Mother’s Madness

A young woman suddenly moves from Birmingham, Alabama to the Vermont hills in the middle of the night, in the space of an hour—as indicated by her smartwatch. To the local authorities it looks like youthful activities—likely something drug related—gone wrong at best, an abduction at worst, the young woman seeming to have wandered out of the hills where the local kids like to party. Probably the former. To the members of Delta Green, the secret organisation with the U.S. government, it looks like something worse. It looks like signs of the Unnatural. Agents are quickly dispatched to the small-town hospital when the young woman, an African American student at university in Alabama. Their assignment is to investigate and potentially, negate an occurrence of the Unnatural before it even happens. From the start this is a challenging investigation. The Agents will need to develop a sufficiently strong reason for their being there and conducting an investigation. The victim, Robyn Bullock, seems profoundly shocked by the experience and there is something just a little odd about her experiences. By the time her family arrive, the initial difficulty of the investigation ramps up. They will not deal with strangers and whilst they will deal with Federal law enforcement, such is their distrust, they do it under strict circumstances. It is this lack of distrust in the Federal government and in law enforcement that runs the rest of the investigation.

This is the set-up for Presence, a scenario published by Arc Dream Publishing for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. This is the modern roleplaying game of conspiratorial and Lovecraftian investigative horror with its conspiratorial agencies within the United States government investigating, confronting, and covering up the Unnatural. There are no specific requirements in terms of the Agents needed to play it, though strong interpersonal skills are going to be useful given the reaction that the Agents will receive during parts of the investigation. The investigation will switch from Vermont back to Alabama, which effectively means that the Green Mountain State is a diversion should the players surmise that its location suggests the involvement of the Mi-Go. What the Agents should learn is that Robyn has an interest in the New Age, astrology, and modern Wicca, and here the scenario is particularly modern in what they have to investigate—her social media presence. This will enable them to discover other several women in the same Facebook community who appear to have suffered similar situations to Robyn, and begin to close in on a suspect. The investigation is rich and superbly detailed and will take them into rural Alabama and take on a more physical nature.

If the players and their Agents have found the investigation difficult to date due to distrust of the Agents, it gets worse, as some of the inhabitants actively hate the Federal government and will not help the Agents at all. When they track down the culprit, it is effectively a ‘kill house’, but one infused with the Mythos as well as booby traps. It is a very nasty end to a difficult investigation.

This is a scenario that will directly change at least one of the Agents, such is the trauma and power of Robyn Bullock, and the scenario includes rules for that and the way in which they will be changed. These are psychic rituals, and there are six of these described. They include Apportation, Divination, Psychic Intrusion, and so on, and they all require the expenditure of Will Points and Hit Points to empower. This is in addition the Sanity loss involved too.

One of the issues with Presence is with the number of the NPCs who loath the Federal government and law enforcement. This makes for good roleplaying, but it will not be familiar to audiences and gaming groups outside of the USA. For example, one of the NPCs is described as a “Deranged dominionist and sovereign citizen”. Non-American audiences are unlikely to understand what this is and perhaps time and space could have been found in the scenario to explaining it.

Physically, Presence is well done. The artwork is excellent, though unfortunately the maps, done on aerial photographs with swathes of green forest are slightly difficult to read.

Presence is a really tight investigation bookended by some really weird nasty encounters with the Unnatural. At least one Agent will come away radically changed and some may not survive the final encounter, and that is to be expected for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

Awful Artefacts

Delta Green: ARCHINT is a supplement, for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. Published by Arc Dream Publishing, this is the modern roleplaying game of conspiratorial and Lovecraftian investigative horror with its conspiratorial agencies within the United States government investigating, confronting, and covering up the Unnatural. Delta Green: ARCHINT details some of the the conspiratorial agency’s worst, vilest, deadliest, and most insidious of objects its investigating Agents have discovered, recovered, examined, and in some cases, hidden away lest exposure to or experience of, drive others to kill, simply disappear, and ultimately lose their minds. The world of modern law enforcement and espionage both rely upon intelligence. Some analysts develop signals intelligence or SIGINT. Some develop human intelligence, HUMINT. Delta Green deals in both, as well as a third type of intelligence—archaeological intelligence. Delta Green: ARCHINT is a supplement for the conspiratorial agency’s worst, vilest, deadliest, and most insidious of objects its investigating Agents have discovered, recovered, examined, and in most cases, hidden away lest exposure to or experience of, drive others to kill, simply disappear, and ultimately lose their minds. These are objects which seem to run counter the laws of physics—let alone mathematics, come from beyond history, and defy ordinary classification.

Delta Green: ARCHINT details eleven items, some new to print, others drawn from previous scenarios. Some are modern, some are not. The collection opens with ‘The Amulet of the Ai-Apa’, one of the two items in the collection seen in an actual scenario for Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game, in this case, Delta Green: A Victim of the Art. Depicting the twin figures of a man and an intertwined flying beast, this is a meso-American artefact that willingly or unwillingly summons a deadly servant. The other is ‘The Stone of Yos’, from Delta Green: Sweetness, a large blob of obsidian which lets the user connected to it to ‘summon’ a shadowy figure. These are not the only commonalities that run throughout the supplement. ‘The Hunahpú Mask’ is also of South American origins, Mayan this time, and shaped like an over-size human skull, which of course, is deadly to anyone who spends tie wearing it. Like ‘The Stone of Yos’, another item which seems to take the user inside itself is ‘The Gowdie Shape’, a green, metal dodecahedron with connections to seventeenth century Scottish witchcraft, that defies mathematical and spatial analysis. Once inside, the user is sorely tested. Similarly, ‘The Mironov Object’ defies analysis, a four hundred pound of unknowable metal that dangerously enhances and energises the user’s mathematical visualisation skills to the point where they begin to resemble reality. Two entries are more modern, one with a shockingly hidden purpose, the other a hidden purpose. Both are constructs of a kind. ‘The Kurville Executable’ is the former, an email-delivered virus that when seen on the screen inflicts what appears to be epileptic seizures so traumatic, that they physically injure the viewer. Their effect is so deadly, the files are physically stored under lock and key with numerous warnings on them. Several artefacts are stored like this by Delta Green, though in some cases the methods of secure storage are laughingly quaint by modern standards. The other constructed item is ‘The Reneteur Device’, an oddly anachronistic computer that tracks the activities of the Great Race of Yith throughout time and space. If only the Agents could decipher the device’s purpose, it could track the Great Race of Yith operatives down and discover what it is they are up to.

Of course, not all of the objects detailed in Delta Green: ARCHINT share such commonalities and where they do, it does not means that they are connected. In fact, as written they are not connected at all. What they do have in common though, is a high level of detail and description that will help the Handler describe them and how they work—or at least what happened when an Agent begins poking around in and about them. The detail and the description includes the known history of each device and how each came into possession of Delta Green. There is more than enough description here to help the Handler bring each and everyone of them into life, whilst also leaving some room for the Handler to add details to the history of each item as she wants. Many of the descriptions, though, will have the Handler repressing a feeling of shock or disgust, whilst also being amazed at how bizarrely inventive they are in detailing each item.

