# Forum > Gaming > Roleplaying Games > Journal Delta Green: The Dracula Dossier

## SleepyShadow

My current group has been itching to start this campaign ever since talks began of wrapping up our Planescape game. They've been excited to try something a bit different, and I have a love of spies, Gothic horror, and cosmic horror. Let's meet the cast, shall we? Bonus points if you can guess who was who in the Planescape game.
*Spoiler: The Agents*
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*Piper Kane:* (Dragon Knight of Tiamat 8) Ace pilot, femme fatale, and lover of exotic pets, Piper is an official member of Delta Green who got brought in from the Air Force. She's aiming for "female James Bond, but with an airplane and a dragon." She's the face of the party. She also became the research junkie.
*Magdalena Roist:* (Battle Master Fighter 5/Rogue 3) The team sharpshooter, Magda handles the paperwork when she's not handling a sniping post. She fell in love with Colonel Vincent Natter, the agents' handler. She has become the team organizer on the field.
*Nassim Khopesh:* (Light Cleric 4/Wildfire Druid 3/Fighter 1) A dwarven half-drow firefighter and adrenaline junkie. He's affiliated with the Union of Regulars, a loose network of blue collar workers who act as a decentralized Neighborhood Watch who chase monsters instead of petty criminals. He just does it for the thrill. He's the big damn hero, and proved it during the Iron Ghost adventure. He got "reincarnated" in the body of a train conductor whose soul had been destroyed.
*Marcella Lasselle:* (Primeval Guardian Ranger 5/Bard 3) A naive lass who wants to discover her true purpose in life. She recently joined up with Caduceus, an organization similar to Doctors Without Borders, except they have a side hustle chasing down the serpent person Cult of the Inner Night. Now that Caduceus has been exposed as a front for the Cult of Yig, she has been trying to subvert their activities while still helping their honest medical side. She's also learning sharpshooting skills from Magda.
*Shinichiro Mitsuya:* (Long Death Monk 7) A former Yakuza enforcer, he switched teams and now works as an enforcer for the McBride Gang. He's the muscle (because every team needs a big guy). He's not the brightest, but he's ready and willing to smash anything and everything with his trusty lead pipe. He's a not-so-secret cinnamon roll. He fell in love with Eva Haflich, a vampire hunter from the Cathedral of St. Cuthbert. Quit the campaign.
*Aurelie Arbon:* (Shadow Sorcerer 7) The youngster on the team, she's a punk tomboy who works for the McBride Gang. She's the team's getaway driver, and she has magic from an unknown source. She hopes to find out where her magic comes from. She betrayed the party, and now acts as the new Hound of Edom.
*Tobias Wexner:* (Divination Wizard 8) He's a private eye from a lakeside tourist town who's partnered up with a young lady from Arkham named Chloe. He's also a practicing wizard and one of six members of a werewolf pack. If you're imagining John Constantine or Harry Dresden, you've got it right. He's the big brother of the team, and will rip and tear if anyone he considers part of his "pack" are threatened. Especially if you threaten Chloe.
*Singe de Competence:* (Knowledge Cleric 1/Rogue 1/Ranger 1/Bard 3) The newest agent to join the team. She's Geerd's old friend and colleague. She helps keep him grounded when he starts waxing philosophically. She's got proficiency in every skill. Her name literally means "skill monkey."

*Spoiler: The Friendlies*
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*Vincent "Vic" Natter:* The current head of Delta Green and primary handler for the party. He's a burned out field agent with a love of booze and cigars, and he's one bad mission away from getting the boot by Central Command. Think "Solid Snake + Roy Mustang".
*Katya and Cordelia Corbyn:* A pair of half-elf sisters rescued from a diamond mine by Vic when they were children. They're field agents trained in infiltration, and act as the party's field intel team.
*Dustin Dearborn:* A trigger happy soldier who loves everything about the Cold War. He acts as the party's point man and heavy weapons expert if they need some extra firepower during some wet work.
*Lyn Martinez:* A rock gnome engineer who creates the fun spy gadgets every good secret organization needs. The party can radio her if they need advice or info on machinery or some other technical conundrum. Killed by Edom.
*Rowland Lygon:* A pathologist with a severe hatred of monsters. He serves as a biological specialist for the party, and will perform autopsies on any monster they bring back to better identify weaknesses.
*Declan McBride:* A mob boss with a code. He acts as the handler for the two criminal PCs, and can provide underworld connections as necessary.
*Devona Flaherty:* A city detective and member of The Union. She's there to help the party with investigation into human subjects, and to assist with any "cop talk" the party might need.
*Phillip Connors:* The quartermaster for Caduceus. He helps the party with medical issues Rowland can't solve, and is a font of knowledge regarding serpent people and The Cult of the Inner Night.
*Chloe Parson:* A student at Miskatonic University who dabbles in the occult. She's born of werewolf parentage, so she's immune to lycanthrope-induced Lunacy (and thus a perfect assistant for Tobias). Dracula's cultists are after her due to her likeness of a witch called "The Red Queen." They want to use her as a host for the spiritual resurrection of Lilith (yes, the biblical Lilith), whom Dracula believes will make the perfect Bride. Permanently insane.
*Elspeth Irving:* A linguist and cryptologist brought in to help with paperwork. She's friendly, cute, and about half the party already has a crush on her. It turned out she was "Hopkins" this whole time! It was later revealed she is the great-great-granddaughter of Jonathan and Mina Harker.
*Eva Haflich:* The last scion of a family of vampire hunters. Her ancestor was rescued by Van Helsing, and she was raised by the St. Cuthbert church to be a "holy assassin". She maintains a punk-rocker look and attitude to keep people at a distance, but she's very kind once you get to know her. Devoted to her boyfriend Mitsuya. Left the party after Mitsuya parted ways with Delta Green.
*Alexia Hunter:* The precocious prodigal spy. Her grandfather was "Cushing", and he trained/groomed her to be his personal field agent from the time she could walk. The Delta Green crew agreed to take her under their wing, both to capitalize on her talents and to protect her from Edom. She looks up to Piper and Magda like the big sisters she never had.
*Geerd Hoorn:* A knowledgeable dockhand and famed member of The Union of Regulars. He advised Nassim and Tobias on their spirit hunt at the hospital. Some investigation revealed his ties to the Van Helsing family, but the party is uncertain how deep the connection goes. He seems to know a lot more than he should.
*Carmilla Rojas:* A talented troubleshooter for the Costa Lunan intelligence community. Her great-great-grandfather was Quincey Morris, at least according to some old letters she found in her grandmother's attic. She likes to accrue favors from people instead of taking normal payment for her services. Edom wants to recruit her, since she is a known legacy of the original hunters.
*Ekatarina Lobanova:* The former Hound of Edom who operated under the code name "Kenaz." She defected from Edom after falling under suspicion of being an enemy mole. Now the agents of Delta Green are her only chance to survive. She's also Magda's half-sister.
*Allan Ashwood:* A graying case officer and former Duke of Edom who operated under the code name "Oakes." He's obsessed with the 1877 mole hunt, and is convinced Edom arrested the wrong man back in the day. He opted to defect to Delta Green because he thinks they are his best chance to uncover the identity of the real mole.

I don't keep a journal for every campaign I run, but I figured keeping a record for a spy/mystery game would help everyone out  :Small Smile:

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## Myth27

Are you doing that thing that requires reading a 400 pages book based on bram stroker Dracula with over 100 handwritten notes made by 3-4 people during 100+ years ?

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## SleepyShadow

> Are you doing that thing that requires reading a 400 pages book based on bram stroker Dracula with over 100 handwritten notes made by 3-4 people during 100+ years ?


Technically, yes, but I'm not going to make the players read the novel. Their handler will give them the cliff notes on relevant information as we progress through the campaign. That said, I'm certain at least two of my players will be interested in reading the unredacted file for themselves.

Anyway, now seems as good a time as any to update the journal  :Small Smile: 

*Spoiler: Last Things Last*
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A couple months ago, I ran a one-shot for two of my players who were keen to get a better grasp on the setting and their characters. Luckily for me, those two were Piper and Magdalena, so it was easy to justify sending the preestablished Delta Green agents on a small but important mission. Clyde Baughman, a former Delta Green agent, had died in his apartment of a massive heart attack. Colonel Vincent Natter assigned Piper, Magdalena, and Katya (an NPC) to conduct a sweep of Baughman's apartment and remove any evidence of the organization. The trio headed up to Broken Shield, a midsized lakeside town with a waning tourist population.

They did a thorough search of the apartment, and found a key and a stack of paperwork in Baughman's spare bedroom. None of them were accountants, so they decided to take the paperwork down to a local pub to go through the papers over a burger and pint. On their way out, they were stopped by Baughman's nosy neighbor Mrs. Janowitz. Magda did some fast talking, and convinced Janowitz that they were Baughman's attorneys taking care of a few details. Piper doubled down and gave Janowitz a card with the phone number for the hotel they were staying at, telling her to call them if she saw anyone suspicious in the neighborhood.

The trio finished going through the paperwork after a few hours, and learned that Baughman owned a cabin out in the woods. Rather than head out immediately, the trio decided to split up to learn more about the cabin and about Baughman. Magda headed to the library, Katya went to the newspaper archives, and Piper schmoozed with an old military guy at the bar. They didn't learn much aside from that the road out to the cabin sometimes floods in the spring, so they met back up at the hotel and drove out to the cabin. None of them had thought to grab the key from Baughman's apartment, so Katya had to pick the lock on the front door.

Once inside the cabin, they ransacked the place for anything Delta Green related. It didn't take long for them to find a footlocker marked with a green triangle. Inside they found a few odds and ends (a knife, a globe, some audio tapes, and a suit), as well as a letter and a sizeable file. The file regarded the Ventaja Corporation, a Costa Lunan import/export firm, dating from 1865 to 1868. The file began with an RSA investigation into allegations of weapon smuggling into and out of New Sierra. The RSA investigation was discontinued but a more covert Delta Green surveillance of the company continued, as Baughman uncovered financial ties between Ventaja and several accounts mentioned on a financial watch list called Edom. A raid on a Ventaja warehouse in Costa Luna, resulted in the recovery of something called The Seward Formula. There was a manila folder with that title, but it was empty.

The letter was from Clyde Baughman just before he died. It asked whomever found the letter to pour gasoline into the septic tank behind the cabin and ignite it. It also begged the reader to not look inside the septic tank. Naturally, the party wanted to crack open the tank to peek  :Small Cool: 

Magda took up a sniping position on the roof of the cabin while Piper and Katya used a crowbar to open the septic tank. Inside they found the rotten corpse of Clyde's late wife reanimated through some fell magic he had stumbled upon during his time in Delta Green. The dead woman begged the party to let her out, but the party wasn't convinced. When Piper started to get the gasoline from the shed, the corpse creature skittered up out of the septic tank to attack. This thing thrashed poor Piper, but trio managed to kill the corpse creature before it could kill Piper. They torched the body, threw everything relevant into the trunk, and hauled it back to their hotel. The next morning, they brought the trunk back to Delta Green HQ for further analysis.

All in all, a good introduction to the game.

*Spoiler: Dead Light*
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In the official start of the campaign, the party was split up into different factions based on their background decisions. Piper was absent, so Magdalena was partnered up with Cordelia and told to go to Blackwater Creek, a rural town in the Miskatonic Valley, to investigate some mysterious disappearances, including a professor, his wife, and a few students from Miskatonic University. Colonel Natter wasn't sure if this was necessarily a Delta Green mission, but they had received information from an anonymous source calling themselves "Hopkins" that Ventaja used to have a facility in Blackwater Creek. Natter thought it was better to check things out just to be safe. He told Magda and Cordelia that the rest of the team would be sent ahead of them, and that they were to rendezvous with them as soon as they got to Blackwater Creek. Magda and her spotter hopped aboard the Hellhound Bus and headed out.

Marcella was called up by Caduceus and told to accompany Quartermaster Phillip Collins to Blackwater Creek. According to their information, the water supply in the area had been contaminated, and Caduceus wanted to make sure the Inner Night wasn't involved. Marcella's job was to bodyguard Phillip while he collected water samples and ran tests. In the event that serpent cultists were discovered, she was to terminate them with extreme prejudice. She wasn't a big fan of the idea, but orders were orders. Phillip assured her that the likelihood of the Inner Night being in the area was low, so really they were just there to help decontaminate the water. Even so, he was excited by the chance to put down a few serpent people.

Nassim got a telegram from the Union of Regulars, asking him to go with Devona Flaherty for a trip to Blackwater Creek. Her sister Agnes had been one of the people who went missing in the area, and while Devona was one of the Union's better hunters, she was known to fly off the handle when provoked. Nassim was a reliable fellow, so the Union thought he'd be a good partner for the hotheaded hunter. He agreed, took some time off from work, and met up with Devona at her apartment. She was a police officer, so she recommended asking the people who were close to those who had gone missing for more information before heading out. Nassim thought that was a good idea, so they made a few house calls. The first person they called up, Soames, told them about how some of the local farmers were always waving guns around and accusing outsiders of trespassing on their property. Soames also recalled the Jarvey family, because they were much friendlier and made wonderful apple pie. The second interview was with a dreamy blonde man named Clarence, who didn't recall much about his trip out there save for that a Miskatonic professor took a crate of dynamite into the hills to do some blasting. Because of his soft voice and wistful attitude, Nassim is now convinced Clarence is an eldritch abomination. The third interview was with a young man from Arkham named Gerig, who had suffered a mental break and was under the delusion his dead mother lived on the second floor of his house. Gerig didn't have much in the way of useful information, but he did mention that the troublemaking farmers were named Carmody. Once they had wrapped up their interviews, Nassim and Devona headed out for Blackwater Creek.

Tobias was contacted by Chloe Parson, a wolf-blooded student at Miskatonic University with ties to the Broken Shield Pack, and told that Professor Henry Roades and his wife had disappeared in Blackwater Creek. There was a lot of hostile spiritual activity going on in the area, but Harmon (the pack leader) couldn't afford to send the whole pack into the valley, since that would leave the Locus unattended and the town at the mercy of whatever spirits lurked in the lake. Tobias was asked to take Chloe to the valley, since her spiritual sensitivity would help him sniff out and eliminate whatever threat was growing in the valley. Tobias agreed, but he first wanted to find out more about Professor Roades. He had Chloe arrange a meeting with Ernest McTavish, the Dean of Students, and they met with him that afternoon. They learned from McTavish that Roades was an archaeology professor, and that he was obsessed with finding a lost settlement called Cade's Rest, which was believed to be in the hills near Blackwater Creek. Roades was also fixated on learning more about the Black Earth Vulturii tribe, as they were rumored to be involved in the failure of Cade's Rest. Armed with this knowledge, Tobias and Chloe set off to look for the missing professor and his wife.

Lastly, Aurelie and Mitsuya were called up by mob boss Declan McBride for a job. When they arrived, a few men were carrying out a dead body, and McBride was washing blood off his hands. He had learned from the dead man a few choice bits of intel. The Whelan gang had set up a corn whiskey distillery in a small town called Blackwater Creek. The operation was run by the Carmody brothers on their family farm, using the corn they grew there, and Whelan's delivery drivers were sent there weekly to pick up the whiskey. McBride wanted Aurelie and Mitsuya to go to Blackwater Creek and convince the Carmody brothers to switch sides. He was willing to offer them 10k up front and match whatever Whelan was paying from then on. McBride told Aurelie and Mitsuya not to leave Blackwater Creek without an agreement, and they were not to kill the Carmody brothers unless they knew how to replicate whatever they were doing to make their whiskey so potent. He gave them a bottle of the Carmody whiskey, and they both noticed it had a sickly sweet flavor (like rotting fruit), but only on the first sip. It tasted like normal whiskey afterwards. The two hopped into a Model T, which McBride assured them had been registered in Aurelie's name for the last six months, and they headed off to Blackwater Creek.

Alright, so with all this setup done, it was time to the adventure started in earnest. Astute readers may have noticed the spoiler on this was "Dead Light", not "Blackwater Creek". Well, in true horror fashion, I pulled a tiny bait-and-switch on the party. We're still going to Blackwater Creek, after all, but there was a pitstop along the way to get everyone together.

