Subscribe to Talien's Tower on Facebook, Twitter, email or via the Site Feed

Saturday, September 13

The Gates of Delirium: Introduction

This scenario, “The Gates of Delirium,” is a Cthulhu Now scenario from The Stars Are Right by Gary Sumpter. You can read more about Delta Green at http://www.delta-green.com. Please note: This story hour contains spoilers!

Our cast of characters includes:

• Game Master: Michael Tresca (http://michael.tresca.net)
• Jim “Jim-Bean” Baxter (Charismatic Hero/Telepath) played by Jeremy Ortiz (http://www.ninjarobotstudios.com)
• Kurtis “Hammer” Grange (Fast/Dedicated Hero/Sharpshooter) played by George Webster

This scenario was originally planned for my brother’s character, Guppy; if you recall from a previous scenario, he stumbled across the whereabouts of his ex-girlfriend, who had been committed to an insane asylum. Guppy was to investigate, discover what happened to her, and then try to survive her “treatment” by yet another insane psychologist.

It didn’t work out that way. Instead, I made it so that Guppy was the victim and needed to be rescued. It helped explain why Guppy had been missing for awhile, so this was an opportunity to bring him back into the fold. What ensues is a rip-off of the movie “The Cube,” in which the agents are placed in a hellish extradimensional series of traps (actually Daoloth). They would have to survive not just Daoloth but each other. It sounded good in theory.

There were two problems. For one, the scenario requires a certain level of basic distrust; freaking out about the circumstances surrounding the mind-bending nature of Daoloth would go a long way in making the scenario a lot more interesting. For that distrust to be sowed, it requires more dissension amongst a larger group. But with just two agents, the PCs weren’t about to role-play that level of distrust; they needed each other too much.

For another, this scenario disarms the PCs. Hammer is good with guns, of which there were none. Jim-Bean is good with working the system, of which he had little system to work with. So for this scenario to work, we needed someone prone to hysteria (like Guppy) and more PCs.

Still, there was a brilliant psychological moment where Jim-Bean brought up the insanity of it all, and that helped make the scenario memorable, if not as enjoyable as the previous two scenarios. [MORE]

Labels: d20 modern

posted by Mike Tresca at 8:13 AM

Want more? Please consider contributing to my Patreon; Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and the web; buy my books: The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games, The Well of Stars, and Awfully Familiar.

---