Mayday Plays - 🕳️The Dead Drop, "Into The Green Box" - September 2023

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

Our first monthly installment covering the DG news from the past few months, a scenario discussion on Reverberations, and an interview with Jake, Kevin, Max, and Will of the green box pod! Check out our patreon where at any level you can get access to the full length version of our interviews with the green box podcast. That's over 15 minutes of extra q+a with the team where they reveal a lot more including; funny anecdotes, great advice, and how the show came to an end...for now. https://www.patreon.com/maydayrp We've got merch! https://ko-fi.com/maydayrp (t-shirts and stickers) We started as a podcast! Listen to us @: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mayday-plays/id1537347277 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5vdTgXoqpSpMssSP9Vka3Z?si=73ec867215744a01 Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/mayday-roleplay Here are some of our other socials; Twitter: https://twitter.com/maydayroleplay Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maydayrp/ Website: https://maydayroleplay.com/ Thanks for your support! Broadcasted live on Twitch -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/maydayroleplay 00:00 Welcome to The Dead Drop 01:36 Delta Green News Round Up 11:36 Scenario Discussion: Reverberations 34:22 The Green Box retrospective 50:13 Closing

Hey everyone, welcome back. I'd like to thank you for joining us again. I'm Sergio, the handler for Mayday's Doom to Repeat campaign. And with me, as always, is the handler for Black Project Gaming Vince. What's up, buddy? Hey, man. Good to be here, as always, and glad to have everyone tuning in. If this is your first time on our channel, welcome.

We're part of May Day Roll Play. We play tabletop RPGs like Delta Green, Vampire the Mask Grade, Fifth Edition, Orpheus, and a whole lot, or something for everyone, all that available in podcast format, or video format as well. And it's all completely free, so please check it out. Vince, we are excited today because although nothing looks different about the show, this

episode is our first monthly installment where we will shift our focus from the King and Yellow and impossible landscapes and instead we're going to cover the Delta Green news from the past few months. We're tackling the scenario reverberations plus a dive into what makes the Delta Green community special. We spoke with four of the original members of the Greenbox podcast to discuss it all. We've got lots to go over, very excited to share it with you. So find a nice, cornerless room to settle into

before the hound of the angles gets you because you have found the dead drop. So Vince, while I don't think we'll cover the news every month, there has been a lot of fun updates within Delta Green in the past few. So I think we should round up those headlines and talk a little bit about them. Absolutely. To kick us off on August 7th, Art Dream launched her own Delta Green specific Patreon, where they will be posting updates and previews of upcoming material. Interested

agents can sign up for free in order to receive news on all the pending projects they've got in the works, but for one dollar, you'll get access to everything from our previews to scenario play tests and more. Speaking of which, patrons can download and play tests in upcoming scenario called Meridian, which is written by Shane Ivey. In this scenario playtests and more. Speaking of which, patrons can download and playtests an upcoming scenario called Meridian, which is written by Shane Ivey in this scenario, written specifically for a handler in two agents. Two agents from the Religious Crimes Task Force are sent to Joplin, Missouri to investigate the finances of a rural homeless youth shelter, and of course they find something

else entirely. As of right now you can join the Delta Green Patreon. You can download that play test now and be sure, please submit your play test reports to Shane Ivy no later than September 15th. I'm excited about this meridian. I hadn't heard anything about it until we started researching about what's been up with Delta Green in the past couple months

and it sounds really cool. I especially like the two agents scenario. I've seen a lot of discussions online about how do you run a game for just two folks. So it's cool to see that they've listened. Yeah, and one of the one of the interesting things about this scenario is it's written from the perspective of inducting two new agents into Delta Green. So, you know, they may start with zero knowledge of the program or the outlaws or the cowboys or anything. By the end of the scenario, they are recruited, so it might be a great factor to bring new players in, new agents in. Then there's Caleb Stokes' God's Teeth, which is a much anticipated campaign that has

been in the works for years now. CoverArt was released on Dennis Debtwiller's Patreon in June and it is suitably disturbing. In an August 7th post on the New Delta Green Patreon, ArcDreams stated they think the PDF will be available in the fall and the hardback a few months later. However, as we all know, these projects can and do shift. So sign up on the Arcade Patreon for further updates. On August 14th, Arcade posted an update stating they're working on a supplement to God's teeth entitled God's Hunt. This is a collection that'll feature four scenarios to help further build out the God's teeth campaign.

God's eye, God's breath, God's law, and God's light. While I, Breath and Light were all previously featured on role-playing public radio and the original campaign that Caleb Stokes ran over there, God's law is an entirely new scenario revolving around corruption and the LA County Sheriff's Department, which sounds crazy interesting. Now, you can sign up for Caleb Stokes' dead channel's Patreon to hear how that one plays out as they've already run through it, I believe. According to ArcGrain, the first of the God's Hunt scenarios will be available just after

the publication of God's Teeth, with the others coming in subsequent months, followed by a hard-backed compilation. If folks are curious to learn more, you can listen to the entire God's Teeth campaign on role-playing public radio. I recommend it. It's a great time, as well as in new play test sessions on the Dead Channel's Patreon. I do need to warn everyone that doesn't know much about God's Teeth. It is an especially rough and grim scenario, so be forewarned.

