Mayday Plays - 🕳️The Dead Drop | "The Guns of Delta Green" | August 2024

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

Join Vince and Sergio as they dive into a discussion with Shane Ivey, co-creator of Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game and the driving force behind Arc Dream Publishing. They explore the latest scenario collection, Dead Drops, with insights into Vince's contributions, while also delving into the challenges of indie publishing, Shane's unique approach to scenario design, and the potential future directions of Delta Green. Plus, don't miss Vince's newest standout handout: The Guns of Delta Green, a must-have primer for agents and handlers looking to enhance their roleplaying as firearms specialists. The Patreon version of this episode contains over 1 hour of additional content including more answers from Shane and the complete overview of Vince's handout. 💵 Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/maydayrp The Guns of Delta Green (available in PDF and Powerpoint formats) PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MMvuKuEEWCnWSzfkYvoS1gSIk8DKEGh8/view?usp=sharing PPTX: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RwOvu9hsXRT2OsvU9j9sY57j_IMZhlyB/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=101974132502999458750&rtpof=true&sd=true Investigations 101 https://www.patreon.com/posts/investigations-106715350?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link -- 👕 MERCH: http://ko-fi.com/maydayrp & https://mayday-merch.printify.me/products 📰 Join our newsletter: eepurl.com/iIVUjo 🎙 Listen to us: 🟣 Apple Podcasts : https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mayd…ys/id1537347277 🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5vdTgXoqpSpMssSP9Vka3Z?si=97a6a19d71cf4be0 🟠 Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/mayday-roleplay 🌟 Other Socials 🌟 🐦 Twitter: http://twitter.com/maydayroleplay 📸 Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/maydayrp/ 🔴 Website: http://maydayroleplay.com/ 🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@maydayroleplay 👾 Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/maydayroleplay 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maydayrp Thanks for your support!

Hello and welcome. Thanks for joining us. My name is Sergio. I'm the handler for Mayday's Doom to Repeat campaign. And with me as always, and this isn't even really a joke this time, the newest published author of Delta Green content, it's Black Project Gaming's Vince. Congratulations, pal. Oh man. Thank you so much, man. I really appreciate that. For anyone unaware, in the latest scenario collection, Dead Drops, Art Dream published a profile I wrote discussing the Air Force Office Special Investigations, a huge honor, huge privilege to be included in this.

And in this episode, we're actually going to be talking to Shane Ivy about the scenario collection, his experience as a publisher and how I got involved. We've also prepped a segment I'm calling The Guns of Delta Green, where we will break down what players and handlers need to know to effectively role play experienced firearms specialists.

So much fun stuff to talk about. If you enjoy the show, make sure to like and subscribe, leave a review for us on Spotify or Apple podcasts, or leave a comment below. Now, you might think that it is impossible to combine the titles of every scenario found within Dead Drops, but in the presence of Jack Frost, Meridian emerged from the dust, a victim of the art, a victim who found the dead drop. You see what I did there, Vince? Hard not to. Absolutely brilliant. Well played, sir. Well played.

Got to contribute where I can. Love it. Now, let's get down to business. Our very special guest today has worked for Pagan Publishing and then later revived the magazine The Unspeakable Oath in 2010. Edited and published games including Monsters and other childish things, Wild Talents, Puppet Land, and Better Angels, contributed to several books for Cubicle 7's The One Ring, co-wrote Delta Green the Role Playing Game, and has co-wrote and published over 34 books in the award winning Delta Green line.

The publisher and managing editor of ArcGreen Publishing, the one, the only, Shane Ivey. Nice to have you on, sir. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Now, Shane, I do have to point out that there is an elephant in the room, which is that our show, which started about a year ago,

is called The Dead Drop, and you just released a scenario collection called Dead Drops. Is this just a coincidence, or is this your way of signaling you're a big fan of the show? Oh yeah, mostly coincidence, unfortunately. There's only so many kind of ominous sounding trade crafty phrases out there, so pretty

soon we're going to have to start recycling them, you know, or come up with some that are really stretches. Well speaking of these collections, there's been A Night at the Opera, there's been Control Group, Black Sites, and now Dead Drops. Could you talk to us about the decision-making process that goes into choosing which scenarios should go together in a collection like this? Oh, there's virtually no process at all. I mean, we basically, when we discover

that we've published enough standalone scenarios that aren't going somewhere else, then it occurs to us, oh, we could put those in a book and we put them in a book. So, you know, like, I mean, a victim of the art, for instance, we originally, up until about three months ago, we had dead drops laid out, perfectly squared away. And then somebody asked about a victim of the art.

And it wasn't until then that I realized we'd never even put that in a collection. So I kind of got our layout artists to shoehorn that in at the last minute. So I think now we're all caught up on our published scenarios being, you know, being collected. But it's very ad hoc. Yeah. Love it. Yeah.

And I guess that kind of answers the question then there's is there really a running theme that you perceive between these scenarios? I'm guessing not. Not usually, no. And on the standalone ones now, I mean, we're we tend to be very driven that you perceive between these scenarios? I'm guessing not. Not usually, no. And on the standalone ones, no. I mean, we tend to be very driven by just whatever occurs to us at the moment

as seeming interesting and awesome and weird. Well, I suppose you could say A Night at the Opera was all about scenarios that work well as opening scenarios for campaigns and whatnot. Yeah, yeah. And again, that wasn't the plan. That was just that was the first whatever four or five adventures that we published for the role playing game. So that so so I think it was kind of inevitable that they would a lot of them have kind of a an easy way in to playing. an easy way into playing. Alright, so the scenario collections have absolutely no order or sense to them whatsoever, but what about the cover design?