Physically, Delta Green: ARCHINT is well done, although it does need an edit in places. The artwork is as excellent as you would expect for a supplement for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

Delta Green: ARCHINT is a good collection of thoroughly nasty objects and artefacts with histories both fearsome and foul. Yet that is all it is. Despite the rich detail accorded to every one of the eleven entries in the supplement, that is all that Delta Green: ARCHINT is. Of course, a Handler is going to be able to use that detail to create cases for her players and their Agents to investigate, but there are no scenario hooks given that might have helped. Equally, there is no broader background to how Delta Green as an organisation handles objects such as those detailed in the pages of Delta Green: ARCHINT or how its experts go about investigating them. For although the title of the supplement is Delta Green: ARCHINT, there is no discussion of the ‘ARCHINT’—the archaeological intelligence—of the title. That is a bigger missed opportunity than the lack of scenario hooks. Ultimately, though, the Handler is not going to be disappointed with the horrible objets d’art on show in Delta Green: ARCHINT—vile, murderous, tempting, and worse.

Heaven & Hell

The Religious Crimes Task Force is a shitshow, a dead end for any federal agent with ambitions or hopes of a better career. Established by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate and prosecute fraud and abuse in tax-exempt religious institutions, in effect it does no such thing. Instead, it alerts religious organisations that they are running foul of the law and might be in danger of having charges brought against them by the Federal authorities. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the head of the taskforce would not have it any other way as it prevents the government’s ‘persecution’ of white Evangelical Christians. For its investigators, it means rolling into small towns across the USA, investigating some small church and its congregation, and discovering that yet one more fringe, possibly cult-like organisation is effectively harmless. The Religious Crimes Task Force is effectively a smokescreen, but it is a smokescreen that Delta Green can take advantage of. It can flag up reports that suggest a religious organisation might be breaking the tax laws, but which to its analysts’ eyes might be connected to an Unnatural threat, and then have Federal agents wholly unconnected to the Delta Green program investigate, and if they uncover anything worthy of Delta Green’s attention, then it can send in its own experienced agents to deal with the issue. If the investigating agents survive the experience and are judicious in their reporting of it, then they may be suitable for recruitment. It is thus a smokescreen not once, but twice.

This is the set-up for Meridian, a scenario published by Arc Dream Publishing for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. This is the modern roleplaying game of conspiratorial and Lovecraftian investigative horror with its conspiratorial agencies within the United States government investigating, confronting, and covering up the Unnatural. It is ideally used as an introductory investigation with perhaps two or three Player Characters. To that end it includes three pre-generated Player Characters—two Agents and an optional character. The Two Agents consist of an FBI agent and an IRS investigator, whilst the optional character is a local social worker, who can either be a Player Character or an NPC. All three are possible recruits to Delta Green, the social worker as a Delta Green friendly. This set-up is not dissimilar to Control Group, the anthology of scenarios designed to create a pool of diverse Delta Green agents with varied origins and introductions to the Unnatural who can then go on to conduct investigations in secret for the conspiratorial organisation. So, Meridian can be used as an addition to that supplement or as a means to explain the addition of new agents to a campaign. To that end, the Unnatural element to the scenario is surprisingly low key.

The scenario is nominally set in the summer of 2018 as the Agents roll into Joplin, Missouri where the Kansas-Missouri-Oklahoma borders meet. They have been assigned to investigate Holy Light Ministries, which files taxes as both a church and shelter for troubled youth, but does not own any property, has just the one officer, the church leader, Daniel Boone Keeler, and uses a mailing address that is actually that of Keeler’s mother. Keeler himself has a criminal record of petty offences going back years, but that halted in 2011. The question is, is Keeler just some small-time preacher and hustler on the make or is there actual legitimacy to his church. The answer to that is yes, there is actual legitimacy to his church, but this being a scenario for Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game, not in any way that you would think was anything other than Unnatural.

Just as the three states of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma seem to overlap, so do the jurisdictions that the Agents have to work. So not just Federal law enforcement, but also local and possibly state, and then Missouri Department of Social Services, because not only does Keeler have a long record with both, but his Holy Light Ministries seems to be primarily concerned with ‘troubled’ youths—teenagers and young adults. A malaise lingers over Joplin, a miasma of economic deprivation, hopelessness, improvidence, and drug addiction which the Agents must navigate in the course of their investigation, but as they make progress, they discover that Holy Light Ministries does offer something. Possibly hope, possibly respite, and a sense of joy in god that transcends earthly, pharmaceutical addiction. Not necessarily though a Christian joy in god, since Keeler does not proselytise in the traditional fashion. Even the run down and dilapidated church he operates out of is more a refuge than a place of worship. As the Agents conduct interview after interview, what also comes up is the mention of the ‘Ghostlight’, a local legend which dates back to the 1940s, red-orange ball of light that appears in the skies at night over the woods on the Oklahoma-Missouri border. Is this what Delta Green wanted investigating? Is the ‘light’ of Holy Light Ministries one and the same as the ‘light’ of ‘Ghostlight’?

The underplayed nature of the investigation in Meridian also means that there is a passivity which runs throughout the scenario. In part, this includes the authorities, but it definitely includes Keeler and the Holy Light Ministries as well as the nature of the Unnatural in Meridian. Unlike in other scenarios for Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game, the Unnatural in Meridian is not an active force, but rather one that welcomes you to it and embraces you in hope. This makes it no less dangerous and frightening.

Physically, Meridian is well done. The artwork is excellent, though unfortunately the maps, done on aerial photographs with swathes of green forest are difficult to read.

Meridian is an easy scenario to run, though more so as an introduction to the conspiratorial world of Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game rather than as a campaign addition. It is run through with a meek malleability and horrific hopelessness, both in the Agents’ current assignment and the teenagers of Joplin, that will ultimately lead the Agents coming to realise that any sense of hope is hideously tied to the Unnatural.

On A Dark Desert Highway

When thirteen people vanish along Highway 70 in the Arizona desert in a matter of weeks, a stretch of road that the press calls it the ‘Devil’s Highway’, local enforcement is at a loss to explain the disappearances. This includes both tribal police—because Highway 70 runs through the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation—and state police, and so the FBI is called in. Despite the wariness of the local police and the distrust of the local populace, what the agents discover is trail of bloody terror that stretches along the highway and then back across America. Investigating murder site after murder site reveals a determined monstrousness, seemingly inexplicable by normal standards, and weirdness and one implausibility after another. Do the FBI agents have one of America’s worst serial killers on their hands or is there something else going on?

This is the set-up for Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays, a scenario published by Arc Dream Publishing for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. This is the modern roleplaying game of conspiratorial and Lovecraftian investigative horror with its conspiratorial agencies within the United States government investigating, confronting, and covering up the Unnatural—the forces and influences of Cosmic Horror—and long-time fans of Delta Green will recognise Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays. This is because it originally appeared in the Delta Green sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu, published in 1997, and was thus for many, their introduction to the world of Delta Green. Then it served as an introduction to the setting of Delta Green and the conspiracy of Delta Green, as well as a recruitment to the latter, and Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays does all three of these once again with this new version. More specifically, this version of Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays serves as an introduction to the setting of Delta Green and the conspiracy of Delta Green, as well as a recruitment to the latter, but as it was in the late nineties, when Delta Green was an off the books, unofficial, and cowboy conspiracy outside of the government, and its enemy, MAJESTIC, was very much inside. This then is an introductory scenario for Delta Green ‘Classic’, one updated to accompany Delta Green: The Conspiracy, the nineties sourcebook for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

The scenario is designed for a small group, as most Delta Green scenarios are. Here, the Player Characters are specifically FBI agents, almost the default Agent background for Delta Green and certainly the most familiar to players. That is really due to familiarity with a big television series of the period, The X-Files, an influence certainly on how the player and the Handler then approached the setting of Delta Green, though notably, not an influence on the designers, since the creation and appearance of Delta Green as an organisation pre-date that of the broadcasting of the series. Another parallel perhaps is with the film The Hidden, but that is lesser known and if there are parallels, then Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays goes in a very different direction to that film, most obviously in the conspiracy of Delta Green and the Unnatural of Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

The investigation is relatively straightforward, but rich in details, and the Agents are soon faced by a wealth of clues, often strangely pointed out to by scavengers. What the Agents initially find is a series of both bloody and bloodless deaths along the highway and nearby, but the investigation then telescopes in and out, as first the Agents discover that the trail of death leads back across the USA, and second, outside agencies—what is actually Delta Green and its enemy—take an interest in the case, the latter a very direct interest in the case, and then the identification of the prime suspect sets up a manhunt across the Arizona desert. The investigation is hampered by the distrust locally—both at large and in law enforcement—and the need to be aware of Indigenous American cultural attitudes, and not just because of native attitudes towards to the Federal authorities. Essentially, if the Agents run roughshod over them, they will find that the local Apache tribe will no longer co-operate with them. This takes some careful roleplaying upon the part of the players.