Children are not safe at all in that scenario. But a preview of the first 31 pages of God's Teeth was published on Death Willers Patreon on July 22nd, so be sure to join up and check it out. You'll also be able to find an early draft of the aforementioned God's Law scenario among others. It seems like art dream is really going all in on this God's teeth stuff. For such an intense scenario, there must be an interest in it amongst the players. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, ever since our PPR did that campaign, it's something that the fan base I think has been clamoring for and what's crazy is how much it's kind of expanded. Since it was originally just a stretch goal, I believe,

and one of the kick starters at Arcure & Ramon and now you're getting not only God's teeth, but you're getting all of these different gods scenarios kind of to flesh it all out. So it's really good to see. And it's awesome seeing Caleb Stokes, who was once a fan, just like you and me. Now, of course, an accomplished RPG writer in his own right now being able to work with Art Dream, it's really cool to see.

But to bring it back to the news, so back in August of 2021, Art Dream launched a Kickstarter for The Conspiracy, which is a remastered source book, converting the original Delta Green for Call of Cthulhu to the updated rules set. When the hardbacks are made available, they sold out pretty quickly and have been out of stock until now. For those who missed the initial Kickstarter, the book is back in stock for order, so go to shop.arttrend.com to pick up your copy. PDF versions are of course available on the art dream website and drive through RPG. You know, we also know that the conspiracy Kickstarter resulted in a bunch of other projects being successfully funded.

We've got an updated version of puppet shows in Shadowplays, which is an introductory Delta Green scenario written by Adam Scott Clancy. Along with a short campaign called A New Age, a scenario like Dead Letter and a Night on Owlshead Mountain, Grace Under Pressure, Art F pressure, artifact zero holy war and some king and yellow related materials well. Finally additional source books are coming one of which is the millennium which will feature profiles of everything from Pisces, the UK, counterpart to delta green and GRUSV8, the Russian counterpart, to phanomenx and the destacks. There's also machinations,

incursions, shotgun scenarios, legacies, transcendence, and agencies. So a whole hell of a lot more to look forward to from the folks in our dreams. It's gonna be great. Also in August, two new scenarios were released from the dust and presence. From the dust is about agents investigating the disappearance of children and the strange reports about the nearby garrison mansion. If you check out the cover artwork, you might recognize a familiar furry face as it seems brown jankin will make an appearance. Lovecraft of Fisianados will recognize brown jankin from the story dreams in the witch house. He is a rat with a man's face and I assume you get to shoot a gun at him. So sounds awesome.

Thank you, Frost. Thank you, Frost. A presence on the other hand, centers around the unnatural disappearance and reappearance of a young woman from Alabama, who turns up in New England in an instant. Judging from the cover art and the flavor text provided, I'm gonna make a guess and say that it probably involves either Shubnigerath or maybe the Migo, you know, mentions the dark woods and

that kind of stuff. So that's my guess. Yeah, I'm going to take that, go to a thousand young bet for sure. Before the release of From the Dust and Presence, there was convergence, which, fun fact, was the first Delta Green scenario ever published that recently got a refund better re-release as well. Now, you may have missed Drive-Thru RPG's cosmic horror sale last month, which was 25% off Eldritch Horror Games, including Delta Green. But fear not, because bundleofholding.com is here with an even better deal. For $7.95, you can get the agent mega collection containing PDFs of the agent's handbook, the complex, which is, you know, more organizations that your agents can come from, and a bunch of agent dossiers. If you pay more than the

current threshold price of $38.19, and you will level up and receive nine additional titles in their handler mega collection, including the handler's guide, the conspiracy, the labyrinth, iconoclasts, and impossible landscapes, static protocol, arc int and the handler's screen. I mean, I can't imagine anybody who's on the fence about getting into Delta Green. This is the way to get in. I mean, a possible landscape alone is worth that price, in my opinion. The sale is going on until about September 24th, so don't miss out.

The link is bundleofholding.com forward slash presence, forward slash DG mega. And for the future, we will hear at the dead drop, keep an eye out for any upcoming sales and try to warn you ahead of time in those future episodes. Then speaking of new releases, new products, our dream has graced us with new Delta Green merchandise. Yes, yes, we have got a Delta Green Challenge coin that was released in August. It's a solid metal coin, 1.75 inches in diameter with a green Delta opposite the unofficial popular program motto, CNT-Mores-S. Five days later, we got a 3-inch sew-on patch for Ennero Delta with the motto Supra et Ultra, which is above and beyond in Latin.

That was released as well. You can pick those up plus a lot more great Delta Green swag by going to shop.nourgreen.com. Probably their best merch or date though. Just came out I think a couple of days ago. A bright pink shirt that reads Delta Green and the famous Barbie fun. And on the back reads, do you ever think about death?