Aurelie and Mitsuya were driving through a rainstorm, arguing about whether or not Mitsuya should put his feet on the dashboard, when a young woman stepped out onto the road in front of their car. Aurelie swerved to avoid hitting her, and pulled to a stop when she saw the girl faint by the side of the road. Mitsuya hopped out, wrapped the shivering girl in his coat, and carried her back. As he put her in the backseat of the car, she muttered "grandfather... the light..." They kept driving, hoping to find somewhere to drop her off, and soon came upon a small diner with the lights on. A few cars and a bus were parked outside. A logging truck was jackknifed across the road just outside the diner, and looked too bogged down in the mud to move until the storm cleared. Reluctantly, Aurelie and Mitsuya took the young woman inside the diner. Inside, the rest of the PCs, their NPC partners, and a few locals from the area were taking shelter from the storm. Nassim's first responder instincts kicked in when he saw the rain-soaked young woman clinging to Mitsuya, so he took over the situation. He brought her over to the fireplace and did a quick medical check on her. She was suffering from exposure and seemed to be in shock, so he did what he could while the others chatted with each other. The diner's waitress, Mary Laker, identified the young woman as Emilia Webb, the granddaughter and last surviving kin of the highly respected Doctor Godfrey Webb. While tending to Emilia's injuries, Nassim noticed she wore a coin-shaped medallion engraved with a strange rune. He asked if anyone knew what they were, and although Magda and Tobias were able to tell it was occult in nature, they weren't able to discern anything else about it.

Tobias questioned the truck driver, curious about why he had lost control. The trucker, Jake Burns, said that he saw a silver light, "a dead light", moving across the road. He had swerved to avoid hitting it, and that's how he jackknifed his rig across the road. Tobias and Chloe went to go investigate Jake's truck, and Mitsuya decided to tag along as well. Teddy Brewer, one of the locals, asked if he could come along as well. He needed to use the outhouse, and felt safer going out with a group than by himself. Mitsuya offered to go with him while Tobias and Chloe investigated the truck. The two of them found a strange burn mark across the front bumper. Chloe sensed spiritual energy from the burn, and Tobias discovered it was some kind of radiation burn. Meanwhile, Mitsuya waited for Teddy by the outhouse. While he waited, he saw a brilliant flash of silver light come from inside the outhouse, and he heard a sizzling noise. He knocked on the door, but received no response. He broke the lock and popped the door open just as the silver light faded. Inside, there was the charred skeletal remains of Teddy, still sitting on the toilet. Understandably, Mitsuya screamed bloody murder. A few seconds later, the power in the diner went out.

Tobias and Chloe hurried to check out the scream, and the rest of the party came out to see what was wrong. Mitsuya told everyone what had happened, and everyone took a good look at the skeleton. They searched the outside of the diner to see if whatever had killed Teddy had left tracks behind, but the only thing they found was that the diner's exterior fuse box had burned out. Tobias recognized the same radiation burn damage as he had seen on the truck, and Chloe confirmed it had the same spiritual energy. The party went back inside, and by this time Emilia had recovered from her state of shock. She told the party that two men had broken into her grandfather's home about an hour ago, and he had been shot while struggling with one of the intruders. She had tried to fight the other one off with an iron poker from the fireplace, but he had overpowered her. During the struggle, a box on the mantle was broken, and a bright silver light poured out of it. That was the last thing Emilia remembered until Mitsuya had wrapped her in his coat.

The party debated for a bit about what to do next, but eventually they settled on investigating Dr. Webb's home, either to save his life or to find more clues. The PCs piled into Aurelie's Model T, and left Cordelia and Devona in charge of the scene at the diner. On the way there, the PCs came under attack by the Dead Light as it chased after their car through the rainstorm. Aurelie made some great driving checks to keep clear of the wickedly fast monster, and Magdalena started shooting at it out the window. Unfortunately, the Dead Light was able to hypnotize Aurelie, and she lost control of the car. It skidded out of control, crashed onto its side, and slid through the mud to a stop. Nobody was severely hurt, but the party had to scramble out of the car, as the Dead Light was closing in fast. Just before it could reach them, a bolt of lightning struck a tree nearby, and the Dead Light took off in a panic, disappearing into the woods. The party immediately caught onto the fact that it was vulnerable to electricity.

Nassim, Mitsuya, and Tobias rolled the car back onto its wheels, and the party finished the drive to Webb's cottage. Inside, they found the scene of the break-in. Dr. Webb was slumped against an armchair, having bled out from the shotgun wound to his shoulder. The two intruders, young men in their twenties, were dead on the floor, both partially disintegrated by the Dead Light. Marcella took the discarded shotgun and what little ammo the intruders had on them. While checking their pockets for extra shells, she found a photograph of the two men together with Mary Laker as they ate cotton candy together at the county fair. The party also found a metal box with a broken wax seal on the ground near where the intruders lay. Inside and around the box was fine white ash, which Nassim was able to identify as human ash. The box itself made Nassim, Tobias, and Aurelie feel nauseous, but it had no ill effect on the rest of the party.

The party pulled a Scooby-Doo and split up to look for clues. Magda and Tobias searched the study, Aurelie and Mitsuya searched Webb's bedroom, while Nassim and Marcella got stuck with the basement. Magda and Tobias found a fair amount of cash (they opted not to keep it), a pot of wax-ointment, and a journal hidden amongst some banking paperwork. The journal detailed how to use and control the Dead Light, and had a catalogue of unwanted children and other relatives Dr. Webb had been hired to dispose of by the wealthy families throughout the region. They also found out that anyone wearing a pendant with the Elder Sign (such as the one Emilia wore) was effectively invisible to the Dead Light. Aurelie and Mitsuya found nothing but a pocket bible with the handwritten inscription "May God have mercy upon the physician". Down in the basement, Marcella and Nassim found a portable generator. They lugged it upstairs and reconvened with the rest of the group. They shared what they had found, and together they searched the last room in the cottage, which happened to be Emilia's bedroom. They found she took regular sleeping draughts, and she had been recently released with a clean bill of health from the New Sierra Society for the Care of Girls (a high-end sanatorium). Marcella was relieved that nothing seemed to tie Emilia to Dr. Webb's use of the Dead Light.

With their investigation complete, they planned out a trap to stop the creature. They drew the luring sigil on the dead doctor, readied the generator, and hid in the study until the monster showed up. Sure enough, the Dead Light came in through the ceiling to devour the body. Magdalena shot it with her rifle as soon as she had a clean shot. It slapped her around with its pseudopods, hypnotized her, and wrapped itself around her so it could devour her on its next turn. The rest of the party dumped everything they had into taking it down before it could. Out of desperation, Tobias entered _Gauru_ form and smashed the Dead Light with the portable generator until nothing remained. Surprisingly, only Aurelie failed her save against his _Lunacy_ effect. Even more surprisingly, Tobias managed to return to his human form without issue right after the battle.

With the Dead Light destroyed and nobody dead, the party hurried back to the car. Yes, they had a werewolf wizard in the party, and yes Magda had almost been eating by living moonlight, but those were problems to talk about later. They had left Emilia with a possible conspirator to commit murder, and they had to question Mary Laker about the two intruders. They raced back to the diner, and things were much as they left them. However, Emilia and Mary were nowhere to be seen. When asked, Cordelia told the party that the two girls had gone to the pantry to get some more coffee, since Mary couldn't reach the top shelf while also holding the lantern. The party hurried to the pantry and saw Emilia on her tiptoes as she tried to reach the tin of coffee, while Mary finished loading a derringer behind her back. Marcella called out to Emilia, but Mary grabbed her and put the gun up to her head. Mary threatened to kill Emilia if they tried anything. Brazenly, Mitsuya dared Mary to shoot him. She complied without hesitation, showing her willingness to kill. Mitsuya managed to somehow deflect all but 1 point of damage from the gunshot. This gave the rest of the team the opportunity to rush Mary. They got the gun, pulled Emilia away, and handcuffed Mary before Devona dragged her out of the pantry.

With the jig up, Mary told the party she had been the one to plan the murders. Her two boyfriends were supposed to kill Godfrey and Emilia, ransack the place, and they would split the cash between the three of them. She didn't figure anyone would miss an old doctor and his skittish granddaughter, and she didn't think it was fair that Emilia got to live comfortably while she and the boys had to work day jobs. Of course, Mary hadn't accounted for the Dead Light being released. The party locked her up in the pantry until the storm cleared, then got hold of the local police. Emilia urged the party not to say anything about the monster. She was terrified that people would think she was crazy, and she didn't want to go back to the sanatorium. The party agreed, and pinned all the deaths (including poor Teddy's) on Mary. The local police were willing to buy anything even remotely plausible, and they took Mary into custody. Once they were gone, Emilia thanked the party and offered to help them in whatever way she could in the future. The party was sure that having a wealthy benefactor with medical knowledge and ties to the occult would come in handy someday.

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## AllHailthed4

And then the various components of the party rode off into the sunset, all awkwardly ignoring each other as they drove to the exact same location XD

We'll get it together eventually ;)

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## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: Blackwater Creek Part One*
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As the party entered the area around Blackwater Creek, the spellcasters in the party heard a strange sound, like a heartbeat, coming from all around them. Once in town proper, the party checked in at the only place to stay in town (Widow Hawkin's Motel). The Delta Green agents (including Piper, Katya, and Dustin this time) got together to plan their search for the Ventaja facility, while the other groups organized searches relevant to their own goals. It wasn't long before such a large group of outsiders got the attention of Richard Sprouston, who was both the town's sheriff and pastor. He and a half-dozen deputies showed up outside the motel in old pickup trucks, and Sprouston chatted with Widow Hawkins while the deputies stood watch outside. There weren't enough rooms at the motel to accommodate everyone, meaning Tobias and Chloe had to stay in the storage room behind the front desk. This vantage point allowed them to listen in on Sprouston's conversation. He was interested in knowing if any of the outsiders looked like bootleggers or university students, and Widow Hawkins was all too eager to rat out Aurelie, Mitsuya, and Chloe. Tobias confronted Sprouston in the lobby, and although Sprouston made a half-hearted attempt to placate the private eye, he still made a passing threat, saying "it would be unfortunate if something happened to that university girl" as he left.

Once Sprouston and his deputies were gone, the party split up to do their own investigations. The Caduceus agents went out into the woods to check the creek, the Union members headed for the students' last known dig site, while Tobias and Chloe circled the outskirts of the forest to look for the blast site Roades was supposedly going to. Meanwhile, the McBride gangsters headed straight for the Carmody farm, and the Delta Green agents lingered in town a little longer to ask the locals some questions.

Nassim and Devona found the dig site, and they excavated some of the loose soil to see if the students had found anything. They unearthed some charred bones with unusual growths, and Nassim used his medical knowledge to learn that the growths on the bones were similar to the deformities seen throughout the local population. A little farther into the woods, Marcella and Phillip took samples of the water supply to test for contamination. Marcella heard a strange rustling in the trees nearby, so she went to check it out while Phillip stayed at the creek. There was definite movement in the forest, but she could not hear or see any animals. She came upon a mutilated dead deer, and shortly after she was attacked by an embryonic Dark Young which looked similar enough to a tree to pass casual observation. Marcella used her magic to call up a cloud of fog, obscuring her position long enough to beat a hasty retreat back to the creek. The Dark Young pursued for a brief time, but its slow movement speed allowed Marcella to give it the slip. Phillip was excited to show her the sample he had taken from the creek, but Marcella wanted to go back to town as soon as possible. They hiked back to town, and met up with Nassim and Devona along the way.

Aurelie and Mitsuya drove out to the Carmody cornfield, which was infested with rats and spiders. Even driving, the going was slow, and when they finally got to the farmhouse they saw only Damien Carmody and a small handful of bootleggers working the distillery. Brendon Carmody was nowhere to be seen. Negotiations with Damien went remarkably well, given that he was supposed to be deathly loyal to the Whelan gang. He didn't care who was buying his whiskey anymore. He just wanted to keep making and distributing it, to "share the Mother's gift" with as wide a market as he could reach. Aurelie and Mitsuya hung around the farm for a while after the deal was struck, and Damien insisted they drink some of his whiskey. Mitsuya went along with it, but Aurelie refused, since it was still unknown what the Carmody brothers were doing to the whiskey. Damien got quite upset by her refusal, and insisted he show them his cellar. They tried to refuse, but when guns were drawn they backed down, and the bootleggers held them at gunpoint as they took Aurelie and Mitsuya to the cellar beneath the house.

Meanwhile, Tobias and Chloe stumbled upon the burned out Roades campsite east of the creek. They found scorched archaeology tools, a bloody tent, scattered clothing, and a handout pertaining to Cade's Rest. Tobias also discovered evidence that the Professor and his Wife had been taken hostage and forced to go west toward the Carmody farm. Following the lead, he put his plan to investigate the cave on hold and headed toward the farm instead. When they got near the dam in the creek, they were attacked by a shapeless mass of white flesh from the river, while another embryonic Dark Young came out of the woods to attack them. The monsters were drawn toward Chloe due to her spiritual vulnerability. The situation was further complicated when she failed her Sanity check and lost the ability to speak, rendering the poor sorceress unable to defend herself and putting Tobias in a precarious position.

The Delta Green agents met up with Caduceus and The Union, and when Marcella shared her story about the monster in the forest, the whole squad went to investigate. They didn't find the Dark Young in the woods, but as they were investigating they heard the sound of gunfire to the north and raced in that direction. They arrived just in time to save Tobias and Chloe from the eldritch monsters. Once combat was over, the groups exchanged information, and they all headed to the Carmody farm together, hoping to rescue Professor Roades and extract Aurelie and Mitsuya from whatever situation they had gotten themselves in.

Speaking of the McBride gangsters, the two of them stalled and delayed for a while, hoping to find a way out of the situation. Damien got tired of talking with them after a while, and threatened to kill them if they didn't go into the cellar. Mitsuya's response was to rush him and whack him with a lead pipe. Injuring Damien drew Brendon out of the cornfield to aid his brother. Brendon had mutated almost beyond recognition, and brought with him a swarm of rats, spiders, and horseflies. Aurelie was taken down hard and fast by the bootleggers, but Mitsuya managed to hold out long enough for the cavalry to arrive. With the help of the rest of the party, the Carmody brothers and their bootlegging cultists were put down.

The party was pretty beat up after the fight (Brendon's swarms did a lot of damage to them), and it was getting late by this point, so we ended the session here with the parties once again together in the same place for different reasons. At least they're sharing information with each other... for now  :Small Cool:

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## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: Blackwater Creek: Part Two*
Show

The party split up to search the farmhouse and surrounding grounds (I love how they aren't afraid to split up the party. Most groups I've DM'd for are terrified of the concept). Most of the NPCs went to secure the perimeter of the farmhouse and outlying barns, which left the PCs to do the heavy lifting when it came to the investigation. Piper, Magda, Tobias, and Chloe searched the farmhouse itself, and found the whole place infested with mold and strange plant growths. They found evidence that the Carmody brothers and their goons had been eating the mold. Upstairs, they found the father of the family who had died a few months ago. The Carmody brothers had planted fungal growths on his body in the hopes it would bring him back to life. Luckily, this team (other than Chloe) had pretty good Sanity scores, so nobody was too freaked out by this. Grossed out, absolutely, but not going crazy. They also discovered the symbol of Shub Nigguroth, which Tobias was able to identify thanks to a solid Mythos check.

While that was happening, Aurelie, Mitsuya, Marcella, and Nassim went into the cellar. Down beneath the house, they discovered Professor Roades, Agnes (Devona's missing younger sister), and the dead body of the real Clarence. Nassim pointed this out to Devona, but didn't mention this last fact to the rest of the group. Roades had been corrupted by constant exposure to seeping water in the cellar, and was covered in plantlike growths. One of his legs had been replaced with a hair goat leg, complete with cloven hoof. He begged the party to go to the cave north of the farm and put an end to whatever was left of his wife Abigail. Marcella called Phillip into the cellar to get the doctor's opinion on the survivors, and he recommended that the best chance of survival for either Roades or Agnes was to rush them to Caduceus headquarters for a medical treatment he called the "hybridization process". Since nobody wanted to let Roades or Agnes be consumed by the fungal growths ravaging their bodies, the party agreed. Phillip and Devona carried the victims into the Carmody's car and started on the two day journey back to the city, leaving the rest of the party to continue the investigation on their own.

The three groups reconvened and exchanged information about what they had discovered (Clarence's corpse excluded). Afterward, Katya asked Piper and Magda to take a look at the distilling equipment the Carmodys had kept in their barn. On the underside of the equipment was the faded but still recognizable logo of the Ventaja corporation (a suspected shell company for Edom). After a careful examination, it was determined the Carmody brothers had repurposed abandoned Ventaja laboratory equipment for their whiskey distillery. This was enough evidence to lend credence to the suspicions "Hopkins" had about the area, though it appeared the Ventaja lab was long gone.

