Who Is Katherine Jones?

Session 0 is better late than never

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.

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Introducing Katherine Jones! I commissioned this great artwork from the amazing Leef of LFZ Creative Expression. She is awesome, and her Instagram can be found here. She does the art for my favorite Delta Green Podcast, 9mm Retirement Radio and I found her through their discord.¹

Look at that smile! Picture day at Quantico Graduation already feels so long ago….

I think this picture sums up Kat at full Sanity pretty well - She’s bright, cheerful and charismatic, ready to face the world. But she is a federal agent, even if she is on the younger side. At this point, I would love to say that I had already planned out some features of her character before I sat down with her sheet, but the simple fact is - I didn’t. When playing Solo, especially if it’s a new game, I like to play the ‘Default Class’. Fighters in DnD and Pathfinder or High Strength Character’s in OSR just to see what the ‘Intended’ experience is. Also because whenever I don’t do that, I find I need to recruit an NPC that is one of those classes, and they then tend to do a lot of mechanical heavy lifting.² The FBI agent is a staple of paranormal and supernatural urban fantasy - X-Files and Twin Peaks being two of the most iconic. Delta Green doesn’t have Classes, instead having Profession Packages that give you a some set Skills and a number of bonds. They then have recommended skills as you get 8 20% boots to any skill of your choice. This adds a nice bit of wiggle room, allowing you to play similar professions with different Skills sets. ‘Federal Agent’ is the catch all term for your FBI, DEA and all the other three letter acronym agencies in the Federal Government, but they can all feel very distinct from each other, despite having the same starting skill package. The FBI agent, for instance, could be higher on HUMINT, Persuade and Search, to show the Bureau’s reliance on collaboration and investigation, while your DEA agent might have base levels in all of those skills and instead have skills in Pharmacy and Science (Chemistry) to show their knowledge of drugs and pharmaceutics. Kat is an FBI Special Agent with the Criminal Investigative Division (CID) meaning her day job is investigative and community based. Let’s take a look at Kat’s Character sheet, starting from the top with Statistics. I chose a ‘Skilled Array’ of Stats for her from the Handbook.

STATISTICS

I chose a ‘Skilled Array’ of Stats for her from the Handbook. There are a few Statistic Arrays in there that focus more on balance and quick character creation, but I think I will be rolling for Stats in the future to keep things interesting. For allocation, I was still new to Delta Green, so I went with what felt like it would be fun to play. Playing high Charisma characters is fun and I knew that Delta Green was more about the investigative side of things rather than exclusively combat, so I made Charisma her highest, followed by Dexterity. One interesting thing about Statistics is if you have a score at 13 or higher, you are supposed to list a ‘Distinguishing Feature’ as 13 is significantly higher than the human average. For Kat, she has DEX and CHA at 14 and 15, so for her DEX, I imagined her as someone who was really into sport in school and college. I imagine her as a the star striker for her school football team.³ I tied this into one of her motivations as I imagine that the FBI training, first year on the job and then being drawn into the world of Delta Green has caused her sports enjoyment to fall be the wayside. For her high CHA, I’ve listed that she ‘Understands People’. I’ve been lucky to meet a few charismatic people in my life, and there’s a whole range of charming people, but I really liked the idea of someone who just gets people. Kat can take a look at someone, strike up a conversation, and have a good idea what she needs to say to get them to do what she wants. She isn’t a bad person or insincere⁴ but she does understand the more advanced forms of social science. ‘This person is obviously quite vain, I can get the information out of them easily by fanning their ego’ would be one of the more basic forms of this.

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BONDS

Kat starts with 3 bonds. This is one area that I want to work on both moving forward and the next characters I create. I thought about the most likely bonds she was going to have, gave them names, and left it at that. Now that I’ve had time to play, and think about it⁵, I prefer the idea of bringing those bonds more into the character’s identity. Why, out of all the people Kat knows, are these the 3 that matter most? Let’s see who we have.

• Isla Jones - Kat’s Mother. A Retired Accounting Manager from a firm based out of Boston. Her husband was a State Trooper and disappeared in the 90s. Her bond with her daughter is extremely strong because of this, both of them relying on each other to get through the times of unknown. Kat moving to Seattle was extremely hard on Isla - which is why her bond score takes the brunt of my projection. As of Operation Winter Strain - It is still intact. For Now.

• Danielle - Danny is Kat’s best friend. They went to school together, played soccer together and lived together in college while studying the same Accounting Degree. While Kat is mostly cool and collected, Danielle is a little more free. I imagine both of them disliking their degree and coping with it in different ways - Kat joining the FBI and Danny becoming a bartender at an extremely trendy club. Take a guess who has more take home income. Danny is loosely based on some of the women I knew growing up, the kind that like to have a party and let loose and take 5 hours to get ready to go anywhere, but will tie up their hair, put on their reading glasses and file their own damn taxes thank you very much.