That is an absolutely genius marketing move on the part of our dream. Yeah, it really is. I already know patrons and folks in the community that have immediately gotten bought it. It was such a good idea. Personally, I'm kind of waiting till it cools down again in the fall. I think I'm going to pick up that sweet Delta Green Ray jacket that they have. Well, folks, that's the news for now. Vince, what do you say we get to talking about a scenario? Let's do it. So Sergio, you and I have both run the scenario that we're going to talk about today and I think we have a lot to say about it, which is why we've chosen it as one of the first ones to really

discuss in detail. For those listening, you want to avoid spoilers, skip to the timeline chapter, green box, retrospective. So, the scenario we're going to discuss is reverberations. And correct if I'm wrong Vince, it's in the Night of the Opera, right, the book? It is. I think it's the very first scenario in the Night of the Opera scenario collection. So the scenario revolves around agents investigating a 90s rave drug called reverb.

It's back on the streets, better and stronger than ever. Now, its users and dealers have started vanishing. The agents need to identify and stop the source of the unnatural drug before it's too late. I first want to get into the pros about this scenario talking to you and then we'll get into a little bit more of the nuance of it. You know, when I first ran it, the thing that I really appreciated about reverberations is that it's a really detailed guide to running just a procedural drug investigation. It has all of the pieces, all of the characters, all of the clues that you need to tell a compelling

and realistic story. And even though I altered a lot about the narrative, I do believe I stayed true to the facts that were presented within the scenario and it helped. With me, one of the big pros I think with this scenario is that it can serve as a great inciting incident for agents that have not yet been re-fruited into Delta Green. You know, it can really start off as just a traditional law enforcement investigation and your players can start off as just run of the mill

federal agents, cops assigned to this task force that are slowly but surely drawn into the unnatural from there through reverb and the effect it has on those who consume it. You know, you ran a night at the opera just kind of going through those scenarios. I did not, you know, I don't own the book, I had the scenario itself. And I never really thought that I think you're completely right.

Starting it as an inception scenario is a great idea. I never really thought about that. But it has all those trappings because most of it is rather mundane. It's a regular kind of investigation and really only towards the end does it start to get into the unnatural territory. Exactly, ma'am. Now there are some cons with this scenario.

It's been discussed at length online and so I don't think we're necessarily trading new ground here, but in my opinion, I think the challenge with the scenario is that it needs a little bit more of a vocative setting. I believe in the scenario, it starts in Chicago, or that's the default setting for it. And Chicago has a very rich history and is a very beautiful city and an interesting place. And I think you could run a really great reverberations campaign or or scenario set in Chicago, but something about it seems to just not quite be as evocative as as as other scenario settings

The other problem is the antagonist is a little problematic As you start to read you find out that the cho cho the infamous Chinese I think they're Chinese or kind of distantly Vietnamese. They're kind of dissonally related to Vietnamese, but they're really just kind of like evil people. But the problem is that they're not quite as interesting as let's say the deep ones, where at least you get to see kind of an interesting transformation in the deep ones, and there's that really fucked up life cycle that the deep ones have. But the Choczo just have all this baggage of labeling a race of people is evil. So I think that's one of the challenges when you approach this scenario.

It's funny you mentioned that. One of the interesting things I ran into when I ran it was, I believe Chicago had come up previously because when I started running my own campaign on Black Project, we'd started off with sweetness, and that ended up in Chicago as well. So I wanted to mix it up, and rather than set reverberations in Chicago, I moved into Los Angeles. And I feel like it really fit that city better than necessarily Chicago. I think Los Angeles is such an ethnic melting pot, cultural melting pot. It's a great spot for that type of scenario.

Yeah, I completely agree with you about the Cho Cho man. It's definitely one of those areas that you've got to handle delicately, especially if you have in done lines and veils or any kind of safety check-ins with your players. It could be one of those areas where that inherent sometimes veiled, sometimes not racism of lovecraft's fiction, can come to the fore a little bit more than you might like it to. So definitely kind of step carefully around that particular subject matter. Right, and I don't think the people at Arc Dream, you know, the devs at Arc Dream intended for this, this is, it's just kind of shakes out that way, especially as, you know, time passes and we just see the way that media can be skewed, the opinions

of minority groups can be skewed or used in a negative light. I think that, like I said earlier, the deep ones can be from anywhere, they can be anybody and they become something else, they become much more alien. Ultimately, the Cho Cho are at their heart, just worshippers of Nearlitho-Tep, you know, in his many forms, I think, in this case, it's the Black Buddha. So this kind of brings us to some of the changes that we would recommend.

For me, it was important to me to select a compelling backdrop and it happened to be Devil's Night 1984 in Detroit. Now Detroit is obviously an off-ocketed setting just because Detroit has so much history, so many ups and downs and you add on to it making it a time period, a 1984 or a period piece. And then on top of that you add the complication of a situation where folks were randomly setting fires, not long before Halloween in Detroit, aka Devil's Night. This is something that really happened. Just adding that little wrinkle to it gave it a little bit more of an atmosphere and made the players just feel like it was...