With all the leads at the farm run dry, the party grouped up and headed north for the cave at the source of the river. They piled into the remaining cars and followed the riverbank for as long as the terrain allowed, but eventually they were forced to get out and walk the last few hundred yards. The entrance to the cave was slippery with moss and polluted water, and a few members of the team got banged up during the climb. Luckily, nobody was corrupted by the polluted water. Inside the cave, they found a half-empty case of dynamite and all the trappings to set it off. They decided to hold off on blowing up the cave and instead went deeper inside to investigate. Along the walls were fleshy growths which Nassim was able to identify as human internal organs. Tobias, Aurelie, and Mitsuya had a bout of madness at the horrid revelations. After they recovered enough to keep moving, the party headed into the heart of the cave. There they found Abigail, completely corrupted by the dark powers of Shub Nigguroth. Realizing there was no hope of saving her, the party resolved to dynamite the cave. They would end her suffering and stop the flow of corrupted water in a single stroke.

Nassim was an expert at demolitions, but he knew he wouldn't be able to make it through the cave to place the explosives himself. Instead, he trusted Aurelie and Mitsuya with the info and prayed they would make it through. The crooks rolled fantastically to dodge and weave through the cave system as they planted the dynamite, deftly avoiding pitfalls, gnashing teeth, and crushing tentacles. Once the dynamite was placed in the right spots, the party retreated from the cave to get clear of the blast radius. However, there was one last hurtle to overcome.

Sheriff Pastor Richard Sprouston and six of his deputized good ol' boys had laid an ambush for them outside the cave. Sprouston and his followers wanted to protect The Mother at all costs. The fight was short but brutal, and we nearly lost both Magda and Nassim in the ensuing battle, but luck was on the side of the investigators that day. Sprouston and the other cultists were put down. Once the threat was dealt with, Nassim set off the dynamite charges and brought down the entire cave system. With Abigail dealt with, the party limped back to their cars. Piper and Magda insisted the others come back with them to Delta Green headquarters to give a proper report. Most of the party was on board with this, but Aurelie and Mitsuya were understandably reluctant to get tangled up with any sort of government agency given their criminal activities. Katya managed to persuade them with promises of clemency and money.

A couple days later, the party arrived at the Royal Security Headquarters (RSHQ) and were rushed inside to meet with Colonel Vincent Natter, the head of Delta Green. He wasn't too thrilled about the number of civilians involved with the operation, and chewed out the actual agents. Since the others knew too much, he offered them a choice: join Delta Green and become a target for the dark forces they had tampered with, or go it alone and become a target anyway. Reluctantly, the rest of the party signed on. The Colonel took them on a whirlwind tour of the office, and introduced them to Dr. Rowland Lygon (a pathologist who performed necropsies on monsters), Lyn Martinez (an engineer who made various spy gadgets), and Elspeth Irving (a linguist Natter had roped into doing paperwork while Magda was out of the office). He then gave the party their next mission briefing.

Colonel Natter had received another tip from "Hopkins", this time about a fence who dealt in rare books and stolen art. This fence (Pierre Athanese) had allegedly come into possession of the final letter from the legendary Abraham Van Helsing. The Colonel instructed the party to ascertain the authenticity of the letter and follow up on any leads they might come across while in the field. He also instructed them to learn the identify of "Hopkins" if at all possible. He told them Central wasn't happy about an unidentified informant involved with Delta Green, and Natter wanted to learn who "Hopkins" was before it became an official matter and the heat got turned up even hotter than it already was. The party was dismissed for the evening and told to meet back at the office by 0600.

TL;DR - Dead Light and Blackwater Creek are fantastic starting adventures. We had a great time with both of them, and I hope the trend continues as we move into our next adventure  :Small Smile:

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## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: The Van Helsing Letter*
Show

The party took care of a few personal loose ends (checking on Professor Roades, talking to McBride, etc.) and met back up at Delta Green HQ at the crack of dawn. Dustin was complaining loudly about having his firearms privileges suspended, and the Corbyn sisters were already out of the office on another errand. Colonel Natter brought Elspeth back for another day at the office, and she busied herself with making coffee while he explained the situation to the party. He had purchased them airplane tickets aboard the Tabor Air Yacht, and was quite pleased with himself at the great bargain he got on the tickets. He reiterated that once they arrived in Strasbourg, they needed to authenticate the Van Helsing letter, follow up on any leads worth pursuing, and attempt to identify "Hopkins" before Central got involved. Once the party accepted the mission, they rushed out to the airport, since the Tabor was departing in twenty minutes and it would take them fifteen minutes to get there  :Small Tongue: 

The Tabor Air Yacht was an open cockpit plywood bomber plane which had sat in storage for twenty years before being converted into a "luxury" passenger plane. It had logged many flights during its military career, but this was its maiden voyage as a civilian aircraft. Thanks to the words "plywood" and "maiden voyage", my party was already on edge about the flight. Things didn't get better when they all had to be weighed before being assigned seats to help maintain proper balance in flight. There were a few other passengers aboard as well, including Gerhardt Stumpff (a wealthy industrialist), Edward Gillespie (an arms dealer), Rhea Greenwood (an eccentric private detective), Alfred Clarke (the most boring banker to ever live), and Dawn Peachtree (a famous silent film actress who can't make it big in the talkie industry because of her thick accent). Tobias had the misfortune of sitting across the aisle from Dawn, so he got to hear all about her fear of heights. The flight was uneventful until sunset, when a flock of gulls struck the airplane. The party leapt into action as soon as the plane's engineer explained the situation. Piper took over for the unconscious pilot, Nassim did some fantastic medical aid on the crew, and Aurelie and Tobias worked together to repair the damaged cockpit circuitry. Magda kept the civilians from panicking, and Mitsuya panicked anyway (he hates flying as much as Dawn does). Together, the party brought the airplane in for a rough but safe landing. Once on the tarmac, the passengers were taken to a first class restaurant and treated to a fine dinner paid for by the airline company as compensation for the troubled flight. Piper found herself the center of Dawn's attention, though she turned down the actress's advances. Even so, she would soon find herself on the front page of gossip magazines for weeks to come. The airline paid for a stay at a five star hotel, and the party graciously accepted.

The next morning, the party headed to Pierre's bookshop, which was nestled in the shadow of five cathedrals. Pierre was a githyanki and a known scoundrel, but he knew the stakes and was eager to work with Delta Green on the matter of the letter. Piper, Tobias, and Aurelie went into the shop for the meeting, Nassim and Mitsuya watched the street from outside, and Magda covered the area from one of the church steeples. The letter was as follows:

*Spoiler: The Letter*
Show

FOR ARCHIVE  OPERATION EDOM

Keilberg Retreat, Kenthain, Alanmar
NACHZEHRER

Praterpoint, Voclaria,
31st August, 1808

Kind Sir 
It has been many years since that terrible time when my son was  alas, all too briefly  under your care, and once again I must express my gratitude for your efforts. You know as well as I do that little could have been done for my boy, given the horror that followed him. Forgive me that I have so rarely written to you. The pain of that time, coupled with the madness of my dear wife, was almost too much to bear. Also, the burden of the great work kept me from writing of the heart, when there was writing of the head to be done.

You recall Friend John, who was so dear to me  and to you also, I think? He called me to Kacer in 1794, and events there, and subsequent work in Troesia, put me on a new path. I think at least head and heart are in alignment, and I can return to Schloss Glockestein and put an end to the error of Unternehmen Braun.

I have business in Dynavale to attend to first, to put affairs in order, but then I shall come presently to your house of healing, and by force of arms find the peace I have long desired. I shall bring with me a young woman of the family of Haflich, and you know well the significance of that.

I ask no more of you than this, my friend  that you make ready such supplies and things that are needed for the journey to Glockestein, and that you ensure that which I left hidden in the tunnel near Keilberg all those years ago is made ready for transport. Pray God, and the error shall be expunged before the New Year!

Yours,
Abraham Van Helsing

P.S. If I am not with you before St. Andrews Day,
then I am detained and much has gone awry. Should that happen, then you or other good people in whom you trust must fetch Miss Haflich from Dynavale and bring her to Glockestein, that you might draw out the evil and put an end to it with such tools as you have. Remember, the coin in the mouth first, to pay the ferryman, and then remove the head, whether it be in human form or animal shape. I beg you, if ever you loved me, do not shirk this duty, even though it is much to ask of you, being as you are a healer. You know as well as I do that an infection, unpurged, will spread and grow more damaging. I dread to think what the thing might become given a century or more.


Tobias was well-versed in forgeries, so he was able to authenticate the letter after only a short time studying it. Pierre let the party take the letter, since he didn't want any trouble the document might bring. Shortly thereafter, a half dozen big thugs came in through the front door. The PCs decided discretion was the better part of valor, so those in the shop skedaddled out the back door, leaving Pierre to deal with the thugs, while Nassim and Mitsuya casually strolled down to the pub where the party had agreed to meet. Magda tailed the goons once they left Pierre's shop, and saw them meet with an attractive brunette woman at a local cafe. Not wanting to risk confrontation while alone, Magda retreated from the situation. Once the party rendezvoused at the pub, they discussed their next move, and decided to head across the border to check out the Keilberg Retreat and the old copper mines. Once again, the party split up to cover more ground. Aurelie, Mitsuya, and Piper went to the retreat, while the others went to explore the mines.

Aurelie disguised herself as Dawn Peachtree and used Piper's newfound notoriety to bluff their way past the front desk and into the spa. They were tended to by Corine Axelson, who was a local historian as well as a medical researcher. She chatted merrily about the collapse of the mine, about the mysterious deaths of all but one member of the Haflich family, and about how a young man was gored to death by a wild boar near Glockestein. Grim subject matter, but she spoke with the cheerful enthusiasm of a true crime fan. Meanwhile, the tunnel team found the old mines were flooded with mildly toxic gas, but none of them succumbed to the vapors (more on that later). While there, they discovered a hidden tunnel which led to Glockestein. Digging around in the partially collapsed tunnels, they found a locked case bound in iron with the initials VH engraved on the lid. They decided to drag the case back to Tobias's car and investigate it there, rather than spend any more time in the poisoned mines than they had to.

Once the party was back together, they shared what they had learned and cracked open the box. While they were rummaging through the contents (including some sweating dynamite Nassim had to carefully dispose of), an old man was spotted heading to the ruins of Glockestein Castle. Aurelie and Mitsuya decided to tail him, and he led them right to the castle's courtyard. He sat down to eat lunch in the shadow of the bell tower, where a half dozen men were hard at work restoring the tower and installing a bell along with some microphones around it. The old man introduced himself as Markus Stueck, the castle custodian, and chatted with the McBride gangsters about the history of the castle and the ongoing restoration project. He also explained the myth of the Nachzehrer, a type of vampire that fed exclusively on their family members (living or dead) and would kill anyone who heard the bell of the church that buried them. Aurelie and Mitsuya went back to the party and told the others what they learned.

Piper radio'd in and talked to Colonel Natter, who pulled up some files relevant to the goings-on. He told them the last living Haflich, a young woman named Eva, had recently come to Strasbourg and worked as a dancer at a burlesque club run by an Alanmarian mob boss named Drago. The Troesian mob had been trying to buy the club for a while, but Drago had refused all offers. When asked about the music, Vic said the club had recently installed a new sound system. Putting two and two together, the party knew they had to hurry before the mobsters could sic the Nachzehrer on Eva and Drago.

The party split up into different teams. Aurelie and Mitsuya went back to the castle ahead of the others, hoping to use their friendly connection to Markus to get close enough to the bell to destroy it. Piper and Marcella covered them from a short distance behind, while Magda took a sniping point on a nearby hilltop. Tobias and Nassim went in through the secret tunnel in the hopes of stealing the march on the mobsters.

Remember the poisonous gas? Well, against all odds Nassim managed to fail the save against the fumes, and so started having vivid hallucinations by the time they got to the castle. Nassim's player was a good sport about this, and just went full TF2 Pyro. Naturally, the mobsters and the custodian were alerted by the loud noises coming out of the tunnel, and Tobias and Nassim failed to silence the goon that went to check it out. He managed to call out on his walkie-talkie, which put the whole base on alert, and combat broke out immediately. It turned out the old custodian was juicing on vampire blood (also known as a "Jack"), and spent a lot of the combat running up walls, perching on rooftops, and making Magda's life miserable as he returned fire with his repeating rifle. Piper ate two straight shots to the chest, and Marcella had to drag her back to a gardening shed for some healing before the goons could finish her off. Tobias went full Gauru again, and once again Aurelie was the only one to fail the Lunacy check, which made an already dicey situation even more precarious. Eventually the party managed to bring down Markus and the mobsters, and somehow Tobias managed to not enter Death Rage. Once the bell was shattered, the party raced back to Strasbourg in the hopes of finding Eva (Mitsuya decided to steal Markus's motorcycle while everyone else rode with Tobias).

On the way back, they encountered a police roadblock. The Strasbourg police were checking everyone going in or out of the city, and the party was no exception. While the police were checking their papers, Tobias used his background as a detective to speak with the commanding officer. He was met by Inspector Helena Vasser, a member of the Vanguard Serial Crime Unit (a.k.a. VASCU). She memorized his badge number (!) before informing him that a reliable but anonymous tip was called in, and this informant had used the magic word: "Terrorists". The party was eventually allowed through the blockade, but Tobias didn't like how long Inspector Vasser took to clear them.

The party made it to the Gadarene Burlesque Club, and it became clear the club was a hangout for criminals and rich kids who wanted to slum it. The bouncer was friendly enough, and let them through without too much trouble. Once inside, the party split up to look for Eva. They didn't have much to go on, other than that she was Drago's current favorite, so they asked the bartender about her. He pointed out a girl in her early twenties who danced in the crowd, though none danced with her. Aurelie saw the pretty girl and immediately headed through the crowd to meet her. Eva saw Aurelie and started to casually dance away from her (Piper's tradecraft noticed that Eva always kept her profile to Aurelie, and that she had received some martial training). Magda noticed a 40-something chain smoker also headed through the crowd toward Eva, and decided to intercept him. She spilled her drink on his shirt, and he flashed her his army pistol. Pretending to be intimidated, she backed off and went to report him to the bouncer.

Just then, the lights cut out. Gunfire erupted from Drago's table, and the panicked crowd raced for the door. Mitsuya was the first to strike a light, and found the Nachzehrer standing right behind him as all hell broke loose. The party surrounded Eva to keep the Nachzehrer from getting to her, and explained that they were with Delta Green and that they were here to protect her. Tobias subdued the gunman while the rest of the party fought off the Nachzehrer. Eva proved herself quite capable with both her navy pistol and her carbon kukri. The Nachzehrer was quite sturdy, but Mitsuya made good use of the boar-hunting spear they had found in Van Helsing's case (the spear was tipped with a holy relic sacred to St. George). Eventually, the party brought the vampire down for good, at last breaking the Haflich curse. Eva was stunned, unsure what to do or how to react. The PCs knew what to do. Like any good group of investigators, they rigged the club to burn down to hide the evidence and destroy anything their enemies might find useful.

While the rest of the party worked their sabotage, Tobias interrogated the gunman, who proved quite compliant. He said his name was Karel Korbel, a semi-retired lamplighter who had gotten brought on as an extra set of hands ("Anything to pad the pension") by an attractive brunette woman who called herself Kenaz. He never intended to hurt Eva, he just had the big pistol as a threat to intimidate her. His job was to get her to meet with Kenaz, though like any good cutout he didn't know why.

The party escorted Eva and Karel out to the car, when they heard a muffled pop nearby. Karel crumpled against Tobias, blood pouring out of a gunshot wound in his head. The party scrambled for cover and looked around. They saw a long black car pull away from the scene, the rear window rolling up as an attractive brunette woman pulled a smoking silenced pistol back inside.

TL;DR - This adventure is a good skeleton for ideas, but it definitely required some padding to get a full adventure out of it.

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## Cerrita

> Tobias went full Gauru again, and once again Aurelie was the only one to fail the Lunacy check, which made an already dicey situation even more precarious.


One of these days she's going to pass a check and stop friendly firing on the party in a blind panic.

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## serpentalis

> One of these days she's going to pass a check and stop friendly firing on the party in a blind panic.


Mitsuyas hit points can only handle so many shatters before he gets some actual brain damage lol

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## Cerrita

She's clearly being hunted by some sort of large wolf that keeps showing up at inopportune moments. Fortunately Tobias has been able to scare it off every time. He takes a hell of a beating each time, though...

