father. Magda was worried the God Machine's agents would be listening in. The team hurried out of the house and headed for the hospital. Geerd did his best to comfort the poor girl.

    Over at the Irving estate, the team had a long-awaited meet and greet with Elspeth's family. Her father Jasper Quincey (everyone calls him J.Q. for short) and her mother Elizabeth had both been Edom agents in their youths, but held bitter feelings toward the agency after a botched mission in Troesia. J.Q. had been shot in the head during an ambush, and only survived by a combination of luck and Elizabeth's tender care. The brain damage left him with a permanent stutter, and Elizabeth often had to help finish his sentences for him. Elspeth's great-grandmother Lucy was a different story altogether. She was almost 100 years old, and had been long awaiting a team of agents willing to take down Dracula. She had been working independently for eighty years to gather intel and artifacts to combat the lord of the Un-Dead. She gladly gave her "dear Ellie" a large red suitcase filled with a treasure trove of knowledge.

    That's when the Edom kill team showed up. However, the Edom agents were in for a rude surprise. The Irvings had been ready for this fight for years, and having the help of young agents made it all the better. Granny took out a roomful of Edom agents with a grenade she had stored in her knitting kit before the kill team took her down. J.Q. rigged some impromptu explosives together, and Elizabeth was handy with a gun. That just left the PCs to deal with a vampirized Juliet, the poor university girl who had been living next door to the party's old safe house. She had grappling hair and strength draining kisses, but the four agents proved quite capable of fending her off. Juliet tried to make her retreat, but a city bus blaring a unique horn ran into her at full speed. The vampiress slithered into a sewer manhole and out of sight. The doors to the bus swung open, and Colonel Vincent Natter smiled at the agents.

    "Get in!" he shouted. "Plenty of open seats. I even brought the dog!"
    Last edited by SleepyShadow; 2022-10-19 at 11:27 PM.

  12. - Top - End - #42
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: Roadhouse
    Show
    Colonel Natter reintroduced the agents to a long forgotten ally - Vildana Petrovic, the sole member of the Delta Green intel team. She rolled out of the back of the bus, complained about her missing kidney, and told the agents that Piper and Eva were being transferred to an RSA black site. Vic had a plan to bust them out before they got there. His plan, such as it was, consisted of sideswiping the prison van off the road. Tobias, Mitsuya, and Magda came up with a better plan. They stole a Rolls Royce, got lost looking for the transport van, and eventually caught up with the RSA agents thanks to Mitsuya's urchin background. Magda shot the tire of the van, and they swerved to a gentle stop.

    Vic followed it up by slamming the bus directly into the cab of the van.

    With the RSA agents liquefied, Mitsuya broke Piper and Eva out of the back of the ruined van, and the whole team piled into the bus (or the stolen ambulance) and left New Sierra. Vic told the agents he had tracked down Cordelia to a town several miles away, and suggested the use of his favorite roadhouse as a temporary HQ. The exhausted agents had nothing better to suggest, so they went with it. The roadhouse was basically Coyote Ugly.

    The agents were finally able to get a good night's sleep. The next morning, Tobias used Sending to contact Chloe, and tried to convince her to go to his parents' house (or to the Broken Shield flophouse) until he could come get her. She was disappointed because it was almost Halloween and she wanted to go exploring a haunted house in Arkham. Tobias hated the idea, and tried to convince her otherwise. She lied when she said she wouldn't go. Picking up on her bad Deception check, Tobias immediately contacted Harmon and asked him to go get her. The werewolves of Broken Shield considered her to be the "junior" member of the pack, so of course Harmon agreed to safeguard Chloe.

    With that taken care of, Vic laid out a plan with the team. He wanted to rescue Cordelia, then go to Arkham to pick up Chloe, and finally follow Geerd out to the Van Helsing estate hidden in the mountains of Troesia. The party agreed, and prepared themselves for the back-to-back rescue missions.

  13. - Top - End - #43
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    This one might be a little rough.
    Spoiler: The Harvesters: Part One
    Show
    The agents loaded onto the bus and headed for Needletown, a place which is best described as "grungy Houston." It was the last point of contact Colonel Natter had with Cordelia. She had sent him a panicked message from a motel in Needletown saying "I'm being set up. Cops and hotel staff in on it. Check my car. Alarm fake. Please help me." There had been no word from her since. Since Cordelia was not just a Delta Green agent, but also the Colonel's adopted daughter, the party felt obliged to rescue her. During the trip to Needletown, Magdalena, Piper, and Tobias had a good heart-to-heart about what had been happening to Delta Green. They were all feeling the stress. Magda was worried it would affect her performance in the field. The others tried to reassure her things would be okay.

    It did not take long to find Cordelia's rundown sedan parked outside of a Motel 9. Mitsuya popped the lock with his trusty crowbar, and the party rummaged through her intentionally messy car. They found she had stashed a pair of handguns, a radio, and some cash in a few hidden cubbyholes. They took her equipment, mostly to make sure it didn't get stolen. Once that was done, the party split into three groups. Piper, Marcella, and Singe went to chat up the staff, Mitsuya and Nassim went to the continental breakfast to question the guests, while Magda, Toby, and Vic scouted the exterior of the motel.

    Piper's team chatted with the man working the front desk, a sleazy guy from Bechana named Adam Chen. The trio pulled some good Tradecraft and kept him distracted long enough to learn what room Cordelia had been staying at before her disappearance. As they turned to go check out her room, they overheard Chen on the telephone whispering "Things are getting out of hand. Now there are three of them!" Up in Cordelia's room, they found signs of a small scuffle, as well as one of her suitcases tucked under the bed. Her room was the only one with direct access to the fire escape, and the locks on the door had been rigged to fail.

    Mitsuya and Nassim talked with some nice old ladies for a while, but they didn't really get anywhere with them. They were just about to leave when Fred the handyman approached Nassim as a fellow Union member (he's retired now). He could tell they were up to something. Nassim came clean and told him they were looking for Cordelia. Fred recognized her description and told them that if anything bad happened to her, Chen and his friends had something to do with it. He told them that Adam's friends consisted of three lowlifes who worked at the convenience store across the street, as well as the local sheriff and a man who was "sick in the soul." This was all Mitsuya needed to go interrogate Chen. The desk jockey squealed after a little bit of Intimidation.

    Chen told them that a Mr. DeVille had called them and asked them to kidnap Cordelia. Over the last few years, they had abducted several young women who had been traveling alone. The gang would use and abuse them for a while before shipping them off to clients around the world. However, this was the first time they had taken a direct request. The traffickers' leader, David D'Angelo, had made it clear that Cordelia was a high value market item. Chen claimed he was a victim of circumstance in all this, but Mitsuya wasn't buying it. He broke one of Chen's fingers and locked him in the supply closet.

    Outside the motel, things were looking good at first. Tobias and Vic confirmed Cordelia's room was the only one with access to the fire escape, and Magda found (much to her disappointment) that the room was in a virtual blind spot, unable to be seen from the street or parking lot. The three group reconvened just as the sheriff arrived in his gold-plated pickup truck accompanied by two redneck goliaths. The sheriff went in alone to talk to the agents, but he did not have much new information. He knew the traffickers had two locations where they held their captives, one called "the gulag" and the other "the farmhouse." However, he did not know which one Cordelia was at, since neither he nor the rest of the gang had "gotten a turn" with her yet.

    I thought Marcella was going to kill him right then and there.