Now, you know, there's very specific art for all of these collections. What's the process when you're designing the cover art? Nothing. I just take whatever Dennis draws, and, you know, if I think it could maybe be improved, then I'll say something. But that's maybe one book out of 10. He has good instincts. So most of the time, we just take what he uses

and put it on a book. And then when we put it on the cover, and we have to put the logo on and all those elements you know there's about half the time he has to sort of redraw it or add add to it or something like that because it needs to come you know the main body of the image needs to come down about two inches that he didn't remember to add but yeah it's it's the process is just hey hey, we're gonna need a cover for this book. Okay. So Dead Drops just, you know, like you just said, you said we need a cover and this is what he gave you. Yeah, again, we kind of work, we most of the time just

work from inspiration more than planning. And yeah, I mean, spoiler alert, the cover for Dead Drops has nothing whatsoever to do with any scenario inside it. Got it. Well, there goes another question we were going to ask. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, there's a lot of- It made me think maybe it needs another adventure that's about, you know, the giant thing coming up out of the ocean, but god,

that would be a lot of work. So let's just leave it a mystery. Right. You know, it does kind of speak to, we have spoken to Dennis before, and he has mentioned that you guys are very in sync about what Delta Green is, and maybe this is an example of, you don't even have to talk about it.

It just works. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we've all, me and Dennis and John Tines and Scott Glancy, I mean, we've all, me and Dennis and John Tynes and Scott Glancy, I mean, we've all been working on this for so long that it's, yeah, it's kind of second nature, you know, so we've developed a lot of shorthands that, you know, don't require a lot of conversation

or socializing or human interaction. Well, then I have to ask about a certain section of Dead Drops, which is that Vince is involved with it. He I guess he was able to write a section about how did that participation come about? Yeah, I mean, I think Vince might remember more than me, but I think it was maybe we were, maybe I had mentioned something about OSI, Air Force OSI on social media or something and was wanting to thinking that was something we'd never really covered, even though it plays kind of a large part in the lore of Delta Green when you start digging. And so yeah, I kind of, if I remember right,

I heard from him and he said he had some knowledge of that. And you know, if I, if we wanted him to put something together, then he could take a crack at it. And I said, yeah, by all means that sounds amazing. Yeah, it worked out really well. Yeah. I believe that's essentially what happened is OSI had been mentioned somewhere and was like, hey, by the way, I have this thing written because I'd written the profile up at that point.

Oh, okay. Awesome. And I was just like, hey, you want to take a look? And you're like, yeah, this is great. And he came back to me and like, I think we bounced some feedback back and forth, but there was like very few changes. And then he came back and we're like, yeah, we're gonna go ahead and include this in something. I'm like, oh, well, shit. Okay. Yeah, that was awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was great. I mean, it was a terrific write-up. So

that was the, maybe the, you know, if you want extra bragging rights, that was maybe the one time in history that somebody wrote something on spec for Delta Green and we actually used it. So well done. Hey, that's a feather in the cap for sure. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Digging into it a little bit more, you know, what, why, if you could go into detail Shane as to why you thought it was important to include this Air Force OSI information. Oh yeah sure, so the, one of the oldest parts of Delta Green's fictional background is of course the big sprawling majestic UFO conspiracy in the US government.

the big sprawling majestic UFO conspiracy in the US government. And a part of that is the sort of infamous men in black who, before Will Smith made them funny, they were this sort of creepy, these sort of creepy government agents that people said showed up at their doors and said, I'm with the government and never said who they were with. And, you know, threatened all kinds of sorrow and mayhem if they didn't shut up about UFOs. And, and in the end, so in the, in the Delta green history, there's a version of all of that that's real. And the men in black tend to use, tend to work out of the, they work out of as bureaucratic cover, they work out of like the National Reconnaissance Office. But since the NRO's activities are so super secret that's like, you know, the first layer of cover and

then the cover above that is usually Air Force Office of Special Investigations because it's a very, it's a comparatively very small outfit and it has a lot of, from my perspective anyway, fairly easy tie in to what the NRO is doing so you can sort of explain it away and it also their federal law enforcement investigators so they have access they potentially have access to a lot of stuff that other federal agencies are up to and then if you want a layer above that they usually pretend they're with the FBI or something like that, just like, you know, Delta Green sometimes does.

But OSI always was sort of there in the, at a sort of percolating at a low level across all of these events. And it has its own part in real world UFO, Coupe conspiracy theories, right? And this along the same lines. So it was just sort of a natural that we ought to cover it, but we, I don't think we ever had.

So yeah, so it was, it was very cool. And when I, I initially started doing some digging on my own to put together, to put together sort of an overview of how OSI worked back in the 90s for a scenario. And when I was doing that, I was able, through a lot of Googling, this was a couple of years ago so Google still worked, but through a lot of Googling of, you know, what are the different components of OSI and what do they actually do? And that was actually really hard to discover because it's not covered as much as all the, as much as, you know, all the really well-known federal agencies. So, you know, I got the most fun

information I got was from things like PDF flyers and brochures and stuff that OSI supervisors had made to explain to newcomers what each of the departments did, you know, and the stuff that wasn't classified, right, but nobody ever sees it. So anyway, so I kind of discovered all that and found a lot of really interesting things there. And then when, and then when I talked to Benz, you know, he just, he had all the context in the world. So it was awesome.