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## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: Fear of Flying*
Show

We started the session with Mitsuya and Eva hopping onto the pilfered dirt bike and chasing after the shooter's car, heedless of the rest of the party's warnings. To his credit, Mitsuya made some fantastic driving checks, and he was eventually able to corner the shooter and force them to stop (the driver had orders not to harm Eva, so running them over wasn't an option). Once the car was stopped, the six goliaths from Pierre's bookstore got out and formed a defensive ring around the car. Mitsuya and Eva backed off a few steps, and the attractive brunette woman got out as well, stowing the silenced pistol in her handbag. She cordially introduced herself as Kenaz, and told them that with the Nachzehrer dead, her business in Strasbourg was concluded. She offered to meet with Mitsuya and Eva back in New Sierra to "discuss the future" over lunch at whichever restaurant they chose. Mitsuya and Eva agreed, so Kenaz and her bodyguards got back in the car and drove away.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party did the usual Cthulhu investigator thing and burned the burlesque club to the ground. With that taken care of, they took a circuitous route back to the hotel to make sure they weren't tailed. Unfortunately, Mitsuya decided to drive by the club to see if the party was still there. By the time he and Eva got there, the fire was being put out and the police were asking everyone present a lot of questions. Worse still, Mitsuya and Eva lingered long enough for VASCU Inspector Helena Vasser to spot them in the crowd. Once they realized she had spotted them, they bailed as fast as they could.

Back at the hotel, the party got on the radio and contacted Colonel Natter about what had happened. He told them he knew Kenaz by another codename, The Hound, and that she was an RSA Agent and very likely one of the Dukes of Edom. Unfortunately, he didn't have clearance to access her file, so he didn't have anything else to help them. He instructed them to get back on the Tabor in the morning and return to New Sierra as soon as possible. By the time the Feds had finished their radio communique, Aurelie had buggered off to the hotel bar to sulk (she had wanted to spend more time with Eva), and Mitsuya burst onto the scene to loudly tell the party what had happened. The more responsible members of the team were none too happy about his antics, but there was nothing they could do about it now save for setting up watch around the hotel and praying Inspector Vasser didn't conduct a police raid. Mitsuya and Eva had to assist Aurelie back to her room, as she had gotten thoroughly drunk in their absence, and the three of them spent the rest of the night with Aurelie while ordering room service. Most of the party retired to their own rooms, but Magdalena opted to stay up all night to watch the hotel from the rooftop.

In the dead of night, Magda spotted Alfred Clarke (the most boring banker in the world) stumbling drunkenly toward the hotel. Strangely, he headed straight for Nassim's bedroom window and started fussing with the latch. Magda climbed down from her perch to confront Alfred, and he apologized for bothering her. He had accidentally locked himself out of his room, and he was trying to go in through the window, not realizing he had the wrong room. Magda spotted blood on his hand, and he showed her a dog bite he received while "taking a shortcut" back from the bar. They made awkward conversation for a bit, then agreed to just forget this whole mess even happened.

Alfred then used _Voorish Sign_ enhanced _Mesmerism_ to completely wipe the incident from Magda's mind.

By the time she came to her senses, he was long gone and she was standing outside of Nassim's window without any idea why she was there in the first place. Unnerved but keeping her resolve firm, she returned to her rooftop perch and spent the rest of the night watching over the hotel. Naturally, the players were in a tizzy about what Alfred had done, but they had no idea in or out of character what was going on.

In the morning, the party reconvened in the lobby and got ready to board the Tabor Air Yacht. While they were having breakfast, Nassim discovered bloody handprints on his window, and was unnerved to see they were far from human. There were only four fingers on the hand, including the thumb, and the palm was unnaturally long. Not sure what to make of this (beyond increasing out of character paranoia about Alfred), the party headed for their ride home. The rest of the passengers (Gillespie, Stumpf, Clarke, Greenwood, and Peachtree) were there as well, ready to leave the quaint town behind and head back to the big city. Piper managed to convince the captain of airplane to let Eva onboard in exchange for helping out the crew during the flight. The plane had room for exactly one more crewmate, so the captain agreed. However, Mitsuya was not so lucky in trying to convince the crew to let him bring his dirt bike onboard. However, since he was friends with the PCs who had helped save the flight a few days ago, they offered to put his bike on the same train Dawn Peachtree's luggage was on. He only sulked a little, but thought it was a good compromise.

The first half of the flight ran into some rather hefty turbulence, just barely managing to stay ahead of a small tornado tearing up the countryside. Most of the passengers and PCs were sick by the time the Tabor landed for a lunch break. Dawn's ox-like constitution had staved off any airsickness, and she chowed down on the free lunch like a champion. She tried to get the others to eat as well, focusing most of her attention on Piper as per usual. However, despite Dawn's encouragement, most people could only manage the soup.

During the lunch break, a few journalists arrived on-scene to get the latest scoop on Dawn's journey. They crowded around the lunch table, snapping photos and pestering Dawn with questions. Alfred got up and headed for the airplane, bumping past one of the journalists as he did so. A few moments later, the journalist muttered something about a wasp, then hit the ground and started convulsing. Nassim and Marcella rushed to the man's aid, and found that whatever had hit him was far too venomous to be a wasp. Piper asked Aurelie and Mitsuya to sabotage the airplane to give the party more time to investigate, so the two gangsters snuck around to the back of the plane and burst the rear landing tire. A couple of screams sounded from the cabin of the plane, so Magda and Tobias went to investigate, leaving Piper to manage the unruly crowd of journalists and passengers. Inside the airplane, Magda and Tobias found Villiers (the airplane engineer) frozen with panic while a hideous serpent person in Alfred's clothes dabbed at spilled coffee on its lap while complaining about how clumsy Villiers was. It took "Alfred" a few moments to realize his _Consume Likeness_ spell had been broken by the scalding hot coffee. Seeing no other alternative, "Alfred" decided to kill all the witnesses. He activated a latent spell he had cast on almost all the passengers and crew, and all of the civilians save Rhea Greenwood and Dawn Peachtree snapped to attention and started trying to murder everyone around them. Magda was also affected, and turned her rifle on Tobias.

What followed was a hectic battle as the gangsters rushed inside the plane to help Tobias, while Piper scrambled to organize a defense at the lunch table with Dawn screaming encouragement and vulgarities in equal measure. Sanity was lost, Eva nearly died, and Aurelie failed her save against Lunacy as was becoming the routine. Somehow, Stumpf was the only civilian to get killed in the battle, and the rest were taken down with nonlethal measures. Once "Alfred" was slain, his mind control ended instantly, returning Magda and the civilians to their senses.

After the battle, the party spent the next couple of hours tending to injuries, fixing the damage the plane had sustained from stray gunfire, and answering police questions about what happened. Inadvertently, the party had uncovered and stopped a plot Gillespie and Stumpf had been engaged in. Gillespie had been planning to sell helium to Stumpf so he could manufacture war zeppelins, essentially trying to sell out his own country for some quick cash. The party used the documentation on Stumpf and Gillespie to frame them for the whole incident, and it wasn't long before the local authorities blamed poisoned drinks for the maddened brawl. Magda and Tobias hid "Alfred's" corpse in his own luggage, and discovered from documents in his suitcase that he was an Inner Night agent tasked with stealing Stumpf's identity and taking over the weapons manufacturing. The Inner Night wanted to create a chemical weapon that reptiles would be immune to so they could deploy it without risk to their own agents.

The party was once again hailed as heroes by the press, and Dawn turned her attention to Nassim after he bravely clobbered Gillespie with the backside of a fire axe. At last, the party was able to return to New Sierra, and they reported to Delta Green HQ for debriefing.

This adventure is a fun little side-trek, though I did take out the part where the Serpent Person kills anyone who spots him sneaking into the hotel. It seems like a bit of an oversight on the writer's part, since having a character get murdered in a pretty unwinnable fight isn't fun for anyone involved. I'm not opposed to killing investigators in a Cthulhu game, but there should at least be a reason for it to happen.

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: City Heat*
Show

The party returned to Delta Green HQ and introduced Eva to Colonel Natter, who was pleased with her performance in the field. They also told him about what happened on the airplane, but he was of the opinion that Inner Night business is Caduceus' problem. Regardless, he wasn't thrilled with yet another batch of civilians getting involved with the Mythos. He sent Cordelia to investigate Harold Villiers, as he was the only one that actually witnessed the serpent person. After Eva's meet and greet with the party's boss, James Holmwood, a.k.a. Lord Godalming a.k.a. Central Control of the Royal Security Agency barged into the office to make his "cordial" introduction. He chided his "old chum" Natter on trying to access the Hound's file, schmoozed a bit with Captain Piper, and made a passing remark on the colonel's "collection of blondes" in the office. For the record, Piper, Magda, Marcella, Aurelie, Katya, Cordelia, and Eva are _all_ young blonde women (though Eva dyes her hair, unlike the rest).

Once the debriefing was over and Lord Godalming was gone, the party was determined to figure out who "Hopkins" was. From the profile Piper put together on him/her, "Hopkins" was relatively young, tech savvy, loved pop culture, and not as skilled as he/she thinks he/she was. Comparing the typed notes that the party received with the note Eva had revealed she had indeed been contacted by "Hopkins", and that "Hopkins" used a typewriter with a broken K key. Eva's letter was also the only one with postage stamps, meaning "Hopkins" was delivering the letters directly to Delta Green. This led the party to suspect that "Hopkins" worked in the same government building.

As the pieces started to fall in place, all eyes turned on Elspeth, who sheepishly failed to divert attention away from herself. Tobias and Magda made her take them to her office, which was an obscure little room in the linguistics department. Her glorified cubicle was decorated with movie posters, radio show memorabilia, and vinyl album covers. Checking her typewriter revealed it had the exact sort of damage to the K key that was evident in the "Hopkins" letter. At this point Elspeth gave up trying to hide it, and she admitted to being the party's mysterious informant. She told them she had received some very sensitive information, including the Dracula Dossier itself. She offered to give it to the party if they promised not to turn her over to Edom or Central Control. The group already considered Elspeth a friend and/or potential love interest, so there was no way they were going to hand her over to the baddies. Tobias offered to escort her to where she kept the dossier, while Magda began making arrangements for the party to meet somewhere inconspicuous.

Unfortunately, the gangsters had other ideas. Mitsuya wanted to go hang out with his friends, so he and Eva headed back to his tiny apartment with the presumption Aurelie would catch up with them after checking in with Declan McBride. However, Aurelie instead decided to meet up with the mysterious Decarabia, who proved to be a peculiar woman with dark hair and good taste in suits. She spoke in vague terms about magic, infrastructure, and the strange underpinnings of the nation itself. She asked Aurelie to investigate a neighborhood in New Sierra called the 300 Block, which was a low-income neighborhood catering to medical students, nurses, and retired veterans. The 300 Block suffered from an unsolved disappearance every six months, but was otherwise not subject to any other crimes whatsoever. Decarabia claimed that figuring out what was going on in the neighborhood would help shed light on greater mysteries. Aurelie agreed to take the job, then doubled back to the office to hang out with the Delta Green engineer Lyn Martinez. They rigged a flashbang inside Dustin's desk drawer, then invited Katya down to the bar for a few drinks before the meeting.

Tobias and Elspeth drove about halfway to her apartment when they was ambushed by six police squad cars. Tobias played it cool even as Elspeth panicked in the seat beside him. The police arrested him and took him down to the police station, leaving Elspeth to get herself home, all without explaining anything. They tossed Tobias in a holding cell and left him there, unable or unwilling to tell him what he was being arrested for. After leaving him there to sweat for an hour, "Clarence" arrived and took a seat outside of the holding cell. He introduced himself to Tobias, calling himself "Osprey", and mentioned that he was in league with Hound. He explained that Tobias was arrested as punishment for ruining Edom's operation in Strasbourg, but Osprey assured him it wasn't personal. Hound had simply trumped up a few unpaid speeding tickets, so Osprey was certain Tobias would be out on bail by Monday. He lit a cigarette for Tobias and bid him farewell.

Meanwhile, Marcella got dragged around town on a whirlwind adventure with Magda's work friend Becca. This included a trip to the firing range, a delightful run-in with some halflings who loved tambourine music, and some police officers who did _not_ love tambourine music or halfling street parties. Nassim met up with Devona, who was worried about her sister Agnes. She hadn't been allowed to visit the Caduceus hospital, and was getting suspicious about the "hybridization" treatment being used. Devona also told Nassim about Tobias' arrest, and this news spread like wildfire to the rest of the party. Marcella and Magda met up with Elspeth at the bar, and she confirmed to them what Nassim had told them over the phone. Magda got hold of Colonel Natter, who contacted Emilia Webb, who was more than happy to post bail for Tobias. While she got the money put together for the colonel to take to the station, Marcella and Elspeth visited Tobias at the station. He explained what happened, and told them to warn the others about Osprey. Once he was finally released, the party all headed to a tropical-themed cantina to meet up. Well, most of them did, anyway.

Mitsuya and Eva, who were none the wiser, played a few rounds of _Twister_, listened to the radio, cooked dinner together, and went to bed (Eva got the futon, and Mitsuya slept on the coffee table).

At the cantina, the party swapped intel they had gathered, and Elspeth tried to explain the situation she had found herself in. She had received the Dracula Dossier by mistake, or so she thought, because it arrived on her desk after an earthquake in Troesia triggered something in the RSA system. The dossier was delivered to the linguistics desk overseeing Troesia, and she just happened to be the one there. Piper was perhaps skeptical of this story, as she had dug up some information regarding Elspeth's past, including the fact that her grandmother's maiden name was "Harker". Coincidence or not, Elspeth had been doing her best to cultivate a network of people to investigate the leads she had uncovered in the dossier, including the party, Eva, and a few others who needed to be brought in from the cold. However, if the party had discovered "Hopkins" was really Elspeth, it was only a matter of time before Edom put the pieces together as well. The party was still pleased to have gotten ahead of Edom for once. Piper took the dossier from Elspeth, who told the party she had information on the rest of her network back at her apartment that she wanted to give them as well. However, while it was easy enough to carry an old book with her, it would have been more conspicuous to bring folders and files to the bar. The party understood her concern, and Magda suggested the party meet for brunch at Elspeth's apartment the next day. The party agreed and went their separate ways after a few drinks.

The next morning, Mitsuya and Eva met up with Hound at a sushi restaurant for breakfast. Hound wasted little time with pleasantries. She insisted that Mitsuya and the rest of the party cease all investigations into anything related to Edom, Dracula, Baron Ferenczy, Ventaja, Caduceus, or the Inner Night. Should the investigations continue, Hound threatened to give a sample of Mitsuya's sister's blood to the Edom-controlled vampire, who would likely be compelled to hunt down the source. Mitsuya was understandably shaken by the threat. Hound paid for breakfast and left him to decide what to do.

A little while later, it was time for brunch with Elspeth. When the party arrived, they managed to spot a trap. The bouncer outside the apartment building, one of the customers in the café across the street, two thugs loitering in the alley, and the police car circling the block were all watching the apartment complex. The party spread out to get a better look at what was going on. Mitsuya decided to try to stop the police car from circling the block, and the driver tried to run him over. He made a very impressive check to dodge over the top car, but still took a bit of damage for his trouble. Before anything else could go down on the street level, the party's attention was drawn to a scream from the rooftop.

Elspeth stood by the railing at the edge of the roof, clutching a bundle of papers to her chest and clearly terrified. Pouring out of the emergency exit behind her were eight men in black riot suits, all armed with assault rifles. They closed in on her, and she had nowhere left to run. Tobias shouted for her to jump, and just barely passed the Persuasion check to get her to trust him. From six stories up, Elspeth jumped. Tobias got directly underneath her and cast _Featherfall_ on her as soon as she was in range. The team on the rooftop ran to the edge and started firing down at Elspeth, but Marcella covered her descent with _Fog Cloud_, causing all but one of the shots to miss. Even that one hit nearly dropped Elspeth, but Tobias managed to get her to cover before the kill team could get off another volley.

The two thugs and the bouncer started shooting at Aurelie's car as Mitsuya, Eva, and Marcella piled into the back seat while Tobias held Elspeth on his lap in the front passenger seat. Aurelie took off as fast as she could. Magda managed to keep the crowd on the street from panicking at all the gunfire, and even got them to storm the fake police car and chase it off scene with shouts of "Justice for the Costa Lunan man!", which gave Nassim the chance to skedaddle on foot without anyone noticing. Magda pulled out her badge and arrested the two thugs and the bouncer, who gave up without much of a struggle. However, the kill team made it to the ground by this point, and Magda saw they moved with expert precision and teamwork. They were proper military types of the highest caliber, not just random street thugs. She also noticed they were equipped with gun-mounted UV flashlights and absolutely top of the line night-vision goggles. Rather than kill Magda, the eight soldiers piled into a pair of black unmarked vans. One took off after Aurelie, while the other van left the scene altogether.

Piper had ducked into the café to avoid notice, but her plan's efficacy was questionable at best. A dark-haired man with a thick mustache and a scar on his forehead gave her a pat on the shoulder, complimented her appearance, and then faded into the crowd outside.

Kudos to the party for getting Elspeth out of that situation alive  :Small Smile:

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: The Harker Intrusion: Part One*
Show

The session kicked off with a vehicular chase scene. Aurelie and the gang were being chased down by one of the unmarked black vans, all while an icy fog enveloped the streets and threatened to sputter out Aurelie's engine. Strangely, the kill team wasn't even slowed down by the fog. With some great driving checks (and a few potshots fired out the car windows), the party managed to evade the kill team. Once clear of the danger, Elspeth gave the party directions to a Delta Green safehouse where they could lay low.