• Markus - Markus was the least defined when I made him. I didn’t want Kat to have a sibling because I didn’t want to add anything to the Mother-Daughter dynamic, but I wanted her to be close with one other member of her family. A cousin made the most sense. Markus is a similar age, attended Miskatonic University at the same time as Kat and Danny.⁶ Not sure what his Major was, or if he even graduated because I imagine him as a kind of bohemian struggling artist. He works part time somewhere, paints and lives in an apartment building filled with other, hippy free love types.⁷ Honestly he is based on Ellis, the sheriff’s son from the TV show From, because I was running out of ideas after 2 bonds and wanted to start playing. His favorite uncle was a cop and his favorite cousin is a federal agent, something that would probably cause friction down the line, but hasn’t effected their relationship yet.

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Motivations

You get 5 motivations when you make a new character. Each time you hit a breaking point, you strike one out and replace it with a disorder. The rulebook says you don’t have to have all of your Motivations established, so I only wrote down 3.

• Find out what happened to father. This is my little background hook. Her father disappeared and now that Kat knows about the supernatural, she suspects something uncanny might have been responsible. A nice hook right? WRONG - I have done nothing with this bit of information, largely due to my inexperience. I could have done a home scene were I Stay on The Case and look over all the old case notes and then using Mythic see if I can get it to neatly tie into an investigation, but I didn’t do that and now it feels like the plot is moving on without this Motivation. Still, we might see it manifest one day.

• Excel at her job. Kat’s in a new city, with a new purpose. With her skills, I can imagine she was a pretty solid student during FBI training. I could see her finding new purpose, finding out about Delta Green, and the best thing she can do when she isn’t on a mission is be the best FBI agent possible, to earn all the favors and and good will from management. I like this Motivation a lot and I think it suits Kat - no notes!

• Get back into Soccer. Playing a team sport gives you a lot of useful skills, but it also provides a sense of community and comraderies that I don’t think Kat would be getting at her job. The FBI community could be quite cliquey supposedly, and if you weren’t a specific type of person (Middle Class White and Male) it could be harder for you to fit in. I gave her this motivation to reflect that, and her desire to be part of a well functioning team. As a motivation to explain her character, it works well enough, but I’ll go into detail below why I don’t like this for a Motivation from a mechanical perspective. I also haven’t done anything with it in writing.

By the end of my first mission, I had filled out the other 2 motivations. I chose one near the beginning, and one a the end, informed by how I was feeling about Kat’s mindset while playing. But there was another reason that I want to touch one before I tell you what the are - Mechanics. Motivations serve two mechanical purposes, as well as their Character building ones.

1. In your home scenes, they provide a way to regain sanity by taking the Home action - Pursue Personal Motivation. Kat did this after the Prologue, throwing herself into work for her excel at her Job motivation.

2. If you hit one of your personal Motivations during a mission you can regain 1 Willpower point. With the GM’s permission usually, but for solo, I would either ask Mythic, or if it was a no brainer just reward the WP. Here in lies the problem - Only one of Kat’s motivations is really achievable during a mission, unless she takes a break from investigating the horrors’ of an uncaring cosmos to kick a ball around. Already, I’ve had a few moment were having that 1 extra WP point would make me feel a lot more comfortable projecting onto a bond, so that was a lesson learned. With that lesson in mind, here are Kat’s other Motivations

• Cleanse the world of unnatural creatures. When you loose 5+ sanity in one shot, you go temporarily insane. This means you have a Fight, Flight or Freeze response. ⁸ Everyone has a different reaction to seeing the unnatural, some run, some are paralyzed and frozen in place by the horror. Kat would fight. That’s why she has this motivation, because I feel like upon learning that the unnatural exists, she would want it gone. Not out of hatred or anger, but out a pure animal drive to protect herself and her loved ones. It’s pretty gamey, I must admit, basically ensuring a single WP regen whenever Kat kills a monster, but her other Motivations are useless for this purpose, so I’m giving myself a break.

• Overcome fear of the Unnatural. This one is why I recommend leaving at least 1 motivation unfilled until the end of your first session/mission. Kat took max SAN damage from failed Sanity checks, all to the unnatural, during the Clyde Baughman Op. It nearly derailed the whole thing if she hadn’t burned Willpower and a Bond to Repress the incident. I think that would have been a wake up call for her, that there is more to what’s going on here than a weird cultist killing teenage runaways. This one relates more to the San aspect of the Unnatural, passing or crit succeeding on Sanity Checks relating to the Unnatural, or witnessing something and plunging ahead anyway. I could also see it as potentially dangerous. Her near death experience during Operation Haruspex, with the winged monster? She was trying to prove to herself that she wasn’t afraid.