That's awesome. Man, yeah, that was a lot of fun to work on. And not to beat the dead horse anymore, but like when you look at other federal agencies, right? You look at the Bureau, you look at NCIS, I mean, there's just such a wealth of information out there. And OSI by comparison is relatively small. But in the world of Delta Green with Majestic and like you said the UFO cover-ups projects, all that stuff, it is such an outsized organization with that much more influence. So yeah, I'm glad I was able to...

The fact that it's so small makes it fun as a GM. It makes it fun to It fun to include players, you know, because I can tell them okay, you're with the US Army And they immediately start thinking oh, I'm like you're one of three agents in This you know four-state area of the US of its Air Force bases or something like that You know and there you can sort of see their dreams of glory start to crumble a little bit. Oh yeah. Can you give us any perspective on, you know, now with your decades plus experience with publishing independently, what is it like for independent publishers? What are the realities of being what you guys are in our dream?

It can, it's, it's risky if you're not really careful as with starting any business and there are a lot of things that, of decisions that you have to be able to make and stick to that a lot of people don't like making, right? So the things that, the things that we've had to learn the hard way are things like minimizing the number of people involved. When we do a new project, we don't try to reach out and bring in everybody that we know. You know, like for instance, when you do that, you raise the risk sort of, I don't know, maybe it's exponentially because each risk multiplies by the other risks, but you raise the risk of things getting delayed, right?

Because if you're bringing in 10 people who are all planning on doing a very small chunk, then that small chunk is going to be very low priority for every one of those 10 people. So you have a much higher chance for any one of them to have something come up that they can't deliver or they can't deliver on time, or they deliver something and it turns out to be not what you need and you you have to shift, reassign it or whatever, all of which means that your time scale can really, really go long.

Now, we're certainly nobody to lecture anyone about delivering books on time, but our delays are for other reasons entirely. And if we, if we had, if we, for instance, exacerbated that, right, by having a really large stable of contributors for every single book, then, I mean, God help us, we would never publish anything. You know, I'll say as a consumer, something our dream, I think, has really excelled in is generating and

keeping good faith with its fan base and that if there is going to be a delay, we know that the end product is going to 800% be worth that delay. With every other small publisher, I mean, it's a roll of the dice, right? Sometimes you're going to get these astronomical delays and you'll still end up with a subpar product. I'll speak for myself, but I'm sure sir do feel the same way. We know that if there is a delay, the product that's eventually going to come out from our dream is going to be fricking incredible. So the delays are worth it. And we appreciate it. You don't have to agree with that.

I won't take it personally. You know, I'm a little spoiled as a Delta Green fan because I joined very late. You guys already did the Kickstarter, the initial books were out, so I kind of joined once the ball was rolling. So I haven't quite experienced, only now, some of those delays, but I don't care. I love reading the books over and over again. Oh, thank you. That's always fun to hear.

And yeah, that's not entirely a coincidence. I mean, to some extent, that's always been something that we've worked really hard on is in accounting terms, it's building the value of the goodwill of your product or your company, right? That's it. Yes. But in more human terms, number one, Um, in more human terms, number one, we like being honest with people better than lying to people.

Yeah. We like it better when people are honest with us than when they lie to us. So, um, so we just do try to do it. And, and we, and it helps that yeah that we all work extraordinarily hard to deliver deliver something that nobody besides us is likely to be able to deliver you know that's I mean that and that's not that's not claiming that it's necessarily better than what anybody else is doing. But, you know, there's a reason there's so few of us that we bring in to write for Delta Green

on a regular basis. It kind of has its own very particular themes and approaches and demands. And we've got a team that are all pretty good at doing that and also developing a thick enough skin to not go crazy when they get something that goes way off base and everybody else has to say hey you know that part was kind of stupid you know which all of us have done and oh yeah a healthy discourse at our dream that's good healthy discourse of the scenarios you have written Shane any

of them that stand out to you as a favorite and if so why oh yeah I think my favorite is probably still observer effect Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's, it's, and that's one of the first ones, it may have been the first one that I wrote for the role playing game, proper. Nice. And yeah, funny enough that, I've said before, I think, on an interview, but I first had the idea for that because Pinnacle, the people that do Savage Worlds, they were planning a horror scenario anthology and we were drumming up the RPG and so I talked to the guys and I said, well, how about I put together a Savage savage worlds thing? That's about Delta green and then maybe that'll rope in some of the Savage Worlds players, you know

Yeah, it's a good scenario. And so I started putting it together and It just you know, like ran way way past their deadline and they fired me from that project you know rightly so and continued on and it went on without observer effect, but that freed it up for us to do it right as a Dilted Brain thing. So yeah, I love that scenario because it feels weird and the pacing of it is kind of strange and there's a lot of elements that creep people out. And there's a little bit of this Groundhog Day thing going on in it that I think consistently and makes, sort of, ratchets up tension and suspense and a kind of sense of stakes that,

and then also kind of forces you to sort of experience some of the weird, traumatic things over and over again, but worse, right? So, I don't know. There's a lot going on in that adventure that I'm really happy with. Yeah, and time travel stuff is hard to do on tabletop, so it's a huge success when you can manage to make it work like it does in Observer Effect. Yeah, well, I mean, in Observer Effect, it's very constrained, you know? It's very limited, and you don't have any options of like, well, let's go back only, you know,

