Horvath’s Hoard

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground was penned by enthusiastic RPG collector Stu Horvath as an outgrowth of his other work documenting vintage RPGs, which began with a humble Instagram account and now takes in a weekly podcast. It’s a handsomely-presented coffee table book, offering a sort of tabletop RPG equivalent of A History of the World In 100 Objects in which Horvath goes over his extensive personal collection and picks out RPG books to discuss – core rules primarily, but supplements, adventures, campaign settings, and less easily categorised items also feature.

Rather than simply offering a run-down of Horvath’s favourites, Horvath attempts to select items which help illustrate something about the tabletop gaming zeitgeist. If a game is historically significant or extremely influential, that counts for a lot, but Horvath also allows himself to include a few items which represent noteworthy oddities, intriguing creative dead ends, or outright screwups, because as in other creative fields infamous failures can be just as illustrative as celebrated successes. In addition, Horvath sticks to items from his own collection – he won’t include something he hasn’t heard of, or has not at least at some point owned and been able to make his own assessment of.

In this respect the biggest gap, as he acknowledges in the introduction, are RPGs in languages other than English; I don’t know whether or not Stu is multilingual, but presumably if he was multilingual enough to read and appreciate RPGs written in other languages, he’d have included some here, so this is really a tour through the Anglophone segment of the hobby; we get only second-hand glimpses, via translations, into areas like the Swedish scene, and nothing on Germany or Japan, all territories where games other than D&D rule the roost.

Supplement Supplemental! (Lustria’s Secrets, God’s Teeth, and Arkham’s Almanac)

It’s been a while, but I’m back here with another round-up of game supplements I read recently. This time around I’m looking at thick books touching on difficult subject matter. Two of these are guides to fictional places which riff on places in the real world but have crucial differences; one of these gets very, very real indeed.

Lustria (WFRP)

As the title suggests, this is a thick supplement describing the continent of Lustria – the Warhammer Fantasy world’s equivalent of South America. (North America is Naggaroth – a brutal place colonised by the cruel, sadistic Dark Elves.) Whilst the Empire is a fantasy funhouse mirror version of the Holy Roman Empire, Bretonnia is the France equivalent, Albion is Britain and so on and so forth, the course of the colonisation of Lustria has taken a very different course in this setting – for Lustria was the stronghold of the Old Ones, the failure of whose science led to the contamination of the Warhammer world with Chaos, and much of it remains firmly in the hands of the lizard people, led by the enigmatic frog-wizards, the Slann.

That said, the lizardfolk have an aesthetic inspired by Pre-Columbian cultures like the Aztecs, Inca, and so on. This gives rise to some headaches; it means that whilst several European cultures get represented in the setting with distinct, fully-developed human societies, an entire continent’s worth of people kind of get erased and replaced with non-human caricatures. That it’s a colonised population suffering this indignity kind of makes it worse.

To be fair to Cubicle 7, this is not a problem of their own making – it’s Games Workshop’s setting, and whilst they have been admirably happy to let WFRP hit its own tone distinct from the wargames in this edition, they’re hardly going to let Cubicle 7’s team outright redesign an entire continent to address this issue. Equally, though, they didn’t have to grasp this nettle; just like they’ve largely skirted around the flavourful but, in retrospect, extremely dodgy issue of Chaos Dwarves, they could have kept Lustria firmly out of the spotlight, said “there’s all manner of rumour about what’s out there but the fact is it’s out of the scope of the RPG and your PCs will never find out for sure”, and leave it at that.

Instead, they’ve made the creative decision to open up the RPG somewhat to exploring other regions of the setting – the Salzenmund and Sea of Claws supplements providing avenues to get Empire-based characters off on seafaring adventures to other lands – and so this means they have to tackle Lustria and flesh out both the lizardfolk and the various attempts to colonise the region.

Supplement Supplemental! (ISIS vs. Delta Green and Mr. Darcy vs. Cthulhu)

Time for another entry in my occasional series of articles giving short thoughts on game supplements which prompted some thoughts for me, but which I didn’t feel inspired to do a full article about. This time it’s a Lovecraftian special, with supplements for Delta Green and Call of Cthulhu which take those games into unexpected settings and eras.

