Ahhh what a great summer it was for role-playing! What makes me say that? Well I got to play in a couple of regular game groups so I got to stay with the same character and players for an extended period of time! This was a welcome break from the relentless editing and post production work! I had my first proper outing to the land of Delta Green, had a game with the playhouse and played in a TV style extended adventure. Best of all, most of the game sessions were there just to be played!
For my first Delta Green Character (Yup, he didn’t make it!) I made a straight cut poster boy of the FBI Agent Bevan. Yes Bevan is a name I’ve used before on other characters and I recycle him as I have character portraits which I can just drop onto a character and have a good idea of who my character will be. A real shame he didn’t last more than one adventure as his stats were great and the skills packages you can put together for Delta Green really suits the investigative aspect of the game. You also then get a few extra bits to your character if they have already joined Delta Green because of a bad experience they had which got them recruited. For his back story, I had Bevan be the victim of some mind control that saw the search party he was with turn against each other in a fight to the death. Only Bevan and a Park Ranger escaped with their lives… If time allows in 2024 I’ll try and break down Agent Bevan in a video so you can see how I made him. How did he buy the farm? Well over the course of our play sessions we were doing well. Handler Steph had us investigating animal attacks and thought we’d check out the tunnel to the old abandoned factory. After a standoff with an unexpected creature another agent presses the wrong button on the mythos artifact and that was the end of that! Oh well, Bevan will return on another character sheet in some way shape or form.
The next wonderful character I got to spend time with was Lawence “The Hammer” Anderson in Damn your Love, Damn your lies. Keeper Sweet had us play neighbours in a small suburban American town so I was thinking of a nice boring middle age Dad who might not last! Instead I roll an absolute unit of a character that wouldn’t look out of place in a Pulp Cthulhu campaign! Lawrence was strong, handsome, intelligent and very well educated so I made him a retired NFL Quarter Back who is now a biology teacher! My fellow players rolled very well and chose to play and ex-Mexican wrestler and also an electrical engineer!
The game was a bit like the TV Show Twin Peaks meets the mythos! Lots of people in the town, each with secrets, each with a theory as to why a woman shot herself and why that body disappeared! I had great fun with a maxed out throw skill, well, Lawrence was a quarter back and this skill came in very handy to hail mary an American football into the face of an evil cultist! We took our time and explored over five play sessions this wonderful mystery and just about survived. My character Lawrence ended up in the Dreamlands for a couple of years but he’s a hardy lad and came home safe and sane… eventually!
Kinyana was my character for the Miskatonic Playhouse game Good Vibes Only by Phaedra Florou! and run by Keeper Hedge It was fun to play a character over a single play session that I wouldn’t normally pick and they came into the game with some background information on the Mystery! How did they get on? Please check out Good Vibes Only over on the Miskatonic Playhouse to find out
Keeper Sweet had another long form mystery for us in late summer which had some matching story elements to a Delta Green game I was playing! We headed out to a desert town called in by local law enforcement as there had been an Occult themed murder – sounds Delta Green already right! So this time I needed a good investigator and it was time for another outing for Agent Bevan, but this time a very different set of stats was generated for them to inhabit! Short, clumsy and average in almost every other way bar from his pulp level Education roll! No genius but very well educated with maxed out First Aid and Medicine so occupation was a Doctor. With that came complimentary skills in Biology, Pharmacy, Psychology and the Occult but nearly no social skills and base in everything else! Not the Denzil Washington I was hoping for, more the Danny DeVito type!
Bevan was paired with a Police Detective who had the unenviable task of driving Bevan around as well as the Biologist who was also recruited to look into the case. Just to add to the nightmare for the police detective, we agreed as players that the Biologist was an ex -student of Bevan’s and an ex-girlfriend! You can imagine the role-playing between that happy trio! Five sessions of play saw us investigate the murder, follow some missing persons leads and eat a lot of waffles. Bevan nearly lost a foot from a surprise alligator attack and that wasn’t the only reptiles we had to face if you know your mythos well enough! We put all the clues together saved the day an even rescued the missing children. I’m pretty sure the detective wheel span his tyres to get away from Bevan once the mission was complete!