Lalonde's Tales From Delta Green

I’ve been super busy the past month, and that’s meant cancelled games and less time to engage in the Delta Green community or the creation of content for it. I decided to post something brief to assure everyone who reads this that I will (eventually) post on here again. Things you can expect in the future are, in no particular order: a second aftermath report for my running of Owlshead Mountain, a post about my once-recent Boring GOO Jam I ran over on the N@TO discord, art of mythos creatures and my own personal creations, updates on Plutomania and perhaps some additional content for it, and any little things I come up with that would be fun for others to put in their games as well.

Quick aside about Plutomania (which, if you don’t know, is my DGRPG campaign about the Exalted Circle, for free right here: https://lalonde-deltagreen.itch.io/plutomania): Basil on the N@TO server is getting close to done playtesting the third part (a big thank you to Basil and the rest of his S Cell), and the fourth and final part is halfway to being completed as well, so if you’re interested then I guess that’s something to look forwards to : )

Be seeing you,

– Lalonde

“… And now we have a breaking news story coming from Tennessee, where an unprecedented epidemic in the small town of Groversville has resulted in a CDC-mandated quarantine of the town. We now take you to Sharon, our reporter on site, for more. Sharon?”
“Thanks Bill. I’m currently outside, near the exit off the 321 that leads to Groversville. We were denied entry to the town, but I believe it can be seen behind me. It’s been under quarantine for four weeks now, Bill, and the CDC is saying it’s a form of hantavirus. That’s a deadly disease you can get from rats and mice. The death toll numbers in the hundreds, a big number for such a small town…”

The news kept playing at low volume, an early morning broadcast. Professor Willow Bridges sat slumped in the bathroom, half-listening. It was the third time she’d vomited in the last hour. She thought, “Thank God the kid isn’t up yet,” as she felt another wave of nausea and bent over the bowl. It was the same, just like last time: hot, green-white slime that discharged itself from her innards and flowed out of her mouth. This had been happening since the Opera. Since Groversville. Since she drove down the highway at breakneck speeds while a man she barely knew, Agent FABIO, bled out in the seat next to her, and another man, FOREST, lay unconscious in the back. He didn’t remember anything when he woke up. She did, though. She had to tell him. He took it well, at least. A mantra marched through her groggy mind: “You survived.”

A week later, Andrew Murphy stood up from the toilet bowl and wiped his mouth. While he washed his hands and fixed his tie, he listened to the news about Groversville and thought. He thought about the thing he had saw, the lurching insectoid with too many legs and too many claws, its head glowing like some awful deep-sea creature man was never supposed to dredge up. He thought about how it had pinned him down, injected him with burning fluid. He didn’t remember anything after. Willow had said that they had got away. That FABIO had died. He wasn’t sure what to say at the time. He still wasn’t now. Andrew Murphy stepped out into the hotel hallway to go to the funeral.

The family had left by the time Murphy and Bridges stepped into the graveyard and walked to the open grave. It was still strange to them that FABIO had a name. The hospital had said Alex Solace, according to Willow. Murphy couldn’t think of him as “Solace.” He was FABIO, the reckless, paranoid, traumatized asshole he barely knew. And then “Alex Solace” had died, and Agent FABIO died along with him. As he set the flowers down next to the pit, Murphy muttered, “So what now?” “I… I don’t know,” muttered Willow back. “Fuck,” Murphy said, “you’re still in the Group, right?” Willow chuckled painfully, “I guess I don’t know that either. I guess I am.” Murphy smirked, “I guess I’ll see you at the opera, then.” As he walked away, Willow thought, “Yeah. I guess you will.”

RIP Special Agent Alex Solace (Agent FABIO), 1959-1996.

Congratulations Prof. Willow Bridges, now Agent FRESCO of F Cell.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

– H.P. Lovecraft

I recently finished running Caleb Stokes’ masterful God’s Teeth campaign, and my group still wanted more. We hadn’t dived into the lore much in that campaign, so I decided to run another where we could. Hence, this. I’ll be posting after-action reports of our sessions and home scenes until we wrap up sometime in the future. This campaign is set in the late ’90s era of Delta Green (my personal favorite version of the setting), and will mostly deal with the final steps of the Majestic War. I will also be including Saucerwatch, Tong Shukoran, maybe the Tadjbegskaya Bratva, and any other stuff that happens to pique my interest as we go. Now, let’s discuss our starting cast.

Agent FABIO/Special Agent Alex Solace

Alex is a veteran of the Group, and the sole survivor of a catastrophic operation that destroyed the last F cell. By day, he works for the FBI in Chelsea, Massachusetts. By night, he sits on his mattress alone and waits for a call, another mission to take his mind off things. When he dreams, he dreams of that operation.

They were looking into a sect of Russian art thieves, who had recently stolen expensive, rare pieces from an art auction in Providence, Rhode Island, and traced them to a warehouse. The warehouse had been turned into a hypercube gate by the art thieves, odd corners and walls bending in on themselves to form a sort of spiral staircase to other dimensions. It was unstable. F Cell was chased by madmen as the building exploded into flames, flinging their bleeding bodies onto the concrete. Alex remembers that music in the hypercube, a swaying cacophony that rang in his ears, and breathed the world.

Agent FOREST/Andrew Murphy

Andrew has always been a little obsessed with the paranormal. Raised in the forests of Quebec with his family, he grew up on stories of fantastical objects in the sky, and things that go bump in the woods at night. He later moved to Vermont on his own, to live with his NEET roommate he met online and to work in the national parks of the USA. He works as a fire watch and wildlands firefighter now, and has pursued little else than being in nature.

He was originally inducted into the group through G Cell. As Agent GUMP, his skills were found useful on three fleeting missions, before G Cell stopped contacting him (and, apparently, A Cell). He was reassigned to F Cell after the destruction of FABIO’s cellmates, where he will witness more action than he once did with G Cell.

Professor Willow Bridges, PhD.

Willow is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University. Her discipline puts her closer to the unnatural and occult than others, though she is unaware of the truth behind much of it. She has come into the proximity of several Delta Green missions, and A Cell has tapped her as a Friendly. She has been told that she will be working with a “Fabio” and “Forest” extensively, to provide aid and information. Perhaps if she does well, she will become a true agent of F Cell.