Even More Short Reviews of Delta Green Actual Plays

 Part 1, Part 2

This will likely be the last one of these for a while: got thoroughly burnt out on the whole thing as I was drafting it, and I’ve stopped listening to all of these in the months since I started compiling the post. At some point I’ll probably resume one or two, but who knows: my podcast listening has taken a hit across the board thanks to changes at work eating up my attention for much of the year so far.

Black Flare

I find this one complicated to recommend: It’s well-put together, the Handler knows their stuff, and the idea of having players new to Delta Green as an RPG playing characters new to Delta Green the organization is appealing. I don’t think it works in practice, though: the opening opera is too open-ended and slow-paced for players new to this sort of investigation (especially when they have a tendency to treat the investigation like D&D characters grilling a shopkeeper) and that makes for bad radio in spite of the generally high quality of all the individual components.

The anomaly in season 1 was too vague and hands-off to be an interesting threat. There’s an episode that’s nearly entirely devoted to the tedium of muddling through some difficult-to-visualize spatial fuckery effects, which never gelled together as something spooky. 

 (I think the spookum was a lloighor, so my bias is on active and on the field already) 

There’s a really good interstitial episode (the cell meets their handler on a freighter ship in the aftermath of a battle with Deep Ones) but then the first five and a half episodes of Season 2 are a red herring with enough feet dragging that it felt more of “oh fucking finally” when we finally got to the real hazard instead of a satisfying build up to it. The action was great when things finally started popping off, but the path to get there was frustrating.

Another issue, which is very much down to personal preference even more than the last, is that I really don’t like how Hollis’ player runs the character; Hollis acts as a sort of continual obstruction to the others, vaguely dancing around questions and being purposefully unhelpful with a blunt “It’s need to know and you don’t need to know”. I can’t tell how intentionally frustrating they’re supposed to be - it’s not an unreasonable part to play in the story - but I think it compounds the bad radio problem by impeding the other PCs from being active investigators and pushing them towards passivity, which doesn’t play well with the already slow pace. 

Hand on the Door

Not as goofy as PTBP, but probably the closest to it tone-wise out of everything I’ve listened to, and I think it does a decent job of threading the needle. It’s absurd, but not so absurd that it negates its own stakes with that absurdity. That said, it does have a tendency to meander and it’s another slow burn investigation despite the threat being something that should have everyone freaking the fuck out. There’s no reason for the PCs to know that the guy they’re investigating is messing with shoggoth biomatter, but the characters knew by the time I stopped listening that the perp has figured out how to refold proteins through unnatural means and the players should probably be leaning into the entirely reasonable panic of “Jesus Christ someone could make a transmissible prion disease with this shit”.

Chaos Springs Eternal

Civilian PCs in a weird little Louisiana town stumbling into the supernatural. More CoC than DG, to the point where I wouldn’t really call it a DG actual play. 10-15 minutes of non-game talk at the beginning of each episode, which is too much for me to sit through without skipping but might not be for other folks. It’s a slow burn and I was with it for a while, but fell off when they got to the helpful magical ghoul character. I like a helpful magical ghoul character from time to time but this one felt too Call of Cthulhu for me, if that makes sense. Not enough of the DG razzle and / or dazzle.

This Line Isn’t Secure

A dedicated Impossible Landscapes run. Very much on the audio drama side of the spectrum, and very good at it. Players and handler work together like a well-oiled machine. Editing / effects / sound quality are extremely good, deft balance of horror vs humor and how the absurd surreality of Carcosa lends itself to both. I feel better about the character arcs than in something like Redacted Reports because we know how this ends, there's not going to be any tail end that stretches out past the climax. Definitely want to return to this one, and I give it a very high recommendation.

Delta Pink

Someone affiliated with the show left a comment on one of my older roundup posts asking if I might do a review: Unfortunately, it didn’t really pan out.

After listening to Session 0 and most of episode 1 I feel like Delta Pink, like Get in the Trunk, is goofy in a way that doesn’t really land for me. The group behind this AP typically plays Shadowrun, and that influence shows like the proverbial and thematically appropriate pink mohawk. They’re still playing Shadowrun characters here in Delta Green; goofy stereotypes unmoored from reality. Factor that as you will into whether or not you want to check it out.

Stories and Lies: God’s Teeth

It’s unfair to compare anyone running God’s Teeth to the original AP, but it’s also unavoidable. 

Go Forth opens like a hammer to the face. Here’s the mission; do it now. You’re immediately in the shit and on the back foot, scrambling for purchase when all your options are bad and you have no time and no resources. I think it’s the most powerful opener in RPGs by a country mile, with Deep Carbon Observatory coming in second.

So I feel like Stories and Lies is doing a disservice to the module by portraying Clove as stable and put-together and having the agent who read the folder beat around the bush during the briefing. The urgency that makes the opening work has been lost and at that point I don’t know why the module was chosen.

 

RPPR: The Labor of Dogs

The only one of these I am actively listening to at time of writing: this one's an all-timer. Not just the name (which is an all-timee in and of itself), but in just how good the component missions are - I think we're done with 3/5 at this point, and each one has been a very distinctly 2020s flavor of awful and weird. Like I would almost call it cringe horror? It's leaning into the ripped-from-the-headlines reality of "sorry, the villains here are evil and stupid and their vapidity is matched only by their temporal power and they will combine the two into lethal danger for everyone around them in an attempt to squeeze a bit of profit they don't need from a source they don't understand." That's the good shit. The real danger isn't Cthulhu, it's some C-suite trying to exploit Cthulhu in stupid ways.

Final Notes

Most of this post is just a simple divergence between what I want to listen to and what people want to make. So it goes, no harm no foul. My perspective is skewed six ways to Sunday on this matter so everything I’ve said so far should be taken with a sizable grain of salt. I don’t know. I feel kinda bad about being down on nearly all of them. Ah well. There will always be more, and maybe I'll come around to one or two when I'm in a better state for what they're offering.