There was more on the line, right? If they weren't going to get caught by the antagonist, they might get caught in a fire or something like that. It just kind of really upped the ante. Also, the antagonist, I decided to change it from the Cho Cho to the fate, or Steven LZ's. We know that in the 80s, the fate were still around. In the more modern version they're kind of gone from, they've been all been, you know, kind of eliminated. But I thought the fate were a compelling enemy because they didn't have the messiness of the Cho-Cho, but it made sense that they might be trafficking drugs. In the actual version of the scenario, reverberations, there's one single line that actually links

the whole thing to the fate. And it's something that most players wouldn't find. I believe that there's a VHS that one of the characters that they meet throws out a window, and if the players are smart enough to go and investigate a dumpster, you know, outside of the building that this character is in, they find this VHS and on the VHS,

they see somebody enter the building and give some reverb to the main antagonist, Spider-Jay. It's quite easy. You know, one of the main NPCs. So when I read that I realized oh all of this goes back to the fate and even though it's written in a time where maybe the fate aren't as prevalent or relevant, they are also Nearlathotepe worshipers adjacent. You know we as Zee's is heavily implied to be an avatar of me or a thotep, but I thought, okay, maybe I can take out the Cho Cho and put in the fate and it started just kind of the wheels turning

in my head about why? Why would the fate be selling drugs in Detroit that ultimately if you take too much of the drug, you get, you know, snapped out of existence by a hound of the angles. And then I made the connection that, well, maybe the fate are trying to eliminate the competition in Detroit. And what an easy way you release into the city this drug that if you take too much of it, like a dealer might or people who are involved with the the drug world of Detroit, they start disappearing and then the fate could move in. This is obviously heavy spoilers for my Doom to repeat campaign the first season. But I thought that that was kind of a motivation that made sense to me and was a good way to take out the Cho Cho and put in a different enemy. I also added

a ghoul, Tanika, which is supposed to be Spider-Jay's girlfriend. I made her a ghoul and a kind of go-between between the fate and Spider-Jay, almost like she was helping them, kind of bring it in and for a price. And I also added Deborah Constance, who we all know eventually becomes Asian Nancy, I thought, because Doom to repeat is so much about the history of the organization, Delta Green, et cetera. I thought it was important to bring her in. She eventually became more of a character

as the seasons went on. Those were some of the changes I made. Obviously a lot of these are very extreme, but I think they work for me and I think that it's okay because like we said in the beginning, there's so many good clues and facts in the scenario that you could completely take it apart and put it back together again in a new scenario and it'll still work, a new situation I mean. Absolutely.

I completely agree, though, the way you kind of did that yourself worked brilliantly, and that's a great example of what you can do with the various leads that Shane IV is kind of written to the scenario. So my suggestions would be, I've ran it pretty much as written, but if you're looking to kind of flesh it out, definitely consider introducing corrupt cops, you know, corrupt law enforcement as an angle, maybe even as dealers themselves, along with the recommended rival gangs that are in there, or community reporters that are chasing a story. When meeting members of the local Cho Cho community, I would just consider making them just Vietnamese instead. And you know, because especially if you want to, you know, your hard set on having the Cho Cho be included, you know, have the, you know, the wider

Vietnamese community, but then have the Cho Cho be some kind of like radical cult that the others view with with disdain and distrust. And it's, it's viewed as a radical faction or split group that is that is not legitimate in the eyes of the wider Vietnamese community. I'd also even make the local advocacy alliance group and actual legitimate Southeast Asian rights organization that has possibly been infiltrated or co-opted by the coal. Bottom line, just take steps to ensure that they'll take an entire ethnic group

unnaturally tainted or not. And highlight the fact that this is an offshoot that is neither supported by nor representative of the local community. That's really the best way to solve it. Without, you know, if you don't want to do a bunch of work and put this in a new setting and, you know, have all new characters and stuff like that, that really is the best advice. Just make it clear, there's a clear delineation.

The other thing that I might recommend is, you know, consider making some of the characters friendly. That's something that I did because it was set in 1984. There was technically only supposed to be three agents, but I had six players, so I made three of them agents and part of F-cell, I think, was the one that I chose. And then the other three players were friendlies. And that created a really interesting dynamic, which actually brings me to a realization of mine, and that is that be careful to not have the players be too antagonistic towards

each other. I had been intending for my run of reverberations to be about three sessions, maybe four sessions, and I think it turned into like seven total sessions. That was a doozy. One of the reasons why is because I set up a kind of antagonistic relationship between the agents and the friendlies where multiple episodes were needed to kind of resolve these tensions between them. And so that really drew things out. If you want to run a longer scenario, that's fine. And I would say take that advice where maybe there's a little bit of interpersonal stuff that the players need to

get over and deal with in-game. But if you're not interested in that and you want to run a tighter game, make it clear to the players that you are all working together and this needs to be a team effort. Otherwise, it's going to take a lot longer. Absolutely. I just thought about that as we were working on this episode I was thinking about. Oh yeah, wow, that may have been my fault that it took so long to get through it. It was still very satisfying and fun, but a good tip I think. Absolutely, yeah. And in fact, the friendly angles, one I think is a good one to recommend and kind of touch

on is that if you are dealing with a larger group of players, like a lot of first time Delta Green groups seemed to run into, you know, you got a lot of folks that are being introduced to it from games like D&D where you've got larger parties and everybody wants to try it, everybody wants to play. So you got a larger group. You know, if you don't make them all law enforcement, definitely consider introducing those friendly.

