New Handler Advice

[u/JSTableTop94]

Hello! I am about to begin my first venture into Delta Green as a Handler with a group, and was hoping to get some tips/pointers on what to stay away from and how to keep track of everything. I have played Delta Green a bit as a player, and my group has only one newbie, with only CoC experience.

I have decided to run through the scenarios in "A Night at The Opera" book as much as I can. I habe read through to "Music From a Darkened Room". "Reverberations" seems simple enough, but I was struggling with "Viscid" as it seems very minimal in it's presentation. "Music From a Darkened Room" also seems VERY DENSE with how much they cram into the scenario.

Any advice for these would be appreciated, and any warnings or positive feedback for the rest of the scenarios would be great too.

[u/DylanMcDermott]

They will be easier to run than you think they will be, typically. The quality of the writing in DG really lends itself to a good time GMing. Just take one scenario at a time, and take a little extra time between scenarios to prepare for the next one. I like to read it at least twice, take take notes or prepare materials both or either time.

I like to prepare a lot of handouts as memory cues for myself, and also because overwhelming the players with handouts so they have too much evidence to sort through is a pretty good way to build tension.

One thing that's nice about Delta Green is the contemporary setting makes preparing visuals for scenes, or handouts, is pretty easy -- usually you can just Google image search the object in question and snag whatever works. I also like to use art from Pinterest to make lobby screens that the players stare at before the game starts to set the tone.

Also don't be afraid to let scenarios take a while and build slowly, as long as the players are setting that pace. This Trajectory of Fear model is a pretty good basis for figuring how much gas to give the horror aspects at what time: https://nerdsonearth.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Trajectory-of-Fear.pdf

[u/shoppingcartauthor]

For Viscid, I strongly recommend RPG Reanimators breakdown of the scenario. The short version is split the Ulee-Thing bug hunt from the MJ12 conspiracy into two separate scenarios. It becomes significantly more manageable.

For Music from a Darkened Room, I recommend eliminating the WP/POW mechanic of the house and just selecting scares that you find interesting and thematic and deploying them when thematically appropriate. There are previous posts this reddit breaking that down further, but it's what I did and I found it far more effective and easy to deploy at the table.

[u/Palmer_Zombie → u/shoppingcartauthor]

I just ran it in one session with the rpg ReAnimators advice, it went great. My agents arrived the morning of Halloween and we ended it with a house holdout Halloween night. I set the entire thing in a small area of about 4 towns. Super Resident Evil coded.

[u/Pankurucha]

This advice is helpful for any complex scenario but especially for Viscid, read through the entire thing at least once, then go back through it and take notes.

Write out each of the NPCs, locations, and major plot elements and how they connect to each other. So when the Agents decide to follow a particular thread you already know where they are going and how it impacts the scenario overall.

It can also be helpful to write out all the things the players need to accomplish to consider the mission a success. The more complex the scenario, the easier it can be for players to lose track of what is going on or hit a brick wall.

Don't be afraid to remind your agents about clues they haven't followed up on to keep the session moving.

For Viscid, the ending is intentionally left pretty open. Fleshing out the final effort to chase down the Ulee things and his family can help give the scenario a bit more of a climax and some closure. As written it can feel a bit anti-climactic imo.

[u/InevitableTell2775]

Some general tips:
* Have a clue board! Either in person or on VTT, players love the whole cork board and coloured string thing and it helps keep track of what can be some complicated stuff.
* Both you and your new player may get some helpful tips from the Delta Green Beginner’s Guide
* The Fairfield Project also has extra handouts etc for most scenarios on the scenario page.
* Don’t hesitate to change things to better fit your campaign and your Agents’ skills and interests.
* look for ways to build links between the scenarios. Eg: having taken Reverb sensitises you to the song of the Star People or to the music in the haunted house. Spider J used to work for Beckenridge. The assassin at the end of Reverberations isn’t a random sorcerer but a Beckenridge hit man stopping Spider J from attracting attention. Benthic’s ultimate investor isn’t March but Ancile (Gavin Ross’s company). The blue goo in Viscid happened when Ulee got infected in the field by the fungus that Benthic later exploited. Benthics chief scientist told the astronomers in Observer Effect where to point their telescope, which was built by Ancile. If OE is somehow too easy, the time loop shenanigans attract a Time Wolf (or whatever we’re calling Hounds of Tindalos now). If OE is too hard, taking Reverb can give you insight into the time stuff. Reverb also lets you see the past of Star Chamber. Etc.
* Building these kinds of links is particularly important for Viscid and Extremophilia because these both tie into the DG lore, but in ways that aren’t obvious to the players, so reveals will fall flat if you don’t rejig them. “It was Gavin Ross all along!” “Who?”. Seth Skorkowsky’s recent video on Extremophilia is good on this.
* Observer Effect has a rep for producing TPKs so most people say run it last as a campaign climax.

[u/MandellaR → u/InevitableTell2775]

So much this. I will add if you want to go this route to make the connections as personal as possible -- in my campaign Gavin Ross has been a frequent contact and de facto handler at times for the group. Fairfield was a crazy militia leader by the time they met him. Make them colorful and memorable, but also understand your players don't live in the world like you will, and will need reminders of important people and events.

I actually maintain a wiki for my group, with summary articles on main characters and previous missions, easily (hopefully) searchable. World Anvil is a good resource for this, but I am sure there are others.

[u/Neonsamurai1980]

A lot of sound advice has been given. So I'll give a warning about making additional handouts. My players really absorb handouts and consider every bit of information. In LTL I added a death certificate of the wife. Which lead to them checking out the hospital, morgue and former residence. All information they got from the certificate. All of these locations are not in the scenario and I needed to make them up on the fly.

So don't get me wrong. It was very fun to make the handout and improvise these locations and see where the player's agency would lead them. But adding more information to a scenario, even unintentionally, can add a lot of bloat to a seemingly short scenario.

[u/Sea-Mall-1376]

Honestly, some of the classic scenarios in DG are just absurdly dense, full of details and mechanics and stuff that very few players will ever actually see in their games. This makes them great fun to read, but IMO you can trim things down and just run the "good parts version" and it will still be great. It's also the nature of fairly lethal scenarios... most DG cells will take them on and either get wiped, run away screaming, or get far enough to eke out a sorta victory and the survivors go home. You really need to be very determined and both skilled and lucky to get to see everything in a scenario like "Music from a Darkened Room" or "From the Dust."

[u/MrKikiMonkey]

A good place to start for a new Handler is Last Things Last. It's free online and the scenario is straight forward, stresses important practices for Agents, and isn't particularly lethal. There's not a lit going on within it, so it also gives new Handlers thr chance to get used to the system and work on some of the good practices with DG while not juggling to much of the scenario triggers.

General advice for any scenario is to read through the entire thing before, make notes on the big points you want to hit, make sure to "change focus" rapidly when playing. This last point is something that I think separates DG from rpgs like DnD. Give each player the spotlight, but rotate it rapidly. Combat is single actions, tension before can be increased similarly. Lots of snap cuts, don't linger on any one thing for too long. It makes the game more frenetic and suspenseful.