Iconoclasts (Delta Green)

Although the Delta Green Kickstarters have already yielded a healthy crop of core books, supplements, adventures, and campaigns, the stretch goals just keep coming. Iconoclasts, by Adam Scott Glancy, is one of them, and is a truly epic scenario – weighing in at a bit over 200 pages, it’s got the sort of form factor one would expect of full-length campaigns, and it could conceivably take a fair bit of time to play through, though it’s really a single investigation and the thing which has caused the page count to expand to this extent isn’t a large number of encounters or incidents so much as it’s the extensive material Glancy needed to provide to make the concept work.

Ever since the early days of the standalone edition of the game, with scenarios like Kali Ghati, Arc Dream’s been tossing out the occasional Delta Green scenario which departs from the assumed “investigating X-Files cases on US soil” baseline that’s been the norm since the original supplements; Iconoclasts is perhaps the most ambitious one yet, and also goes deeper than ever into the “ripped from the headlines” approach (which means it may risk becoming dated over time).

Set in 2016, the action focuses on Mosul under the brutal rule of ISIS – yes, they’re the titular iconoclasts. Unfortunately, they’ve gone and broken the wrong relic and set something terrible free. Delta Green tasks the PCs with setting up a forward HQ in a friendly airbase in Kurdish northern Iraq, gather what intel they can, and then undertake a mission to get into Mosul and suppress the horrors – by any means necessary.

Supplement Supplemental! (Chambersian Clues, Chilly Catastrophes, and Slim Scenarios)

Sometimes you read a game supplement which is worth taking note of, but isn’t quite substantial enough to waffle on about at length. When that happens to me, I make articles in this series. This time around, I have a couple of Delta Green offerings and an adventure book for Land of the Rising Sun.

Static Protocol (Delta Green)

This is a sort of little companion supplement to Impossible Landscapes, much as The Labyrinth had a companion booklet in the form of its Evidence Kit. Like that Evidence Kit, it’s a collection of handouts, but it’s more focused; in essence, it’s a little dictionary of likely subjects player characters may wish to research while playing through the campaign, and underneath each entry there’s a clutch of little clues provided as little text boxes with dates and salient facts – perfect for adding to red string boards! – arranged based on which sources are likely to yield that information.

This makes running research processes in the campaign nice and easy – just consider what avenues the players have chosen to take in their research, judge whether they need a roll (remember, Delta Green encourages you to let people have stuff for free if it’s fairly basic and they have decent skills), and then provide the items in question in response to successful research.

Like the Evidence Kit, this can be obtained in hardcopy via DriveThruRPG’s print on demand service, but I genuinely think it is most useful as a PDF, since then clues can quickly and simply be copy-pasted into whichever group chat or Discord server you’ve set up for your game (or PMed to players at the table). In-person, really the best way to do this is to provide index cards, write the clues on them, and let the players come up with a massive timeline or red string board on their own using them.

Navigating the Unnavigable

Impossible Landscapes is a new supplement for Delta Green with an extremely long history. In its introduction its author, Dennis Detwiller, explains how since the early 1990s he’s tried to produce an epic King In Yellow-themed campaign for Call of Cthulhu; with this, he’s kind of done it, at least to the extent that Delta Green shares enough DNA with Call of Cthulhu that if you wanted to just run Delta Green material with the Call of Cthulhu system it wouldn’t be that difficult.

Taking as its initial seed Night Floors, an adventure from the second of the original Delta Green supplements (the legendary Countdown), Impossible Landscapes substantially builds on that adventure and then jumps the timeline forward some 20 years (you could fit in an entire campaign of more Delta Green investigations in there) before the other shoe finally drops, dumping the player characters into the sort of bizarre morass of surreal horror the whole King In Yellow concept lends itself to.

Delta Green has a history of dealing with this sort of thing, of course. As well as providing the original outing for Night Floors, the Countdown supplement provided John Tynes’ seminal essay The Hastur Mythos, which hyped up the potential of the themes delineated in Chambers’ The King In Yellow for a more surreal and personal style of horror than the Lovecraftian cosmic horror that Call of Cthulhu usually defaults to; Impossible Landscapes is the result of Detwiller spending a few decades refining that idea.

Supplement Supplemental! (Imperial Enclaves, Condensed Conspiracy, and Classy Clues)

Sometimes you read a game supplement which is worth taking note of, but isn’t quite substantial enough to waffle on about at length. When that happens to me, I make articles in this series. This time around, a WFRP release and a couple of tasty treats for Delta Green.