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Skills

The all important Skills tab. One thing I like about Delta Green is that the skills are nice and self explanatory. Want to drive? You have a drive skill. Shooting a gun, trying to stab someone or punch them in the face? It’s easy to see what skill related to what. There are a few odd ones. HUMINT stands for Human Intelligence, and it the process of reading body language, social cues and micro expressions. It’s Kat’s highest skill, tying into her High Charisma but also as a convenient Solo tool so I don’t have to justify when I know more about an NPC than they are saying through dialogue. How do I know that the Sherriff is a Touchy Polymath? Because I have 80 HUMINT. How do I know this person is telling the truth? 80 HUMINT. Obviously its not infallible, people lie, or have their memories played around with but in moment-moment gameplay, its a good way of tying together player knowledge and PC knowledge. Persuade, Firearms, Alertness and Search are all her 2nd highest skills at 70. Persuade ties into the Charisma and Firearms was her best subject in training. I see her as a gifted shooter, her dad probably taking her to the range from a young age. Also I don’t want her to die, so being able to hit something consistently is good. Search and Alertness was to highlight that she is a pretty solid investigator. With the changes coming to Kat after Operation Winter Strain, it adds another layer to those skills being so high. The rest of her skills are part of her basic Federal Agent package. You have a choice of taking 1 out 4 options after the initial skill package, and I chose Accounting at 60%. That’s the reason she has an accounting degree. I like when skills that are out of her profession inform Character Backstory. When I make a new character sometime in the future, I’ll use their skill sheet to inform more and more of the character. Marrying the mechanics and the fiction always, in my opinion, makes for a more enjoyable experience!

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Mini Biography

There’s a little Character history box on the back of the character sheet, so I did fill that out of course, keeping it on the smaller side so that it could fit. I’ve copied it verbatim below.

Kat spend her whole life looking up to both her parents. Her father was a police officer and former coast guard, while her mother ran her own accountancy firm. Kat was a natural athlete, but while she was great at many different sports, she didn't excel at any. As a jack of all trades, she decided to give up her nascent dreams of a career in athletics, and pursue a day job. Growing up in Boston in the 80s, she decided to pursue accountancy, instead of law enforcement. After spending 4 years behind a table battling with numbers and mind numbing bureaucracy, she hated the idea of making it her full time job. After a summer spent stressed about her future, she was picked up by a hiring scout and shipped of for basic at Quantico. The argument she had with her father the night before she left was the last time she spoke with him, as he disappeared a few months later. After finishing basic training, her first year as a FBI agent was unremarkable but for one event, the event that caught the eyes of Delta Green.

I had forgotten that in my original bio, her father had been around during her college years. I’ll have to edit that in the character sheet haha. For the sake of consistency, her father disappeared the Spring of 1999, in Kat’s last year of High school. That’s the reason she went down the accounting path, because she couldn’t bring herself to pursue law enforcement and hurt her mothers feelings. The rest of it is consistent with how I’ve been playing her. I chose Boston for the obvious Lovecraft connection⁹ and I was originally thinking of having her FBI base of operations in Arkham. I didn’t do this for a few reasons, mostly because FBI agents get shipped away from their home town for their first assignment, a fact I did not know until I finished the opening scene.¹⁰

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The final part of Kat’s character sheet is brief as it relates equipment. Most Handler’s aren’t too picky about gear for Delta Green, following the logic that if it makes sense for you to have it, you probably have it. As a Federal Agent, she has hypothetical access to a lot of gear, most of which she wont see during an operation unless she gets creative, but for her personal belongings she has her service pistol and an old 1991 Volkswagen Jetta that has been on its last legs for the best part of a decade. After the Prologue, she has an old Remington shotgun illegally purchased through an unnamed contact and a sturdy protective vest, both of which she keeps in the trunk of her car at all times.

The last thing to mention for Kat is her personality. I didn’t give it much thought when I sat down to start writing, letting her skillset and personal history inform most of it, but like most characters I write in from a 1st person perspective, she ended up a little more sarcastic than I expected. I spent a lot of my formative years struggling to turn the sarcasm off, especially in moments of stress, and I think Kat suffers from the same thing, for better or worse. Her other major personality trait is that she is Practical. I think this ties into her initial fear of the unnatural, as it doesn’t gel with how she sees the world. She is a problem solver, which in her current line of work is both a boon and hurdle. Some problems, especially on this scale, simply can’t be solved.

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So that’s Kat! I really enjoyed writing this up, Kat is fast becoming one of my favorite PC’s and I’m really excited to share more and more of her story with you all. The tone was a little lighter than my usual writing because I’m full of dopamine from the Kat artwork. Let me know what you think in the comments or drop me a message! Thank you for reading!

1. If you like audio content, I have an increasingly long list of Delta Green Actual Play Podcasts

2. When I played Pathfinder 2e Solo, I had a rogue. I loved her, she was awesome, but anytime combat broke out, the damage and effects she had on the battlefield paled in comparison to the half-orc fighter who could take on half the encounter by themselves.

3. Soccer I suppose. It feels unnatural to type that word unless I’m in character as an American though.

4. Not yet anyway

5. And listen to more Delta Green Actual Play Podcasts

6. All 3 Attended Miskatonic university because I am a hack haha

7. No shade on hippies, I just thought it would add an interesting story element somewhere down the line

8. Some people throw a 4th F in, Fawn, which is a cool addition.

9. See footnote 6 re: Hack Status

10. I also want to do Call of Cthulhu Solo at some point, and that’s a lot of Arkham content.