Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game and associated books were nominated for seven ENnie Awards in 2018. Here, publisher and co-author Shane Ivey discusses Delta Green: A Night at the Opera, nominated for Best Adventure.
The Delta Green Handler’s Guide features a step-by-step guide to creating a great Delta Green scenario.
- It needs a horrifying hook to involve the Agents, to grab the players’ imaginations, and to establish the tone of what’s to come.
- Create important non-player characters who may be sources of information, or confusion, or antagonism.
- Add leads for the Agents to follow as they unravel the truth of what has happened and how they can stop it.
- Make sure one or two leads are dead ends, to add a sense of challenge and surprise.
- Invent a few genuinely creepy moments — this is the fun part — where you dig in to your imagination and come up with appalling things for the Agents to experience.
- There must be unexpected events triggered by NPCs responding to the Agents, or by the Agents uncovering the right secrets.
- Add trouble and interruptions to keep the Agents always a little off-balance.
- Imagine the resolution: ways in which the agents can put an end to the evil, with ever-deeper cost if they were not cautious and alert along the way.
- Finally, get a sense of possibilities for the cover-up, the all-important final steps the Agents must take to prevent the evil from spreading or being loosed again.
Those steps are a great place for a new Handler to start. When I design an adventure, though, I don’t follow those steps too literally. I’ve been doing it long enough that thinking about the process too much can interrupt the process itself. Everyone has their own way of creating. But if the scenario turns out well, it lines up with that process after all.
I often start not at the hook, but with the germ of a creepy scene, and build out from it. How might that weirdness happen? Where would it have to be to take place? What might people have done to allow it to happen? What might get the players’ Agents involved? What might make their involvement more fraught and awkward?
Likely characters emerge, at first as the vaguest of templates: a Scientist, or a Doctor, a Cop, a Homemaker, whatever. As I imagine a character’s role in the events that have attracted Delta Green, I think what the character’s personality must be like to have gotten involved. I think of ways to tweak the character to be a little unpredictable, to feel self-driven and real: to feel vital, to feel like someone who has their own needs and priorities and will fight like hell for them, whatever the Agents say. Crafting NPCs is usually my favorite part of scenario design.
Let’s look at the Night at the Opera scenario “Extremophilia” as an example. (Warning: This may require spoilers.) The kernel for that scenario was my reading about the discovery of extremophiles in the toxic Berkeley Pit in Montana. Researchers found strains of fungi thriving in the arsenic-thick waters, fungi that produce compounds that might have potent medicinal value. How was that not already a Delta Green scenario?
So I started there. I imagined someone infected with a fungus that was not merely toxic but unnatural. How would that infection have even happened? What would people do when they recognized it? What if it affected behavior, like that fungus that turns ants into zombies? I added some established elements of Cthulhu Mythos lore, twisted them and tweaked them so they would not be too obvious (but, I mean, you can already see where this is going), and explored some possible repercussions. I’m lucky enough to be friendly with a virologist who is a longtime Delta Green contributor, and I got his help in making my warping of the science more convincing.
I invented a fictional analog of the pit and moved it nearer Helena, Montana, because Helena has appeared in Delta Green scenarios before and I wanted the town itself to be a feature. I wrote about the Helena police in some detail because they would be likely to respond if the agents were careless, and because I have a background in criminal justice. I find the politics of policing a source of interest and frustration too rich to just leave lying around.
I thought a lot about whether and how to tie the horrors that emerged from to other Delta Green lore. As with the earlier scenario “Observer Effect,” this proved a fun way to touch on the evolution of important organizations in Delta Green and plant seeds — or spores, anyway — to explore later.
Along the way, I ran concepts and drafts by Dennis Detwiller, my daily creative partner with Delta Green, and, as it took firmer shape, by the other Delta Green creators, Adam Scott Glancy and John Scott Tynes. They contributed thoughts and corrections; Dennis proposed a change to one of the characters that proved a highlight of the adventure. I played the scenario with my local friends, then I recruited outside playtesters to play it and point out the inevitable parts that were clear only in my own head, and I worked it over until I couldn’t think how else to improve it.
As with everything we do in Delta Green, creating an adventure is challenging, exciting, and exhausting. It is a difficult process. When it yields an adventure worth sharing with the world, it is intensely rewarding. “Extremophilia,” “Music From a Darkened Room,” “Observer Effect,” “Reverberations,” “The Star Chamber” — the scenarios in A Night at the Opera are a deep mine of creative satisfaction for those of us who labored over them. We hope they are sources of shock, suspense, and terror to gamers everywhere. It is thrilling to see them recognized with ENnie Award nomination for Best Adventures. Please vote “1” for them to win at http://ennie-awards.com/vote/2018.