let's go back four days instead of two or whatever like that. It's something that's happening to the player characters, not something that they're involved in, which I think helps a lot in skipping over all of those particular pitfalls that you can run into with the time travel adventure. Now Shane, after writing so many scenarios, what do you find inspires you or draws one out of you? What's that inspirational process like for you? Yeah, I just, I don't know, I mean I just read a lot and read the news a lot and I'm interested in, I'm interested in things that I don't understand very well,

right, like really advanced science, physics, and astrophysics, and ancient history, and the ways in which people and the ways in which people over the span of human history have tried to understand the world and things in the world that they couldn't understand, right? Before we had science, you know, we had faith, we had animism, we had this sense that the world itself is something that's alive in ways that you can't see except when a whirlwind starts over there out of nothing, you know, or when a thunderstorm hits. All of which was incredibly potent and people have always been sort of desperate to figure

out what's going on, you know, why is this happening? So anyway, so I read a lot about things like that and I try to sort of stay sensitive to potential weirdness, you know, and potentially weird connections that can form from, you know, one whatever story to another. So, I mean, you don't have um too many articles about um about physics or biology uh before it advances in them before things crop up that are going to strike you as being really weird and you know what if what if that particular thing went a little wrong you know and, and oh shit, that would be bad, wouldn't it? And so, I mean, observer effect, right? That came out entirely because way back when I was reading some stories, some news stories about about physics hypothesis and that

that that had to do with this with the idea that the the universe that we experience Might be according to the hypothesis might in the big picture be a Sort of a hologram projected into three dimensions from a reality that had more dimensions than that. Anyway, it all came about because of that, right? There were experiments that had to do with that, like this, they were using these like super finely calibrated lasers to look for changes in gravity that if they happened at certain intervals or whatever might correlate with this. It was all kinds of that stuff coming together. And yeah, and so I was just sort of thinking about

that and found it fascinating whether it was right or not. And, and thinking about it through the lens of, okay, what if also the universe was kind of alive and hungry and hated us. And, you know, it got it got kind of dark. Now, various Delta Green related Patreons, years when it was active, you know, dead channels I think has a little bit and then now the overall Delta Green Patreon, they've released some updated or modified rules for the game. The two that come to mind are like the blooding content combat rules and then the revised skills, revised professions. How has

community feedback been to those? And do you foresee releasing new, like, modified rule sets in the future? Yeah, I mean, the feedback is usually great, you know. I mean, whether it's positive or negative, it's great, you know, because it's useful. And, I mean, those things we can, we just sort of, we can experiment, and we get a wild hair, we can just do it and put it out there and say, hey, this seems fun, is it fun fun and people can tell us what they think so it's so it's so it's super super useful and yeah some of that will wind up making its way into an

eventual second edition of the game I feel like it's kind of overdue for a second edition because I mean I could I could put a second edition of the game together now if we wanted to sink the time into it because we've been paying attention to the things that it needs to do better all along. But it'll be a while. I mean, you know, I feel like we probably ought to have the original Delta Green Kickstarter done and out of the door before we tell people we've got a second edition for the game that they're still waiting on getting all of their awards for.

So, you know, it's not going to be imminent, but I'm looking forward to it because yeah, the more it goes on, there's all kinds of stuff in there that I've wound up sort of changing in my own games at home that I feel like improve play a lot, right? But it's a little much to try to put it out there as, I don't know, as supplementary options for the existing game. That gets really confusing, really fast. And none of it's like game breaking. It's not like people haven't had a great time playing the existing game for all these years.

So we don't have an urgent need to fix things, but when we get around to it, I think it'll be an even stronger game. And I assume as long as the sales of the scenario releases and all these other things are still strong, it feels like there's no rush, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well Shane, it was a real pleasure to talk to you.

We are really enjoying kind of going down the list of all the Arc Dream contributors and talking to each one of you. We appreciate your time and all your insights that you have to offer. Yeah, my pleasure. Who's next on your list, you know? We've got Dennis, we've got you. We should speak to John's, excuse me, the gentleman who's creating Pisces.

I get Tynes and him. Scott Glancy. Scott Glancy. We should probably speak to him next. Yep. Shane, this has been great, man. Thanks for sitting with us. Thanks for chatting with us.

Oh, sure. Always a pleasure. Well, we'll have you back on again soon. Maybe, hopefully, maybe next time as a gamer. Oh yeah, that'd chatting with us. Oh, sure. Always a pleasure. Well, we'll have you back on again soon. Maybe, and hopefully maybe next time as a gamer. Oh yeah, that'd be a blast. I love it. All right, let's do it. Thanks again, Shane.

Vince, tell me, what is better than fighting eldritch abominations in a desperate bid to save the world? How about doing it with big fuck-off guns? Hell yeah! Well, maybe we should first preface this discussion with a small disclaimer. Guys, firearms are no joke and the information you are about to hear is not meant to encourage anyone to touch a firearm unless they have gone through the proper training. Absolutely. Many government employees carry firearms and will have years upon years of training. So this is meant to just be a primer for players and handlers

that will lend to roleplaying someone who is used to handling and using these things in the field. Now I know that when discussing something as dangerous as a firearm, the first thing you really need to talk about is basic safety, right Vince? 100%. The first thing we're going to talk about is basic safety, right Vince? 100%. The first thing we're gonna cover, as we do with all discussions involving firearms, even if we're not necessarily handling them physically, are the four rules of firearm safety.