In terms of the antagonists, the alien threat and the seemingly unstoppable killer of the original Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays from 1997 remains the same in the 2024 version. What is different in the new version is the naming of the horror at the heart of the scenario and the development of the presence of the Unnatural in the scenario. This includes tying the scavenger to a particular Unnatural deity and then to a particular figure in the Delta Green Mythos, one whom only veteran players of Delta Green will recognise. Of course, if the scenario serves as the introduction to a Delta Green campaign, then that figure can appear and serve as a callback to Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays.

Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays is designed to introduce the classic period of Delta Green for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game to the players, and introduce new Agents to the conspiracy of Delta Green. To that end, the Agents are both hounded by NRO DELTA Agents of MAJESTIC and recruited by Delta Green. That said, Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays can be played as a one-shot. For campaigns set in the contemporary period of the core rules for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, then it could possibly be run as a flashback, especially if one of the Agents is a veteran of Delta Green. There are notes on running the scenario if the Agents are already members of Delta Green, although sadly, not for adapting it to the modern period of Delta Green.

Physically, Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays is well done. Now in full colour rather than black and white as in the original Delta Green sourcebook, all of the scenario’s illustrations, handouts, and maps have been redone.

Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays has aways been regarded as a classic scenario for the Delta Green setting and after twenty-five years since it was originally published, it still stands up as a great scenario. It has fantastic cinematic pacing to it, especially in the often-desperate action scenes against its antagonist, but it gets up close and personal—especially in the autopsy scenes—where it becomes really creepy and unsettlingly, before leading to desperate action scenes once again. In many ways, Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays set Delta Green up, and it is good have it doing that job once again for the nineties for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

Memetic Madness

Impossible Landscapes is a campaign like no other. It is a campaign of cosmic horror investigative roleplaying rather than Lovecraftian horror investigative roleplaying that forgoes much of what we expect to see in other campaigns for Call of Cthulhu or other Lovecraftian horror investigative roleplaying games. It does involve an uncaring threat to humanity, but this is not a threat whose presence on Earth can be merely forestalled until such times as the Stars are Right. This is a threat that seeps into our world, spreading like a meme before the concept was defined, infecting and altering reality over and over, changing our perceptions, making us vectors, its influence spiralling and twisting until everything we see is connected by it. Mankind cannot stop it. At best we can curtail it—temporarily, for it always finds other vectors. At the very least, we can survive it, but we will not be the same as before, for we will have seen the Yellow Sign. The threat is the Yellow King, whose influence spreads via The King in the Yellow, the story collection by Robert Chambers, from the ur-city that is Carcosa, standing on Lake Hali, out through the surrealist region that lies between Carcosa and our world and into our minds. It is in this surrealist region, this ‘Carcosa Country’ where much of the events of Impossible Landscapes take place.

Impossible Landscapes – A Pursuit of the Terrors of Carcosa and the King in Yellow is a campaign for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, published by Arc Dream Publishing. Its origins lie not just in Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow Mythos, but also in the writings of two Delta Green stalwarts. First in John Scott Tynes’ own attempts to write a campaign focused on the King in Yellow that would lead to both short stories and his lengthy exploration of ‘The Hastur Mythos’ in Delta Green: Countdown. Second, in Dennis Detwiller’s ‘Night Floors’, a highly regarded scenario for Call of Cthulhu, also found in Delta Green: Countdown in which the Agents investigate the disappearance of a tenant from the Macallistar Building in New York and discover how easy it is to get lost in the building and its new floors at night. It is ‘Night Floors’ that forms the basis of the opening part of Impossible Landscapes, greatly expanded and connected to the rest of the campaign. In terms of scope, Impossible Landscapes is both a small campaign, encompassing just New York and Boston as its key locations, and a huge campaign, taking in as it does, the whole of unreality.

The campaign opens in 1995 with the reiteration of ‘The Night Floors’. Abigail Wright has gone missing from her New York apartment in the Macallister Building. As part of Operation ALICE, the Agents are to assist the FBI in collecting evidence from her apartment connected to her disappearance and determine whether or not there is something unnatural behind it. Almost from the start, the collection of evidence will appear strange, a random assortment of oddities glued to the wall in layers, but the building itself is stranger still. The other residents are initially recalcitrant and self-absorbed, but they seem to change at night, as does the building itself. There are new floors to the building, which seems to go up and up, yet never changes from the outside. ‘The Night Floors’ lays the foundations for the campaign, showcasing a duality between night and day, between reality and unreality, between rationality and irrationality, all of which runs throughout the initial parts of the campaign until they all begin to blur into one another. ‘The Night Floors’ is creepy and weird—and whilst the rest of the campaign is also creepy and weird, here it seems constrained and containable. Of course, it is far from that, but it does not seem to sprawl as it does in the rest of the campaign. The scenario also shows the Agents for the first time, that survival is their best and only hope.

‘The Night Floors’ is likely to end without a sense of any real achievement. It is not intended to, but this is not helped by the radical shift as the campaign jumps forward two decades for the second part, ‘A Volume of Secret Faces’. The options here are the Agents to have been deactivated during the intervening twenty years or the Handler to run some cases set during that period. The jump in timeframe has another effect though. It enforces the sense of unreality as connections begin to be spotted between the encounters in the here and now of 2015 and the past investigation of 1995,and that the Agents are being called back to that sense of unreality, and for them, that it truly never went away. In the second part of the campaign, the Agents are asked to investigate Dorchester House, a Boston psychiatric facility dealing in trauma where other Delta Green agents have been committed and disappeared. What the Agents will discover is a similar, but worse duality to that of the Macallister Building that will draw them deeper into the Impossible Landscapes. Here the campaign seems to pulsate with its unreality, expanding out to some utterly bizarre and frightening encounters, before contracting again to focus solely on the corridors and rooms—and beyond—of Dorchester House. Ultimately, the Agents will find themselves trapped in Dorchester House and its duality, but they will be able to escape.

The third part, ‘Like a Map Made of Skin’ turns the Agents’ paranoia back on themselves and sees them hunted, any trust issues they have fully justified now. The Agents will find themselves pushed and pulled, and though there are chances to revisit previous locations, ultimately, they have one choice and one destination, from where they can push on through to the other side—perhaps in pursuit of answers or even Abigail Wright still. This location, the Hotel Broadalbin, is one of many places in the campaign where it possible to transition between times and places in the campaign itself. Many of these are optional, and may or may not be discovered by the Agents. Hotel Broadalbin is not. Transitioning here will enable the Agents to make the final crossing into the Impossible Landscapes in the campaign’s last part, ‘The End of the World of the End’, and onwards towards Carcosa itself. Here the Agents will find war and despair as they search for a way to attend the court of the King in Yellow.