So right, your anthropologists, your historians, your scientists, you know, folks who aren't necessarily government employees or full fledged members of the conspiracy, but you know, are to use the phrase useful idiots to the program. Yeah, definitely. That's always a good piece of advice. And just take the opportunity to make it something special, especially this is going to be the first scenario that you're running for your folks. Yeah. Additional tips that I would throw out there. Eventually, the players will get to the kind of penultimate scene

I think that the entire scenario is kind of built around this where they interact and they witness the hound of the angles come out of spider jays eye the corner of this eye You know this is I think good advice for all of Delta Green, but don't go into too much specific detail about the hound. If you want it to be scary, don't really describe it as even a hound. Describe the complexity of the shards of reality as I described it, and the way it would steal reflections and the weird noises it makes. And maybe imply a little bit of animalistic nature,

certainly to threaten the players so that they get the hell out of there so it doesn't destroy all of them. But I think less is more when it comes to describing the unnatural and really find weird ways of describing the hound. And maybe even this works for reverb as well. If any of the players take reverb as many of them, I think, will want to really make it

weird, make it a strange experience. I believe that there's examples even listed in the scenario of things that Spider-Jake could describe as he's experiencing this overdose of reverb. You know, take those and play with those and use those to inform your own players' visions if they do decide to sample the product, so to speak. This scenario is so much about the city that you're in that you really want the players to feel

like they're connected to the city somehow. They all need to be either from it or intimately involved with it somehow. You don't want to bring characters from out of state or if they do come from out of state there's something that's grounding them to the city because I think it raises the stakes. Especially if you're gonna be using it as as kind of an inciting incident to bring new agents into Delta Green. If you're dealing with

like a narcotics task force that's been organized specifically to look into this. These are all local cops who have grown up and worked in Chicago. These are all federal agents who have been assigned to Chicago for however long and have made it their home. So there's definitely, yeah, definitely have those connections there, especially if there's gonna be your first outing

as a cell or as a working group. There's something interesting where SpiderJay is kind of the source of all of this, but you gotta get to SpiderJay first. So there's a little bit of a controlling of information that the handler needs to do, because there's probably a lot of NPCs that have interacted with or no SpiderJay,

but you'll kind of spoil things if you don't meet or out that information a little bit. So if they speak to dealers on the street, if they talk, you know, there's a whole interview section where you can go to the police station and interview folks, really control that and don't let it out too soon that Spider-Jays is the source. Or if you do, just, you know, make the next challenge figuring out where spider jay can be found. I mean if you're dealing with the local gang culture and so on and so forth these are people who are this will not be their first run in the belong force and they are seasoned

telling police to go fuck themselves. So play that up. These are not people who talk. These are not people who snitch. And so if your agents are trying to get information out of them, they better come with either a sweet enough deal or with enough pressure and leverage to get at that. So then that can introduce a whole other angle in and of itself to kind of expound upon the boundaries of this scenario.

So when I first read the scenario, I also realized it doesn't have much of an ending, right? So there's the big climactic reveal of the hound and then the players run for their lives and hopefully they survive. But once that happens, I feel like some handlers might not know how to bring things to a resolution.

I'd like to hear from you how you did that and I could talk a little bit about how I did that. Yeah, to be honest with you, I really did. It was just one of those things that we just kind of left hanging. They met these, it was kind of an early lesson and do only what your handler tells you, your case officer tells you and go no further.

Do only what has been requested of you. And that's it. You know, this is not exactly a profession made for, you know, going outside the bounds of a given operation. But, you know, talking with you and kind of seeing how you've incorporated various elements, specifically like the fate. I mean, the handler's guide has a lot of great information on

where the feat is today. So if you're running a modern day scenario, feel free to turn this into the first scenario in a fake campaign, either in a resurgence or some kind of, these fate hangar rounds that are trying to restore the organization to its former glory and the wake of Stephen L. Z. as disappearance, the cult's destruction,

what have you? Or any other insert organization here. It could be a great introductory scenario to just follow that chain of dealers, suppliers, buyers, etc. all the way to some suitably unnatural and terrible conclusions. If you are a bit of a completionist though, or you do want something satisfying, what I basically did was the players learned that Spider-J was the distributor, but he wasn't necessarily the source.