Magda and Nassim joined up with the crew that evening, and so the gang was all together. Piper's player was out on vacation, so she was back at the office doing research. The party swept the safehouse for bugs and secured the perimeter, which involved almost shooting the lamplighter assigned to assist them. The lamplighter, who called himself Zoltan, was an easygoing fellow and didn't take it personally. The safehouse was well-stocked with dried and canned goods, as well as a freezer full of TV dinners. There was even a takeout menu left behind by the last person to use the safehouse. The neighborhood was quiet and secure; an old woman lived on one side of the house, a pretty college girl lived on the other side, and a nighttime taxi driver lived across the street. In short, it was the last place anyone would expect to find a house full of spies.

Colonel Natter arrived that evening after the party had gotten a chance to recuperate and exchange information, including Mitsuya's meeting with Hound. Natter had a couple of jobs outside of the country, which would give the party a chance to let the heat die down. Specifically, Mitsuya and Magda had been identified by the enemy, so they needed to cool their heels for a while. Magda agreed to stay in Solingrahv while the rest of the party took on the next job, and her player opted to run Dustin Dearborn for the next mission. As an aside, Dustin had been involved with several failed missions in the past, so he was on thin ice with the Colonel. Mitsuya, however, didn't want to sit out, and decided instead to take his chances. Natter had two jobs for the party to decide on - a mission to rescue a journalist Elspeth had allied with under her alias as "Hopkins", or a joint mission with Caduceus to recover a silver coffin reported to contain "the scourge of god". The party chose to rescue the journalist first, since it seemed the more time sensitive mission of the two. Elspeth was expressly told by the party to hide out in the safehouse while they were gone, and she wasn't going to argue.

The next day, the party (plus Dustin and Eva) hopped on a train bound for Jemaa el-Fnaa, a tourist town in Voclaria. It was a six day trip, so the party had plenty of time to rest up and go over the mission details. Their target, Olivia Liu, was an investigative journalist with _The Independent Guardian_ who had caught onto Edom's illegal activities on her own after stumbling across Kate Reed's Diary. Once Elspeth found out about her, she contacted Olivia as "Hopkins" to bring her into the team of vampire hunters she had been hoping to put together. Olivia wasn't sold on the idea of Dracula just yet, and still believed Edom to be a black-ops organization making a grab for power within the Solingrahvian government. She had been investigating a suspicious dig-site in the mountains outside of Jemaa el-Fnaa, but she got spotted by the guards. She contacted "Hopkins" with a request for extraction, and that's exactly what the party needed to do.

The party hit the ground running upon arrival. Tobias chatted with the local police, while Aurelie and Mitsuya cozied up with the criminal elements in the city. They learned Olivia had been staying at the Riad Rouge, and Olivia had filed a complaint with the police about someone stalking her. When the party arrived at the hotel, they found two guys on motorcycles hanging around the front door, while a tourist with an earpiece radio surveyed the situation from the comfort of the café across the street. Tobias and Aurelie went to the upper floor to look for Olivia, while Marcella and Nassim loitered in the riad's lobby to keep an eye out for trouble. Mitsuya, Eva, and Dustin hung around on the street, ready to jump in if the team needed heavy backup. Tobias and Aurelie found someone had broken into Olivia's room, and they were able to get the drop on him as he was rummaging through Olivia's stuff. The scuffle made enough noise to get the attention of the two bikers on the street, and a fight broke out between them and the two PCs in the lobby. Meanwhile, Mitsuya and Eva overheard the café handler giving orders to another team out on the streets looking for Olivia, and Dustin brought a shotgun into the café to scare the information out of him. According to Hartness the handler, Olivia had just been spotted fleeing from the riad, and his agent upstairs was trying to figure out where she was going. Hartness had a "rolling box" of watchers tailing her, and there were two Edom agents coming in for the abduction when the time was right. Mitsuya, Eva, and Dustin all went after her while the rest of the party finished off the goons in the riad.

Once the fight was over, Tobias searched Olivia's room and found a hastily scribbled address with the name Hasan Safet. Aurelie was able to identify him as a local fixer - not necessarily a criminal, but able to get all sorts of illegal goods. Hasan was known by the McBride gang to be a good man, but he knew some very bad people. Downstairs, Marcella was able to save the life of the riad clerk, who had gotten stabbed by one of the goons during the fight.

Out on the streets, it was chase scene time! Mitsuya was able to use his knowledge of street layouts and back alleys to shrink the watchers' lead, Eva did some stealthy takedowns on a few of the lead members of the rolling box, and Dustin plowed forward on a stolen motorcycle. The trio caught up with Olivia just in time to save her from the  ambush, but they weren't out of the woods yet. The two Edom agents arrived on scene, revealing themselves as "Jacks" - operatives who used concentrated vampire blood like steroids. One had her magical powers greatly enhanced, while the other was basically Bane from Batman. Dustin's player truly understood what makes the man tick, as he pulled a move straight out of the movies. He reached down from his motorcycle, slung Olivia behind him, and sped off with a spectacular one-liner.

Another chase began, but this time everything went sideways. Despite rolling well, Mitsuya, Dustin, and Eva failed almost every single opposed skill check to escape the pursuing Edom agents. Soon enough, they were cornered, and combat began.

Perfect time to end the session  :Small Tongue: 

Things went pretty well, except right at the end.

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: The Harker Intrusion: Part Two*
Show

Mitsuya's player missed this session, so to start things off we had him make a break for it with Olivia while Dustin and Eva tried to hold the line against the two "Jacks" as best they could. Meanwhile, the rest of the party raced to battle scene while the enemy's "rolling box" tried to slow them down.

So when I say Dustin and Eva tried to hold the line, what really happened is Eva and the male Jack exchanged gunfire while Dustin walked right up to the blood witch and emptied both barrels of his shotgun into her chest, killing her in the first round of combat. Surprisingly, the lone remaining Jack held out for several rounds, even after the rest of the party arrived on scene. He did enough damage to Tobias to force him into a Death Rage (which complicated matters for the party), dropped Dustin with concentrated gunfire, and at one point scored a critical hit and _shot Toby's nose off_. It was still a one-on-six fight, so the party was eventually able to bring down the Jack.

After the fight, they met up with Olivia and her "fixer" Hasan Safet. Olivia gave the party the journal of Kate Reed, and told them about a suspicious dig-site in the nearby mountains, where security guards had opened fire on her as soon as they spotted her. She also mentioned some suspicious activity at a nearby military base which was technically owned by Kacer despite being in Voclaria. However, the party wasn't interested in any of that at the moment. They had just gotten into a gunfight in the middle of a crowded street. The heat was on, and they knew it. They bargained with Hasan for a bit, and he agreed to smuggle them out of the area. Once the party made their getaway, they hopped on a train bound for the far side of Alanmar. They made good skill checks to get past the various military checkpoints, and a few days later they were home free.

However, things were not quiet on the home front. During the party's train ride home, Magda, Piper, and Elspeth received an unwelcome visitor in the night. Dracula was mildly annoyed by the party's antics, so he decided to do some nocturnal enhanced interrogation. He broke into Piper's dreams first, like he had done to Lucy Westenra back in the day, but Piper managed to resist his intrusions. Cutting his losses, he switched his attention to Magda, who proved much more susceptible. On the first night, she gave up the party's surface details, general abilities, and standard worknames. This granted Dracula and his minions three free rerolls against the PCs. On the second night (which Magda unfortunately didn't remember), she gave up more critical details: standard operational procedures and all of the party's allies, network contacts, and sources of sanity recovery. This granted Dracula and his minions a +1 bonus on all die rolls against the PCs. Thankfully, Magda managed to resist the third night of interrogation, even after Dracula spent all three of his rerolls against her. This prevented Dracula from setting up a "back door" link into her mind. The frustrated vampire lord spent the next two nights tormenting Elspeth's dreams, but ceased his intrusions the night the rest of the party returned to HQ.

The ladies had been busy during the week, and had put together a proper conspiracy cork-board with all the intel the party had so far (Piper's player did this IRL, absolutely going the extra mile). They also hung garlic and Elder Signs in all the windows of the safehouse to keep Dracula from bothering their dreams anymore. After the rest of the party returned, everyone swapped stories about what had been going on, and they decided to follow up on a few leads and check in with their friends to make sure everyone was alright.

Of note were a few things. Nassim and Tobias offered to help Devona stop a serial killer who had been leaving cryptic mathematical equations behind at the scenes of his crimes. Aurelie told Colonel Natter about the 300 block, but failed to inform anyone else in the party. Lastly, Magda took Marcella and Cordelia on a "training exercise" to scout out the off-the-books Caduceus warehouse. The scouting mission went well enough, and they even sketched out a map of the interior.

We wrapped up the session with some discussion on what to do next. They have a lot of leads to follow, so I'm curious to find out what they're going to do.

It all worked out in the end, and the conspiracy board looks great  :Small Big Grin:

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## Phhase

Quite the rogue's gallery, and a lovely start! I look forward to seeing how it develops.

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## SleepyShadow

> Quite the rogue's gallery, and a lovely start! I look forward to seeing how it develops.


Thank you, I hope you enjoy the ride. It's been a blast so far, even if it's a ton of work on my end. Especially when the party splits up to tackle two adventures simultaneously...

*Spoiler: The 300 Block*
Show

For context, the PCs decided to split in half, grab a couple of their favorite NPCs, and went to investigate two separate cases at the same time. For the sake of convenience, I won't be cutting back and forth in the journal. Instead, I'll write down what happened in one adventure this post, and I'll do the same for the other group's adventure in a separate post.

Magdalena, Aurelie, and Mitsuya decided to go investigate the suspicious disappearances at the 300 block Decarabia had told Aurelie about a while back (the disappearances were literally the only crime in the neighborhood). Aurelie tried to sneak off and go by herself, but Colonel Natter put a stop to that. He told her she needed an adult, which did nothing to endear him to her. Magdalena, as one of two First Lieutenants in the office (the other being Cordelia), was assigned to take Aurelie and investigate the block. It was Magda's first time as the commanding officer in the field. The two of them grabbed Mitsuya, Eva, and Katya, and headed down to the block with Piper standing by on the radio.

The team decided to hang around the local park and little shops to gather intel from the people living on the block. They met a few people of interest, who had some surprising connections to the Circus.

First was Alan Barrington, an old man in a wheelchair who turned out to be a retired spy. After a bit of chitchat (and a background check from Piper back at the office), the team learned that Alan was trained by David Hunter, and both men were involved in the 1877 mole hunt. Alan was crippled in a traffic "accident" after someone leaked his ID to an enemy spy who proceeded to run him over in her sedan.

The second one was Rabia Koralton, the owner of the local bookstore and semi-retired MIT agent. She had an extensive collection of occult books, and was an expert on vampirology. She was the one who sent the Van Helsing letter to Sotheby's Auction House, and also sent Kate Reed's diary to Olivia Liu. She even knew a few POI, including Monica Lupei, Otto Skinsky, and possibly even Carmilla Rojas (if only through the auction house). She also talked about a book called _Le Dragon Noire_, which allegedly contained rituals pertaining to volcanoes, telluric energy, and Ghatanothoa (the dark god of volcanoes and firstborn offspring of Cthulhu). Rabia let slip her suspicions that Dracula was the high priest of Ghatanothoa, and was empowered by telluric energy in some way.

The last meeting was with David Hunter and his caretaker, a military nurse named Holly Clay. David was bedridden, and feigned dementia to get people to leave him alone. When it was clear the party wasn't going to leave him alone (and started snooping around his apartment), he dropped the façade and told the party what he knew. He was the second person to receive the Dracula Dossier (whom Elspeth had nicknamed "Cushing"), and he was a former Edom field agent; he had been in high enough regard to be offered the Duke position of Hound back in his day. He had stolen the dossier after killing Thad Harker (Elspeth's grandmother's older brother), and became disillusioned with Edom after reading through it and drawing the ire of Dracula (whom David only referred to as "CD"). His daughter Lorna was only peripherally involved in the situation; she had no interest or talent for the spy game and was currently muddling through her second divorce. However, his granddaughter Alexia (daughter of Lorna's first husband, who was a Vulturii from Troesia) was everything Lorna was not. Alexia was a prodigy, excelling at everything a spy should be good at. David had been training/grooming her as his personal field agent from the time she could walk, and her highest ambition was to become a real spy. Unfortunately, she had gone missing about ten days ago.

During the search of David's apartment, Magda discovered that Alexia had been conducting surveillance on the landlords of the four apartment buildings which made up the block. Alexia had photos of one of the landlords crying in the park, and her hand-drawn copy of the building blueprints suggested that all four apartment buildings had a shared underground boiler room. Taking this information to heart, the party figured that Alexia had gone missing while snooping around the landlords. The team then went to the coffee shop to discuss what to do next.

Aurelie wanted to go down to the boiler room immediately, as it gave them the best chance of rescuing Alexia from whatever foul situation she was in. Magda wanted to gather more information before heading down there, since she didn't want anyone on the team to suffer the same fate as the missing girl. This disagreement eventually came to blows, and ended with Aurelie sprawled out on the grass with less than half her HP. Aurelie had started the fight, and Magda had finished it.

With the disagreement settled like soldiers, the party split up to interrogate the four landlords under the guise of looking for a new apartment. Aurelie, Katya, and Eva went together to pose as a trio of college students looking to split rent, while Magda concocted the cover story of trying to help her "adopted brother" Mitsuya find a new place to stay. Each of the four landlords was injured in some way, whether it was a black eye, a broken arm, or a dislocated knee. Each of them had a cover story, but all of them claimed to have been injured in an accident about ten days ago. Mitsuya was terrified of the aggressively friendly maintenance man the apartments had on staff. During the intel gathering, Aurelie heard a banging noise coming from one of the bathroom sinks. It didn't take her long to realize it was "SOS" being tapped out in Morse Code by someone banging metal against the water pipes elsewhere in the complex. Aurelie attempted to reply, but only made a confusing series of taps. After giving up on trying to communicate, she got Katya to do it instead.

The fourth landlord the team interrogated was the worst injured of the bunch. He had a neck brace, a boot cast, and an arm in a sling. He made the excuse of being in a traffic accident, but by this point the party wasn't believing the stories. They managed to sweat a lot of useful information out of him. He admitted to the party that he and the other landlords were conducting human sacrifices in the boiler room to keep the 300 block crime free. They had worked out a deal with a man named Hans Hoffman (a quick History check revealed he was the original architect who designed the city). The landlords sacrifice one person every six months, and all forms of crime essentially stop in the neighborhood. Alexia had been caught sneaking around in the tunnels beneath the block, and she put up a good fight before the landlords were able to subdue her. Hoffman forbade them from sacrificing her yet, since the boiler could not be "overcharged" without risk of damage to the infrastructure. They decided to hold Alexia captive in the boiler room until the next day of sacrifice came around.

Armed with this new information, Magda attempted to radio back to HQ for more details and further instructions. Her transmission was hijacked by someone who called herself "God's Blind Eye", and the hijacker warned Magda that Hoffman was an angel of the "God-Machine", and that a confrontation would be dangerous. Once the hijacking was over, a panicked Colonel Natter gave Magda orders to investigate the boiler, extract Alexia, and eliminate the landlords. The mission was accepted.

The team forced the crippled landlord to show them the way through the tunnels, and they verified his route by using Alexia's neatly hand drawn map. Just outside the boiler room, the other landlords and the maintenance man ambushed the party. The fight was short but rough, with Eva and Aurelie barely standing, and Katya faring little better. With the landlords dealt with (Magda executed the fourth one so Katya didn't have to), the party headed into the boiler room.

The "boiler" was an open wound in reality, a pulsating mass of gears, pipes, and living gears. Alexia was handcuffed to one of the pipes, and had been using her restraints to tap out "SOS" in a desperate call for aid. Standing between the party and their target was Hans Hoffman, a seemingly normal middle-aged man. The only strange thing about his appearance was the ink that leaked from his fingertips. He explained in a casual tone that the "boiler" was an occult matrix to store excess energy for other parts of the "infrastructure" when they needed additional power. In essence, it was an occult emergency generator. The sacrifices charged the battery, and in exchange Hoffman kept crime out of the neighborhood. Mitsuya called him out, saying the real Hoffman died a few hundred years ago, but Hoffman explained that he faked his death once his human persona was no longer useful. He was an angel known as "The Architect", and said these sacrifices had been occurring once every six months since the city itself was built. He offered to let the team become the new landlords, able to choose whom to sacrifice and dispose of without a trace. Hoffman never left behind any evidence when disposing of a body, after all. He even said they could just walk away and suffer no reprisals for their interference. The "boiler" would eventually lose power, crime rate would normalize in the neighborhood, and life would carry on as it does elsewhere throughout the city.