These are the pinnacle of every interaction you, your character, anyone will have when interacting with these dangerous items. Number one, treat every weapon as if it's loaded, full stop. Doesn't matter if you know that three minutes ago somebody unloaded it, something could have changed in that interim. We see this with unfortunate and tragic incidents like with the rush shooting. That weapon was not treated like it was loaded. So until you can verify, definitively prove for yourself, otherwise every weapon needs to be treated as if it is currently loaded. Secondly, never point your weapon at anything you do not intend to kill.

That is what a firearm is designed to do. It is designed to kill. Don't point that muzzle at anything that you do not intend to destroy. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are aligned and on your intended target and a decision to fire has been made. No reason your booger hook should be on the bang switch unless you plan on employing that firearm to potentially take somebody else's life. And finally because bullets have a tendency to just keep going know what is in front of know what is behind and know what is to the sides of your target. So once again treat

every weapon as if it's loaded never point your weapon at anything you don't intend to kill, keep your finger off the trigger until the decision to fire has been made and your sights are on target, and then know what is in front of, behind, and to the sides of your target. For the role players in the audience, obviously this means your character

is not going to be willy-nilly moving their gun around. I mean, your character is gonna treat it like the way Samurais did back in those old black and white movies When they remove that weapon it means they have intention to kill and so it's some seriousness needs to be placed upon that Amen absolutely could have said about it myself All right, so moving on to the ammunition of these firearms if you were to show me a bullet I don't think I could tell you whether it was a 22 or a 223.

Can we talk about the differences between ammunition and how they work? Oh man, do I have a slide for you. Buckle up. All right, so here we go. Let's talk about handgun rounds. On this slide, you're going to see most of the common handgun rounds and even some uncommon ones, the 5.7 FN being a good example. I don't see a lot of that. But these are your typical handgun rounds, especially the ones that you're gonna encounter in the guns that we have in Delta Green, right?

And then on the very right, you're gonna see a 5.56, a 5.56 NATO rifle round. So you can kind of see in comparison what the sizes are. But you've got your nine mil, you've got your 40 Smith and Wesson, your 45 automatic Colt pistol ACP. Pretty much the main differences between these are going to be the size of the casing, right? The amount of propellant that's used, the amount of powder that's used, and then the size of the actual bullet itself, the grainage, the weight.

And how big this this fuck-off bullet is going to be when it hits you, when it transfers all of that kinetic energy into somebody's person. But these are your pistol rounds. And to be clear, not all of these rounds work in every gun, right? Like there are very specific guns for these bullets? Correct, yeah. Every handgun is chambered for a different caliber, right? So you can't necessarily shoot, you know, a 10 millimeter round through a 9 millimeter pistol and vice versa because the magazines are going to be different the barrel is going to be different the uh recoil system the springs the guide rod is going to be different there's a lot of like actual mechanical differences that go into that the one exception i will say

is when you're dealing with 38 Special and 357 Magnum, in some cases, especially with revolvers, they can fire both because they're pretty similar rounds for the most part. But yeah, you're not going to be firing 45 out of a 9mm. Not going to happen. Now when we talk about shotguns, especially 12 gauge, there are two types of rounds that are mentioned in the Delta Green Guide. We're not going to get into birdshot and everything else.

For the most part, you're going to be dealing with buckshot, which is the one you can see here on the left. All of those little pellets are up there in that cartridge. And you've got slug. Slug is essentially just a big fuck-off plug of metal that is going to come out of that shotgun really, really fast. Most police departments issue those to be used to shoot engine blocks, to disable vehicles. Yeah, so those are going to fuck you up. Nine times out of 10, you're gonna win that rap battle.

So slugs are awesome, but very, very devastating. But now moving on to our rifle rounds on our next slide here these are all the various varieties some of the varieties of rifle rounds that you're gonna see in you know your your carbines your light rifles all up to your heavy rifles right and again you can see some similarities but some differences in the size of the casing the amount of propellant and powder used. 5.56 is the most common one but then you've got 7.62, you've got 300 blackout, all of these. This is just to kind of give you as a player an idea as to what do these bullets look

like? When I'm loading a magazine, what's the size of bullet that I'm putting in there? What size of bullet am I using against my target? It's all just context, right? Context and flavor. And then on that final slide, you've got, you can see some of your really heavy, what we call anti-personnel rounds all the way there on the left. Your 338 Lapua and your 50 BMG. That's the anti-personnel or anti-vehicle?

Those bullets are huge. They call them anti-personnel, but yeah, you use those to take out vehicles for the most part. I mean, yeah, you can certainly use them on people, but yeah, that's a little bit of a cooler. There won't be much people left, I think, once you're done with that. No, no, those tend to do their job very, very, very well.