Archives of the Empire Volume I (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay)

This is presumably the first of a series, the idea seeming to be to package up small amounts of material on WFRP-relevant subjects in broadly thematically-related collections – kind of like Hogshead’s old Apocrypha Now collections, only a bit more focused. This first Archives of the Empire is broadly based around diversifying the coverage of the Empire. First up, there’s a useful section giving a rundown of the various Grand Provinces of the Empire, as they exist just prior to the events of the Enemy Within campaign. (There’s a promise that the final Enemy Within volume – Empire In Ruins – will give an update detailing what the lie of the land is once the campaign concludes.)

Delta Green’s Nocturnal Songs, Deadly Experiments, and Dark Locales

To round off this catch-up series on the Delta Green RPG (remember, I covered the core rules and some supplemental material in the previous two parts of this series), I’m going to cover here three scenario collections. A Night At the Opera and Black Sites are largely compilations of material previously released as individual scenarios, but I think smart buyers will prefer the collections to getting the individual ones. Both of them are quite diverse collections, and as a result there will probably be some scenarios you like and some which don’t appeal to you – but if you buy a collection then you can run the scenarios you like and strip-mine the others for what material you can, whereas if I am putting money down for a single scenario I want to be fairly sure it’s one I enjoy and will be appropriate for my table.

Control Group, on the other hand, is a sort-of campaign. I say “sort of” because each of the scenarios in it can be run individually as one-offs (or, in the case of the final scenario, slotted into a long-running Delta Green game without having to play through any of the others), but it’s presented as a series of scenarios all designed by Greg Stolze.

A Night At the Opera

As mentioned, this is a hardcover compilation of various adventures, many of which are stretch goals funded by the original Delta Green Kickstarter campaign. I got free PDFs of many of the adventures in question through my pledge level, and I liked more of them than I disliked and therefore preordered the hardcover compilation when Arc Dream presented the opportunity to do so.

(In case you were wondering: the title comes from the euphemism used in Delta Green to inform Agents that they are required for an operation. Though I’ve used the term in my home campaign, it always reminds my players of Queen albums and Marx Brothers movies; I’ve informed them that their PCs should be really worried if they ever get a message about “A Day At the Races”.)

It kicks off with Reverberations by Shane Ivey, a brief but decent introductory mission marred by the fact that it’s entwined with the Tcho-Tcho concept – and, in particular, the unreconstructed version of the concept from August Derleth and earlier iterations of Call of Cthulhu. It should be viable to tweak the investigation to make it less reliant on a “this entire ethnicity is evil and genociding them would have some positive aspects” trope – but Arc Dream haven’t done that, so still leaves a bad taste in the mouth, especially in a time when Chaosium have backed away from the more unacceptable implications of the Tcho-Tcho idea.

Delta Green’s Garden of Forking Paths

As promised, here’s part 2 of my catch-up article on the current Delta Green product line – last article I did the core rules, so this time I’m concentrating on supplemental material other than fully-developed scenarios (which I’ll cover next article) along with an entire standalone companion game.

The Complex

So, over the course of the Kickstarter for the Delta Green core rules four PDF articles were funded. The pieces in the Redacted series were all intended to provide a set of thematically-related player-facing writeups of US government agencies (and private contractors), along the lines of the agency writeups in the Agent’s Handbook. These are useful for players and referees alike – since the writeups provide guidelines for PC careers in the bodies in question, and also provide a basis for working out the capabilities of NPCs hailing from those agencies and ideas for what they might get involved in.

As it stands, it just made sense to combine the four documents into a single supplement – The Complex – and make it available via PDF or print-on-demand, and it’s well worth it. The chart of agencies towards the beginning, which helpfully points to their writeup in The Complex or The Agent’s Handbook, vividly establishes just how much The Complex extends the game. Some of the agencies are are a bit specialist or off the beaten path – making the material here perfect if you want to add an NPC (or even a temporary PC) to the game who has specialist knowledge they can use on a consultant basis, or if you want to incorporate a player character with an odd set of skills without departing entirely from the assumed “government employee/contractor” status of Delta Green agents.

You could even use the supplement to run games where all the PCs come from a specific agency – say, NASA for some spacefaring fun, or the National Parks Service for a Delta Green investigation into the whole Missing 411 thing.