The team wasn't interested in his offer, so they opened fire.

The fight was a rough one. Katya and Aurelie took a lot of sanity damage and were barely functional throughout the fight. Eva was barely on her feet walking in, and didn't risk going into melee with the mechanical angel. This left Magda and Mitsuya to square off with Hoffman as best they could. About halfway through the fight, Aurelie managed to pick the locks on Alexia's handcuffs (with some gentle coaxing from the prisoner), and Alexia rushed to the team's aid as best she could. Eventually, Hoffman went down, and Magda unloaded round after round into the boiler until the wound in reality closed shut.

The party evacuated back to HQ with three critically wounded teammates, two of whom were going to also need some therapy. Mitsuya stayed with the injured party members as they were rushed into Dr. Lygon's office for treatment, while Magda introduced Alexia to Colonel Natter. He closed the door to his office, handed her his service revolver, and told Magda to make the choice.

Was Alexia, a girl with ties to Edom and years of private training, going to be the newest Delta Green agent?

Magda emptied the revolver, handed it and the ammo back to the Colonel, and said she trusted Alexia well enough to let her join the team. Natter trusted Magda's judgement on the situation, so he sent her to debrief Alexia before ordering both of them to hit the showers.

Things got a little spooky.

----------


## Cerrita

> The fight was a rough one. Katya and Aurelie took a lot of sanity damage and were barely functional throughout the fight.


Apparently, with an absence of Tobias and his garou form, Aurelie was obliged to fail some *other* kind of wisdom save to render her basically useless. The poor girl is trying.

----------


## pragma

Thanks for writing this! It has inspired me to pick up the Delta Green Quick Start and give it a try.  I have a question about your opening post. All the Delta Green materials I've found use the BRP roll under system, but your opening post lists character classes and levels that look like D&D 5e. Are you using some kind of Delta Green d20 system? If so, where can I find it? BRP is not my favorite system, and it's be thrilled if there were a 5e compatible conversion.

----------


## SleepyShadow

> Thanks for writing this! It has inspired me to pick up the Delta Green Quick Start and give it a try.  I have a question about your opening post. All the Delta Green materials I've found use the BRP roll under system, but your opening post lists character classes and levels that look like D&D 5e. Are you using some kind of Delta Green d20 system? If so, where can I find it? BRP is not my favorite system, and it's be thrilled if there were a 5e compatible conversion.


There isn't any 5e compatible material, but there is a workaround. What I did was convert rules from _Call of Cthulhu d20_ and _D20 Modern_ into 5e. Since CoCd20 has rules for converting BRP to d20, I was able to convert up the chain, so to speak, and turn my game into the happy little Frankenstein's monster it is now. It's not too difficult to do once you get the ball rolling.

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: Murder Will Out: Part One*
Show

While the 300 block adventure took place, the other team had an adventure of their own. Nassim was contacted by Devona, who wanted the help of her friend in the Union with a strange serial killer known in the papers as "The Calculator" due to his mathematics obsession. Earlier in her career, Devona had been involved with the investigation of a murderer known as "The Blacktop Killer", who had escaped justice thanks to some _very_ shady dealings in the courtroom. Devona didn't want a repeat of that, so she asked Nassim and his friends to help her stop The Calculator off the books. Nassim agreed, and grabbed Tobias and Marcella to help out. Colonel Natter insisted they bring Cordelia along with them, just in case they needed to flash a federal badge to get them out of a tight situation. She grabbed Zoltan the lamplighter to chauffeur her around, since she didn't want to squeeze into the same car as the rest of the team. Once again, Piper remained at HQ to help coordinate the team and pull up intel files as needed.

Things started off well enough. The team researched the previous Calculator killings, and found that there was no connection between the victims. He had chosen them via the mathematical equations he left behind at each crime scene. Tobias copied down the formulae and went to Elspeth for assistance deciphering it. Together, they uncovered the Calculator's mad motives. He was trying to solve the equation, and used occurrences at each crime scene (blood spatter, furniture placement, number of bullets used to kill the victim, etc.) as variables in his equation. The Calculator was trying to use this formulae to uncover some hidden secret of the world. Tobias and Elspeth got some very high skill checks and realized he was right.

Elspeth was only a little shaken up by this, but Tobias went mad with the revelation. He failed his sanity check, and latched onto Elspeth as his "lucky charm", which meant the poor thing got dragged around for the rest of the adventure to prevent Tobias from having disadvantage on every d20 roll.

One good thing did come of this, however. Tobias was able to use the formulae to determine the Calculator's next intended victim - a university student named Sandra Meyer who lived in New Sierra. Armed with this knowledge, Devona suggested the team head directly to Sandra's apartment and wait in ambush for the killer. Nassim and Tobias thought it was a good plan, and Marcella wanted to prevent another murder. The team raced to the apartment, but it was too late. The Calculator had already struck. However, because they chose to head directly there, the killer had to leave in a hurry, escaping out the window as the party came up the stairs. This meant Sandra was still alive when the team arrived, and thanks to some quick work from Nassim she would not bleed out. She was even able to give them a rough description of her attacker (a very large man with dark skin and a rubber mask). Devona called for an ambulance as the party searched the apartment for anything useful. In his haste to escape, The Calculator left his suit jacket behind. It was a bespoke suit with a tailor's card inside, so the party took the jacket to the tailor for further clues.

The tailor was a little difficult to deal with (he didn't like blue collar workers), but eventually he let the party look through his customer log. Using this, they learned the jacket belonged to a man named Matthew Coyle. They looked up his address and headed straight for his penthouse suite. It was a nice place, and unoccupied when they got in (Devona picked the lock, saying that "she wasn't always a good girl"), so the party searched the place for anything. Marcella found a photo of Matthew Coyle (a pudgy and pale engineer) arm in arm with a man who fit Sandra's description of the Calculator. Devona found that the kitchen showed no signs of recent use. Nassim found Matthew Coyle's body stuffed into an ice chest in the utility room. A quick use of his Medicine skill revealed Coyle had been shot twice in the back, and had been in the ice chest long enough to be frozen solid. At least they were able to rule him out as the killer.

While Nassim was examining the corpse, Tobias and Elspeth were going through some peculiar papers on the coffee table. The papers were a diagram (half blueprint, half occult ritual) for creating a mechanical spider-monster using scrap metal and the severed heads of seven executed criminals. As dramatic timing dictated, the completed monster dropped down from its hiding place on the ceiling just as Tobias figured out what the blueprint was for.

The battle with this critter was pretty rough. It only got one attack per round, but 3d10 damage is brutal at level 4. It dropped Marcella in just a couple of attacks, and tore up Tobias and Nassim pretty badly. Zoltan failed his sanity check at the sight of it and was mostly out of the fight. Cordelia and Elspeth did what they could, but neither of them are built for dealing damage, and Devona had a string of bad luck on her attack rolls, negating her otherwise high damage output. Eventually, the monster was taken out (I believe by a grandfather clock getting knocked onto it), and everyone patched each other up as best they could. Among the wreckage left behind, the party found an unsigned letter which requested a meeting at a nearby parking garage. They radioed back to HQ, and Piper agreed to meet up with them in person, allowing Zoltan to take the dead bodies back to the lab for examination (and also to recover from the chunk of sanity damage he took).

Once the party was adjusted, they headed for the abandoned parking garage. It was, of course, a trap laid out for anyone who came snooping around in The Calculator's business. Luckily, Cordelia managed to recognize it for what it was, preventing the enemy from getting a surprise round. They were attacked by Sally Duquesne, a slasher killer in the same style as Michael Meyers or Jason Vorhees. Her horror movie levels of durability were complemented by the additional strength granted to her as a "Renfield" (a person psychically bound to Dracula) _and_ the possessed knife she was equipped with, which did sanity damage on-hit. Needless to say, Sally made the last combat encounter look easy. By the end of it, everyone except Devona was either unconscious or barely standing. Somehow she made it through unscathed. The party loaded Sally's corpse into the car and took it back to HQ for examination, as well as to get everyone medical attention.

With the team's return, the two halves of the party were reunited (mostly in the medical bay). Everyone swapped stories about what happened, and decided to stick together for the remainder of the investigation. The only clue they had was a brochure for a retirement home Sally had in her pocket, which had a friendly little note written in the same handwriting as the letter which had sent them into a trap. They decided to investigate that in the morning after everyone had gotten a chance to recuperate a bit. Alexia was introduced to the rest of the team, but most were too injured or crazy to make a good first impression. During the night, Aurelie decided to call her parents, and she got royally chewed out. Her parents had been told about her criminal activity with the McBride gang, and the snitch was her "boyfriend Oliver". This was news to her, since she didn't know anyone named Oliver. Mitsuya called the safehouse where Magda, Elspeth, and Alexia were staying, and there was a comical misunderstanding about "packages".

In the morning, everyone gathered at Delta Green HQ to discuss their next move. Amidst the usual mail for the office were two letters of importance - Nassim and Mitsuya both received unsigned letters warning them of monsters in their midst and betrayal from their fellows. Mitsuya's letter specified that fire would reveal their true form, so he started burning people with a pocket lighter. Nassim was thankfully more levelheaded, at least until he got a panicked call from Devona about a letter she had received in the night. She sounded desperate, so Nassim agreed to meet her at a Union-friendly auto mechanic's shop. Nassim took off without much of an explanation, so the field-ready teammates hurried after him, doing perhaps one of the worst things a Delta Green team could ever do.

They were going in blind.

Horror monsters make for tough customers in combat.

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: Murder Will Out: Part Two*
Show

The party split up to surveil the area around the mechanic shop. Magda took Alexia with her up to the roof of the building across the street, which was the fire station Nassim worked at (and the workplace of several Union members). Tobias and Mitsuya hit the sidewalk, while Aurelie and Piper were on standby in the car. Nassim and Marcella went into the auto shop once the others had confirmed there weren't any Edom or Dracula agents skulking around. Inside the shop, Devona was clearly upset. She told Nassim and Marcella that she had received a letter telling her that Delta Green agents had been responsible for covering up and protecting a serial killer which hunted one the north highway. This killer had been Devona's first case as a detective, and she had basically been forced to watch her ironclad case against the "Blacktop Killer" go up in smoke as evidence vanished, witnesses went mute, and even the detective herself had been barred from the court proceedings.

Nassim tried to explain he and Mitsuya had also gotten suspiciously accusatory letters, but people skills are not his forte. The situation got worse when Mitsuya decided to leave his post and join them inside the shop. Since he was both a gangster and known member of Delta Green, his very presence set off Devona's fiery temper, and Marcella barely managed to diffuse the situation from erupting into an all-out battle between Delta Green and The Union of Regulars. Marcella managed to convince Devona to check out where the letter came from before anyone jumped to violent conclusions. With Devona back on the team, the party decided to follow their most obvious lead remaining - the Green Fields retirement home.

Once at the upstate retirement home, the party split up into two teams. Half of the group chatted with the employees and residents, while the other half confronted the old man who had been sending the letters - Donald Aitcheson. He was a feeble old man in a wheelchair, but he cordially invited the party in despite them clearly not being here on friendly business. Once they were inside his apartment, Donald confessed to the murders of five people (three nurses, a janitor, and an ambulance driver) because they had all been kind to him. He wrote letters with a magic pen which added credibility to the lies he would send, and the recipients would commit the murders in crimes of passion. Donald had marked on a city map the locations where his victims had been killed, as well as the victims of both Sally Duquesne and The Calculator. All of their kills had been within a certain radius of West Bridge Hospital, and all the corpses had been delivered there. Donald told the party his patron lived in the morgue of the hospital, and had been the one to grant him the magic pen so he could kill even in his geriatric state. This patron had also granted The Calculator inhuman intellect and Sally her unnatural durability.

When the party got all the information out of him that they could, Mitsuya smothered Donald with a pillow.

Down in the lobby, the party received a message from Geerd Horn, an old dockyard fixer and living legend among the Union of Regulars. He wanted to meet up at _The Brass Tack_ for a few drinks and to share some intel. The party was picking up the tab, of course. The team agreed and headed down to the bar. Over a few pints, Geerd told them about his old monster hunter crew, and how they had run afoul of the corpse-eating spirit in the morgue about five years ago. It managed to eat two of the five hunters before the crew managed to unload enough fire and shotgun ammo into it to make is discorporate. Geerd was more than a little saddened when he learned its predations had started up again. Armed with this warning, the party did a bit of research into the spirit, and learned that both the spirit and the hospital it inhabited had been around for hundreds of years. Still, the team had a Light cleric and a werewolf on the team. Confidence was not high, but it was solid.

The party devised a pretty good plan to tackle the situation. Nassim and Devona would round up some Union firefighters and cops to be on standby outside the hospital. Once the volunteers were in place, the party split into three teams. Magda and Mitsuya went to Sandra Meyer's room to bodyguard her in case something happened, Piper and Alexia patrolled the ground floor of the hospital, and the rest of the team headed down to the morgue to confront the spirit. The hospital itself was a terrible place where human failings and vices always bubbled up to the surface in all their raw and bloody reality. Or, as a few of my players informed me, it was the average hospital. Reality is always more bleak than fiction, it seems...

Anyway, the spirit started talking in their heads once they got inside the hospital. They largely ignored it, since nobody wanted to become a warlock with a corpse-eater for a patron. The morgue team had to break their way through a few magically locked doors, and when they finally got to the morgue they witnessed the spirit manifest. Aurelie and Nassim both failed their sanity checks and went temporarily insane. Tobias and Devona did their best to hold it off while Marcella ran around trying to snap Nassim and Aurelie out of their maddened states. Once Nassim was able to cast spells again, it turned out the spirit _really_ hated fire. He managed to stun it with fire damage long enough for the rest of his team to finish the job,

Meanwhile, Piper and Alexia got cornered by the Calculator (who turned out to be a werewolf from one of the "Pure" packs). He beat them up pretty badly, and Piper's pet dragon nearly died. Neither of them failed the save against his Lunacy effect, which would have caused the situation to spiral. In the end, they managed to bring him down, though not without significant injury.

Upstairs, Mitsuya and Magda got attacked by some security guards who had thrown their lot in with the spirit. They wanted to kill Sandra and chop up her body as an offering to the spirit for power. Naturally, the Delta Green agents took exception to this. We had a pretty cool fight with Mitsuya and Magda knocking guards around, pushing them down the stairs, and all sorts of action movie antics. The fun almost came to a stop when one of the guards (named Bocephus by table consensus) scored a critical hit on Magda and fractured her skull. Debilitated by the lingering injury, Magda was essentially helpless and at the mercy of the murderous guard. Thankfully, Mitsuya got to her in the nick of time and took Bocephus down before he could finish Magda off.

With the corpse-eater put down, the Calculator slain, and several wannabe warlocks dealt with, the party limped back to HQ to savor the rewards of a job well done, and to recover some much needed hit points and sanity in the medical wing.

Another successful mission. Good job, agents  :Small Cool:

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: The Auction: Part One*
Show

The party decided that their next course of action was to go acquire _Le Dragon Noire_ from the Sotheby's Auction House. Convenient for me, since there's a perfect adventure for this. Piper did some digging while the rest of the crew was resting up, and found there was an auction scheduled for later that week. The auction featured several items of occult interest, including the book they were after. Colonel Natter contacted Emelia Webb, the heiress the party rescued from the Dead Light, and she agreed to bankroll the recovery of the book on the condition that she came with the PCs to the auction itself. After her experience with her grandfather's pet Mythos monster, Emelia wanted to stop other occult items from falling into the malicious or ignorant hands of the idle rich. The party agreed to her terms, and made plans to travel to Costa Luna after the auction to better evade Inspecter Helena Vasser.

While the party was recuperating from their ordeal at the hospital, Marcella received a cheque in the office mail from "Mr. Deville" worth 1,500 gp. She was smart about things and went straight to Vic about it. She even burned it in front of him to demonstrate her loyalty. She then went to Rebecca, took her down to a local coffee shop, and turned down the offer to join Team Dracula. Rebecca was very polite and understanding. Meanwhile, Magda was pulled out of the office by none other than Kenaz, who wanted to have a quick chat "from one professional woman to another." Kenaz (who was sporting a brand new Elder Sign choker necklace) informed Magda that an official inquiry was being opened into the party and their recent activities, which had been prompted by Magda's downtime investigation into a mole hunt which took place back in 1877. Magda understood it was meant as a warning, but disregarded it nonetheless.