    He tried to bribe the party into leaving Needletown, but obviously they weren't having any of it. They knocked him around, took his gun, and stuffed him in the closet with Chen. From inside the closet, he told them one of the three goliath traffickers might know where she was, but even that intel did not get him released. The party peeked outside, confirmed only two of the three goliaths were present, and drew guns on them, hoping to intimidate them into an easy surrender. Instead the agents got into a gunfight with them. Magda proved her sharpshooting worth, and Vic proved he wasn't above slitting throats, especially when his daughter's life was on the line. One of the goliath's died at his hand, and the other spent the whole fight paralyzed thanks to Tobias using Hold Person. They tied up the survivor while he was still paralyzed, and dragged the big lug back inside the motel.

    Wicked villains often have wicked minions.

  14. - Top - End - #44
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: The Harvesters: Part Two
    Show
    The party interrogated the surviving goliath, but he didn't know much beyond "Go talk to McGruder." It turned out he was a gang member who was shirking his duties and had not gotten himself involved in the traffickers' activities for the last two or three kidnappings. However, it was McGruder's job to take the girls to either the "gulag" or the "farmhouse", so he was the only one who knew where Cordelia was. The agents did not get a chance to ask any other questions, because a sniper shot liquified his head right in front of them. The party scrambled for cover, but a second shot did not come. Magda caught sight of Firiste the mercenary sniper, who was perched atop the roof of a candy factory. The party hurried inside the hotel.

    Once they were inside, all of the telephones in the building rang.

    Piper was the one to answer. It was the Prime Minister. He said he had "called everywhere" looking for them, and was glad he finally got hold of the agents. He assured them that he did not agree with Godalming's actions and would be taking measures to remove him from office. The Prime Minister wanted things to go back to the way they were - an uneasy balancing act between Edom and Delta Green. He also warned them that Godalming had put out an assassination contract on Colonel Natter, and that Firiste had accepted the job. He suggested they should be fine in the short term, since she prioritized her "personal missions" over contract killings. Piper thanked him for his support, hung up, and filled in the rest of the party on what was happening. The party hurried back to the bus, using Chen and the Sheriff as human shields for Vic. Firiste was obliged to gun down the two human traffickers. Once inside the bus, the team sped off before Firiste decided to fulfill her contract.

    The agents went to McGruder's trailer home at the edge of town. He confessed everything to them. He said he thought the gang was into kidnapping and ransoming, but he tried to drop out of the gang when he found out it was really a human trafficking ring. However, David D'Angelo, the leader of the traffickers, threatened to kill him if he left. McGruder had been hiding out in his trailer ever since, and only participated in Cordelia's kidnapping when the Sheriff showed up and dropped her on his doorstep for "sorting". He offered to turn himself into the police if the agents agreed to let him live. It was clear he felt deep guilt for his actions, and so the party agreed to his terms. He told them he took Cordelia to the gulag, and hadn't seen her since. Nassim suggested McGruder should join the Union once he served his time in prison. With the final piece of intel acquired, the team sped off to the gulag to rescue their poor little friend.

    The gulag was a repurposed bomb shelter out in the middle of the woods. The stolen city bus could barely handle the dirt road which led out to it. The team checked for any sign of pursuit, but it looked like Firiste had not followed them. They went inside the bunker, and soon found a shrine built around the desiccated corpse of a woman. Hostile spiritual activity warned them of something supernatural in the area, and Tobias was able to perceive the hideous ghost of a woman whispering and skittering about. Tobias learned she was the ghost of David's first victim, a girl named Laura, who had become obsessed with him after her passing. Her hate and loneliness had driven her spirit mad and anchored her to David. Nassim pulled out his holy symbol and went full exorcist on her. It was a mighty battle of wills, and Nassim went a little bit crazy from the experience, but his exorcism was powerful enough to send her on to the afterlife rather than just temporarily banishing her. I'm not doing it justice here, but it was a pretty cool moment for him.

    Further into the bunker, the agents tangled with a couple of Gloom Hounds (weird displacer beast dog things). They had an opportunity to set up an ambush for the Gloom Hounds, so most of the party did sensible things like ready their guns, prep a spell, or set a spear to receive a charge. Tobias scattered some dried dog food across the floor in the hopes of causing the monster dogs to slip and fall. It was a silly idea, but I was willing to roll with it. One of the hounds was fine aside from taking some gunshots, but of course the other hound rolled a nat one on its Dexterity check as it charged down the hall. It slipped, fell prone, and ate a critical hit from Mitsuya's monster slaying boar spear. The Gloom Hounds did not last long in the face of a team of well prepared and well organized agents. Once past the hounds, the party found the cell where Cordelia was. Or rather, the cell where she had been until very recently. The walls were covered with markings from previous victims. Some counted out days, others left messages to loved ones, and some were just heartbreakingly sad. However, Cordelia had kept her wits about her and left a message for the team she knew would come. David had taken her to the farmhouse.

    The agents raced back to town and headed for the farmhouse. They were determined to either rescue or avenge Cordelia. Either way, D'Angelo had taken his last victim.

    They stormed into the house, where D'Angelo barely even put up a façade of normalcy. The fight was brief but brutal. Mitsuya came dangerously close to having another episode of scaly outbreak. Once D'Angelo was put down, the agents scoured the house for any sign of Cordelia. Piper and Singe found her in the root cellar behind the house. Her clothes had been taken from her, and she had been chained up to the same post Laura had once suffered at thanks to the ghost's influence. However, Cordelia was unharmed albeit quite shaken. She was grateful for the rescue, and apologized to everyone for the trouble she had caused them by talking to Godalming. The agents held no grudge against her, and welcomed her back into the fold after they explained what had occurred in her absence.

    The agents were about ready to leave town, when Magda once again spotted Firiste loitering on a nearby rooftop. The agents all took cover and debated what to do. Vic wanted to just go to the bus and leave, while Magda wanted to take Firiste down now. While the rest of the agents debated the matter, Singe decided to step out into the open. She hailed Firiste and offered to parley.

    A successful mission! Let's hope the agents can maintain this momentum.

  15. - Top - End - #45
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: Coyote Falls: Part One
    Show
    After a bit of recuperation at the roadhouse, the party headed for Arkham to pick up Chloe. They headed straight for Miskatonic University where she was supposed to be waiting for them under the watch of the werewolf pack from Broken Shield. However, neither Chloe nor any of the werewolves were there. The agents met up with Toby's parents (his father is a professor there), and learned that nobody had heard from Chloe or the pack since Harmon and the gang arrived in town. Toby's mother suggested going to a hideout she had taught Chloe about in case of an emergency, while his father suggested looking around at the university first in case Chloe had left any clues behind. The party also received a warning about some strange energy coming from the locus near the hideout.

    The agents decided to snoop around in Chloe's room for clues. Nothing seemed amiss, aside from the leftover material Chloe had been using to make her Halloween costume. According to one of her friends she had gone to the "old witch house" on a dare to see if she was brave enough to spend Halloween night in a haunted house. Toby knew Chloe had the temperament of an Uratha, even if she didn't have the power, so her accepting a stupid dare was not out of line with her past behavior. The party decided to split up into three teams - Tobias and Geerd went to look in the emergency hideaway, Magda and Marcella would go to the witch house to see what they could find, while Piper, Nassim, and Singe went to track down the guy who had dared Chloe to go in the first place. The guy they were looking for was a football star named Billy.

    Piper's team had easy success, and Nassim provided the right sort of intimidation to get Billy talking. He had allegedly been asked by his steroid provider (a "hot brunette" named Jackie) to convince Chloe to go to the witch's house. He didn't know why Jackie wanted her there, but he was promised that his next fix would be free if he did. Singe spotted the telltale signs of addiction to vampire blood, and they realized Billy was juicing on the Seward Serum. They took their leave of Billy and began to concoct a way to break him of his addiction, preferably in the most unpleasant way possible.