Delta Green’s Return To Duty

For some 4-5 years or so now, Delta Green has been reactivated. Previously a run of critically acclaimed third party supplements for Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green is now a standalone game, with both its core materials and major new tentpole supplements funded from two Kickstarters. The major product on the first Kickstarter was the core system; on the second, The Labyrinth, one of the new supplements. An extensive number of other supplements, scenarios, and other bits and pieces of supporting material were funded as stretch goals to those Kickstarters.

In fact, so deep is the bench of existing and incoming Delta Green material that I have thrown up my hands and given up on doing a conventional Kickstopper article on the subject. Instead, I’m going to do a little trilogy of articles to cover major releases in the line so far. First up, in this article I will cover the core system. Next article, I will take a look at a few scenario-agnostic supplements and The Fall of Delta Green – a GUMSHOE-powered companion game. Finally, I will cover three scenario collections which between them incorporate a good chunk of the scenarios so far released for this edition of the game.

To summarise the premise of the game, for those that haven’t bothered to read my review of the older supplements: back when the FBI raid on Innsmouth uncovered only ye liveliest awfulness, the US government began covertly investigating the Cthulhu Mythos. This program of investigation, containment, and suppression of Mythos threats was known by various names over the years, but the iconic name is Delta Green – named for the triangular green stickers added to the personnel files of agents to denote their membership.

Delta Green was not the only conspiracy within the Federal government to delve into the paranormal, however. In the wake of Roswell, the Majestic-12 conspiracy – yes, the one some actual UFOlogists claim was real and which provided much of the basis for the backstory to The X-Files – was performing its own work. Delta Green and MJ-12, however, had very different attitudes; the former wanted to destroy and suppress alien technology, the latter wanted to exploit it. (If this is all sounding rather Conspiracy X, it’s almost certainly a matter of parallel evolution, overlapping influences, and maybe a touch of the Conspiracy X authors being inspired by some of the early Delta Green material in The Unspeakable Oath magazine.)

In the 1970s, Delta Green overstepped its mark; the catastrophically violent results of some of its operations gave Majestic-12 the leverage it needed to argue that Delta Green was a haphazard, borderline-renegade operation which needed to be brought to heel. The gambit worked beautifully, and Delta Green was shut down… officially. Unofficially, many of its members organised themselves into a cell structure and kept the project going, too aware of the potential consequences of if they didn’t. Right through the 1990s into the new millennium, Delta Green was an illegal cross-agency clique operating without legitimacy or sanction. Now read on…

Agent’s Handbook

The player’s guide to the standalone Delta Green RPG contains more or less no setting information beyond flavourful snippets of fiction; it is clear that players will rely on the referee (or “Handler”) for all their information about the Delta Green conspiracy itself. What you do get here is a nice, simple, elegantly presented, very easy to understand fork of the Call of Cthulhu game system, developing it in a different direction from 7th Edition and one better suited to the specific style of Delta Green.

Character generation is streamlined in some quite nice ways: you pick an occupation, that sets some of your skills to different base levels than they otherwise would be at, then you pick 8 skills to add 20% to. This takes the place of the awkward point-spending process of earlier Call of Cthulhu editions, at the cost of losing some fine granularity and the option to go very specialised in some areas in character creation. It also means that characters with a high Education and Intelligence scores don’t end up with a massive advantage – in fact, along with the Appearance stat, the Education stat is entirely gone. (7th Edition Call of Cthulhu has resolved this problem in a slightly different way by providing careers where your career skills don’t wholly depend on the Education stat.)

An Arcane Followup

So, a while back I did an article looking back at Arcane‘s Top 50 RPGs list from back in 1996, as polled among their (primarily UK-based) readership. At the time, I said that no truly comparable list had been produced since, but I’ve recently become aware of Tabletop Gaming magazine’s June 2018 piece on the Top 150 games. This includes board games and card games, but RPGs are healthily represented there – in fact, the top game on the list is an RPG. It’s also a UK magazine which feels in some respect like a present-day update of Arcane with a wider remit and some somewhat deeper insights, and the list was also based on a reader vote.

So, I thought it would be interesting to extract just the RPGs from that list to get a “Top RPGs” sub-list, and compare it to the Arcane list. Perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into it – the readership may well not be that similar – but it’s interesting to think about, right?