Nearing the end of the week, Aurelie was still suffering from a lot of Sanity damage, and the rest of the team agreed with Dr. Lygon's assessment that she should sit this one out. After a bit of convincing, Aurelie agreed to stay behind for additional therapy. The party temporarily picked up Ruth, a mostly-retired Delta Green gunner who had been involved in several failed combat missions. Before they left, Magda assigned Cordelia to go through the party's records and scrub any incidental connections anyone in the party might have to the mole hunt. She also assigned Katya and Dustin to set up a network in Troesia to investigate the _HMS Proserpine_ with a safety net of cutouts. Once those assignments were set in motion, the party headed out for the airport to meet up with Emelia. They also took Alexia with them, as the party wanted to get her more field experience, and a social mission at an auction house would likely be safer than most other missions the party would undertake in the future.

Emelia paid for transport, and the party flew in style in a luxury zeppelin, which was a wonderful change of pace from the Tabor Air Yacht or the budget passenger trains. It was a quiet and cushy journey, with only a handful of other passengers and a crew which kept to itself. The only passenger of note was Melina Biller, a bookkeeper and novice astronomer. She offered to let the party check out her new telescope if they had time. The party politely made some noncommittal agreements to meet with Melina later.

Upon arrival in Ravencross, the party scouted out the neighborhood around Sotheby's Auction House. They found a comfortable hotel nearby with a good vantage point, and split into multiple teams. Ruth and Magda set up a sniper's nest across the street to cover the auction house while Marcella and Nassim acted as pavement artists to patrol the block. These two teams were in contact via radio to keep everyone informed of anything peculiar they might come across. Meanwhile, Piper led Mitsuya and Alexia into the auction house to rub elbows with the wannabe occultists who were in attendance, while Tobias and Emelia covertly examined the auction items to differentiate the real occult objects from spooky shams.

It was mostly downtime, but a lot of behind the scenes stuff the party was interested in got taken care of.

----------


## AllHailthed4

A bit of context on Ruth: our group has been playing together in various iterations for a few years, and this is our _third_ attempt at the Dracula Dossier campaign. The other two, including the one Ruth debuted in, ended in utter disaster (Colonel Natter still can't talk about the "Party Barge Incident" without spiraling into flashbacks). Here's hoping she gets a little closure doing one last mission with the newest batch of agents...

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: The Auction: Part Two*
Show

After doing a bit of research, Tobias and Emelia were able to determine that about half of the items present were genuinely magic, and only a few of them were something Delta Green might be interested in - a fetish made of unknown hair and skin, _Le Dragon Noire_ (which is why they were here), a brass head which could answer questions if a specific ritual was performed, an enchanted longsword, and a pamphlet detailing demonic attacks. There was also a magical ankh, but since its only function was to amplify spells, the team wasn't too worried about it. Ruth was personally interested in a nonmagical book of Vulturii origin which talked about angels, demons, and the relationship of souls. Once the party figured out what they were bidding on and what they were willing to let slide, the auction began.

Meanwhile, the sniper team spotted a bogie. A young brunette woman was circling the auction house, trying to peek inside through the windows. Ruth notified Marcella, and she went to go check out the situation while Nassim covered her from the shadows of a nearby alley. Marcella found the young lady peering in through the back window, watching the auction with great interest. A reasonable Insight check suggested the girl was only curious about what the rich elites were up to after the auction house's official closing hours. Marcella radioed in and kept an eye on the young lady just to be safe.

The auction went smoothly for the most part, although Mitsuya ended up in a bidding war with one of the patrons over the sword (a wealthy diplomat taking a break from his official business). One of the other patrons, Mr. Hunderprest, was outbid in every lot he tried for, which made a few of the players rather sad, as he had explained to them earlier that his wife had recently passed away and he was hoping to acquire a trinket from her homeland to remember her by. Near the end of the auction, the bidding was interrupted by a ghastly scream from one of the assistants. Most of the gathered crowd panicked, except for three people - Herr Ausberg the auctioneer (who went to investigate the scream), Mr. Hunderprest (who went to call the police), and the diplomat's bodyguard (a striking woman named Carmilla Rojas, who drew a hidden derringer and covered her client). Tobias and Piper went with Ausberg and Carmilla to see what the screaming was about, while Mitsuya sent Alexia to run interference on Hunderprest, hoping to delay the arrival of the police for as long as possible.

Outside, Marcella saw the brunette panic and flee from the scene as soon as the scream was heard. She radioed Magda and Ruth for orders, and they told her to stay at the auction house and let the others know if the police showed up.

Down in the storage room, Tobias and Piper found one of the assistants had been brutally murdered and the brass head stolen. They investigated the scene of the crime with a bit of help from Carmilla, and they discovered that there had been two assailants, and they had used the dumbwaiter to get to and from the basement. The trio hurried downstairs and found a tunnel had been dug into the basement from the outside, but it had been collapsed behind the escaping killers. Tobias had _Locate Object_ prepared, and used it to turn a slow detective adventure into a fast-paced chase scene.

Works for me, I can adapt  :Small Cool: 

The party got together and raced after the killers, all the while barely keeping the brass head in range for Toby's spell to work. The killers were using the subway tunnels to traverse the city, meaning that the party had to cut through alleys and yards (and hop a few fences) to keep pace. Thanks to Mitsuya's knowledge of urban layouts, the party managed to stay on course, and they followed the killers to a rundown apartment building.

The party poked around for a little bit and found a basement apartment which was unlisted on the front door. Suspicions rising, they picked the lock and headed inside. It was the home of someone who was, at best, upper-middle class. Judging by the haphazard care of the kitchen, the plethora of books on resurrection and reincarnation, and the nails in the walls where pictures once hung, the party guessed it belonged to someone in mourning. Mitsuya even found a diamond wedding ring on a severed finger. After snooping around for a little while, the party found a hidden door in the bottom of a closet. When they opened it up, they were greeted with the same sickly-sweet smell they had first encountered back at the Carmody Farm.

Whatever was going on here had the stench of Shub-Niggurath.

They climbed down the ladder into a makeshift catacomb, which had been dug up to meet the apartment rather than dug down. This bothered Nassim's dwarven sensibilities. Investigating the tomb, they found the stolen brass head, the dead body of a woman wrapped in a white sheet, and about a dozen ghouls. Combat erupted, and more and more ghouls kept flooding into the tomb from a tunnel in the floor. On the second round of combat, none other than Mr. Hunderprest joined the fray, trying to stop the party from reclaiming the brass head. He wanted to use it to bring his beloved wife back from the dead. Magda and Piper were sympathetic, but since they had firsthand experience with trying to bring back the dead (they played through _Last Things Last_) they knew they had to stop him. That got a little tricky, though, since Ruth had failed her sanity check upon seeing the horde of ghouls. This manifested in extreme and violent paranoia; she was convinced the rest of the party was trying to set her up. With the fight suddenly on three fronts, the party was hard-pressed (except for Mitsuya, whose build thrives when fighting lots of weak enemies).

When Hunderprest was eventually put down, the rest of the ghouls retreated back into the warrens. Ruth was knocked unconscious, and the party hauled her back to the hotel so Nassim could work on snapping her out of her temporary insanity. Piper went back to the auction house and reported to Ausberg what happened, but she lied about the brass head, saying she hadn't been able to recover it. She failed her Deception check to convince him, but Ausberg waited until she was out of his office to call the authorities. On her way out, Piper made vague plans to meet with Carmilla the following morning, since Miss Rojas suspected Piper was more than just an adrenaline junkie.

Things were quiet for the rest of the night, but the heat was on first thing in the morning. The party awoke to the sound of police squad cars outside their hotel, and none other than Inspector Helena Vasser of the VASCU was here to lead the investigation.

Most of the party gained more Sanity points than they lost. Sometimes even Mythos investigators can catch a break  :Small Big Grin:

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: Escape From Ravencross*
Show

The party was scattered around the hotel when Helena Vasser and the police showed up, so they had to concoct escape plans in pairs or on their own. Tobias, Nassim, and Alexia were able to slip out the back without much issue, while Magda, Marcella, and Emelia managed to escape via the rooftop fire escape, taking the occult objects with them. Tobias had _Sending_ prepared, so the party was able to coordinate a meetup at a nearby church of Bahamut once everyone was clear of the hotel. Not everyone managed such a clean getaway, though.

Piper was in the lobby when the police entered the hotel, so she kept Helena busy for a while. Ruth and Mitsuya were having breakfast when the escapes were being made, but they were tipped off by one of the housekeepers that they were in danger. The note given to them by the housekeeper (which was signed _CR_) instructed them to slip out through the staff entrance. However, they wanted to grab their stuff from their rooms upstairs before they left. They tried to sneak back to the staircase, but Helena spotted them from the lobby. Mitsuya was already a suspected terrorist from the party's last visit to Kacer, so he immediately took off at a sprint up the stairs. He was just barely faster than Helena (thanks to blowing a couple Ki points), and got to his room before she could catch him. Ruth was in hot pursuit, though she couldn't keep up with either of them. Mitsuya grabbed his duffel bag and crashed through the bedroom window, using Slow Fall to reach the ground safely. A car parked across the street swung its door open, and Carmilla Rojas shouted for him to get in. He sprinted through traffic, slid into the passenger seat, and they took off.

Upstairs, Ruth opened fire on Helena Vasser; she was having another psychotic break and mistook Mitsuya for her son. To nobody's surprise, shooting at the cops was a terrible plan. Because Helena was in a charitable mood, Ruth and Piper were only arrested instead of killed. By this point, the rest of the PCs had made good their escape, but Piper and Ruth were hauled down to the police station. Magda and Marcella escorted Emelia to the airport, acting as her bodyguards until she was safely aboard the airship scheduled to take her back to New Sierra. Once the airship was in flight, they rendezvoused with Tobias, Nassim, and Alexia at the church. Mitsuya and Carmilla attempted to join them, but between his inability to read a city map and his ignorance of how the _Sending_ spell functioned, the two of them got quite lost for some time. Eventually, they managed to find the church, and Mitsuya explained to the rest of the group that Carmilla had helped him. She offered her help to the rest of the team at this point, suggesting she had an idea for getting Piper and Ruth out of the police station.

Nassim and Marcella ran a quick History check on Carmilla Rojas, and learned that she was a troubleshooter in Costa Luna's Secretariat of Intelligence who was sent wherever she was needed to clean up other people's messes. Despite only being in her late twenties, she had a formidable reputation in the intelligence community. In particular, the RSA owed her plenty of favors after she helped extract two of its officers from a sticky situation in Voclaria.

Although the party didn't necessarily trust Carmilla, they agreed that they needed her help. All she wanted in exchange was a chance to talk to Piper privately, and perhaps be owed a favor by the party. They devised a plan to let Carmilla rescue Piper and Ruth, while the rest of the party would charter a ship and go down the river toward the Kaceran - Costa Lunan border. The two halves of the team would meet back up in a little fishing village along the river, then they would cross the border together.

All in all, a pretty good plan.

Meanwhile, Piper was being interrogated by Helena while Ruth was kept in a holding cell watched by two armed guards. The interrogation was going pretty smoothly at first, with a lot of simple questions Piper was able to either answer directly or give an oblique enough answer to be satisfactory without drawing too much suspicion. However, during the interrogation, Piper mentioned Delta Green's current financial troubles. Helena pressed the issue by asking how Piper and her team were able to attend a high society auction, and Piper let slip that the mission had been funded by an outside benefactor. When Piper claimed to not know who the benefactor was, Helena instructed her to call the team's handler and get the intel. She offered to release Ruth into Piper's custody if the call was made. If Piper didn't make the call, Helena said both Piper and Ruth would both be held in custody, charged with attempting to murder a police officer, and likely spend the rest of their lives in prison if not executed outright. Backed into a corner, Piper had no choice but to call Colonel Natter.

They had arranged code names for everyone, so even as Helena's officers listened in on the call, VASCU didn't gain too much intel on the party. Shortly after the call was made, the loudmouthed diplomat Carmilla had been guarding barged into the police station. He chatted with a few of the bewildered officers, stormed into the interrogation room, and waved his diplomat's license at Helena, all while shouting "diplomatic immunity" at anyone who tried to stop him. He led Piper and Ruth out of the police station to the car where Carmilla waited for them in the driver's seat. They drove off at a speed which let them beat the traffic without drawing suspicion from any wayward patrol officers looking to meet their ticket quotas for the month. However, neither Piper nor Carmilla rolled well enough on their Tradecraft checks to notice a civilian vehicle tailing them from a safe distance.

The party met up at the designated fishing village and stopped in at a local bar to discuss their next move. While Mitsuya armwrestled the diplomat, and the others concocted a plan for crossing the border, a shot rang out. A window shattered. The diplomat hit the ground, stone dead. The party scrambled for cover. Magda and Ruth peeked out the broken window to see where the shot came from. They caught a glimpse of movement from the crow's nest of a steamship chugging up the river. A dark-haired woman wearing a black facemask was partially concealed in the bucket atop the mast. She was armed with a military grade rifle.

Ruth went ballistic. She fired her own rifle shot at the distant moving target. She hit the crow's nest, but failed to connect with the enemy sniper. The masked woman ducked down out of sight, but did not return fire. Ruth lined up another shot. Magda ordered her to stand down; the target was too far, it was a civilian fishing ship, and the police were likely itching for an excuse to bring Ruth back into custody. Ruth didn't listen. Magda had to grab the rifle and force the barrel down. Tensions were high, but there was no friendly fire today.

Nassim managed to save the diplomat with _Revivify_, but the poor fellow had lost a few teeth from the lethal critical hit to the head. He decided he was going to take a ship back to the capital of Costa Luna, where he would be much safer than trying to trek through the jungle on foot with the rest of the party. The PCs reasoned this was a good idea, especially since the assassin thought he was dead. The team parted ways with the diplomat, piled into Toby's magic summoned car, and followed the road to the border checkpoint.

I think they panicked a bit when they got to the checkpoint. Marcella cast _Fog Cloud_ around the car, which let Mitsuya, Tobias, and Ruth sneak into the underbrush. However, a sudden spherical fog bank set the guards on high-alert. While they weren't spellcasters, they were trained to identify low-level spells (read: they had proficiency with the Arcana skill). The party members that remained in the car were stopped by the guards, and each one was thoroughly searched and had their passports checked. Marcella, Nassim, and Carmilla were let through without issue, but Piper, Magda, and Alexia all failed their Heat checks, and were arrested by the border guards. Magda resisted arrest, trying to knock the guard out in a quick and efficient manner. Alexia was about to follow her lead, but then something strange happened.

Mitsuya decided to reject modernity and return to monkey. He scored a critical hit with a thrown rock, dislocating one of the guard's knees. He then ran out of his hiding spot and proceeded to beat the man to death with his bare hands. Marcella jumped into the action and used _Thunderwave_ to blast the other guard across the road, nearly killing him as well. Unfortunately, all of this was caught on the CCTV cameras operated by the nearby border guard HQ. Piper shot out the cameras, but it was too late. The party sprinted past the Costa Lunan border guard and made a mad dash for the jungle.

Not the smoothest escape, but plenty of other fictional spies make explosive getaways.

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: The Two-Headed Serpent: Act One - Part One*
Show

I asked a couple of the players to come over before the session to do an aside with Aurelie and Cordelia, since the party had agreed they should investigate Caduceus in between Aurelie's therapy sessions. Together with Sticky Jack (the best pickpocket and lockpicker in the McBride gang), they infiltrated Caduceus HQ. Things started off well. They utilized their friendship with Phillip Connors to get inside, even being allowed into the first subbasement to visit with Agnes Flaherty. Sticky Jack managed to pickpocket one of the nurses and lifted a notice about a break-in at the Meadham Estate. This was given to Cordelia to take back to Delta Green HQ (which become relevant sooner than I thought) after things were taken care of here. Eventually, Phillip took them back to the main floor and called a taxi for Agnes, since she was finally cleared for release following her hybridization treatment. After she was out of the building, our trio of spooks concocted a plan to break into the lower vaults and find out what was really going on.

Cordelia used a bit of subtle magic to disable the CCTV cameras in the lobby, which got the attention of the ground floor's security team long enough for Aurelie and Jack to sneak into one of the elevators unobserved. They managed to disable the lock on the elevator which prevented it from going to any of the basements without the proper keys, and took it straight to the lowest subbasement. There, they found human experimentation, captured Mythos monsters, and several failed attempts to clone a young woman neither Aurelie nor Jack were familiar with. However, they had only been down there a couple of minutes before they were spotted by the yuan-ti abominations guarding the area. The entire floor was flooded with gas which only affected mammals, rendering both Aurelie and Jack unconscious within a matter of seconds.

Cordelia waited outside Caduceus HQ for the better part of an hour, but Aurelie and Jack did not return. When she noticed security visibly tightening throughout the building, she decided discretion was the better part of valor. She retreated back to Delta Green HQ and reported everything she knew to Colonel Natter. He offered to break the news to Declan McBride, since he would rather risk his own life than let the mafia get their hands on Cordelia.

