Post Script Two: Where The Shadows Lie

Unpacking Operation Haruspex

Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are ©SolumProtocol, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.

Thumbnail Photo by Lennart Wittstock: https://www.pexels.com/photo/low-angle-view-of-man-standing-at-night-316681/

---

Operation Haruspex is complete, and I’ve managed to scrape by without hitting Kat’s breaking point. I had a lot of fun running something a bit more free form, and it really kept me on my toes running through a mission using just the Rogue Handler supplement. Overall, there's a lot to like with this oracle system, and I feel like more experienced handlers would be able to use use Rogue Handler by itself to run any number of Delta Green operations solo. I really like the clock system, as it added a sense of urgency to each scene, even when I wasn’t sure what the clock hitting 100 would mean in the current context. The arrival of the monster at Elliot Abel’s house was something I had in mind going into the scene, so when I kept failing checks and the clock was ticking upwards I felt very tense! With that being said, I did end up using two other resources to fill in some gaps, although I do believe this is more down to preference and a lack of experience running solo games. Those gaps were an NPC emulator, for which I used UNE (The Universal NPC Emulator) and the open question table from an investigative game called Little Town, by Gustavo Coelho. I’m a sucker for open questions, and find the two word combinations to be a lot more evocative than asking a series of yes/no questions. In general, I do enjoy rolling on tables over asking yes/no questions, and so I rolled frequently on the sounds/smells/sights tables, and while many of these are context flexible, I could see it getting a little repetitive in continuous play as many of them are slightly more specific than some other tables I’ve used in the past. I feel like a lot of this could be chalked up to my lack of experience playing Delta Green though, and I did really like the mission set up table, which has so many options, all of which are just vague enough to ensure every mission you generate will be different. My next mission will be using Mythic 2E as the primary GM emulator, but I’ll be keeping Rogue Handler handy, because so many of its tables are useful!

---

For the mission itself, I knew I wanted to experiment with having just a single agent, trying to solve as much of the mission herself as possible. Delta Green is usually run with a group, ensuing a level of firepower and balance of skills, but it’s easier to write from a narrative perspective if I’m not wondering what the rest of the team is doing the whole time, and unlike other games that have a party, it’s standard in DG games to split the group, and for agents to investigate different leads simultaneously. It started off well, but by the time I reached Eliot Abel’s house, and I wrapped up the combat, I realized that Kat wasn’t going to be enough to finish the mission. Fortunately, I feel like this made sense in the fiction, as she had just faced death, confirmed overt unnatural activity and got the first, tangible lead to act upon. Still, I think I’ll run a more traditional, team based mission for now unless I have a compelling enough reason to go it alone. I ended up rolling a character sheet for every new character introduced, which was only Wen Ko and Candela Reynolso, but I don’t want to roll up new friendlies every mission, especially as I want to keep true to Delta Green, and have missions take place nationwide. One aspect of myself that I want to improve on is the need to have every prompt or clue be relevant. One that sticks out was the fish smell in Tabitha Abel’s apartment. Fish makes me think of Deep Ones, or other Cthulhu related entities, but it didn’t really line up with the opening, and I feel like I could have just kept exploring, and tied it in more naturally than having a pile of dead fish in the kitchen. I’ll try to work on that moving forward, and hopefully as I get more experience the scenes will flow a little easier. Other than that, I was happy overall with how things went. Tabitha’s role shifting from culprit to victim was fun, and wasn’t something I had in mind at the outset, but the prompts from her NPC description and oracle questions meant there was no self-serving reason she would be harming animals. One issue I had while editing was realizing that Kat’s decision at the end, to fake the suicide, felt a little out of character for someone still somewhat new to the job. The reason it made sense at the time was that I had a week between finding Lester Roth asleep, and playing out the finale due to a busy period at work and with my kid, so I had a lot of time to think about the best thing to do. When it came time to write it down, I didn’t include some of the conclusions I had come to in the meantime, mostly that Roth had killed, and would kill again, and would likely do something terrible once he had the power he was searching for. I added in the email, a boastful, victory email he planned to send to an unnamed contact in the Order of Midnight, but it still felt a little off. I was ready to go into Kat’s internal battle, but she aced the Sanity check, and took 0 loss, so there wasn’t a struggle to detail. What did you think? Did the story make sense? Let me know!

---

Mechanically, there were a couple of hiccups, mostly around the combat encounter. Kat lost nearly all of her HP, going from 10 to 3, and so should have been stunned, which is a rule I constantly overlook because it isn’t in the combat section of the Agents Handbook, but instead underneath the rules for Stun. I was mostly just grateful she didn’t hit 2HP and fall unconscious, so I don’t blame myself too much, but still! I also did a few of the Opposed rolls wrong, either by doing an opposed roll when I wasn’t supposed to, or the other way around. For the monster, I used the ‘Winged Servitor’ stat block, and while I don’t think I mentioned it implicitly, it was summoned and sent by Lester Roth to find the person interfering with the animals. I feel like it was a good example of the precarious nature of Delta Green combat, as Kat really nailed the thing with her shotgun, knocking it down to 0 HP before it could finish Elliot off, but that's when the dice turned against me. I continued my policy of asking the dice if enemies are dead, rather than relying on stats, and the dice decided that it wasn’t over yet. I’m not sure what I would have done if that last pistol shot hadn’t done enough damage to penetrate the creature’s armor. She probably would have died, and I would have had Montford or Palmer pick up the story the following day, but it would have been a pretty bleak outcome!

I roll more than I would in a real game. One of the awesome things that people mention when playing Delta Green is that if you have a stat over 50/60%, then you often don’t need to roll if it isn’t a tense situation, like combat or an infiltration. This is great for keeping things moving, in the Investigative stage and making sure people don’t get locked out from clues, but Solo is a little different. Kat has an Alertness, Search and Persuade all at 70%, so if I was GMing a game with people, I probably wouldn’t have had them roll for every check that I did. In Rogue Handler, if you fail a check, you make the assumption that there was nothing there to find, so you can’t lock yourself out of clues, and you have to roll to see if there is anything there in the first place. This has the side effect that some of her skills are rising faster than they usually would, as you increase failed skills by 1d4 at the end of every session. I don’t mind this, but it’s something to keep in mind. As I write for any amount of time between 10 minutes and 2 hours, I consider a ‘session’ to be around 3 or 4 scenes. Her Persuade is already on the rise, having failed it more often than I would have expected.

---

As mentioned previously, I’ll be using Mythic 2E as my primary resource for the next mission, but I’ll be using a few different tools to supplement, specifically the Random Book of Tables - Eldritch and Rogue Handler in conjunction to create the Mission Hook. I’ve also decided to reduce the Word limit per Chapter to the 3k/4k mark, as it’s a bit more manageable with the sheer amount of footnotes I have to transfer over.

Is there anything you want to see more of? Let me know! And please consider subscribing or following to keep up to date with Kat’s adventures! Thanks for reading!