In terms of what the players and their Agents will confront—or is it what will confront the players and their Agents?—it is primarily a sense of the ineffable, of uncertainty, of never knowing quite what is going on and who to trust. That lack of trust has always been present in Delta Green and in Delta Green, but here the author winds this up so that it is not just a case of the Agents barely being able to trust who they work for as operatives of Delta Green, but they can no longer trust reality. Once exposed to the influence of the Yellow King, the surrealism never lets up, the motifs of Carcosa and The King in Yellow seeping in everywhere. Nowhere does this show more than in the clues the Agents will discover and the cascade of connections between persons and places in the campaign that never once seems to let up. There is moment at the beginning of Masks of Nyarlathotep in which having confronted the killers of Jackson Elias, the Investigators are presented with a thick wodge of clues that connect from New York to the rest of the campaign and in its opening moments threatens to overwhelm the Investigators with too much information. Impossible Landscapes is like that moment, but it never seems to end.

As a consequence, Impossible Landscapes all too often actually feels impossible in terms of an investigation. Although the campaign is quite linear in structure, determining where and what to investigate, what clues to follow up, can be daunting for the players. At other times, the campaign funnels down to one choice, and whilst the Keeper is provided with suggestions and tools with which to push the players and their Agents forward, this does undermine the agency of the players. To an extent this fits the campaign and its intentional uncertainty, but at the same time, it feels as if the author is writing the Agents and their players into a labyrinth, thus getting them lost, and then having to force them out again via a deus ex machina and into the next…

The campaign is also deadly. There are scenes and moments where it is physically deadly, but these seem almost inconsequential to the way in which the various encounters, discoveries, and more importantly, the realisations about the connectivity of one clue or fact or encounter to another constantly threatens to scour away at each Agent’s Sanity. Actual Sanity losses are individually low throughout the bulk of the campaign, but they are ever present and they mount up over the course of the Agents’ investigation. In addition, the influence of the Yellow King and each Agent’s susceptibility is measured by a separate track—Corruption. As this increases, invariably through actions and decisions upon the part of the player and his Agent, each Agent has the chance to learn more and access other locations, thus encountering ever greater moments of surrealist uncertainty. There are moments—few and far between—when an Agent can regain Sanity and lose Corruption, but once gained, Corruption can never be truly lost. Any Agent who actually survives Impossible Landscapes will be both scarred and corrupted by his experiences in the Impossible Landscapes, but to be clear, when the Handler decides to run this campaign, there is no play beyond it.

Physically, it is clear that Impossible Landscapes is not just a roleplaying campaign or a roleplaying book. It is a tome in and of itself, subtly recursive as if trying to infect the Handler as she reads and prepares the campaign. Images are not placed in the book, they taped in place haphazardly with masking tape, as if some unknown Delta Green agent is attempting to put together a file on the investigation for the archives. The influence of the Yellow King seeps into the pages with every mention of him marked and appended with the question, “Have you seen it?” There are subtle changes throughout the volume that startle both Handler and reader, just further adding to its atmosphere and tone of uncertainty. Throughout, the book is annotated by different voices whose identities can only be guessed at, throwing in weird anagrams and comments that suggest further connections, and suggesting that somehow, these annotations have been made post publication to the copy in the Handler’s hands. And then there are the handouts. There have never been handouts like this before. They are used to enforce the campaign’s surrealist uncertainty for much like the campaign itself, they are layered, they cannot be taken at face value, and they hide their ‘true’ information. In essence, the handouts have to be investigated in themselves in order to become useful clues to the investigation. For all this, as well as the fantastically accessible, but layered graphic design and the excellent artwork, it is no wonder that Impossible Landscapes won the 2022 Gold ENnie Award for Best Graphic Design and Layout. (It is also a travesty that Impossible Landscapes only won the 2022 Gold ENnie Award for Best Graphic Design and Layout. It deserved more.)

As to the writing, Impossible Landscapes is well written and easy to grasp. This does not mean that the campaign is far from challenging to prepare and run, given the complexity of the connections that snake back and forth across its length—though there is good advice given to both ends. What it does mean is that the writing does not complicate the process of either preparing to run or actually running the campaign.

Impossible Landscapes – A Pursuit of the Terrors of Carcosa and the King in Yellow begins with surrealism and uncertainty and never lets up on either, let alone the tension. This is superb creation, one which supplants the very way in which the King in Yellow is presented as a threat in other scenarios—typically as an attempt to stage a performance of The King in Yellow, with or without the Investigators’ involvement, to pull them or others into Carcosa. Impossible Landscapes does that to an extent, but always seems to be skirting the performance, instead focusing on the reality destabilising/unreality enforcing that takes place somewhere between our world and that of Carcosa. This is not an experience that any Agent can win nor does it involve a threat that any Agent can defeat. Rather it is an experience to understand and survive, a threat to be avoided, knowing that its infectious, reality warping surrealism is never going to be stopped. As a result, Impossible Landscapes elevates the Yellow King and his influence into an existential contamination that unbinds, rebinds, and connects reality and truly delivers a superlative cosmic horror campaign and playing experience.

Tell me, have you seen the Impossible Landscapes?

Miskatonic Monday #240: Beyond the Veil of Dreams: Susupti

Between October 2003 and October 2013, Chaosium, Inc. published a series of books for Call of Cthulhu under the Miskatonic University Library Association brand. Whether a sourcebook, scenario, anthology, or campaign, each was a showcase for their authors—amateur rather than professional, but fans of Call of Cthulhu nonetheless—to put forward their ideas and share with others. The programme was notable for having launched the writing careers of several authors, but for every Cthulhu Invictus, The Pastores, Primal State, Ripples from Carcosa, and Halloween Horror, there was Five Go Mad in Egypt, Return of the Ripper, Rise of the Dead, Rise of the Dead II: The Raid, and more...

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

—oOo—

Name: Beyond the Veil of Dreams: Susupti

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Byron the Bard

Setting: 1980s Arkham

Product: Scenario
What You Get: Fifty-nine page, 1.79 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Sometimes the missing disappear for a reason

Plot Hook: A missing persons case leads into strange research and encounters with desperate people
Plot Support: Eighteen handouts, eight maps, ten NPCs, one Mythos artefact, and one Mythos creature.

Production Values: Plain

Pros

# Modern Lovecraft Country scenario

# Very detailed investigation

# Very detailed backstory

# Would work as a ‘Night at the Opera’

# Oneirophobia

# Somniphobia

# Antlophobia

Cons

# Never actually defines the nature of the threat

# Needs an edit

# Very detailed backstory

Conclusion

# Highly detailed investigation that threatens to overwhelm the Keeper with information whilst leaving the real threat undefined

# Potentially interesting combination of Indian mysticism and the Mythos

Magazine Madness 19: Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue

The gaming magazine is dead. After all, when was the last time that you were able to purchase a gaming magazine at your nearest newsagent? Games Workshop’s White Dwarf is of course the exception, but it has been over a decade since Dragon appeared in print. However, in more recent times, the hobby has found other means to bring the magazine format to the market. Digitally, of course, but publishers have also created their own in-house titles and sold them direct or through distribution. Another vehicle has been Kickststarter.com, which has allowed amateurs to write, create, fund, and publish titles of their own, much like the fanzines of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest. The resulting titles are not fanzines though, being longer, tackling broader subject matters, and more professional in terms of their layout and design.