    The witch's house was an old church which had been converted into a home, only to later be abandoned and left to rot. Magda and Marcella poked around the outside without finding much, and reluctantly went inside without the rest of the team. It did not take them long to find Jared, one of the Broken Shield pack mates. He was lying dead on the floor at the top of the basement stairs. Given his many wounds, it looked like we went down swinging. Magda and Marcella did not dare go into the basement on their own, so they hightailed it back to the university.

    Tobias and Geerd drove to the very edge of town, and had to climb underneath a bridge to find the hideaway. Hidden in the abandoned drainpipe underneath, surrounded by protective charms and seals, was Chloe in a tattered red dress. Tobias was relieved to see her safe, and she clung to him like a frightened child. She told him that Harmon and the others had shown up shortly after she arrived at the witch's house. Harmon had taken her to the cave behind the waterfall to show her the locus and admonish her for going to a haunted house, while the rest of the pack canvased the area for trouble. Her memory was hazy about what happened next, but something frightened her and she fled from the cave. The next thing she remembered was being thrown into a police car and taken back to the old house. She described the police officer who had taken her, but it wasn't anyone Tobias was familiar with. Chloe concluded her story by saying the rest of the pack showed up at the old house to rescue her, but something came through the Gauntlet and started attacking everyone. She ran from the house and had been hiding in the drainpipe ever since. Chloe suspected that whatever had come through the Gauntlet was still after her.

    Tobias and Geerd took her back to the cave behind the waterfall to see if they could find Harmon, but an overwhelming wrongness convinced them to turn back and link up with the others. Whatever was in there wasn't something Tobias wanted to expose Chloe to again, or at least not without backup. Once everyone was together again (and Toby's mother finished fawning over poor Chloe), the team decided to return to the "old witch house" together. Whatever they were dealing with was strong enough to kill one or more experienced werewolves, and our Delta Green operatives did not want to get caught out alone. They needed more information, and they were under pressure to find out what they were dealing with before it came after Chloe again.

  16. - Top - End - #46
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: Coyote Falls: Part Two
    Show
    The party headed to the witch house as a group, with Magda and Singe covering the others as a sniper/spotter duo. Inside the house they found the other members of the Broken Shield pack, all dead at the hands of some monstrous beast (along with several strange self-inflicted wounds). It was a rough situation for Toby, but thankfully he passed his sanity check at the sight of his dead pack mates. However, Harmon was nowhere to be found. Tobias suspected the leader of the pack could be found in the cave behind the waterfall outside of town. Down in the basement, where most of the dead werewolves were, the agents came under attack by a powerful spirit which had all the horrid aspects of a wolf, an ape, and a shark. Tobias was quick on the draw with a Banishment spell, and the agents retreated from the witch house before it could manifest again.

    Before heading to the waterfall, the party wanted to catch the police officer who had brought Chloe to the witch house. Using their federal authority and a bit of good Persuasion, Singe convinced the police dispatch to send the officer out there on the pretenses of picking up Chloe. Officer Cooper arrived in good time, and he chatted with Singe for a bit. He claimed Chloe was a reported runaway, and he needed to take her to her parents. It didn't take long for the agents to grow suspicious of Cooper, and eventually Magda shot him with a tranquilizer dart. Surprisingly, Cooper didn't go down. His attitude and voice changed completely, and Tobias realized Cooper was possessed. The spirit inhabiting the poor guy admitted to his identity - Coyote, an ancient trickster spirit who had a lot of run-ins with the Broken Shield and Arkham werewolf packs. He loved to possess people and go gallivanting about to cause trouble, especially around Halloween. Despite his numerous encounters with many werewolves and sages over his long existence, none had ever discovered a permanent way to banish or destroy him.

    Once the agents realized the police weren't after Chloe, and it was just Coyote being a nuisance, they decided to let him go if he promised not to bother Chloe again. He agreed, and drove off in his police cruiser. The agents piled into Toby's magic Mystery Machine, and started for the waterfall. During the drive, he asked Chloe what she remembered about the witch house. She grew increasingly agitated as she told him about how Coyote kidnapped her and took her to the witch house so he could lure the Broken Shield pack there. She prayed for someone to come protect her, and the pack showed up to rescue her. It was then the wolf-spirit showed up and started slaughtering the pack.

    Toby knew she was mad at herself (which was normal) and angry with him (which was rare). Shortly after Chloe's temper flared, the agents heard the sound of a car crash. They hurried to see what the matter was, and saw Coyote had wrapped his car around a telephone pole. The wolf spirit had manifested once again, this time trying to slaughter Coyote. Toby used Mind Spike against the spirit, and it had the unfortunate side effect of cluing him in as to what kind of spirit it was - an entity named Wolf's Hatred, the unfortunate combination of an all-powerful guardian mixed with the deepest of self-loathing. The agents drew its ire away from Coyote (who was still in the body of an innocent man) and drove away at top speed. The spirit couldn't keep pace with the van, and discorporated after the agents got out of sight.

    Once they reached the waterfall, the agents split into two teams. Tobias, Nassim, and Marcella went into the cave, while Magda and Singe stayed at the top of the cliff with Chloe and Geerd. The cave behind the waterfall was a locus of spiritual activity, and it had become heavily corrupted quite recently. Blood trickled down the walls from no discernible source, and the sounds of the water hitting the rocks was akin radio static. There were photographs of the pack's good times pinned to the walls of the cave. At the back of the cave, lying on a sofa, was the dead body of Harmon. His own silver knife protruded from his chest. There weren't signs of a struggle. Despite the odds not being in his favor, Tobias once again passed his sanity check.

    Top side, Magda's team failed their Perception checks. Coyote crept up on Chloe and grabbed her. He put a gun to her head and held her tight. Firearms were drawn on him, but nobody wanted to take a shot while he had Chloe as a shield. Coyote claimed he had figured out the problem. He told the agents that Chloe's psychic abilities had caused the wolf-spirit to manifest. He believed she was acting as an anchor for Wolf's Hatred, and only her death would return it to the spirit world for good. Magda and Singe kept him talking to delay him pulling the trigger on Chloe.

    When asked how he knew that, he said he had possessed Chloe while she and Harmon were alone in the cave. He used her to stab Harmon to death, since he knew Harmon would never hurt Chloe even to defend himself. Chloe had managed to force Coyote out of her body and run away, so Coyote possessed Officer Cooper, and the agents knew the rest of the story from there.

    "Really, she's the one to blame for all this," Coyote said.

    Wolf's Hatred manifested once again, larger and angrier than ever. The agents opened fire on the wolf-spirit, since they still didn't want Officer Cooper to get killed for Coyote's actions. Toby's team heard the gunfire and raced to the top of the cliff to join in the fight. Coyote kept shouting that they needed to kill Chloe if they were going to banish the spirit for good. This was the straw that broke the camel's back for Tobias. He threw himself into a death rage and went after Coyote.

    The brawl was a bloody one, but Wolf's Hatred was forced to retreat into the cave to heal its wounds. Marcella led Nassim and Geerd into the cave to keep it from regenerating while the others dealt with Coyote and prevented him from hurting Chloe any further. With Tobias in full werewolf form, Coyote in full possession form, and Marcella in her guardian tree form, the battlefield looked like something out of a Godzilla movie. Officer Cooper ended up with a pair of broken legs before Coyote was finally forced out of his body, and Tobias mercilessly threw him back across the Gauntlet. Meanwhile in the cave, Marcella and her team managed to take down Wolf's Hatred and fully discorporate the angry spirit.

    With the battle over, Nassim and Geerd took up the task of patching up the party's injuries. Tobias spent a long while talking to Chloe and convinced her to keep living.