You know, the way that the scenario describes it. I think the scenario describes it. He went to Asia, possibly Vietnam, and he got the loud, the scenario describes it. I think the scenario describes it. He went to Asia, possibly Vietnam, and he got the Lalle, the Black Lotus, from that area. I modified it a little bit where he was getting it from the fate. And so when the players learned that, they realized, okay, the source of this is in town. I laid clues for them to learn that they're in town for one night to drop off some drugs for Spider-J Have a connection with Tanika who like I said was it was a ghoul and they were kind of working together

So the players learned this and they decided to kind of do something about this I think there was also an artifact a crystal which was relevant in the doom-to-repeat modern relevant in the Doom to repeat modern scenario, which by the way that that crystal was pulled from the green box generator. I don't know if you've ever messed with that. Oh no shit. But there's that great green box generator and one of the options was this crystal that was created by the not the me go, but the the the elder things. Yeah, okay. So it was an elder thing way of increasing your power score. The fate wanted that or they were trading it to Taniika. The point is is that it gave the player something to bring the story to a resolution about.

They got the crystal, although some of them died, but at least they were able to stop the fate from cementing themselves into Detroit, and at least brought things to a satisfying conclusion. That's maybe a little bit of advice in case you do want to take into a route where it feels like there's an end to the scenario. Absolutely, that's great advice. Yeah, I like that. Thank you. I think this is a great scenario. I know that there is some criticism online about reverberations But I really agree with you that this is a great possible a first scenario for new players new agents and it makes sense that it's one of the first in a night at the opera because they probably thought the same way

Oh, yeah, it's definitely up there with one of the the better introductory scenarios You know, of course last things last is the one that everybody thinks of and recommends for good reason It's a oldie but goodie and it does what it does very well This is another great one. Not even our new sweetness to a certain extent You know, there's a lot of great ones out there and and What's phenomenal though is that the the writers do such an amazing job with these scenarios that they give you a great framework That if you decide to tear the walls down to the studs, you've got more than enough to rebuild something in your own image and what fits your group of players in your

campaign. It's important to remember that for every great tabletop game, there is also the community rallying behind it, playing the game and spreading the good news. In our modern age, when playing in person is tough or downright not possible, we use Discord servers and websites that connect us to strangers so we can all play these games together. But before 2016, Delta Green fans had to find other ways of keeping the game alive. The Shotgun scenario contest, the Fairfield website and the Delta Green mailing list are much more so than anything I did without the opera.

What made Delta Green what it is today, they are the ones who kept interest in the game alive in the period in between the release of the older flatbooks for Colock and Felu and the present day edition. That's Max Nelson. He's known in the community as the prolific scenario author, Melanbred. He's also the creator of the Night of the Opera Discord, which has been running since 2016,

and has become the number one place to meet up and run Delta Green games. It has, it's more popular than the official Delta Green Discord. And that's Will Roy, Max's friend, who joined the site to play Delta Green and eventually became the editor and producer of a podcast born from an influence by the Discord. We did a pilot episode for Abnite at the Opera, just with the original title. I wanted to draw a line between our show and the Discord server of which we remembered. It's not out of any distinct for the community, I love the community. It's because I wanted the Greenbox to be the show that the five of us made because we wanted to make it. We'll get back to the distinction between the show and the Discord, but the Greenbox

podcast was produced from 2016 to 2020 by Will Roy, Max Nelson, Jake Cook, and Kevin Ham. I'm Jake, and my role on the Greenbox was that I was a co-host and very, very occasional audio producer, but more often than that I was an audio problem. My name's Kevin, I'm a live online nobody, I'm a hand-out to the one, 004. I'm a freelance photographer, I'm doing the Maps for Delta Green for about four years or so. And then I was I was a member of the Greenbacks podcast, one of five. The show had other contributors like Tom is the Paulo and a user named Dol. And usually most discussions centered around how to successfully run Delta Green.

That's pretty much the most discussed topic on the Greenbox was how to put the clues together because it's something that's difficult in RPGs, it's something that publishes and struggles with it, it runs the game, struggles with, and it's the cause of the most frustration because if you get stuck, then you're going to come away with a negative affect towards the game, which is not what we don't want. Like the Discord, the podcast grew in popularity amongst Delta Green players. We kind of had a captive audience, so everybody from the Discord tended to listen, or people who want to listen to Delta Green podcasts, certainly every time we would post an

episode we'd see it, because we would post it on the Discord, we would post it on the Facebook like Delta Green Street team. Those areas, you know, the night of the apperserver, the PGML and the Facebook, that's probably that's 95% of Delta Green players worldwide who want to be engaged. So people who came to Delta Green were also like podcasts, were obvious easy listeners. Now we have to remember that back in 2016 when Max first started the night at the opera discord, the Delta Green Kickstarter had just been funded, and the game in its modern iteration was still very new. It started as a call of cthulhu supplement that had grown in that grassroots popularity

through the 80s, the 90s, early arts. Now Delta Green is this multi-award-winning tabletop role-playing game that's played all over the world. Well Max started it, which is funny because if I remember, I'm the guy who got Max on Delta Green. So there's a little bit of chicken in the egg there. The first person I played Delta Green with was Will. He told me all about how great Delta Green was,

the new standalone edition. And my understanding of Delta Green at that time was that it was like the worst parts of the X-Files, the conspirator, the metapod that everyone hated. A game that Will ran for us that time was that it was like the worst parts of the X-Files, you know, the conspiracumetoplata that are to be hated. A game that will ran for us that I was introduced to Delta Green and I ended up enjoying it enough that I was compelled to start writing my own material for it. And start writing he did. There is currently a nine-page PDF available containing dozens upon dozens of hyperlinks to Max's scenarios and PCs, artifacts, and all the other great ideas that spilled out of his head while he was inspired by the game.