—oOo—

Most magazines for the roleplaying hobby give the gamer support for the game of his choice, or at the very least, support for the hobby’s more popular roleplaying games. Whether that is new monsters, spells, treasures, reviews of newly released titles, scenarios, discussions of how to play, painting guides, and the like… That is how it has been all the way back to the earliest days of The Dragon and White Dwarf magazines. Wyrd Science is different—and Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue (Wyrd Science Vol. 1/Issue 3) is different in comparison to both Wyrd Science Session Zero and Wyrd Science – Expert Rules. Gone is the ‘BECMI’ colour coding of the colours and the focus upon fantasy and the Old School Renaissance. Instead, the issue focuses on a much darker genre—horror, and instead of providing new monsters or scenarios, it explores the genre which has threaded its way through roleplaying since 1981 with the publication of Call of Cthulhu with a range of interviews and articles. This is not say that other genres are completely ignored, but the emphasis in this issue is very much on the dark and the forbidding, the scary and the spinetingling, and the unknown and the uncertain.

Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue (Vol. 1/Issue 3) was published by Best in Show in September, 2021 following a successful Kickstarter campaign. There are some ten interviews in the issue, beginning with ‘Publish & Be Damned: The Merry Mushmen’, or rather Eric Nieudan and Olivier Revenu, the French publishers best known for Knock! #1 An Adventure Gaming Bric-à-Brac and its subsequent issues. They give a little of their history and how they came to work together and their interest in the Old School Renaissance, including both Knock! and other projects. ‘Cast Pod: the Vintage RPG Podcast’ continues the magazine’s showcasing of a podcast in each issue and this time it is the podcast, The Vintage RPG Podcast run by Stu Horvath and John ‘Hambome’ McGuire. The podcast is dedicated to the history and art of RPGs, but the interviewees explain how they came to hosting a podcast and how they about creating an episode and in the process create a community around themselves.

Two artists are interviewed in Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue. The first is Tazio Bettin in ‘Art of Darkness: Tazio Bettin – Fighting Fantasy’. An Italian artist, he is the illustrator of Secrets of Salmonis, one of the two titles released for the fortieth anniversary of the Fighting Fantasy series and the first to be written by the series’ co-creator, Steve Jackson. There is some fantastic artwork on show here alongside the interview, in which the artist talks about his work and his turning his interest and hobby into a full time occupation. The second is Jonathan Sacha. In ‘Monstrous Arcana: Goblins & Gardens’ we find out how he came to be interested in Tarot decks and adapting the monsters of Dungeons & Dragons in weirdly bucolic, but unsettling Tarot deck by combining them with a gardening book!

Where all of the previous interviews have been conducted by John Power Jr, the editor of the magazine, Will Salmon interviews David Hughes of Plumeria Pictures on the release on Blu-ray of the 1982 television film starring Tom Hanks, Monsters & Mazes. The interview provides some context for the film and is more positive about it than others might be.

The issue’s horror theme swings into action with ‘I Will Show You Fear In A Handful Of Games...’ by Shannon Appelcline, which takes the reader through a history of the horror genre in roleplaying. He does this in a series of one-page mini essays, each one dedicated to a particular ear. Thus we begin in the early days of the hobby and Dungeons & Dragons, in which its horror was best seen in modules such as X1 Isle of Dread and I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City veering towards the Lovecraftian, but quickly steering away following issues with Deities & Demigods and mostly adhering to Pulp horror. The title of the opening essay, ‘Dark Shadows: 1974-1986’ is a nice nod to the soap opera of the period. The article really takes off with the appearance of Call of Cthulhu, the Satanic Panic of the eighties (of which the aforementioned Mazes & Monsters was a partial instigator), and the appearance of Vampire: The Masquerade in 1990, tracing their evolution over the past forty years and coming up to date with the more recent broadening of means, such as the Jenga of Dread, and areas explore, like LGBT adolescence with Monsterhearts and the feminine fairytale in Bluebeard’s Bride. It is an excellent history and with any luck, should future issues of Wyrd Science explore other genres, there will be similar articles.

Roleplaying games and the Gothic collide in Jack Shear’s ‘Wuthering Frights’. Here he looks at his favorite setting, Ravenloft. First seen in the 1983 module, I6 Ravenloft, this would be later developed into a full setting with the Realm of Terror boxed set in 1990. Shear examines the origins of Dungeons & Dragons’ signature villain, Count Strahd von Zarovich, of I6 Ravenloft fame, in Dracula and then each of the other Domains and their villains more recently for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition presented in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. A clearer bibliography might have helped what is otherwise an informative article and useful accompaniment to whichever version of the Ravenloft setting that the Dungeon Master is using.

Just as horror roleplaying games have changed over the decade, so have their portrayal of mental health. After all, the nature of the genre is all about the loss of self and control—physically, emotionally, and mentally. However, as Stuart Martyn points out in ‘Mind Games’, the portrayal of that loss, especially the mental loss, has not always been an accurate one, often leading to the enforcement of stereotypes about mental health and a lack of understanding of those suffering from poor mental health. To be fair, much of this can be explained by a game’s age. Call of Cthulhu is rightfully acknowledged as the first roleplaying game to explore fear and model the loss of control through its Sanity mechanics, but Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: The Masquerade are singled out as leading examples poor portrayals of mental health. However, as the article moves into the twenty-first century and comes up-to-date, it makes clear that modern iterations of these roleplaying games, as well as others, designers have shown more awareness and understanding of the subject and better tried to reflect that in their games. This is a fascinating look at a key mechanic, or least concept, that almost no roleplaying game can really avoid dealing with, and how it has changed over the years.

John Power Jr. takes us temporarily to the ‘Mythic North’ of Scandinavia, before returning to the British Isles in ‘This Septic Isle’ and an interview with Graeme Davis about Mythic Britain & Ireland, his supplement for Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying. This highlights the stronger tensions and divisions present in nineteenth century Britain, discusses some of the new Vaesen to be found in the new setting, and interestingly, suggests how the limited geography of the setting can lead to distinct variations upon the Vaesen within only a few miles. Davis also draws the distinction between the horror of Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying and the horror of Call of Cthulhu, primarily in that the later the aim at best is not to lose, whilst in the former, it is possible to resolve situations without necessarily resorting to despair. A different type of horror roleplaying game, Campfire, is discussed in ‘Flames of Fear!’, Samantha Nelson’s interview with its creators, Adam Vass and Will Jobst. Campfire is a storytelling game inspired by the horror anthologies such as Creepshow and Are You Afraid Of The Dark? The game uses decks of cards as prompts to encourage the players to tell horror stories about the protagonists rather than a single character each and also allows the players to step back from the story itself to comment upon the ongoing narrative as they are watching it unfold. This is shared storytelling and designed for shorter sessions than most roleplaying games.

Just as Call of Cthulhu remains the template for horror roleplaying in general, Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien remains the template for all Science Fiction horror games. John Power Jr.’s ‘Dark Future’ looks the three roleplaying games and how they handle horror and fear in examining this meeting of genres. Most obvious here is Free League Publishing’s Alien: The Roleplaying Game, but Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG – Player’s Survival Guide is also inspired by the film too. The third roleplaying game is The Wretched, a solo-journalling game about the last survivor aboard a spaceship whose crew was killed by alien monstrosity except for the survivor. One aspect of these settings that the article does not really explore is the class distinction between these and other horror roleplaying games. These are all Blue-Collar sci-Fi horror roleplaying games whereas many horror roleplaying games are not. Again, this is a legacy of the film Alien. Featuring interviews with the designers of three roleplaying games, article however, does nicely balance the unknown, but not cosmic, nature of the sub-genre’s horror against the possibility of survival—and even hope.

Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue also interviews the team at Rowan, Rook, & Deckard. They talk to Luke Frostick in ‘The Importance of Powerful Deaths’ about the origins of Spire: The City Must Fall and the consequences that its protagonists—Drow rebels seen as terrorists by the High Elf state—suffer in acting against the regime. Spire is not necessarily seen as a horror roleplaying game, at least not in the traditional sense, but the article makes it clear that it has strong horror elements. The article explores how the team works together and some of the ideas and concepts which make it into the setting, but without restricting the setting for the Game Master and her creativity. The issue returns to the Old School Renaissance with ‘In The Darkest Recesses of Ourselves’, an interview by Walton Wood with Paolo Greco of Lost Pages about The Book of Gaub. This brings out the horrific nature of the book and its spells and their broader effect upon a campaign. It is a pity that this book comes from Old School Renaissance, because being systems agnostic it can have a wider use in non-fantasy genres and settings too. The interview does not necessarily suggest this, but it highlights the nature of the book and will hopefully bring it to the attention of a wider audience. The interview by John Power Jr. of Guilherme Gontijo, in ‘Silver Scream’ turns to mundane horror, but horror, nonetheless. Blurred Lines – Giallo Detective Solo RPG is the Brazilian designer’s solo journalling game designed by the Italian giallo cinema of the sixties in which the protagonist is a crime scene photographer who hunting, and in turn being hunted, by a serial killer. Like the earlier The Wretched, this explores the notion of playing alone and at night, how that can immerse the player deeper into the game. The interview also notes the difficulty in bringing designs from Latin America to the English-speaking hobby and various attempts to support this.

The last two articles in Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue do not switch subject, but they do switch format under discussion. In ‘Roll & Fright’, Dan Thurot asks whether a sense of horror can be created in playing a board game, pointing to hidden identity or movement games such as Fury of Dracula or Battlestar Galactica, as possible vehicles as they both add a high degree of uncertainty to play. Whilst he acknowledges that most horror board games are merely themed, adding the veneer of the genre, he ultimately concludes that it is possible, if only under its terms. The challenge being that sense of immersion and the loss of control at the heart of the genre makes it all the more difficult to do in a board game. The last interview in the magazine is again by John Power Jr. and with wargames designer, Joseph McCullough. In ‘A Field of Horror’, the designer of the highly regarded Frostgrave: Fantasy Wargames in the Frozen City talks about his latest design, The Silver Bayonet, which fuses Napoleonic wargaming with horror and narrative storytelling. This looks to be a fascinating setting and with rules for solo play included suggests it can be played on a more casual basis without the need for more confrontational play of traditional wargaming.

Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue is rounded out with ‘Hit Points’, its extensive reviews sections. It includes reviews of wargames such as Warlord Games’ Sláine – Kiss My Axe Starter Set, roleplaying games like the RuneQuest Starter set from Chaosium, Inc. and Orbital Blues from Soulmuppet Publishing, board games such as Tales From The Loop: The Boardgame from Free League Publishing, and a range solo games (all revewed by Anna Blackwell), like Be Like a Crow and Bucket of Bolts, before looking at Christopher Frayling’s Vampire Cinema – The First one Hundred Years and various films and television series, which has a report from the FrightFest 2022. Two of the more interesting reviews here are of The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity by Jon Peterson and Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs, pleasingly placed opposite each other in an entirely appropriate pairing. Lastly, the issue catches up with the adventures of Mira Manga in ‘Appendix M’. It adds a personal touch to the magazine and brings it to a close.

Physically, Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue is impressively bright and breezy—despite its subject matter. The layout is clean and tidy, but the issue does need another edit in places though.

Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue covers a wide range of roleplaying games in exploring the issue’s genre. Some of the roleplaying games and supplements, such as Call of Cthulhu, Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, and Mythic Britain & Ireland obviously fall into the horror genre, others less obviously so, for example, The Book of Gaub. There is a lot to read and discover in the pages of the magazine and that is where it is at its best, finding out about a game you never heard of or wanted to know more about. Yet the format of the magazine, or at least this issue, makes it unbalanced and often not as engaging to read as it deserves to be. There are simply too many interviews in the issue compared to other articles, so that the other articles, whether Shannon Appelcline’s ‘I Will Show You Fear In A Handful Of Games...’ and Jack Shear’s ‘Wuthering Frights’ stand out more because they are different rather just because they are both interesting and informative. Consequently, whilst the issue is interesting and informative, providing an engaging look at a particular genre in roleplaying, Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue is better for what it covers rather than the way it covers its content.

Allies & Adversaries

At its most basic, The Labyrinth is an anthology of organisations for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, published by Arc Dream Publishing. However, delve into this supplement for the modern roleplaying game of conspiratorial and Lovecraftian investigative horror with its conspiratorial agencies within the United States government investigating, confronting, and covering up the Unnatural—the forces and influences of Cosmic Horror—and it some becomes apparent that it is something much more. First, it marked the return of John Scott Tynes, one of the co-creators of Delta Green, to writing for the setting and for roleplaying in general. Second, that it won the Gold Ennie award for Best Supplement in 2020. Third, the organisations presented in the supplement are not just organisations, but also frameworks which slot onto a Handler’s existing campaign with plots and events which play out around that existing campaign. Fourth, although the organisations in The Labyrinth are split equally between four allies and four enemies (or four potential allies and four potential enemies), their roles within a campaign and how the Agents—the Player Characters—view them is likely to change. All eight organisations have their own agendas, their own reactions to the Agents, and that is likely to change as their interaction with the Agents grows. Fifth, these organisations are inspired by and drawn from the here and now. For a roleplaying game of modern conspiratorial horror like Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, the enemies and allies of The Labyrinth are horrifically contemporary. Sixth, the eight organisations in The Labyrinth are connected. Not necessarily directly, but enough that if the Agents pull at one thread, they will find themselves wandering down a path and investigating and interacting with another organisation before they understand what they got themselves involved in with the first. Yet even as they get lost, the Agents may come to realise two things—that the influence and forces of the Unnatural reach deeper into the United States than they ever imagined, and that humanity is bad enough already…

The Labyrinth was published following a successful Kickstarter campaign. The book’s introduction begins with an overview of the eight organisations and some advice for the Handler on building or mapping her own ‘labyrinth’, essentially how to connect the eight organisations. Or rather connect those that the Handler feels will fit her campaign. Tynes provides his pinboard style, as well as suggesting how that labyrinth of connections can be used to build a campaign. The advice is not extensive, but forms a solid starting point. The other thing that the introduction does is suggest ways in which the Handler can also connect the various operations for Delta Green to the organisations presented in The Labyrinth. For example, ‘Agent Renko’ can be connected to the events of Music From a Darkened Room, Kali Ghati to the ‘Dream Syndicate’, Lover in the Ice to ‘The Prana Sodality’, and so on. Each of the organisations in the supplement is also connected to more than one operation, so there are multiple ways into the maze that The Labyrinth presents.

Each of the organisations is presented with a complete history, a description of its organisation, notable operatives and individuals, its beliefs and mandates, how it operates, and potential for friendly opportunities to work with them. It is followed by a suggested progression—or story arc—of how the interaction between the organisation and Agents will play out and how those involved will react, over the course of three stages. Lastly, the ramifications of this interaction is explored and possible connections between that other organisation and those elsewhere in the book. All of this is background, detail, and structure, but it is not a scenario. The Handler will need to develop the content to fit the nature and events of her campaign.