So, but now we've talked about casing, propellant powder, all that stuff. Let's get into ammunition anatomy a little bit. What goes into a round? So you've got a bullet, which is going to be your projectile. And some of those slides, that'll be that copper piece at the very top. Then you've got your casing, which is where it rests. And within that casing, you've got propellant, you've got primer, which is what the firing

pin will strike. And then you've got the rim of the bullet've got primer, which is what the firing pin will strike, and you've got the rim of the bullet itself. And so that's essentially how that works. It's all just essentially firing pin will strike that primer that'll ignite the propellant inside the casing. And that very violent exothermic reaction that that explosion for all intents and purposes is going to force that projectile out of that casing really fucking fast. So, and that's where you get your velocity from. Got it. So what's hitting people is just what's at the tip of those bullets. What's just at the tip. And then the casing that, that,

that brass part is what's ejected out of the weapon. All right. Well, this is a lot of good information on ammunition, but it does feel like there's even more options when it comes to the actual firearms themselves. What should we know about these different types of guns? Yeah, so what I did was I took the examples that were featured in the agent's handbook and I just found examples of those and populated these slides of them. So we'll start with your light pistols. You've got your 22 long rifle, your 32 ACP, 380, 38. You can go back and reference that previous slide to see what those look like. But your common variants are going to be your Smith & Wesson Model 36, also known as the Chief Special or Revolver there, or your Walther PBK. I'll

be honest with you, in today's day and age, in 2024, very few people are carrying these calibers and these types of weapons simply because they underperform. They're not useless, but with the continued evolution of ballistics and mankind's ingenious ability to find better ways to kill each other, These are simply obsolete in a lot of ways. Not dead by any search of the imagination, but there are better options out there. But now we'll get into medium pistols. These are going to be your workhorses, right? Speaking from a practical standpoint and from a real-world operational standpoint, you really have no reason to go beyond these calibers unless you're just one of those people who's ate up about bigger bullets right all law enforcement agencies federal law

enforcement agencies issue these calibers and these weapons and these calibers these are your workhorses these are your average day-to-day guns specifically nine nine millimeter the again the improvements in modern-day ballistics have ensured that the nine millimeter is really like a pinnacle round. It is good at what it does. It's, it may not drop them in one shot like a freaking 44 Magnum wheel, but you've got more, you've got more rounds, you've got less recoil, which means more manageable weapon, which means easier follow-up shots, and a proven track record

of being effective, especially at this point. You know, like these days, most special operations forces in the military carry Glock 19s, which is chambered in the 9mm. There's a very good reason for that. It fucking works. Some still use 1911s. We'll go over that Silo pistol that fires a.45, but those are increasingly less and less used simply just because 9mm gets the job done. So anyway, that's to stop all you edgelords in the comments who want to get into a caliber discussion. Because we have so many edgelords in the comments giving us a leaf about it. Yeah, I don't fucking know.

Listen, this is going to go on YouTube, man. We know how that works. True, true. But, so your types of rounds are gonna be your nine millimeter, your 40 Smith and Wesson, and your 45 ACP. Funny story about 40 Smith and Wesson, that started off as the 10 millimeter round, which we'll cover in the next couple slides. But, you know, cause the FBI had been involved

in a really, really awful shootout where some of its agents were killed. And so they wanted a better performing round. They tried to go to the 10mm from the 9mm, I believe, and because of the size of the round and the amount of recoil, their agents just couldn't handle it. Accuracy went out the window and so they went to Smith and Wesson and developed the 40, which is really just, they call it the 40 short and weak, just just because it is a smaller kind of more manageable version of the 10 millimeter. Okay.

But anyway I digress your common types are going to be your Beretta 92fs also known as the M9, your Colt M1911A1, Glock 17, Glock 22. So all Glocks look the same so that's why I just have the 19 up there. That is the probably the most common and probably the best combat pistol out of the box out of all of these. The Glock 19 is is the staple. The Glock 19, the current model, the Gen 5 is a great pistol that I think most if not not all but most are using that pistol these days again, the military. The Beretta, that was the standard issue sidearm for the US military. They recently went to a Sig Sauer pistol. I hated, when I was in, I hated the Beretta. It's dog shit. The 1911 is great. It's just not, it's high

maintenance. It's a very high maintenance pistol. You've got to really keep that thing clean and keep it lubricated, keep it moving. The Glock varietals, we'll just call them, all the different Glocks out there, they call them lawnmower guns because you can leave them out in the rain, you can oil them once a year and they're probably still going to shoot just as good as the day you got it. They're really, really good. Interesting. Next, we got our shotguns. The big two are going to be our Mossberg

Model 500, your Remington Model 870. These are just pump action. You pull the trigger, fire, rack it, it's going to chamber another round. That's how they work. They're devastating. They're really easy to shoot. They fire a lot of little rounds at once and they're very, very good at what they do. If I could carry any gun in Delta Green as a player, it'd probably be a shotgun because it works out really, really well. But of course you can't engage at distance, which actually brings us to light rifles or carbines. These are going to be kind of like the medium pistols for your work horses for the handgun arena. The light rifles or kerbines are going to be your workhorse for the long gun variety, right?

Your types of rounds, you got 5.45 by 39 millimeter. It's a Soviet round and you got your 556 NATO. Common types are going to be your AR-15, your Colt M4, your FN SCAR-L or SCAR-Lite, and then your AK-47, which on the next slide you can see there fires 762 by 39, and your M4, which it can fire both 223 and 556. The difference in those is minimal. The 223 is just a smaller round. It's less pressure, less pressurized. So for example a 556 can safely shoot a 223. It won't be as good but a 223 cannot

fire a 556. It's gonna cause some damage to that weapon, simply because it's a bigger round with more punch behind it. Now for your most common firearms, these are the ones that everybody is going to have access to. It really doesn't even matter on their position or their department.

Like these are pretty much standard issue at this point. Your Glock 19 or your nine millimeter medium pistol, that's common standard issue. Remington Model 870, those are everywhere. And finally your M4 style carbine or your SBR, which is a short barreled rifle, it's a smaller, more compact version of the M4. Those are everywhere.