We have a link to it in the description below. What about Jake and Kevin, though? How did they find the server? I was looking for games online and I came across the Oarslash night of the opera. I got on there like pretty early on. I think I've played in some of the first games that were there, maybe the fourth or fifth game there that Melon bread ran. And I stuck around because it was a place full of like-minded people who were interested in this thing game, right? Everybody there was you know playing games, writing stuff, talking about the games, talking about the old games, like the community was pretty good. By the nature of the fact that most people who were in Delta Green tend to have, you know, the tend to be interested in modern

law enforcement and modern military stuff, or history, the mythos and stuff. So there's the, you know, the Van diagram was very much a circle, a circle for a lot of things. So we have a bunch of gamers who join the server, run games for each other, begin a stranger and in the process become friends. And one day, one of them has a bright idea. I guess the inception of the Greenbox, Kevin came to me and Max and said, something to the effect of D. Guys, I want to do a podcast. The Greenbuck started mainly just because the group of us who started like talking about Delta Green, we were like, well, we should, we're talking about it all the damn time, you know, on Discord, so we may as well, you know, and people seem to enjoy the conversation. So why not, you know,

record it and see. So when we started, we basically said, hey, let's record 10 episodes and just see if anybody gives a hoot. 10 episodes came and went. And before any of them could really even consider what they were doing, they were producing a podcast. I'm not really sure what I intended with the show. It was sort of a project that fell into my lap and I thought would be fun to do.

I remember initially it was supposed to be kind of open to everyone at the community. If you could get three people to get together and talk about something that was what the goal was initially. The initial room full of people got winnowed down as do the scheduling issues because once you get beyond like four or five people, it's very difficult to pick a regular recording time. They just kind of took off after that. The team not only discussed how to run the game, but they also began highlighting the creative work

that was being produced by the community in the form of the Shotgun Scenario Contests. The first contest thing that we ever did was of course the Shotgun scenario contest because at the time that we started the Greenbox, the Shotgun scenario contest was the Delta Green event, right? That was it. That was all it was.

Up until recently, the Shotgun scenario contest has not been administered by the Knight of the Opera Discord. It was administered by the Delta Green mailing list. Ed Possing is the one who took it upon himself to run that and now it's run by Kevin Ham. So Vince remember earlier when I said we'd get back to the distinction between the podcast and the discord? Well much to Will's chagrin, I'm not sure that that line was ever very clearly drawn. We tried to discourage wherever we could if people were like, I came here from the show like alright well we appreciate you like it,

but this is the discord for the whole community. No, it's not just art, you know, it's not our thing. So it would be impossible to separate the two MIIs because so much of what we talked about came from there. It came from the games that we were running, came from the scenarios that people were writing, the contests, and the jams, and all the other collaborative work that was on there. Without the discord, we wouldn't really have had too much to talk about since that's where the majority of our gameplay was coming from, where our experiences were coming from. Which brings us to a running theme that I discovered while interviewing everyone.

A theme highlighted by all of this fan-made creativity that builds upon the mythos lore. In Lovecraft's day, other writers were inspired by his work, and they built upon his dark pantheon. A kind of meta-narrative was born, and it's so cool to see how that sense of collaboration is mirrored by the community. I would like to think that spirit of collaboration and co-authorship is something that has been

shared by the wider, you know, mythos adjacent community. Certainly the guys at Arc Dream seem very, very keen to have other people play in their sandbox, which I cannot say for other people who are right to tabletop RPGs. So major kudos to them. While there are now many actual place that run Delta Green, including the ones that you and I have produced, there has always only been one green box. Well, sure, okay, but there is also another podcast called the Green Box. Okay, correction. One Green Box show. We call it the Green Box podcast, the distinguishing from

other things that are called the Green Box, but the official name of it is just the Greenbox. Regardless of the distinction, the Greenbox Podcast and its team managed to produce a hundred official episodes along with several bonus sessions. I asked them how they worked together over the five years to pull it off. Yeah, and everybody had something that they contributed in their own way. If the Mimbo wasn't like an official sort of responsibility, it's just the way that we all are because we are people, our personalities. We didn't all see eye to eye on everything,

but we could have the discussion about, you know, like I know, we're doing like me and Max, like you know, Max likes to lean into the, we called him the weird and the the the mythos and I, we were the haven't mythos, free adventuring. Neither was it wrong, but weird, a lot of scum and things, different perspectives. When it comes to actually getting the whole recording software stuff set up,

that was all will, will is the one who is our editor. He probably put more actual work into it than maybe the rest of us combined, but it was really more than I did. Kevin also did a lot of the guest wrangling, we had a guest on it. It was like nine times that a tenant was Kevin who arranged that.