The first of the allies is the ‘Center for the Missing Child’, a non-profit organisation dedicated to locating missing children and supporting their families, which works closely with law enforcement. This potentially means the Agents as one of their number is likely to work in law enforcement. However, their involvement could lead to one of their consultants taking too much interest in their ‘other’ work and lead him down that path with disastrous consequences. ‘The Dream Syndicate’ examines the members of an online forum who have had very similar dreams of unnatural events. This organisation feels underplayed at first, but contact with them can become very personal for the Agents. ‘Agent Renko’—named in a nice nod to the novels by Martin Cruz Smith—is likely to be huge fun for the Handler to roleplay, an individual rather than an organisation, a GRU SV-8 agent who crashes into their lives and seems to be dogging their every move. The fourth possible ally is ‘The Witness Alliance’, another non-profit organisation, but one dedicated to tracking and exposing the activities of hate groups. Again, this organisation has knowledge that will prove useful to the Agents, but like the scenario, ‘Last Things Last’ in Delta Green: Need to Know, this story arc explores the calamitous effect that Delta Green operations have on their agents to the very last, putting the Agents in deadly peril.

Over half of The Labyrinth is dedicated to it quartet of antagonists, and if the allies were interesting enough and potential contact with them could lead to horror and despair, then the author really gets into his stride with this foursome of fear. The quartet starts with ‘New Life Fertility’, a private company that offers an extremely exclusive, one hundred percent successful fertility treatment and which has the means to protect itself and the families it helps—especially the families it helps. This combines modern science with a classic Old One and links back to the Severn Valley to potentially push forward to a ‘cuckoo in the nest’ situation on a scale never before imagined. ‘New Life Fertility’ could easily have been a campaign all by itself, but will likely form a major strand of any campaign run using The Labyrinth. In comparison, ‘The Lonely’ presents not so much a group as a number of individuals who are likely to prove to be irritants, although potentially very deadly irritants. Already isolated and alone, their loneliness is driven unnaturally deeper into misery, grim realisation, and then outright fury at the world. If other Delta Green content treats the Mythos surrounding the Hastaur Mythos and the Yellow King as a meme, here it is a vector that slips unseen through modern communication… Consequently, investigating this is going to be highly challenging. ‘The Sowers’ begins in the Rust Belt, a devout Christian sect with a secret path to absolution and near divinity, that appears to do good and brings its members prosperity and happiness—its male members at least. The entry points are interesting in that they take on a more personal touch in that an Agent could become involved with the sect as a possible path to redemption. The last antagonist is ‘The Prana Sodality’ and is perhaps the most complicated and isolated of the four in the supplement, primarily because it is so deeply tied into both the U.S. military-industrial complex and the history surrounding many of Delta Green’s adversaries. A photograph of a boy with a disturbing tumour in his eye draws the Agents to the town of Stanton, Washington state, one of the most polluted towns in the country and when they arrive, the Agents literally step into a mass shooting. Is this a coincidence? It only gets worse from there…

Physically, The Labyrinth is very well presented, as you would expect for a supplement for Delta Green. However, the artwork will feel familiar from previous Delta Green supplements. Lastly, if there is any issue perhaps with the antagonists, it is that ‘The Prana Sodality’ could benefit from a few more maps since the investigation is primarily based around the one location.

Ultimately, The Labyrinth is a toolkit, whether the Handler uses one of its tools—or organisations—in her campaign or several. Each one of the organisations, whether ally or antagonist, in The Labyrinth stands up on its own and can be used to supplement existing campaigns or even have campaigns built around them, such as ‘New Life Fertility’. Where The Labyrinth comes into its own is a campaign of its own, but in comparison to the classic campaign of Lovecraftian investigative horror, The Labyrinth greatly differs.

Fundamentally, it would not be a linear campaign and it would not be a campaign against one threat, but an interconnected web of allies and adversaries, threats and dangers, that the players and their Agents can navigate in a more open fashion. Although there would be a beginning and an end of sorts, at least in terms of the content presented in the page of The Labyrinth, neither would be obvious and consequently there is no cathartic sense of finality to the events of the campaign—just one aspect of cosmic horror in Delta Green. This is what the author describes as a ‘narrative sandbox’ and it means that a campaign involving The Labyrinth is going to be structured and very different to that run by another Handler. The horror of The Labyrinth is as evil and unpleasant as you would expect, though of course, dispersed far and wide by the ‘narrative sandbox’ nature of the campaign.

The Labyrinth is not ready to run—and that is the point. It is, however, ready for the Handler to prepare and run, to make it her own around the campaign she is already running. The Labyrinth brings a wealth of interconnected depth and detail to Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, pulling its Agents deeper into an entanglement of the uncanny and the Unnatural, a secret world where the horrifying layers and links never seem to end.

A Cthulhu Collectanea III

As its title suggests Bayt al Azif – A magazine for Cthulhu Mythos roleplaying games is a magazine dedicated to roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror. Published by Bayt al Azif it includes content for both Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition from Chaosium, Inc. and Trail of Cthulhu from Pelgrane Press, which means that its content can also be used with Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game and The Fall of DELTA GREEN. Published in November, 2020, Bayt al Azif Issue #03 does not include any content for use with the latter two roleplaying games, but instead specifically includes three scenarios—stated for both Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and Trail of Cthulhu (and therefore would actually work with The Fall of DELTA GREEN if the Keeper made the adjustments necessary), discussion of various aspects of Lovecraftian investigative horror, interviews, an introduction to Call of Cthulhu in Japan, a review of a recently-rereleased classic campaign for Call of Cthulhu,  an overview of Lovecraftian investigative horror roleplaying in 2019, and more. All of which, once again, comes packaged in a solid, full colour, Print On Demand book.

Bayt al Azif Issue #03 opens with editorial, ‘Houses of the Unholy’, which discusses how the Mythos was and is never one thing, but quite mutable and what we make it, and that in order to do that we should run it and play it, before diving into ‘Sacrifices’, the letters pages. The inclusion of a letters pages lifts Bayt al Azif above being just a supplement, and whilst the letters are most congratulatory, they marks the start of another role for the magazine. Which is to help build a community. The more fulsome content gets underway with ‘Cthulhu in 2019: A Retrospective’. Witten by Dean Engelhardt of CthulhuReborn.com—publisher of Convicts & Cthulhu: Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying in the Penal Colonies of 18th Century Australia and The Apocthulhu Roleplaying Game, this covers the releases, major and minor, through the year, from each of the various publishers, beginning with Chaosium, Inc., before moving on to Stygian Fox, Golden Goblin Press, and Sons of the Singularity. Amateur publications and magazines are not ignored, including Bayt al Azif, and the author also covers Trail of Cthulhu from Pelgrane Press and Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game from Arc Dream Publishing, plus numerous other Cthulhu horror-themed roleplaying games, such as Sandy Petersen Games’ Ghoul Island series and the Weird Frontiers RPG (previously known and identified here as Dark Trails: A Weird West RPG) from Stiff Whiskers Press. Notably, it touches upon just a handful of the entries available on the Miskatonic Repository, which in future is likely to become too unwieldy to cover effectively as the number of titles grow and grow. Lastly there is an examination of titles currently awaiting fulfilment on Kickstarter. Each of the various is accompanied by a thumbnail description, enough detail to spur the reader’s interest, but not really a review—although the author does offer an opinion in places. This update dispenses with the references to individual reviews on Reviews from R’lyeh included in previous entries in the series, which to be fair saves spaces as more and more titles are covered. As in previous issues, this is an extensive overview, which again nicely chronicles the year keeps us abreast of anything that the reader may have missed or forgotten.