And those are gonna be your most common weapons. Got it. Okay, so we've all seen it in the movies where the secret agent needs to take someone out and they need to do it discreetly and they slip on the old silencer. Can you give us the real deal on what suppression is all about? Absolutely. Yeah.

So on this slide, you'll see two examples here. The one on the left is one you would typically see mounted on a rifle. Now the common misconception with these is you can just screw a suppressor onto anything. That's not true. There has to be a mounting option. There has to be something for it to mount on. So we'll take the pistol on the right, the Glock on the right, as for example, you'll see it has a little nub there at the end of the barrel that isn't on any of those others. That's what we call a threaded barrel. So that's a barrel where you can take the protector off and then screw on a suppressor onto the end of that weapon.

Now with rifles you have what are called muzzle brakes or flash hiders. The one on the left is a muzzle brake, the one on the right is a flash hider. And those you use those just every day to control recoil or to minimize the amount of flash that's coming out of your weapon when you fire, but those are also mounting options for suppressors. So you can really just take a suppressor, screw it on there and it'll secure and then now you've got a suppressed weapon. Now when it comes to suppressors themselves, what is actually being suppressed? It's really two things or one thing mainly, it's the gas. What makes a lot of the noise is the gas. When you've got something, when you're essentially creating an explosion inside of that weapon every

single time, it certainly sounds like that there's a lot of gas and there's a lot of power powder that's being expelled. So what a suppressor does is it can it consists of baffles that will trap and give that gas and all that material a place to go and expand without coming out the end of the weapon. So it's gonna contain a lot more of that violent, that violent exothermic explosive process. And it's gonna help control recoil,

it's gonna reduce your muzzle flash, it's gonna be increased accuracy, and it's actually, it's gonna make the sound a lot more manageable if you aren't wearing hearing protection, but it doesn't completely mask it. The other thing is if you're firing a supersonic bullet, that bullet is still going to create a crack as it exits that weapon because it's going supersonic, it's breaking the sound barrier.

You can use what's called subsonic ammunition and so and that's a twofer there where if you've got a suppressed weapon firing subsonic you are dealing with the gas that's coming out of that weapon and so you're containing that noise source but you're also mitigating that crack as that bullet travels you know breaks the sound barrier and so it's going to be much more quieter. There are some weapons we'll use the MP5 for an example, where it was so quiet with firing subsonic ammunition and having a suppressor that all you would really hear is the bolt on the weapon reciprocating. That was interesting. So the movies aren't really lying in certain instances that you can get it very, very quiet. You can, but you need to be firing

a very small caliber at subsonic speeds. And so, but don't forget you're sacrificing velocity at that point. And velocity is critical to threat neutralization. Gotcha. Gotcha. When it comes to decibel levels, right? 140 dB is considered a hearing safe level according to OSHA. And, you know, for an M4 rifle firing unsuppressed, that's about 165 decibels. It's pretty loud. A jack hammer is 130.

A jet taking off is 150. And a rifle is firing at 165. Now what a suppressor will do though, it'll bring that level down to where if you're firing a suppressed rifle, a suppressed M4, it's down to about 134 decibels. Still louder than a jackhammer. So keep that in mind.

Same with a pistol. Pistol unsuppressed, pretty loud, but with a suppressor on there, it's down to 125, which is louder than thunder. So what a suppressor is really designed to do is to make it more difficult for someone to pin down a direction for when that gunfire is coming from and make it less recognizable as a gunshot. It's not meant to completely obscure and, you know,

mitigate all sound that originates from firing a weapon. It's really just mass direction, mask the fact that it's a gunshot. So I'm sure that there are a lot of misconceptions about firearms from popular media and fiction. What's something only an experienced gunner would know? Alright, so yeah, we'll kind of run down a list here. So federal agents and law enforcement can carry just about everywhere these days, thanks to the Law Enforcement Officer Safety Act, which was a congressional act to ensure that law enforcement officers could carry pretty much anywhere,

including on planes. As long as you've gone through some kind of flying while armed training, you could carry on a plane while flying. Civilians, however, can't, so you got to make sure you know your local gun laws, especially if you're a handler, is all about versatility and realism. And if they're looking up the local gun laws, you need to be too, so you don't get yourself in trouble. You know, shooters may develop calluses on the web of their dominant hand, the one that's all the way high up on that grip, and on the knuckle of their middle finger,

which rests kind of just under the trigger guard, do that constant contact and friction that comes with a lot of shooting. That makes sense. Experienced shooters tend to not flinch as much if at all when they're firing, especially when you're just starting out like you're going to flinch. You're going to be surprised and shocked every time that gun goes off. Yeah. But folks who've been doing it a lot, they tend to flinch barely at all, if any. Shooting a firearm inside without a suppressor or hearing protection is going to cause severe hearing damage and loss or loss, not might cause it. It will cause it.

You are going to walk away with some form of hearing damage. It's going to happen. How, you know, we talked about this a little bit with Shane, but like how strict should we, should we be about this as handlers? You know, if the players are in an apartment complex versus like a cement room, you know, where is the, the, players are in an apartment complex versus like a cement room. Where is the the line here where we should be a little more strict about something like this?