  17. - Top - End - #47
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: The Iron Ghost: Part One
    Show
    We started the session off with the agents concocting a plausible explanation for the deaths of five people, and used their questionable status as federal agents to force-feed the police the idea that "the RSA will handle things" and "the investigation is ongoing". Once the press conference was over, the agents packed up Chloe's belongings and scheduled her for an extended break from Miskatonic University. Sad but not surprised, Professor McTavish wished her well and hoped she would come back next semester. Tobias bid farewell to his parents, and the party returned to the roadhouse.

    We had some good lighthearted banter between the agents and their friends before everyone settled in for the long haul drive to Dynavale. Singe spearheaded a lot of this. She teased Magda about her relationship with Vincent, flustered Geerd by talking about remodeling his house, and almost convinced Alexia to start calling Tobias "daddy" instead of "sir" while he mentored the protege. Things were at last looking up for the agents.

    The arrival in Dynavale started off well. The town had myriad troubles, but a quaint coffee shop owned by a loving father/daughter duo helped to set the agents at ease. Of course, a few of them were convinced something bad would happen to the elderly man and his beautiful daughter, but I can't blame them. Spies are a paranoid bunch, and rightfully so. At long last, the agents were able to meet up Dustin and Katya and fill them in on everything that had transpired. Katya was horrified and outraged, while Dustin ranted about how he had been right all along. After the reunion, Dustin took the rest of the agents to a meeting with a smuggler so the PCs could rearm and resupply. The smuggler was none other than Otto Skinsky, who was always happy to do business with spies.

    After buying a few guns and some extra clothes for the trip, the agents split up. The PCs (plus Alexia and Chloe) headed for the train station, while the NPCs took the bus loaded with all of the equipment, not to mention the silver coffin containing the Scourge of God. The train would be faster, but there was no feasible way to get all of the guns and lab equipment aboard, so the bus would take the long mountain pass and meet the PCs at the Van Helsing estate. This would give the agents an opportunity to secure the estate before the arrival of the valuable equipment, plus scout out the nearby village of Bistritz for any potential trouble.

    As an important aside, Magda hates trains. Perhaps saying she's terrified of them is a better way of putting it. The agent who was trying to smuggle her into Solingrahv had been run over by a train during a nighttime border crossing. Ever since then, she's always avoided trains. I'm sure some exposure therapy will do her some good

    Tickets were acquired without issue, and the train they were scheduled to take only had five other passengers. The crew aboard the train were sullen and quiet, and all of them had strangely hairy hands. Other than this, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the train. Magda pulled Nassim aside for some therapy in the corpse car, while the others settled into their rooms or got a drink at the parlor. After a little relaxation, Alexia got Marcella and pointed out the peculiar gargoyle-like plates on the inside of all the doors. Marcella got Alexia and Chloe, and the trio of young ladies went to consult Tobias about it. The plaques all detected as magic, and upon further examination a strange apparition manifested.

    The apparition was an impossibly tall figure in a black hat and coat, who seemed to be friendly despite its unsettling appearance. It conjured forth the image of a family who were all dressed in the style of one hundred years ago. The apparition tried to make the agents understand the profundity of this image, but whatever message it was trying to convey was lost on them. A short time later, the apparition and the conjured family image faded away, leaving Tobias scratching his head and Marcella with a bit of sanity damage.

  18. - Top - End - #48
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: The Iron Ghost: Part Two
    Show
    The agents and the other passengers were called to dinner by the conductor, who led them into the dining car with a peculiar looking key. The agents were suspicious, so they naturally poked around the dining car while the conductor wasn't looking. They didn't find anything strange, so they let the oddity go and enjoy their meal. They chatted for a while, and Tobias filled in the team as to what he saw. After dinner, the agents tried to summon the specter again, but no amount of fiddling with the face plates in their cabins yielded any results. After a little while, the agents returned to their own cabins, except for Tobias and Marcella, who stayed with Chloe and Alexia to discuss things further.

    Once everyone was settled into their rooms, the face plates released a knock-out gas into each cabin. Luckily, Magda was the only PC to fail the saving throw. The agents regrouped and recovered, and decided it was time to conduct a thorough investigation. Magda volunteered to stay behind with Colonel Natter so they could keep the civilians safe, and Singe elected to stay behind as well since her Persuasion was much better than either soldier. This trio convinced the civilians to gather in the salon car under the pretense of throwing an engagement party for Vic and Magda. Meanwhile, the rest of the agents, including Alexia and Chloe, broke into the dining car with the intent of exploring further up the train.

    Instead of the dining car, the agents found themselves in a troop transport train. Surprisingly, none of the agents took any sanity damage for the sudden shift in scenery. According to a friendly Troesian soldier, the train was taking an artillery regiment to a hospital before they were to be redeployed at a different area on the front line. A few good History checks revealed this battle had taken place nearly one hundred years ago, and this artillery unit never arrived at the front line. Because of their absence, the casualties on the front had been catastrophic. The party tried to explain the situation to the soldiers, but none of them believed the agents. The friendly soldier (who was given the nickname Pip by the players) even volunteered to go with the agents to explore the rest of the train just to prove there was nothing strange going on.

    He was quickly proven wrong when the group headed into the next train car.

    Here the agents met a group of Vulturii engineers and workers from over a hundred years ago who were on their way to help build railroads and bridges in western Solingrahv. Like the last train, this group never made it to their destination. Without the engineers, the bridges were built improperly, and many lives were lost during the subsequent collapses. On it went as the agents explored from car to car, each containing people whose absence led to a tragic loss of life. A photographer and journalist whose "kidnapping" led to war between Kacer and Zarizon. An Alanmarian spy who was never able to warn the king about an assassination plot. One car even had a runaway girl from twenty-three years in the future, where a nuclear war had broken out across the globe due to the party's sudden disappearance. Tobias rolled incredibly well on a Mythos check, and received a madman's insight about the train itself. It was part of the God-Machine's infrastructure and a self-powering occult matrix, used to quietly dispose of people who could prevent some kind of tragedy.

    The last leg of the exploration was getting to the engine itself, but this proved a little tricky. Piper unfortunately fell off the train trying to get to the engine, and was left to fend for herself in the vast wasteland outside. The train moved too quickly for the other agents to attempt a rescue without getting left behind themselves. The remaining members of the team broke into the locomotive, and there confronted the conductor in its true form - a fleshy pink blob with many whipping tendrils and grasping pseudopods.

    Back on the salon car, the gargoyle faces from the sleeper car broke into the bar, along with the rest of the ghoulish train staff. Magda, Vic, and Singe mounted a spirited defense against the monsters, and they were aided by the Spectral Traveler who had tried to warn the party earlier. Of note, Magda proved she wasn't just accurate at close range; she was a surgeon with a shotgun. The gargoyles and ghouls proved no match for a trio of determined Delta Green agents.

    Piper came under attack by a wandering prowler in the wasteland, and her fight went much worse. The creature subdued her in only two rounds of combat, and dragged her back to its lair (an abandoned train car) where it hung her on a meat hook for later consumption.

    The fight against the conductor went well for the agents... right up to the point where it opened the firebox. The box contained an open view of the vast infinity of the universe, and spiraling at the center was the unknowable true form of the God Machine. The sanity loss was 1d10/1d100 for witnessing the God Machine in all its glory. It hit the agents pretty hard, but of the PCs Tobias was reduced to just 10 points and picked up the permanent insanity effect of alchoholism. Chloe lost all of her sanity, retreating into her mind in a vegetative state, never again to recover. The still-functioning agents managed to finish off the conductor and close the firebox before anyone took more sanity damage.

    Nassim got to be the big damned hero at this point. He stepped up to the train's controls, failed his Con save but passed his sanity check. His body was warped into the same form as the conductor, but because he managed to scrape through that entire situation without suffering even a temporary madness effect, he got to retain his mental faculties. He learned how to stop the train. Prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, he declared "I'm saving everyone on this here train!" and severed the train's connection with the God Machine.