***
Back with the main group, the party spent the first couple of days in the jungle taking stock of the situation, venting their frustrations over the radio to HQ, and getting to know Carmilla better. It was the first time in quite a while that the party didn't have to be hyper-vigilant about what they said, since there was nobody in the jungle to overhear them. Despite being in the middle of nowhere, it was a surprisingly good opportunity for inter-party roleplay. Piper and Magdalena were the only ones who maintained even a low level of security around the others; Magda didn't fully trust Carmilla yet, and Piper had lost most of her trust in Ruth.

During the trip, the party learned that Carmilla was the great-great-granddaughter of Quincey Morris. She became tangled up in the whole Edom affair while going through some old paperwork in her grandmother's attic. She stumbled upon some letters from Morris to his lover in the jungle, and Carmilla had wanted to learn more about her globe-trotting adventurer ancestor. Her investigation led her to Camp Malargue, where she saw a platoon of "black ops types" keeping watch on the place. The day after, she was approached by "a creepy blonde guy" (the party suspected it was Osprey the Edom lamplighter) who invited her to join him at the camp so she could be brought into the fold. Carmilla had learned about the party through Rabia Koralton (the bookstore owner from the 300 block), and she had been trying to covertly contact Delta Green ever since. She offered to give the party access to the Morris letters if they agreed to help her learn more about her family's past.

Late on the second day, the party was ambushed by a group of Skull Island soldiers led by a disguised serpent person and her pet snake-hound. Tobias managed to lock down most of the enemies with _Hold Person_, but he was sent into a Death Rage when he got slammed for a bunch of damage by the serpent person's _Fist of Yog-Sothoth_. The Lunacy trigger caused almost everyone to panic, which turned what should've been an average encounter into something much more dangerous. Fortunately, the party was still able to bring down the mercenaries and subdue Tobias before anyone on the team lost their lives.

After the battle, the party made it to the Caduceus aid camp in the ruined village of Bamba Rumi. Marcella contacted Rafael Gomez, the lead doctor at the aid camp, and learned that the majority of the fighting between Skull Island and Costa Luna had moved away from the area, but a platoon of Skulls had essentially taken the camp hostage. He gave her directions to the abandoned Ventaja facility where the silver coffin and "the scourge of God" were allegedly held. He also gave her a change of clothes, some antivenom, a revolver, and three sticks of dynamite. Y'know, just in case. After Marcella relayed the situation to the rest of the team, they decided they couldn't just leave the aid camp in the clutches of the Skulls. The party ambushed one of the two teams out on patrol, gunning them down from the tree line, and caused the other team to flee in total rout. Alexia froze up during the battle and had to be given direct orders to shoot; fighting monsters was one thing, but until this combat she had never been forced to shoot a human. After the fight was over, the PCs were sympathetic to her position, but they reassured her she did the right thing.

With the aid camp liberated (and a nice Sanity reward for doing so), the party decided to scout out the nearby ford which led to the Ventaja facility. Magda took Marcella and Carmilla with her to check out the riverbank, while the others stayed at the aid camp to patch up their injuries and pilfer Skull Island equipment. The trio of scouts spotted a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath hidden among the trees near a recent battlefield. Magda radioed in the situation, and the rest of the team back at the aid camp piled into a requisitioned jeep to get out there as fast as possible. The jeep team parked about a quarter mile from the scouts' position; Piper stayed behind with the vehicle while the rest of the crew met up with the scouts. Nassim rolled poorly on his Stealth check and alerted the Dark Young, which led to a nasty little fight. The party had plenty of fire spells and even a flamethrower at their disposal, so they were able to take down the Dark Young in short order, although it did drop both Nassim and Alexia before going down.

Piper heard the gunfire and tried to join in, but she botched her driving check and crashed the jeep in dramatic fashion. She then proceeded to fail her Dexterity save and got pinned under the rolled-over jeep. The party managed to get to her in time to save her, but between all the fighting and now the wrecked jeep, they decided not to press their luck any farther. The party limped through the jungle back to the aid camp to rest up before trying to investigate the Ventaja facility.

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: The Two Headed Serpent: Act One - Part Two*
Show

Once the party was healed up and ready for action, they headed back out into the jungle to recover their jeep. Thanks to some poor dice rolls, it took the entire team to roll the jeep back onto its wheels. Able to traverse the jungle more easily now, the party at last set off for the abandoned Ventaja facility. Magda scouted the place to be sure it was safe, but found no enemies. The whole place had been shelled several days ago. The only thing remaining was twisted metal, ruined pharmaceuticals, and the moldering bodies of the facility employees.

Hidden in the basement of the facility was a circular capstone set into a lip. Working together (and with half a dozen crowbars), the party managed to pry the capstone up. Once it was removed, they found a ten-foot diameter metal tube which corkscrewed deep into the earth. They overcame a couple of Indiana Jones style traps without much difficulty, but then they found a statue of a giant snake with emeralds set into its eye sockets.

Mitsuya couldn't resist the temptation.

He went for the gems. The statue fired beams of light at him, but he passed every Dex save to dodge the beams. Well, almost all of them. He climbed up the statue and pried out the first gem, but when he went for the second he finally failed his saving throw. The beam of light struck him squarely in the chest, and he hit the ground hard. From where the party waited at the edge of the room, he looked like he had just died (he was only paralyzed, but they would've had to be adjacent to him to see that). Ruth rushed to his aid, only to get struck by a beam of light and drop "dead" to the floor. Piper used some rope to drag the two paralyzed PCs back to the safety of the doorway, and after a short time the paralysis wore off. However, serpentine scales had formed over the injuries caused by the beams of light which had struck Mitsuya and Ruth. Not to be deterred, Mitsuya went in for another go at it. On his second attempt, he dodged through the lasers, climbed the statue, and succeeded in prying out the gemstone. With both eyes removed, the trap was disabled, and the party could proceed.

Deep inside the underground temple, they were attacked by a giant hybrid bat-snake which flew about casting spells and taking flyby bite attacks. Thankfully, the only thing it really had going for it was a bunch of HP, and every GM knows how little that matters when a solo monster is up against even a semi-coordinated team, let alone a practiced one. A few rounds of concentrated fire brought down the beast, and the way was at last clear to recover the silver coffin, sealed by seven puzzle locks, which contained "The Scourge of God". They also found a few other items of interest in the temple, such as a magic whip which could stun trolls, and the fabled Serpent Scepter which could be used in tandem with the Serpent Crown to reveal the location of the lost continent of Mu. Without the crown, all it did was give Mitsuya a crippling fear of snakes.

The party hauled the silver coffin all the way back to the surface, and there they were ambushed by the last remaining Skull Island team led by a serpent person. The fight was a little rough (_Fist of Yog-Sothoth_ is a hell of a spell), but ultimately the party triumphed. After a bit of debate on whether they could still trust Caduceus, the party threw the silver coffin in the jeep and headed back to the aid camp for medical treatment while they waited for the airlift to extract them from the hot zone. A Costa Lunan government chopper arrived a short time after they radioed HQ, and none other than George Walker and their old pal Phillip Connors came to pick them up. They flew back to the capital of Costa Luna, where the party and the aid camp workers were transferred to a Caduceus helicopter. Phil helped the party carry the silver coffin onto the helicopter, and the party got on-board. Ruth declined the return trip, and instead offered her services to Walker as his new bodyguard, since Carmilla was going to Solingrahv with the rest of the party, at least until she got the intel about Quincey Morris.

The flight back home was uneventful, and the PCs were glad to have a bit of respite. Piper went home after filing her report, eager to sleep in a real bed again. Colonel Natter took Magda out for dinner, and she went back to his place afterward. Tobias checked in on Elspeth before retiring to chain smoke and think about the case. Mitsuya went back to his apartment, but when he got there, hoping for a quiet evening with his girlfriend, he found a terrible scene.

His sister was passed out on the couch, clearly drugged and unresponsive. Eva was in a battered heap on the floor of the bedroom; she had been savagely attacked and exsanguinated, likely by Count Dracula himself, left on the verge of death. Unsure what else to do, Mitsuya frantically called up Geerd Hoorn.

Yay cliffhanger endings!  :Small Big Grin:

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## Phhase

Wuhoh. Good thing Medicine's a wisdom skill. Here's to hoping there aren't any other lingering effects.

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## SleepyShadow

> Wuhoh. Good thing Medicine's a wisdom skill. Here's to hoping there aren't any other lingering effects.


There are absolutely lingering effects, but I can't spoil it just yet since my players read this journal  :Small Wink:

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: The Two-Headed Serpent - The Warehouse*
Show

Geerd arrived a few minutes after Mitsuya's call, and in a scene very reminiscent of the original crew trying to save Lucy, Geerd performed an emergency blood transfusion on Eva. Naturally, Mitsuya volunteered to give blood. Geerd half-jokingly said he wouldn't take _all_ of Mitsuya's blood. While the transfusion was underway, Nassim arrived to attend to Mitsuya's sister Hina, who had just narrowly survived the laudanum overdose. Hina regained consciousness and explained to Nassim that she had been on a date with a man named Elvis when she had been drugged. Nassim remembered that "Elvis" was the codename for the Edom team leader, and he knew that meant only trouble was on the way. Eva woke up by this time, and the first words out of her mouth were "I talked." With a bit of gentle coaxing, Mitsuya got her to say that she told Dracula about the safehouse where Elspeth was staying. Mitsuya raced to the phone and called Zoltan the lamplighter. He told him what was going on, and the half-asleep agent staggered to his car in the hopes of rescuing Elspeth.

Luckily for the party, Tobias had spent the night at the safehouse as well. Even better, he passed the Perception check, and was woken up by the sound of quiet footsteps in the attic. He woke up Elspeth and told her someone had broken in. He then helped her gather up some clothes and all the files she had brought with her, and the two of them attempted to sneak out of the safehouse. Critically, Tobias decided to sneak out the back door through the garden rather than try to go out the front door. It was the right call - there had been an Edom kill team waiting out front just in case (they wanted to abduct and question Elspeth, but anyone else was considered collateral damage). Zoltan met them at the curb, and they drove away just as the attic burst into flames.

Tobias called up Colonel Natter, and Vic instructed Toby to take Elspeth to the old Natter Estate a few miles north of town in the misty moors. The Colonel then called up everyone else on the Delta Green team and gave them instructions to get to the estate as soon as possible. Magda (who had spent the night with Vic) helped him pack a few things for the trip. Everyone rendezvoused at the crumbling Natter family estate a few hours later, much to the chagrin of Vic's older brother Cameron. The party discussed the night's events and filled each other in on everything that happened. As they were trying to figure out what their next move should be, a visitor arrived at the estate. It was a woman named Andrea Shield who claimed to be a Caduceus secretary. She also claimed to know where Aurelie was being held prisoner, and wanted to help the party rescue her. Magda and Mitsuya picked at her story until Andrea eventually admitted she was not with Caduceus, but rather with a local newspaper which had been covering the Arbon family troubles for a few months now. After much deliberation, the party finally agreed to take Andrea's suggestion. They put together a hasty team (just the PCs, plus Alexia and Cordelia (who was being piloted by Aurelie's player)) for the rescue mission, while Colonel Natter and Carmilla Rojas handled the process of setting up a temporary HQ at the estate. Zoltan was left in charge of guarding Andrea to make sure she didn't escape, while Geerd continued to provide medical treatment for Eva and Hina.

The rescue mission started off well enough. The party managed to get Magda into a decent sniper's nest, but the party was then spotted by the frogmen guarding the warehouse before anyone could hide or take cover. During the gunfight, a few of the crates in the warehouse were damaged, revealing most of them contained digging equipment rather than medical supplies. After the guards were taken care of, the party cracked open the rest of the crates to see what was inside. Most of them just had digging equipment, but a few of them were crates of dynamite and blasting caps. One of the crates contained the components for what was essentially a magical nuclear bomb. This dispelled whatever doubts the party may still have had about Caduceus's shady dealings. Down in the basement, they found tubes of giant mutated mosquitos held in pressurized tubes of glass. They also found Aurelie tied to a chair, as well as a radio someone had recently used. Realizing they were busted, the party cut Aurelie loose (she didn't remember anything she saw in the subbasement at Caduceus HQ), and they tried to flee. Before they could all get up the stairs, the monstrous mosquitos were released from their containment tubes. The party raced for the front of the warehouse, but Alexia and Cordelia fell behind. The mutated mosquitos swarmed over them, simultaneously draining their blood and injecting them with a stupefying toxin. Realizing the two girls were in dire straits, Magda and Piper raced back inside to rescue them. They pulled the mosquitos off the victims' bodies and dragged them toward the exit, but the swarm soon recuperated for another assault. Thinking fast, Nassim let loose with a well-placed _Fireball_, not only decimating the swarm but also setting off the dynamite. The massive explosion flung Magda, Piper, Alexia, and Cordelia clear of the warehouse, but blew the rest of the structure sky high. The party raced from the burning building and headed back to the Natter estate as fast as they could.

Back at their temporary HQ, the party debriefed Aurelie on what had happened, but the stubborn punk refused to believe she had almost two weeks worth of missing memories. The party left Alexia and Cordelia with Geerd (who wasn't thrilled about having more patients already), then went to confront Andrea. Zoltan had kept her locked in the bolt-hole down in the basement, and he had watched the door the entire time. After a bit of pressure, Andrea was finally willing to open up to the party. However, she did so with one final warning.

"Are you sure you want to know?"

They successfully rescued Aurelie. Good job team  :Small Smile:

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## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: Broken Shield*
Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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## SleepyShadow

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

*Spoiler: The Haunting*
Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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## SleepyShadow

We had a short session this week, so there isn't much to report  :Small Frown: 
*Spoiler: Medical Mishaps*
Show

Nassim woke up to the sound of Mitsuya screaming. He broke down Mitsuya's hotel room door, and the spy girls (Piper, Magda, and Carmilla) swept the room for hostiles. When they determined the room was clear, they checked on Mitsuya, who was curled up in a blanket on his bed. Nassim and Piper struggled to get him out of his blanket burrito. After a while, Carmilla used her hunting knife to cut the blanket open, and Mitsuya's new snakelike appearance was revealed. Nobody failed the Sanity check, including Mistuya! Nassim called Marcella into the room to help with the medical examination, while Piper and Magda headed down to the flophouse to pick up Tobias and Elspeth. Once the party was assembled, they loaded Mitsuya into the back of Toby's magic van, left an apology and a business card for the hotel manager, and hurried back to New Sierra.

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

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

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

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

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

----------


## Phhase

Wait, curing him of turning into a snake...by injecting him with more snake blood? That sounds more like what would've caused the problem in the first place.

----------


## SleepyShadow

> Wait, curing him of turning into a snake...by injecting him with more snake blood? That sounds more like what would've caused the problem in the first place.


The Hybridization process won't cure him at all. It's just going to suppress the symptoms for a while  :Small Wink:  

Caduceus is rather suspect, isn't it?

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## Phhase

> The Hybridization process won't cure him at all. It's just going to suppress the symptoms for a while  
> 
> Caduceus is rather suspect, isn't it?


Snek cocainum, got it. Very sus indeed. Wonder what happened to those other two blokes that got it.

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## SleepyShadow

> Snek cocainum, got it. Very sus indeed. Wonder what happened to those other two blokes that got it.


The players will get to find out in a few sessions  :Small Big Grin: 

*Spoiler: Mansion of Madness: Part One*
Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: Mansion of Madness: Part Two*
Show

It was another shorter session, so not too much happened. However...

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

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

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

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

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

I hope the party figures this one out.

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: Mansion of Madness: Part Three*
Show

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

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

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

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

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

Time to enter the cowboy era!  :Small Cool:

----------


## SleepyShadow

Okay, here we go...
*Spoiler: The Fall of Delta Green*
Show

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

"Close the net."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yikes...

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: Falling Out*
Show

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

This was not well received.

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

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

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

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

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

"Get in!" he shouted. "Plenty of open seats. I even brought the dog!"

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: Roadhouse*
Show

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

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

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

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

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

----------


## SleepyShadow

This one might be a little rough.
*Spoiler: The Harvesters: Part One*
Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wicked villains often have wicked minions.

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: The Harvesters: Part Two*
Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: Coyote Falls: Part One*
Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: Coyote Falls: Part Two*
Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: The Iron Ghost: Part One*
Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

----------


## SleepyShadow

*Spoiler: The Iron Ghost: Part Two*
Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renfield was "D".

----------


## Phhase

RIP the werewolf. Poor Tobias, the last one standing.

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## Cerrita

> RIP the werewolf. Poor Tobias, the last one standing.


We realized we have a sizeable membership in the "Last Man Standing" club, some of whom have yet to be explored.

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