Back to Basics - Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room

Ran session one out of a two or three-parters maybe today. 

Music from a Darkened Room is a cool horror adventure for Pelgrane Press' Delta Green game and as far as I'm concerned it's rock solid. It's a sandbox investigation: you get a clear objective but no clear way to accomplish it, and it's up to the players to figure out what to make out of various threads they can look into, with a heavy emphasis on player skill. I don't use Delta Green's system (though I have last time I ran this adventure and it worked great), so instead I used a mix of Michael Raston's Kontextspiel d6 and Cthulhu Dark's Insight Die. Essentially going "system-less" and nearly but not fully diceless. I decided to stop caring about tinkering or what would be most appropriate and just go with whatever I wanted to do on the spot. It wasn't an issue at all, and I don't think the dicing really slowed things down.

The players, 7th Outpost and Brine from the FKRC, made very fun and opposed polarity characters: one is a straight-faced shadowy CIA operative who does not compute supernatural stuff, and the other one is a goofy Dirk Gently/Dale Cooper expy with hints of Big Lebowski or Inherent Vice: Agent Danois dropped acid when he stepped into the spooky house, much to the chagrin of CIA spook nicknamed "Rat".

The two of them spent the better part of two hours negotiating entrance into a storage shed (Green Box) and sorting out possible evidence and clues left behind by another DG operative who had looked into the spooky house; later on they went into the house proper and weird shit started happening, I think we're pretty much set into dark comedy now, with some really entertaining moments between the PCs and just scene-settting from everyone at the table. I'm saying dark comedy because the subject matters are fairly heavy, there's talk of suicide, and we stopped on a cliffhanger with one agent apparently zoning out and about to slit his throat with a razor while the acid has barely kicked in, which is I think a pretty bleak counterweight to the very goofy stuff that the same character's displayed so far.

I tried something where I describe things as if we were all the audience of a movie or show we're watching, and it helps me find my words and juggle mood and practical description while keeping things low pressure. IC dialogs happen here and there but a lot of the players' part in setting mood relies on using these same tools organically, something I wish I saw happen more often when I run. I'm not sure yet whether it's a product of the players being used to each others' flow or the running technique I tried out tonight, but either way it's been a blast.

I'm refraining from talking about the events within the adventure for now as I'll wait for them to finish the scenario before I spill the beans on what's up, and will tackle how they went through the module once it's done in a later article. For now, this is more me dusting off the blog and remembering what I really love about tRPGs, which is deffo the actual playtime, rather than prep or theories around play.

Simple stuff.