Working as a government for as long as he has, I guess it kind of ingrained that's sort of like cat wringling. Who's available to record? What are we talking about? Like that was him, he'd always just kind of like kick our butts to try and, you know, whip us into shape like that. And much of the actual content work of the things that we talked about.

Most of that was Max, Jake, and Tom. And I think Tom was the one, he was sort of like the heart of the team because Tom was the one who, when we were at our most venomous, was like, I don't know that, maybe, maybe remember that this is something that you're doing because you need to do it. So act like it. And that's really valuable, even though you don't realize it at the time. You know, I'm curious, which of their hundred episodes do you think they'd recommend to a new listener?

I like all of our, I think all of our interviews are great, all of our interviews are super fun. One of the things I love about Dell Screen is that the devs are super accessible. They, I don't think I've ever heard of them refusing to go on somebody's show and talk because they're like me, they like to talk about themselves and they like to talk about their work. We love the game. They love the game and we just get to nerd out together. The one that I always point people to is Episode 36 where we had, we made the mistake of inviting

Scott Glantzion to talk at us at length. I joke, but Glantz is wonderful. He is a great guest because you don't have to do any work. He just does a lot of work for you. Episode 40, that is where we followed the advice of writing the scenario. Like at the back of the Dullthor Green Handlers Guide, they have like nine steps to help you write a scenario. We did that.

Those episodes, I think, are fun because I get to do Ascenario Development with my pals and test all of these hypotheses that we're seeing here. Like, this is the way fall of Delta Green recommends you build a snare. This is the way the agents handbook and the handlers guide recommend you do it. This is the way I personally do it. The other one that is my personal favorite, just because I love the subject matter, is Deshaavu. That is about the Groundhog Day scenarios, time loop scenarios, I love those. And what they mean for like your agents, you know, what kind of growth your agent might experience or I guess decay ultimately in the Intel Supreme, because you only lose sanity and never goes up. Then go through our list and find something, you know, we have episodes on,

like if you find, if you find in your home game that you're not great at briefings or you're not great at, you know, home scenes, and we talk about those, find that episode. But start with either a Shane Ivy interview, Glancy or Chris Gunning. Chris Gunning was a lot of fun. He's a really good dude and Shane, like we did, there was a double episode. And we just talk about all the fun stuff he's working on and how we got into Delta Green and fun stories about the industry and stuff.

So that's where I would start with the interviews. Listen, if joining a game or running Delta Green sounds like fun to you, you absolutely need to join the night at the Opera Discord. We do have a link to it in the description below. Like what you can find there now, it's like that event channel is popping. They are running games every day, every other day there,

and not just like, filtering in other game systems. And the thing that I love to see is that when I go on that website now, there's a whole cohort of regular players that play regularly. And that's like a mirror universe version of the like six or 10 people who schedules lined up that I used to play with five years ago. And so that makes me super happy to see that there's,

there's a whole other generation of players and handlers on there. Well, as a fan of the show, it was a real treat for me to interview Will, Max, Kevin and Jake. They just could not have been nicer people. I had to end our conversation, though, asking them what effect, if any, they think the show's legacy has had on the Delta Green community. It would be nice to think that we had an influence on the wider community. I don't know that we ever really did.

And to be honest, I never wanted to really tell anybody, this is the one true way to run Delta Green. Like it was, I always came at everyone's perspective of, here's, here's how I do it. Here's why I do it this way. Here's what works for me. Take what you want, leave what you know, right? In theory, in five to five years, 10 years, whatever, how to write a scenario or how to do a good briefing, that should fill the relevance. I hope we'll get stuff out of it you know as long as it stays on the internet. For a while we were probably like the primary like source of tips and advice for one of the game.

There's always been that that strong adult engineering community maybe like night of the operas just like the latest carnation of it. Sir, did you did a great job talking to him interviewing him? It was really great to learn more about them. And let me just take this opportunity, if you don't mind, to guys I hope you're listening, to really just extend my most heartfelt thanks to you

for everything you've done to support the Delta Green community, to get it to where it is today. I really thank you, played a more instrumental role than maybe you're willing to acknowledge and spreading that gospel of Delta Green. So really from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for everything you've done. If you wanna hear more about how the show started,

the team's interactions with Arc Dream, some of the lessons they learned producing the show, funny behind the scene stories, great advice from some of the team, and a lot more, I suggest you subscribe to our Patreon, where we are offering over 15 minutes of extended interviews.

Well folks, that is it for our first official monthly episode. We'll be back on the second Friday of next month and every month after that with the latest Delta Green News, scenario discussions and a whole hell of a lot more. Thanks for tuning in guys. Don't forget to check out our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash maybe our P. We lovecom forward slash madeyrp. We love your support, we love getting questions. I don't know about you, sir, that's something I would absolutely love to see as suggestions for future discussion topics.

Oh, that's a good idea, for sure. Future discussion topics, let us know what you want us to talk about. That'd be great. But until next time, stay safe everyone, and as always, we will be seeing you. Bye, guys. next time, stay safe everyone, and as always, we will be seeing you. Bye, guys.