    The train rolled to a gentle stop at the station in Bistritz, arriving more-or-less on schedule. Piper (who had gone temporarily insane from the horrors of the prowler's lair) was returned to storage car, bleeding profusely from her grievous injuries. The agents were returned to their own timeline, and the souls of those it had ensnared were at last released onto the afterlife (except the girl from the future, who never boarded the train). Nassim's soul was shunted into the body of the real conductor of the train, whose soul had been obliterated by the minions of the God Machine (effectively Reincarnating Nassim). Lastly, the Spectral Traveler shook hands with everyone on the station platform before he too departed for the afterlife. It was only after he was gone that Magda realized the Traveler was the soul of the Delta Green agent who had sacrificed himself to get her across the border all those years ago.

    Once everyone had gotten their bearings again, the agents followed Singe through the winding streets of Bistritz to the Van Helsing estate. They scared off a couple university students who thought going ghost hunting there was a good idea, then settled in for the long winter as they rebuilt their office, took stock of what they had, and went through a lot of therapy to recover some sanity points. Notably, Magda was able to recall several key pieces of information during her therapy, including the fact that a Shoggoth haunts the border between Solingrahv and Alanmar, and that R. M. Renfield (the mad man himself) had been the one to debrief her after her teenage border crossing. Renfield had used Dracula to place Magda under hypnosis after the incident, and kept an eye on her for years afterwards. Later, Allen Ashwood (the former Oakes) was able to confirm that Renfield was the true head of Operation Edom.

    Renfield was "D".
    Last edited by SleepyShadow; 2022-12-28 at 07:49 PM.

  19. - Top - End - #49
    Bugbear in the Playground
     
    Phhase's Avatar

    Join Date
    Sep 2010
    Location
    X/Z 12,550,821

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    RIP the werewolf. Poor Tobias, the last one standing.
    Sometimes, I have strong opinions on seemingly inconsequential matters.
    Quote Originally Posted by Crisis21 View Post
    Phhase he played four
    He played nick nack on my door
    With a nick nack paddy whack
    Give a dog a bone
    Phhase came rolling home.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ventruenox View Post
    You found a way to backstab... with a ballista...

    I want to play at your table.
    Spoiler: How to have a Good Idea
    Show
    Quote Originally Posted by Yunru View Post
    Buy a lava lamp, it more than doubles the rate of good ideas :p
    Better yet, buy this lava lamp.

  20. - Top - End - #50
    Pixie in the Playground
    Join Date
    Sep 2019

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Quote Originally Posted by Phhase View Post
    RIP the werewolf. Poor Tobias, the last one standing.
    We realized we have a sizeable membership in the "Last Man Standing" club, some of whom have yet to be explored.
    Princess Battle Flower

  21. - Top - End - #51
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    We took a break over the holidays both in and out of game.
    Spoiler: A Holiday of Sorts
    Show
    The agents took some much deserved time to lay low and recover at the Van Helsing estate. Singe and the tech team busied themselves trying to make the house usable as both a base of operations and a home for more than a dozen people. Piper took Dustin hunting for a winter goose, but Dustin proved to be a terrible hunter. He blew up the goose with a grenade launcher. After that debacle, Marcella and Alexia went hunting and managed to bag a holiday bird for the team. Nassim worked with Cordelia to get new IDs, and now his legal name is "Nasim Kophesh" (we thought it was funny). Tobias resigned from Delta Green, and spent his time taking care of Chloe.

    Over the holiday break, Piper (and her player out of game) finished going through Dracula Unredacted and compiled a long list of clues to research and follow up on. She recruited Magda to help her sort through all the data, and sent small infiltration teams to scout out various hot spots of Edom activity around the globe. I won't bore you with a long list of clues, but I'll bring them up as they become relevant to the sessions going forward.

    For our first session back from the break, things stayed relatively low-key. Geerd arranged a meeting between Delta Green and The Inner Night, and Rose Meadham (the cult's high priestess) offered an alliance in order to finish off Caduceus and put a stop to her father Joshua Meadham. The party declined. Rose was frosty about it, but understood their position. The two groups parted ways with an agreed upon ceasefire for the next few days. After the meeting, Marcella was reunited with her longtime sweetheart from home, Wolfgang Baciu. The two had a picnic on a hill (watched from a distance by Katya), and Wolfgang told her about how he had been investigating the Heal the Children Foundation and the orphanage they ran is Strasba. He was once an orphan from there, and wanted to know more about his past. He could remember almost nothing from before the age of nine. Marcella offered to help.

    It was later determined that Marcella, as well as the Edom agent Osprey, had been raised at the Strasba orphanage as well. This was very unsettling for Marcella, since she had distinct childhood memories. However, under hypnosis, those memories blurred and overlapped with memories of her time in the orphanage.

    A few days later, Piper used her connections in the military to borrow a small airplane. She and Marcella did a flyby over the most likely location of Castle Dracula. Like many things in Troesia, the ruined castle had become a tourist attraction for those with an interest in the macabre. After taking several pictures from the air, they met with the tour guide Janos Ujvary. He was a peculiar dwarf who claimed to be related to the major domo of "The Blood Countess" Elizabeth Bathory. He had all sorts of grisly stories, but he was otherwise a charming fellow. The agents were a bit suspicious of him, but they took a short tour of the castle ruins with him. The castle had remarkably well-armed guards for being a tourist trap, and there were many areas the tour didn't go through. As soon as the tour was over, Piper began to formulate a plan to sneak around the castle at a later date.

    The following day, Singe and Marcella tracked down Tabitha Holmwood (Lord Godalming's daughter) and cornered her in a coffee shop. According to the tabloids, Tabitha was a socialite, famous for being famous, and queen of the trashy party. The press followed her constantly, and her bodyguard/PR manager had "damage control" on a business card. Singe chatted with her for a little while, and discovered Tabitha had some hidden depth to her. She was witty and charming, naturally, but she was also an expert in art history, and she had a brilliant mind for understanding complicated geopolitics. Tabitha even knew just enough tradecraft, courtesy of her father, to give her bodyguard the slip and follow the agents away from the press. They slipped off to a local museum, where Tabitha enthused about expressionist paintings. After a little conversation, she told the agents she had been diagnosed with a severe form of myelodysplastic syndrome, which is why Tabitha had been living life on fast-forward. She was unlikely to live past the age of 30. Her friend Jacky (whom the agents surmised was Dr. Jacqueline Seward) had been trying to find a cure, but to no avail. Tabitha invited the agents to a fundraiser she was being dragged to in a few days, since she wanted someone more interesting than old money to chat with. It was a charity event for the Heal the Children Foundation, which Tabitha didn't much care about, but her PR manager insisted it looked good. Tabitha knew Jacqueline cared about it, and thus put up with the whole ordeal.

    It was a chance to meet the elusive Dr. Seward and investigate Heal the Children, all in one fell swoop. Singe and Marcella readily agreed. Once the rest of the agents learned about this, it was all hands on deck to prepare for infiltration.

    TL;DR - A holiday vacation gave the agents the downtime they needed to piece together some clues, recover some sanity points, and plan to take the offensive.

  22. - Top - End - #52
    Halfling in the Playground
     
    RedKnightGirl

    Join Date
    Jan 2018
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Quote Originally Posted by SleepyShadow View Post
    A few days later, Piper used her connections in the military to borrow a small airplane. She and Marcella did a flyby over the most likely location of Castle Dracula.
    A small plane indeed. Nothing fancy. Just a Lockheed U-2...

  23. - Top - End - #53
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: In The House of Glass: Part One
    Show
    The first half of the session was spent planning for the charity event. It was an art exhibition of blown glass sculptures, and was being held at a botanical indoor garden which featured plants from different biomes all housed in their own sections. The building housed rare and exotic plants from all around the world.