Oh, man. It just depends on how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go on this and how how savage you want to be with your players. Yeah, I probably I probably wouldn't. But if it comes up and it's, you know, and also it depends on the environment, right? Shooting an unsuppressed weapon inside a room where there's a lot of furniture,

a lot of carpeting, curtains, all of that helps to absorb sound. So it's definitely not gonna be as bad as shooting in a bare concrete stair. Right. You know, so it handlers fiat, but yeah, I mean, if you really want to hammer them for shooting indoors unsuppressed, you could, yeah, you can't hear anything for the next 1-12 hours.

Yeah, it just seems like, you know, as we've done our research here, that this is very much a reality and I don't often see it broached in games like Delta Green, so it's something that folks have to really consider and maybe homebrew it. A rule. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. If it were me, if I was going to implement this tonight,

I would say, yeah, you fired a weapon unsuppressed inside. You have lost your hearing and for the next 1D12 hours and all of your alertness checks, unless you roll a critical, are a failure. Something like that. Yeah, or audio-based alertness checks. Spent and burnt gunpowder has a very unique smell that can really only be described as gunpowdery.

Everyone has a very different description. The most common ones I've heard have been acrid, metallic, maybe a bit, but not quite like sulfur or fireworks. A lot of folks tend to say, ah, the smell of cordite hung in the air. Cordite's no longer used in modern gunpowder. So it's really just that very acrid metallic kind of smoky smell to it.

And as we mentioned, suppressors do not completely silence a gunshot. They just make it less easily identifiable as one and more difficult to determine the exact direction it originated from. Got it. When we're talking about sound, bullets will crack because they're going supersonic.

They're breaking that sound barrier, but they whiz. Like they're gonna whiz through the air when they're close. When you're hearing that whiz, a very sharp sound you need to get to cover because you're being shot at. Gotcha. Adrenaline and the fight or flight response can be both your best friend and your worst enemy. You'll get what's called tunnel vision. You'll hyper-focus on what's immediately in front of you,

and you'll lose up to 70% of your peripheral vision, simply because what's happening is that your body's going through that fight or flight. And so it's redirecting blood flow. It's shutting down redundant systems and it's focusing only on what's necessary for survival. So the body's going to hyper focus in on that immediate threat in front of you. You will also potentially experience auditory exclusion. You'll be unable to hear nearby voices or sounds.

There have been reports of people who have been in gunfights and they couldn't hear somebody right next to them shout their own name. Wow. And this could be a method through which that hearing loss is mitigated because they have found that people who experience auditory exclusion did not have a severe hearing loss after the gun fight. Interesting. Yeah. And then you'll also lose your fine motor skills potentially. That occurs when the heart rate exceeds 115 beats per minute, because between 115 and

160 the blood flow is being redirected from the extremities to your major organs and you're going to lose some of that fine dexterity. Typically these effects are mitigated just through intense physical training and conditioning and psychological awareness of what to expect and that's what's referred to as stress inoculation. Interesting. So even if as a handler, you don't want to punish the players too much when they fail their firearms roles, when they're in the middle of combat, you can use this as an example of why they're missing because their fine motor

skills are just being tested to the limits and their heart rate is just bringing their blood flow to other places. And then finally, we have got to talk about cover and concealment. Yeah. You are not flipping a wooden park bench or picnic table and taking cover behind that. That is concealment.

Cover protects you from incoming fire. How effective the cover is is going to depend on the weapon shooting at you. So good examples, brick or cement walls, vehicle engine blocks. You get down behind an SUV, behind the engine block, it's pretty good cover. Large natural features like boulders, thick oak trees. We'll use this graphic on the right. Somebody with a pistol, a gun safe works, a bookcase works, a refrigerator, a water heater, the couch in the chair, the wall, not so much because it's drywall. Concealmentalment just protects you from being observed. That doesn't protect you from gunfire.

Just protects somebody from being able to see you. So that includes literally everything else to include drywall, wooden tables, car doors. Car doors don't stop anything. They may redirect the bullet, but they don't stop the bullet. In the example below, you've got an individual rifle. And really the only thing that's gonna be effective cover is that gun safe because it's just thick metal. That's it. That's gonna punch through everything else. So good to remember that it's not like the movies

where you can just hide behind anything and be okay. You need to find those things that are actually going to stop or redirect the bullets. Absolutely. It's gotta be big. It's gotta be heavy. Yeah. Vince, you know, last episode you said that you

didn't often give players handouts, but you are more than making up for it this year because you've already produced two standout handouts. First there was Investigations 101 and now this, the Guns of Delta Green. So thank you for all of this work. I think this is really going to help players and handlers. I hope it does. No, a lot man. I really appreciate that and if you all found that useful please let us know in the comments. We'll keep stuff like this coming. I have one more guide I want to try to get written by the end of the year all about you know tradecraft and essentially covering up your mess and cleaning up after yourselves called the cover-Up, a guide to redacting the truth

in Delta Green. Hopefully we can get that out soon. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that one. And just so everyone understands this, what we've been showing you, these slides and whatnot, will be available in PDF and PowerPoint for you to download and to give to your teams and your players to help everyone understand how

Firearms works. Absolutely. So that is it for this episode gang. If you've got questions or topics that you want to hear, let us know about it in the comments below. Don't forget to check out our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash MaydayRP where you can get access to extended versions of this and every Dread Dead Drop episode. Last episode I had to cut a lot of good bits out so if you're ever vibing with an

episode and you like the topic at hand know that by joining our Patreon at the $5 level you will get access to a lot more information on the top. But until then, everyone, please stay safe and we'll see you next month. See you everybody.