Bayt al Azif Issue #03 continues the Germanic feel of Bayt al Azif Issue 02. This is because it reprints—in English—content drawn from the German Cthulhu magazine, Cthulhus Rus, which began with ‘False Friends’, a 1920s scenario set in the university town of Göttingen by Philipp Christophel and Ralf Sandfuchs. Its sequel, ‘The Murders of Mr. S’ moves the action to 1925 and Berlin, making it even more suitable to be run using Berlin: The Wicked City – Unveiling the Mythos in Weimar Berlin. When a number of scientists at a pharmaceutical plant in Berlin are inexplicably murdered and the letter ‘S’ written in their blood beside them, the lurid newspaper reporting dubs the killer ‘Mr. S’, the Investigators are hired by one of its owners (who previously hired them in ‘False Friends’) to find out who is responsible and whether there is an ongoing threat to his business. The scenario takes the investigators into Berlin’s industrial district, so has a different feel to it. Although given permission by their employer to investigate events at the plant, the Investigators will be received with a certain reluctance by his partner and a certain disregard by the victims’ fellow Bulgarian scientists, all three of whom are reluctant to talk about their research. With echoes of Fritz Lang’s M, ‘The Murders of Mr. S’ is a decent investigative story, but the Keeper may need to work that little bit harder to make sure that the players and their Investigators make connections with some of the NPCs and so push the scenario to a conclusion.

The second scenario in Bayt al Azif Issue #03 is ‘In the House of Glass’. Written by Gail Clendenin, this is a modern survival horror scenario, a ‘locked room’ one-shot set during the hours of daylight at an arts event. And it does not involve the Yellow King. The Pierce Botanical Conservatory is about to hold a stunning art exhibit by famed glassblowing artist Galen Tisselly, and whether connected to the conservatory staff, donors to the conservatory, or fellow artists, the Investigators are invited there to be present during the installation a few days before the exhibit opens. Played out over three different biomes—mountain, desert, and tropical—after they discover one of the staff dead, the Investigators’ visit quickly turns weird as glass sculptures seem to come to life and stalk them and the great sheets of glass that form the conservatory walls warp and show strange visions. The Investigators will need to avoid the strange things hunting them and locate their source if they are to bring their nightmare to an end. ‘In the House of Glass’ is an enjoyably inventive scenario which takes its inspiration—a pair of historical greenhouses—and combines it with the artwork of Dale Chihuly. The scenario is well written with decent staging advice and good handouts, and should deliver a weird and creepy session of roleplaying.

The third and final scenario in the issue is ‘Operation Ice Dragon: 1960s scenario’ by Rich McKee. This is a Cold War scenario set in a remote military base in the Artic in 1960. Part of United States’ Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line system intended to warn of imminent Soviet nuclear attack,  Ice Dragon Station has recently been subject to a series of strange signals which have interfered with the station’s radios. The government has already sent a team led by a radio expert, Doctor Kreuger, to the source of the signals, but when the Investigators arrive shortly after, the signals intensify and begin driving the staff at the base crazy. They quickly find themselves going after the Doctor and his team, but not before some scary moments in the base. Essentially, Ice Station Zebra meets the Mythos, this is nicely atmospheric piece with certain Pulp sensibilities that make it suitable for use with Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game and The Fall of DELTA GREEN.

In the Designers & Dragons series, Shannon Appelcline delivered a five-part history of the roleplaying industry. Of course, that history is ongoing, and as he charts further aspects of it at RPG.net, he continues to update previous histories. As the title suggests, ‘Designers & Dragons Next – Chaosium: 1997-Present’ updates the previous history begun in the series, bringing Chaosium up-to-date, examining its ups and downs of the last two decades or so, essentially spanning  the period between founder Greg Stafford leaving the company in 1997 to his returning and sad passing away in 2018. The history is tumultuous and difficult and most fans of Lovecraftian investigative horror will be aware of much it, but nevertheless, the article is informative and explains the reasons behind Chaosium’s actions over the years.

Although Call of Cthulhu has been published in numerous languages, little consideration is given to how it is played or perceived outside of the English language, so it was a surprise to learn that the roleplaying game is very popular in Japan. ‘Kuturufu No Yobi-Goe: How New Media and Indie Pirate Culture Elevated Call of Cthulhu to the Most Popular RPG in Japan’ by Andy Kitkowski, we get to see how and why. This is a fascinating look at the roleplaying culture in Japan and just how its fans play the game, organise events, and more. It highlights how the Japanese roleplaying hobby enjoy replays of adventures—both in the form of transcriptions and YouTube videos, how many women are playing, and how the Japanese understand H.P. Lovecraft’s racism. This is most interesting article in Bayt al Azif Issue #03, enabling the reader to look at the hobby from a very different perspective and way of playing.

In ‘The Mythos and Technology’ Tyler Omichinski explores how the Mythos might interest with modern technology, suggesting that to properly combine the two, a Keeper would need to research her ideas and be consistent. The author also gives a real-world example, that of the Necronomicon, published by Avon Books in 1977 and asks what would happen if it were actually a scanned version of the Necronomicon. The article is short and really does not do the subject justice, but the addition of a real-world example gives it a little more heft.

Sanity and losing it is a fundamental part of Call of Cthulhu, but it can be difficult to handle and roleplaying. Jared Smith, editor of Bayt al Azif suggests ways of handling the set-up, the roleplay, and the mechanics of Sanity in ‘The Best People Usually Are: Sanity in RPGs’. Paired with ‘Sanity Point Costs: Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition’, it offers good advice and is worth reading no matter how long you have been running Call of Cthulhu. 

Jared Smith offers just the single interview in this third issue, but it is with the most important person in the history of Call of Cthulhu in ‘Something Never Seen Before: An Interview with Sandy Petersen’. This is with the creator of the roleplaying game, Sandy Petersen, and covers his introduction to gaming, his creation and first playthroughs of Call of Cthulhu, creating for his own company and designing for the video games industry, and more. Like the interviews in the previous issues, is interesting and informative, and is likely one that all fans of Lovecraftian investigative horror would want to read. Evan Johnston continues his enjoyable comic strip, ‘Grave Spirits’, and Jason Smith contributes another entry in the ‘Sites of Antiquity’ series, this time ‘Cappadocia’ and suggests how this series of cave complexes in Turkey could be used with the Mythos.

Physically, with the third issue, Bayt al Azif keeps getting better and better in terms of production values and look. It is clean and tidy, and though it might need an edit in places, the main issue is that some of the artwork veers toward being cartoon-like.

Bayt al Azif Issue #03 is another decent issue of the magazine. It follows on from Bayt al Azif Issue #02 in containing longer articles and a more diverse range of voices. Again, the content from Cthulhus Rus opens up an aspect of the Call of Cthulhu community which would otherwise be inaccessible to the predominately English-speaking community, and of course, the scenarios are not only well done, but they also highlight Bayt al Azif as a vehicle for scenarios that whilst good, are not necessarily commercial enough to be published by Chaosium, Inc., Pelgrane Press, or a licensee.  In particular, ‘In the House of Glass’ and ‘Operation Ice Dragon: 1960s scenario’ stand out here. The former as a creepy, weird, craft-based one-shot, the latter as atmospheric, almost high adventure, but definitely peril on the ice mystery and chase that verges on the Pulp. The highlight though, is Andy Kitkowski’s ‘Kuturufu No Yobi-Goe: How New Media and Indie Pirate Culture Elevated Call of Cthulhu to the Most Popular RPG in Japan’, which is simply fascinating. 

Overall, Bayt al Azif Issue #03 provides solid support for, and about, Lovecraftian investigative horror roleplaying. With a good mix of decent scenarios and interesting articles, what more could you ask for?