    We had a good laugh about keeping a gympie-gympie under lock and key.

    While plans were made (and shopping for new outfits was done), Singe took the liberty of digging around in tabloid magazines in an attempt to find a guest list for the event. She was successful in this endeavor. In addition to Dr. Jacqueline Seward and Tabitha Holmwood (with the agents listed as her 'entourage'), a few familiar names were spotted on the list. Eugene Dragos ("Cushing's" contact back in the day), Otto Skinsky (the smuggler), Angela Holcriss (known mole and suspected Bride of Dracula), Laura Teague (private eye under ROSE's thumb), and Ana Iser (heiress of the Hildesheim law firm). With this colorful cast of characters in play, the stage was set.

    The PCs went in, dressed to the nines, and were accompanied by Cordelia and Ekaterina to watch their backs during the art show. Colonel Natter and the other field agents were positioned around the building, taking up the roles of wheel artist, pavement artist, and sharpshooter to discreetly cover the building in case Edom or Dracula's goons tried anything suspicious. The agents inside the glass building rubbed elbows with the rich and influential, paying special attention to Jacqueline during the party. Singe and Piper had convinced Geerd to brew up a potion of Feign Death, which they were going to slip into Tabitha's drink at an opportune moment. The plan was to convince Jacqueline to leave with the group under the pretense of helping her friends, all while smuggling the ladies aboard a friendly Union ambulance which Nassim had arranged to pick them up. If Jacqueline didn't want to leave with them willingly, Piper had a black bag prepped just in case.

    The plan made it as far as slipping Tabitha the potion. During the initial confusion and panic of her hitting the ground "dead", Angela Holcriss and the artist who made the glass sculptures animated the artwork into liquid glass monsters and sealed the building shut with eldritch rites. Holcriss turned into mist and made her escape, laughing as she went.

    Yay cliffhangers!

  24. - Top - End - #54
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: The Glass House: Part Two
    Show
    I don't have much to report on this week. The majority of the session was taken up by the fight against the glass monsters and the two cultists. The agents did a great job in dealing with them, though.

    The first thing they did was shoot the fire sprinklers in the ceiling to douse the molten glass monsters in cold water. This meant the monsters were taking continuous damage throughout the entire fight, allowing the agents to go toe-to-toe with the monsters even without most of their gear. The agents also did a great job of protecting the civilians from harm. Magda and Marcella coordinated to herd the civvies into the back rooms, and the rest kept the semi-capable NPCs from getting too badly hurt in the scrum. At one point, Magda critically failed a Sanity check and went berserk, nearly killing Jacqueline Seward before Marcella was able to snap her out of it.

    The agents put everything they had into the fight, and not a single civilian was slain. Good job, Delta Green!

    During the aftermath (which involved Colonel Natter, Carmilla, and Laurel Teague's handler building an improvised car bomb), it was discovered that Otto Skinsky had slipped the line and made his getaway, living to smuggle another day. Magda and Ekaterina reunited with their long lost father (Rustin Lobanov, who was acting as Teague's handler), and many tears were shed. As the agents were picking up the pieces and convincing/intimidating the journalists into sharing the story that the damage to the greenhouse had all been caused by the car bomb, Detective Janos Tugurlen arrived on scene. It didn't take long for the agents to realize he was perhaps the only honest cop in the city, and he was one click off from piecing together the whole story sans Dracula. He had figured out the agents were spies, he knew Holcriss was into some dirty dealings, and knew the agents were on the run from multiple government agencies.

    Since Janos was already so close to figuring out the truth on his own, the agents figured it was better for his own sake to let him in on the full picture. However, they knew time was of the essence (the rest of the cops were on their way after the gunfight and explosion), and didn't know him well enough to take him all the way back to the Van Helsing estate. "Ana Iser" a.k.a. Elina Hildesheim offered to take the agents to her safe house in the city. The agents agreed to this, so the PCs and a select few NPCs went with her to the safe house, while Colonel Natter took the rest of the NPCs back to the Van Helsing estate.

  25. - Top - End - #55
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: Camp Malargue
    Show
    Elina Hildesheim took the party to a church which doubled as her safe house. There, the agents had a chance to rest up and plan their next move. Magda also had an opportunity to speak with Rustin Lobanov. She explained to him that Dracula was potentially making a move against Princess Svetlana, the daughter of the King of Alanmar and a popular figure among the common people. In exchange for his help getting Natalia out of the gulag, she offered Delta Green's help protecting Svetlana from Dracula. He begrudgingly agreed to the plan, and told her it would take him some time to set up Natalia's extraction.

    Once that business was settled, Delta Green prepared to go on the offensive. They had a few targets they wanted to hit, all in an effort to cripple Edom and Dracula. The first on the list was Camp Malargue, a research facility staffed by Ventaja Corporation (a shell company for Edom and run by Martin Creasey) out in the jungles of Costa Luna. The agents had a lot of favors with Carmilla Rojas to repay, and striking against Creasey was a good way to stay in her good graces. Piper called in a favor to get an off-the-books airplane, and the rest of the team did as much research as they could into Camp Malargue. They learned it was guarded by a mercenary company from Skull Island, which got the agents' hackles raised immediately. Over the course of the campaign, the players have made no secret of their disgust with Skull Island's ruthless activities.

    After the research and preparations were complete, it was time to head out. The agents brought Carmilla, Dustin, Ekaterina, and Alexia with them for this mission. Given that they were going up against a full company of soldiers, they correctly reasoned they would need the backup. Once in Costa Luna, the agents made a brief pit stop to visit Magda's uncle, who was a retired spy and a master of exfiltration. They convinced him to help them rescue Natalia after they were done in Costa Luna.

    Magda, Marcella, and Alexia spent the next day scouting out Camp Malargue and the surrounding area, while Nassim and Dustin spent a good portion of their time clearing land mines from civilian roads - a favorite tactic of Skull Island, and one of many reasons why the players hate those guys so much. The scouting party found that Skull Island had not bothered posting their "actual" troops to guard Malargue, but rather a company of press-ganged POWs from the last war Skull Island had participated in. These POWs were outfitted with substandard gear, given minimal rations, and subject to frequent abuse at the hands of the Skull Island officers stationed there. Only the POW liaison treated them with any amount of respect or decency. In addition to the troops, a single juggernaut was considered by Skull Island to be sufficient heavy armaments. The clearing around the camp had been turned into a minefield, but the hill behind the camp had not even had the sight-lines cleared.

    Nassim used his newfound Wild Shape ability to infiltrate the camp and sow confusion among the Skull Island troops. It was easy enough to do, given the abysmal levels of morale. A few kind words and a honey-ham sandwich was all it took. One POW in particular, a woman named Blythe, worked with Nassim to devise an escape plan for the POWs willing to defect. However, it never came to fruition. Nassim was spotted by a Skull Island fanatic with the appropriate nickname "Dogma", and the alarm was raised. The rest of the agents raced into combat positions.

    Of importance to note is that Skull Island is the product of a different campaign I ran with a different group of players many years ago, who went full Outer Heaven rather than becoming spies or monster hunters. As such, I had coordinated with them ahead of time and let them formulate a plan to defend the camp as if they were handling the situation from the perspective of their old characters.

    What followed was a protracted battle which took two full sessions to complete.

    Rather than going into a round-by-round analysis of the full battle, I'll just give broad strokes of what happened. Nassim, Piper, Dustin, Carmilla, and Ekaterina held their ground in the center of the camp for most of the fight, using a jeep as improvised cover. Singe used her skills of persuasion to get some of the POWs to stand down, or at the very least to only ready actions to fire if fired upon. Marcella and Alexia drew the fire from the juggernaut to their somewhat sheltered position so it did not shell the majority of the party. Magda hunkered down in the treeline and picked apart the enemy officers. It was a grueling battle, and while none of the Delta Green agents died, a few of them are likely to be in the hospital for quite some time.

