Them That Chase

From the movie Enemy .   December 15 Wren was still reviewing Patrolman Revett's encounter with Gina Bullock when Gina actually called. She and Emily were flying back to Birmingham later that day, but first they were going to fill up on breakfast at the Red Fox Inn. She invited Wren and her team to join them, an offer Wren leapt on. Up at Indian Rocks, Rex and Malachi were not having such an easy morning. Malachi's head felt like it was going to explode; Rex's camelhair coat had spontaneously caught fire, leading him to stop-drop-roll in the thawing mud; and both realized the other was somehow responsible for their predicament. Unnaturally responsible, even. Malachi drew his pistol on Rex, who crabwalked backwards into the abandoned pickup truck: he was convinced Malachi had been the one to attack first, but that wasn't something to quibble over with his life on the line. Wren saved Rex's life by calling Malachi at that moment, offering to pick them up. In the car,...

With Clyde Baughman's indiscretions covered up, and Delta Green's secrecy maintained, the Agents went home to be with their own families. The spitting image of a sitcom dad, Malachi threw open his front door and called out, “Honey! I'm home!” He shared a drink with his wife Claire before dinner, first bemoaning what a little shit their son Ash had become now that he was a teenager, then describing the alpine moss he'd been away studying on Mt. Greylock. An environmental consultant, Claire could mostly keep up with Malachi’s research, but she had no idea alpine moss doesn't grow on Mt. Greylock. Wren went digging into the FBI's files on Joy Schusterman, once a psychologist specializing in prisoner behavior until she fled arrest in 2008, and found a paper in which Joy had praised Albert Yrjo. His story was similar to Joy's own: a psychology professor until 1964, Yrjo was disgraced after a test subject killed multiple people during one of his experiments. Wren ...

Photo by Philip Greenspun . It was 4 pm on a weekday in the city of Boston, MA, and the Agents' case officer had directed them to Government Center—or rather, to a dead drop in the parking garage across the street from Government Center. In a stairwell out of sight from parked cars and security cameras, the members of this new Delta Green task force held their first mission briefing. Special Agent Wren Harris of the FBI, flown in from [DATA REDACTED] Dr. Malachi Danielson, a field botanist with the Massachusetts Division of Fish and Wildlife Dr. Rex Marianetti, the best medical examiner at the worst hospital in Denver, CO The dead drop was a broken guardrail: someone had stuffed a manila envelope inside the hollow tube, concealing a burner phone, a key, and two documents written in code. Rex, a man of many hobbies, decoded their mission objectives and a profile of a former agent codenamed BEAN COUNTER. It turned out BEAN COUNTER's body had been removed from his apartment the pr...

My first two RPGs were Fiasco and Delta Green , which is a perfect summary of my tastes. I like games that center the characters and spiral into chaos, danger, and the thrill of seeing how I get fucked over this time. I've exclusively been a player for a few years now. I used to run Delta Green on and off but never felt I had the skills to provide the kind of game I wanted to, and I ultimately dropped it for other games. Except now, having played those other games and learned much from them, I'm starting to try again.   My plan for this blog is to post once a week, alternating between play reports and "tools of the trade;" those will be breakdowns of ideas I love in other games and how and why I'm applying them to my current campaign. GMing is a thing you can only learn by doing, but writing down what I'm doing helps sort out my thoughts. So, thank you for being my rubber duck.