    Unfortunately, Skull Island got the last laugh. As a contingency plan (and as a part of their standard operating procedure when deploying POWs), the uniforms of the soldiers had all been rigged with Semtex and set to explode if one officer in particular should die. When he inevitably did, it brought the combat to a sudden and gory end. Delta Green suffered sanity loss for witnessing the event.

    With the combat brought to an unexpected end, the agents dragged their wounded into one of the buildings to administer emergency first aid. Piper and Magda contacted Colonel Natter over the radio and explained the situation. He advised they take whomever was still in fighting shape to investigate the tunnels behind the camp, as it was likely the Ventaja personnel were trying to destroy evidence of their research. Magda took Marcella inside and left Piper to stand guard at the entrance. Sneaking through the tunnels with assistance from Pass Without Trace, the two of them found what remained of the enemy inside the underground lab shoveling paperwork and chemicals into a blast furnace. Martin Creasey paced around the room, anxious to have the destruction of the evidence finished. A handful of Jacks guarded the researchers, and looking down from the scaffolding above was none other than Fort, the dwarven Duke of Edom known for her explosives expertise.

  26. - Top - End - #56
    Bugbear in the Playground
     
    Phhase's Avatar

    Join Date
    Sep 2010
    Location
    X/Z 12,550,821

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    >Open Furnace Door
    >Visible enemies

    It's times like these that make me truly appreciate Vortex Warp.
    Sometimes, I have strong opinions on seemingly inconsequential matters.
    Quote Originally Posted by Crisis21 View Post
    Phhase he played four
    He played nick nack on my door
    With a nick nack paddy whack
    Give a dog a bone
    Phhase came rolling home.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ventruenox View Post
    You found a way to backstab... with a ballista...

    I want to play at your table.
    Spoiler: How to have a Good Idea
    Show
    Quote Originally Posted by Yunru View Post
    Buy a lava lamp, it more than doubles the rate of good ideas :p
    Better yet, buy this lava lamp.

  27. - Top - End - #57
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Quote Originally Posted by Phhase View Post
    >Open Furnace Door
    >Visible enemies

    It's times like these that make me truly appreciate Vortex Warp.
    It's a shame we don't have our wizard anymore

    Spoiler: She's a Brick House
    Show
    Magda and Marcella opened fire in a surprise attack, disabling all but one of the Jacks with holy water tranquilizer rounds. After the surprise attack resolved, the two of them held the line against Martin Creasy and Fort until the rest of the agents got into the fray. Martin broke Alexia's arm early in the fight, but he was quickly taken down (non-lethally; the agents wanted to question him) a short time later. Fort proved more of a challenge. Between her grenades, her Fireballs, and her Eldritch Cannon wandering the battlefield, she had enough AoE damage to take on multiple agents and the durability to handle it. To top it all off, well, I'll just quote Nassim.

    "Oh no! She's hot!"

    The agents eventually got the better of her, although there were a few close calls on their end. Once Fort was dead, the agents gave her a warrior's funeral by sliding her into the furnace with Nassim giving her last rites. After the funeral for their honorable opponent, the agents unceremoniously dumped the Skull Island officers into the fire.

    The party spent the next couple of days at the resort town to relax and recuperate from the battle. After everybody had gotten enough hit points back, it was time for a beach episode. Dustin brought a crate of beer, a crate of wine, and a crate of meat for the grill. The ladies engaged in a rather competitive game of beach volleyball - Magda and Alexia proved to be the best team. All in all, it was an enjoyable way to recover a few sanity points.

    That night at the hotel, Nassim was the only one to pass a Wisdom saving throw. He was awoken by the sounds of shuffling feet outside his room. Curious to see what was going on, he found Piper, Magda, Marcella, and Singe all sleepwalking out of the hotel. He tried shaking them awake, but only Magda snapped out of it in the hotel. The other three made it out to the street. They were heading to the beach. Working together, Nassim and Magda managed to wake up Marcella, and divert Piper into a bus station, but Singe made it to the beach, drawn inexorably by pleasant music being played by a campfire. A young woman played the guitar by the fire, and she invited the agents to join her. Singe sat down and it was only then that she woke up, having no memory of how she got down to the beach. Nassim stayed with Singe, while Magda and Marcella collected Piper.

    Once the five agents were in her presence, the young woman introduced herself as Focalor. She claimed, like Gandalf the White, to be coming to aid them at the turn of the tide. Focalor told them that Decarabia had been caught and slain. She also told the agents that if they destroyed Dracula, the hidden island of Mu would rise. From there, the agents would be able to strike a decisive blow against the God Machine itself.

  28. - Top - End - #58
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: Heal The Children
    Show
    The agents spent the next morning getting to know Amelia Focalor better. Like Decarabia, she was a fallen angel of the God Machine (or a demon, if you prefer). She was an analytical specialist who fell after questioning why she was gathering the data she was gathering. She also served as a "lady in red" when she was an angel, sent to seduce unsuspecting enemies of the God Machine in order to arrange their downfall. However, now she was a freelance operative, and promised to be more "hands on" than her predecessor. The agents took her quirks in stride.

    Later that day, Carmilla brought the agents down to the Secretariat HQ so they could take part in Martin Creasey's interrogation. He responded well to anything other than intimidation, to which he just rolled his eyes and shut down. Carmilla's gentle approach won him over soon enough, and he told the party everything he knew. As it turned out, he didn't have much in the way of new information, but he was able to confirm a lot of what the agents knew or suspected already. The only new intel he had was 1) the young volcanologist Francesca Collins had gotten snared into working for Edom (and would likely need the agents to rescue her), and 2) part of Costa Lunan's intelligence community was interested in starting up a vampire project of their own. After this revelation, Carmilla decided to part ways with Delta Green so she could investigate the accusation more closely. The agents were sad to see her go, but they nevertheless bid her good luck and farewell.

    The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing in the resort town (or in Magda's case spending time with her uncle). Colonel Natter and Elspeth got in touch with the party over the radio with a report on some paperwork the agents had sent over from Camp Malargue, and told them that Ventaja/Edom had been using an old bank in Troesia to launder money for the camp to help keep their records clean. The agents decided to file that one away for another time.

    One uneventful aeroplane ride later, the agents returned to Dynavale and rendezvoused with the home team back at the Van Helsing estate. They filled everyone in on what had happened, and Geerd showed them a news broadcast he had recorded earlier that day. Zehra, the young woman whom Nassim's new body had been married to before the ghost train, made a final passionate plea for her husband to come home; all of her assets had been frozen, and she had no way of getting the bank to cooperate without his help. The agents knew this was a trap, but they had pity for the poor girl. She was being used as bait in Edom's machinations, and was suffering the consequences through no fault of her own.

    After a bit of debate, the agents decided to investigate Heal the Children, and specifically the Strasba Orphanage. They split up into two teams: Piper, Nassim, Singe, Janos, and Focalor went to snoop around the organization's main office, while Magda, Marcella, Wolfgang, and Alexia straight to the orphanage. Piper's team did some glad-handing at the front desk to give Janos time to sneak around in the back rooms and peek at some off-limits files. From this, they learned Heal the Children had once been an Edom shell organization, but the operation took on a life of its own as a real charity; these days, Edom had no control over it beyond having access to the charity's records when they needed an easy cover identity.

    Meanwhile, Magda's team poked around the grounds of the orphanage. Most of the building was collapsed, with only a quarter of the facility still in operation. There was a rundown chapel with an old mass grave behind it, and both Marcella and Wolfgang got some peculiar deja vu. While they were snooping around, they caught someone doing a poor job spying on them - a teenage girl named Violca who was a resident at the orphanage. She had been curious why a bunch of strange adults were sneaking around the orphanage, and rather than doing the responsible thing and calling the cops, she wanted to find out what they were up to. Marcella quickly warmed up to the precocious girl, and soon the agents were following Violca into the bowels of the abandoned part of the building in search of an old journal she had found during her explorations of the off-limits section.

  29. - Top - End - #59
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: Happy Faerie Day
    Show
    This was a combat session, and quite an eventful one at that.

    The team sent to investigate the office was attacked by Iram, a Duke of Edom and a wheel artist specialized in "offensive" driving. Accompanying him was his girlfriend/flunky Sophia, who took potshots at the agents with a hunting rifle while Iram tried to kill them with his James Bond style car-mounted guns. During the chase scene, Singe managed to ruin Iram's plans with good uses of Mage Hand to mess with his car parts, while Nassim turned the super-car into a slow cooker with Heat Metal. However, Iram did manage to destroy the agents' car. Thankfully, Piper is an expert with vehicles, so she managed to keep the crash damage to a minimum. After that, things turned into a street shootout. Janos took down Sophia with nonlethal damage, and the Winston the dragon companion used his acid breath to ruin Iram's car. Before the agents could capitalize on the exposed Edom Duke, there was an interruption in the fight by the annual appearance of Kaylor the Faerie Huntsman.

    It's a long story, but suffice to say his appearance is a St. Patrick's Day tradition for our group.

    The agents turned to deal with the rampaging faerie, leaving poor Janos to have a knife fight with Iram in the background. Janos managed to take down the bloodied Duke, although he received a punctured lung in the process. The rest of the agents pelted Kaylor with everything they had, but they weren't making much progress against his defenses. Eventually, Singe managed to Command Kaylor to just leave. Since their weren't any runaway changelings around, Kaylor accepted the order and wandered back to the Feywild, though not before stealing a muffin from the local cafe. With the huntsman dealt with, the agents took Iram and Sophia into custody.

    Meanwhile, the team at the orphanage was dealing with an Edom Duke of their own. Osprey and four kill squad soldiers ambushed the agents while they were snooping around the ruined part of the building. What should have been a difficult but doable encounter quickly went sideways for the agents. Between several bad dice rolls and Osprey's manipulative enchantment spells, things were looking grim. Wolfgang was under Osprey's magical control, Marcella was brought down by the soldiers, Alexia was cowering behind rubble, and Magda had unintentionally attacked Alexia more often than the enemies. Near the end of the fight, Magda was the only one still standing, and only one soldier had been taken out. In order to save herself and her companions, Magda surrendered to Osprey. He accepted her surrender, had the soldiers knock her unconscious, and rounded up his prisoners for extraction.

    By the time the other team got to the orphanage, Osprey and his captives were long gone. He had left a note with Violca to give to Delta Green when the agents inevitably came. He wanted Piper and the others to know where he had taken them.

    They had been taken to the HMS Proserpine.

  30. - Top - End - #60
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    SleepyShadow's Avatar

    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Earth

    Default Re: Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

    Spoiler: Proserpine Problems
    Show
    While resting up at Geerd's house, the agents turned to Colonel Natter for guidance. He went full Metal Gear on the situation. Requisitioning a silent-running boat, some explosives, and some wet-suits, Vic prepped the agents for the rescue mission. The plan was simple. Take the boat out to the HMS Proserpine, scale up the scaffolding, and sneak inside. Once the prisoners were located, the agents would exfiltrate back to the boat. Meanwhile Vic would locate the scuttling charges, plant his own explosives so he could set them off remotely, and detonate the whole thing once the agents were outside the blast radius. With Magda and Marcella being among the prisoners, their players chose to run Ekaterina and Katya for this mission. Furthermore, Elspeth and Focalor would wait in the boat to provide backup/intel over the radio as needed.

    The first part of the plan went off without a hitch. It was a dark night, the weather was calm, and the sentries on the outside of the fake oil rig were lacking. The agents got to the main platform and began their search. After a bit of discussion, they agreed that they needed a map of the place. The players knew they could not treat the Proserpine like a dungeon crawl, since their intel indicated that there were between 80 and 240 Navy SEAL equivalents stationed here at any given time.

    Speaking of Edom soldiers, the agents ran afoul of four of them early on thanks to the Proserpine staff being quite perceptive. The agents weren't able to take them down quickly, so this encounter turned into a protracted gunfight in the gym locker room. Despite being armed with only pistols and basketball shorts, the soldiers did a fair bit of damage to the agents. On the one hand, this had the intended effect of conveying the danger these soldiers posed to the agents. On the other hand, it had the unintended effect of demoralizing about half the team - if barely equipped soldiers could be this much of a problem, how bad would it be when the soldiers were fully armed and armored?

    From here on out, the agents prioritized stealth over all else, since half the team thought that another encounter would be a death sentence. The party found some interesting intel as they searched for a map, including Osprey's sketchbook (which was full of obsessive drawings of Lucy Westenra). Once they had a fire map and had disabled the communications equipment, the agents made their way to the lower decks where the prison cells were located. On the way, they ran into a patrol team of three fully kitted-out soldiers. The agents managed to take them down, but they had to radio down to the boat for help after the battle was over. They had blown through most of their resources to pull it off. They hunkered down and hid amidst the scaffolding until Focalor was able to get to them and patch them up with her magic. Once again, the sultry fallen angel jokingly offered to be their warlock patron, but they (specifically Piper) politely declined.

    The agents decided to bring Focalor with them for the rest of the mission in case they got into another fight, as without her they likely would not be able to get through it. They were almost to the lower deck when a couple of them were spotted by a lone soldier out on a smoke break. Thinking fast, Ekaterina was able to convince him that she was here to rejoin Edom. The soldier fell for her lies, and let her pass without a fuss. She waited for the rest of the agents to sneak past before departing.

    Down on the lower level, the agents found and rescued Magda and Marcella, but they were unable to find Alexia or Wolfgang. They contacted Vic over the radio to report their status, and he told them to get back to the boat and leave the rest to him. The agents were soon ambushed by Osprey, the remnants of his kill team, and the Edom Duke sharpshooter code-named Nails. This fight was rough. Even though the agents had numbers on their side, they were down a lot of resources, and player morale was about to break. By the end of it, about half of the agents were down, a few had severe lingering injuries, and those that were conscious were barely standing. However, the kill team and the two Edom Dukes were finally dead.

    Thinking they had to cut their losses and run while they still could, they retreated to the boat where Elspeth was waiting for them. To their pleasant surprise, the agents found that Vic had managed to rescue Alexia and Wolfgang while the agents were dealing with the Dukes. He even rescued Winston (Piper's pet dragon), who had been shot and fallen into the water during the battle. He helped the wounded into the boat, and once they were clear of the blast zone, he detonated the scuttling charges and sent the HMS Proserpine screeching to the bottom of the ocean.

    After a few days of recovery (both physical and sanity), Magda and Vic got married. It was a much-need bright spot for the agents and players alike. Toasts were made, songs were sung, and the groom and his brother instigated a drunken hoedown toward the end with Marcella accompanying them on the piano. During the after party, the agents learned from Rustin Lobanov that Edom had rolled up their own operations in multiple locations; Edom was circling the wagons, so to speak, which would give the agents a golden opportunity to rescue Princess Svetlana from Dracula.

    With the excuse of helping the agents during the border crossing (but really just wanting to cap off all the celebrations), the Corbyn girls "borrowed" a tank and some rocket launchers. The agents took Alexia, Vic, and Dustin out for some monster hunting.

    They bagged themselves a shoggoth
    Last edited by SleepyShadow; 2023-04-15 at 10:10 AM.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •