Welcome to RPG Reanimators, a podcast for GMs where we dissect horror scenarios and offer our experiences and advice. to reanimate them at the table. I'm Nathan.

I'm Lex.

And I'm Alex.

So let's see what's on the slab. The subject of this procedure is Viscid, written by Dennis Detwiller for Delta Green. In this scenario, a retired geneticist and his partner are found mauled inside their home, and when local police discover a hidden lab, complete with biohazard scrubbers attached to the garage, they call in the CDC and FBI. That's where our agents come in. As with any dissection, we'll be discussing all the gross innards of this scenario, and there's some gross innards, so from this point on there will be spoilers. If you're interested in playing this scenario, please stop here and share this episode with your GM so they can listen and consider running this for your group. We'll also include links for where you can purchase a copy of this scenario for yourself in the show notes of the episode. Now with that out of the way, let's begin our dissection. So to begin with, why are we talking about Visid today, guys?

I appreciate the tee-up for that one because I have been begging y'all to cover this scenario for a few months at this point because it's a bit of an odd one. I think that at its core, Viscid is a really fun monster hunt that has a unique creature that's kind of like the Thing with imperfect and human motivations. But in reading it, there is this huge DG lore angle that I think overly complicates the overall scenario and leaves a lot of people wondering like, how the heck am I going to run this? Um, at our last RPG Reanimators Con, I ran this as a one-shot and was really satisfied with the players' experiences and wanted to share the edits for that to distill this down into a potent one-shot monster hunt.

Nice.

Yeah, I think, uh, Lex and I, we're gonna, we're gonna butt heads this episode.

I was telling Nathan, it's like we're flip-flopped. You're the one who's always like, yeah, how do I make this a one-shot? Because I'm not going to take 8 sessions to run music. And now we're the opposite.

Yeah. Uh, because Today I'll be focusing on really slowing down the action and emphasizing that lore angle because I think that's an interesting in for player characters to find out more about the history of Delta Green.

Yeah, and I'm somewhere in the middle of you two of I kind of want it to be a one-shot, but I kind of like the conspiracy, but I'm not sure either work particularly well together. Like, it's not a Reese's to me at the moment. I, I want this to be a Reese's scenario.

I think, um, I think by the end of this, this episode, I think we'll come to a nice medium, or, or not, um, as we stitch everything together or start hacking apart limbs.

Yeah, that's my job.

All right, so let's get into the scenario proper. What the heck is actually going on in this scenario?

Okay, so during the '90s and presumably beforehand, Majestic 12 was doing Majestic 12 things at various U.S. military agencies like DARPA, using them as staging grounds to test various unnatural items and compounds just to poke it and see what happens. During one of these tests for Project Arc Dream, Not making that name up. Air Force Lieutenant Daniel Yulee was exposed to some alien substance known as blue blood, which basically dissolved him instantly in 1992.

Unlucky.

And the sample was immediately put into deep freeze, and they refined it into something called ARD-15. Doesn't really matter. And Yulee's death was written off as an experimental jet fuel explosion, since there wasn't any remains to share with his family.

Okay.

In that time, Gavin Ross has been doing Gavin Ross things in the mysterious shadows. Uh, in case you do not know, Gavin Ross is a prominent Majestic 12 figure in Delta Green lore and has come down with an aggressive colon cancer and is refining this ARD-15 as kind of an anti-cancer slash everlasting life regeneration agent.

Oh.

Again, don't ask too many questions at this part. We're just vibing. It's a nifty pill that can extend his life, uh, from And while he's well over 70, he can look a vibrant and lively 60 because I could definitely tell the difference in those two.

Absolutely. Maybe once you're that age, you'll be able to see the distinction. Importantly though, he's running out of this stuff, right? He had all this stuff refined and now it's running out. I think he's only got a few weeks supply left by the time this scenario is going.

Sure. Why not? Yeah.

Yeah, sure.

And in order to try and replenish this supply, he has leaned on this former MJ-12 researcher as a Dr. Tybalt Greaves, and operating through various third parties, is pressuring Greaves to refine ARD-15 in his nifty home Tier 4 biohazard lab because he just, you know, has hobbies, I suppose. Some of us paint figures, others have a biohazard containment lab. Anyways, he's not very good at his job because at some point—

Damn.

Greaves is fucking with this contagious stuff. Maybe he doesn't know what he's doing. Maybe he's a little drunk and gets infected. And then the stuff rips out of his body before too long, then attacks his wife and creates this whole shitstorm where the CDC and FBI are called in whenever local Smokies see all sorts of weird shit going on in the house. The CDC has come in, classified this as a massive biohazard quarantine area, and then they fly off with the samples to get them tested in Atlanta. Surely nothing bad will happen there.

Nah.

The FBI is tripped up in red tape to give the agents opportunity to arrive on scene while everyone else has been waiting for a couple of days and is feeling very impatient.

Yeah, and during that, to kind of wrap it up too, Gavin realized like, ah, shit, everything's gone down. Time to clean house. And begins to activate some sleeper agents he's had for a while to start cleaning up like their go-between between a detective agency that was between Gavin and Greaves.

Right.

And while the agents are investigating all of this, these The EP agents are, you know, killing other private detectives and other people in there.

Yeah, yeah.

The monster of this scenario is Daniel Yulee, kind of fragmented, and since the incident in 1992, he has this very broken consciousness. And so as these things form out of more organic tissue, it's this very scattered sense of self, you know, barely remembers himself, mostly just remembers his wife, and so is scrambling to try to get back home to reunite with them. Like just with the barest threads of memory about himself. And so that's going to be the main monster baddie for the agents to really preoccupy themselves with because there's more than one Daniel Yuley.

Oh, there's 3 by my count.

Yeah, they split.

3 as written.

3 minimum.

Have as many as you want besides that, because anytime someone gets infected, if the substance gets a chance to work in their system, it can split off after a certain point and you now have a new threat to contend with. It's a really fun monster in my opinion, because it's kind of infectious like the Thing, but the Thing couldn't drive away in an RV. So, um, yeah, it's a little more fun for your players.

I also like, as a body horror person, that it grows on the person and then like rips out of them.

Mm-hmm.

So that they just have this, like, almost a Looney Tunes hole of Wile E. Coyote smashing the wall, but in this case it's a dead baby.

You have a blue Kool-Aid Man-sized hole in your chest.

What could this be?

Well, actually, I think the real monster is Gavin Ross because he made all of this in the pursuit of immortality.

We were the monster all along.

Yeah.

The monsters were the friends we made along the way because Gavin Ross is like being double, triple espionage cover and can be active in all of this. Like, it's a whole thing.

This is such like, it's, it's PC energy. It's giving GM PC energy. And like, I'm pretty sure Gavin Ross was one of the original like Arc Dream PCs in their home game or some shit.

Yeah, he's definitely written as a like, oh man, he's 20 steps ahead of you. You're like hosed if you even think about dealing with him. It's like, well, which is what you want in a tabletop role-playing game.

But there's solutions. There's solutions.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think that goes a lot into the discussion of, is this going to be a one-shot or is this going to be something long-term? But We'll get to that in reanimation. Let's talk about the PCs. What is the situation that they arrive on site to? Dead guy in the driveway?

Well, that depends on how closely you're going to run this as written, because strictly as written, they find a dead puddle in the driveway.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Like, the scenario starts off with this really cool evocative setup where Greaves is stumbling out of his house to call for help, even though his tongue and bottom jaw have been ripped off. So it's kind of like you get that nice image. He collapses and bleeds out in his driveway, and there's a bunch of crows that are pecking at him. Then there's a newspaper delivery person that finds the body, goes, ah, in a little Kevin McCallister style face.

Yeah.

And so scares the crows away and then calls in the cops. As the sun comes up, his body dissolves into goo as written, because apparently getting infected with this just compromised the entire structural integrity of the rest of his body. Then this is where I mentioned, you know, CDC and FBI get called. CDC goes in, quarantines the house, gets the stuff. We already covered this. And then by this point, the FBI— big air quotes— the PCs, the agents, are going to arrive about 2 days after this. You know, as written, the scenario is very convenient where the inciting event, the death, is on October 1st, and then October 3rd is whenever the PCs actually arrive on scene. So everyone is a little kind of testy because they're sitting around on these weird bodies. They don't know what's going on. And then they can go in and investigate the house and actually perform the autopsies and things like that.

Mm-hmm. And everyone's been like being checked out too. Like the CDC is running all the tests on people and it's all coming back negative. So that's possible.

Not exactly. No. The CDC got into a private plane and flew off late in the evening of October 2nd. On October 3rd, somewhere in the forests over Idaho, shit happens, TM, and the plane crashes. There is now another Yuli thing out of the samples that they were carrying, so they never make it to Atlanta, which makes for a really fun bang mid-scenario whenever, you know, the PCs are like, oh shit, how are we gonna take care of the— wait, what? Goddamn it. Like, it's a fun additional complication to throw in.

Mm-hmm. So, with that, I think this is a good chance to start talking the real complications. Let's talk about the NPCs for this, because there, there's a lot of NPCs in this scenario. Deceptively so, I think. At first it seems pretty much like, ah, the main 2 people are dead. You're gonna talk to some police officers, you know. Maybe follow up there. But if you get in that conspiracy angle, hoo boy.

And I think for this, Alex, if you like, I think I can cover the dead folks and like the 2 cop NPCs they can talk with if you want to cover the conspiracy stuff. Like, because boy howdy, I cut a lot out of this.

Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

So you can do a little bit of postmortem investigations into Tybalt and Amber Greaves. Tybalt was an associate professor in biochemistry at Northwestern before getting involved with DARPA and MJ-12 and all of that stuff. While Majestic was crumbling, Greaves takes a bunch of patent documents and files and things on the way out and has repeatedly sold them for millions of dollars and basically sustained his lifestyle doing whatever the fuck he wants. He retires early and finds Amber, an exotic dancer, to be his partner. And they have lived a quiet, drug-fueled party life ever since in upstate Washington. Gavin then finds Greaves, taps him to refine all of this stuff, and then maybe out of fear or offers him more money, he acquiesces and does this. Amber has a substantial section detailed in terms of like her background and other people in Florida.

Okay.

I'm just gonna say that she is written as an exotic dancer with a troubled past, but would not really go into any meaningful depth on the other stuff. I wasn't a fan of how this character was created as written.

I agree.

They only really work as like a, do you need a scapegoat for the 2 deaths?

But it's also an obscure scapegoat that like, I don't even see how they could justify that like from a PC perspective. But yeah, whatever.

Maybe if your agents are incredibly thorough. I will let you know when I find incredibly thorough agents.

Then while they're at the Sonoma County Coroner's Office, they can meet Dr. Louis Stubbs, as written, the coroner who coronates, who shows them the dead bodies. And then you can also find a very brief entry for Isabel Ulee, Daniel's widow. There's more about Daniel in his previous life rather than Isabel. She works as a dental hygienist and basically is a stereotypical small-town Midwest American. That's kind of it as written.

Yeah, her and the kid are 100% there for finale, probably gonna die. That's about it. And I just got to note, Louis Stubbs. Classic Delta Green coroner. I don't know that there's a single coroner in these games where they don't just go, I don't need to know more about this. It's always like, if they figure this out, they dive in, baby. They're going deep.

It's also really funny that you mentioned the kid too, because out of these NPCs so far, guess which ones don't have any stats?

The one that'll fight to save his mom?

Don't worry about it. The one who will take max sand damage at seeing Daniel, but there's nothing. It's fine. We're fine.

It's fine.

We'll handwave it. That's, uh, that's actually the GM's problem, actually.

He's gonna get eaten anyways. It doesn't matter.

All right, well, let's get down to the conspiracy lore angle here. And I think at the center of it all, I think the, the point of contention would be Evelyn Wells here from the, uh, Dennett, Belton, and Wells Detective Agency, who Gavin Ross, hired under a pseudonym, Michael Bellick, to keep tabs on Tybalt. And he's trying to clean house here, so he gets these, like, fanatically loyal mercs, these 3 mercenaries who I think you could just group into one, like, unit in terms of convenient tools to use.

Yeah.

You got Earl R. Daniels, Charles Ace Sorino, and Lila Masten. They're all socially maladjusted killers. that you can just play as that, um, because that's what they are. Uh, they're an obstacle for your, your PCs. Um, so he is basically telling these mercs to clean house, and they burned down the detective agency. They tried to kill everyone. Uh, Evelyn obviously survived and is in her hospital room. Their next step is to basically take her out, uh, and that's a hidden spinning plate ticking time bomb. Mm-hmm.

And I will say, uh, noting timeline-wise, because this will be important later, she doesn't wake up until 12— October 12th, I believe, which is pretty far into the scenario.

So whenever they're already killing the Yuli things.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But they're supposed to be killed in—

on—

I'm going to talk about the timeline because I have thoughts.

Yeah.

Yeah. Like your agents will probably have to deal with these mercenaries in the hospital, right, doing a second attempt on Evelyn.

Or if, you know, Gavin Ross knows that there's heat on his trail, he's probably gonna divert some of the mercenaries over to the agents, right? This is, uh, this is a moving obstacle that the Keeper can use. I mean, the Handler can use. But I think that's all I'm really gonna focus on.

You don't want to talk about Justin Croft and Ortega and the law firm in DC that you're just going to jet over?

Like Justin Croft, the guy with the, what do you call it? The storage container that blows up and it's just a dead end.

The 60% lethality storage.

The difference between the multiple 60% lethality storage containers and that Justin Croft and Ortega are different people. I love having different NPCs with the same names because Justin Croft is dead. So why—

or is he?

And then also Michael Bellick is Gavin Ross, who is Justin Croft's— no, I'm sorry, Justin Ortega's uncle, who is like Justin's son.

Fake uncle.

Funkle.

Right.

Oh no, that doesn't work.

No, he's like, yes, I'm your uncle because Justin Ortega— Just trust me, girl. Is going to inherit all of this majestic shit. Yep, because that's just how it works, and I'm sure there was no way he could have can it. I don't know. Whatever the point is, yeah. This kid inherits all the majestic stuff, and Gavin Ross, in his vast intellect, has manipulated and gotten this kid ready, and he just manipulates and has all the information himself.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Hehe. Supervillain laugh, etc.

Yeah, like his entire upbringing was because of. the machinations of Gavin Ross.

Which I guess at least he's a potentially sympathetic character, like the kids. Not bad.

Okay, I'm gonna flash forward to Limitations. How will your agents know that? There is so much going on behind the curtain that just feels like GM lore dump fodder. Yes, I agree. The PCs will never be able to know. So what's the point? To them, it's nothing. These are just names of shadowy people.

It's another person to shoot.

Yeah, this is Alex, yeah, I think you were talking conspiracy side. This is for your agents that want to do financial crime solving and hunting down shell companies of shell companies and doing all that tracking. If you've got players that like that shit, this, like, this conspiracy angle will be so far up their alley because it is 100% that of like, oh, this one payment because of a late payment links to this company. which is owned by this person who's— yeah, it's a lot to follow.

Well, you know, that sounds like we're kind of moving into the key locations that are described in the text, which we're going to— I'm going to go off on a little bit too.

Hell yeah.

In terms of Mill Creek, Washington, where most of the scenario takes place, you have Greaves' house and the lab. You have the coroner's office in Chenomas County, which is a few minutes away. It doesn't matter. Don't worry about it. And then you have the Ulee home in Billings, Montana. Which will be about a 13-ish hour drive with no stops following Interstate 90 in a more or less straight shot to the east from Mill Creek, Washington, just following the interstate. This may come up later in terms of my edits, but that, that's the core case. And then you have all of this other stuff that's kind of— it feels tacked on to it, in my opinion. Alex, Nathan, like y'all were already talking about, like— When do you want to jet over to DC in the middle of all this too?

I think Alex will talk about it later for the most part, but in the second part of the scenario, probably realistically, right? Like, yeah, I don't know that I'd probably try and put them, especially if you're doing a one-shot. It's a lot.

I mean, cards on the table here. If I were running this, I just split it into 2 scenarios.

Yeah.

The first, like, monster hunt, monster hunt focus, like Lex is doing. And then second part, it's the cleanup.

So then question, what big payoff will you expect for your players? Because you already have the climactic, we got the monster. And then you have a lot of these loose ends that are difficult to chase up, are flimsy at best. and then lead to a result if they don't kill themselves in the process. Like, I would struggle to give them some kind of a reward for continuing the case. It's just, it's one of my bigger problems with this scenario.

Yeah, I mean, just because it's fresh in my mind, I'm gonna say it now, and you're free to move this—

Sure.

Another section. But I can see multiple ways of going around this and making it rewarding. Like, if they want to keep on the case during a home scene, they can definitely do that, be given extra clues to lead them to the right places. Gavin Ross is a just absolute goldmine of unnatural data and artifacts or whatever. Like, he's, he's, he's post-Majestic, right? So the program is really interested in that. And if the players aren't motivated to follow up. You can just have the program look into Gammaros to clean up that loose end. And I imagine that you can have a fairly mundane climax that's not supernatural versus, I don't know, he just uses one of his many artifacts to summon or add a complication to the climax when they do meet.

Yeah, he seems like he'd be a good make a deal with the devil finale, right? Right? Like, you get to that end, you finally get a hold of him, and he gives you that, like, sure, you could report me to the program, or you could be filthy fucking rich.

Right.

And help me, like, find the new drug, do whatever. Like, this would be a good mission spawner, potentially.

All the while, I imagine program's like, don't trust Bellick. Yeah.

You found Gavin yet? Yeah, no, no, boss. I haven't seen him. Why, why do you have so much money?

Uh, uh, yeah.

So I think it would be a good— like, the second half of the scenario, this theoretical second half, would be good as like maybe a 3/4/midway point of a campaign.

Mm-hmm.

That way you can actually use these boons in future scenarios. Yeah, if you take that deal with the devil.

Yeah, I like that. I, I think earlier in so that they have some chance to deal with this guy. Yeah, because that does seem like that would be kind of the main thing after a while is like, how do you take out Gavin Ross?

Mm-hmm. The name of scenario, just kill Gavin Ross. Gavin Ross must die.

Honestly, that, that's a pretty cool scenario name.

But yeah, first things first, deal with the Yuli thing.

Yeah. Yeah, so let's, let's talk about timetables, Lex. You had come up with a really good Date-wise bit for this, which is kind of intriguing.

I can't take too much credit because Dennis did include a timeline at the tail end of the scenario here, which I've missed on all of my other rereads until seeing timeline in the bookmarks.

Should have put it at the beginning.

So there is technically a timetable for when certain events are scripted to happen in this scenario. Again, it's at the end of the book or PDF, whatever you're looking at. But it goes on a span of several days. And we've talked on the podcast a few times about every time we run Delta Green, our players are just pedal to the metal, no sleep. We got to get this in and out in a couple of days. And I want to do a quick sidebar and just talk with y'all for a minute about these timetables that are more— I don't know, it sounds odd to say time-based. Which I worry could give GMs the wrong idea that, like, these things don't happen until this day. So if the agents come by, then it's like, well, there's nothing here because it— like, she hasn't woken up yet, which I feel could lead to some, some difficulty in terms of running games. Whenever I'm looking at a timetable, I tend to think of it in terms of a progression meter or some kind of an escalation meter, but would really encourage GMs reading this or considering running it to play pretty fast and loose with the timetable and just take it as a sequence of events or bangs that you can throw in, but be flexible with how your agents are going to actually encounter some of these. You know, if they are looking at the morgue on their first stop after arriving, as written, they arrive October 3rd, right? October 4th, the PI's place is firebombed, Evelyn Wells is shot. They may not really know or care with that because, like, what the fuck does that have to do with anything?

Yeah.

Then on October 5th, the Yuli 1 starts leaving town after, you know, kind of hanging out in some gross rundown RV or something. And then it says Yuli 3 will erupt from Amber's corpse and leave the morgue. But if your agents are there on day 1, or in this case October 3rd, have that bad boy pop out.

Yeah.

Like, don't wait for these pre-planned things to go off and just really try to work with your players to come up with a fun story there.

Absolutely.

As written, from October 5th, there's just this, like, long gap of, I guess, they're expected to be running around the town hunting down the trail of the Yulee thing before Ross's goons are going to show up to kill Evelyn Wells in her hospital bed before she can actually wake up to talk. This is, you know, 4-ish days. My agents are typically ready to go home by this point. So, you know, in my own imaginary.

Monster's dead.

Yeah, right.

And then like October 10th is whenever the first Yuli is supposed to arrive in Billings, and then the 12th is the Yuli from the CDC flight. Yuli 2 will then arrive and is bigger. And then on the 15th, Yuli 3 from Amber is even bigger. It's in the tons and will show up at the house in Billings, Montana, which I haven't even talked about. There's a second house between Isabel. It's one of those details I just can't wave over because it makes No sense to me.

Well, she don't live there anymore.

And how will they know that? How will he know that? How does he just have a little pigeon homing device to head there? Again, I cover all this, but—

He finds it in the phone book, is I believe literally the logic they went with because she hasn't changed her phone number. I'm not sure how that all works, but that is, I believe, the path. Okay.

So that's the general timeline of things as written. But if I know any of my players, This is going to happen at a much faster rate.

Right. And I would like to just emphasize that this is just a timeline, which is just the guideline. And you as the handler, you can make the timeline work for you.

Alex is pointing at you, listener.

Yeah. Yeah. If you want to have something happen because it would be more exciting, have it happen earlier or have it happen later, then just do it. Yep.

And part of, Lex, I think your have them be attacked in the morgue is great because then they'll probably kill one of these so you don't have 2 times— like, that's one less time they have to go to Billings, Montana.

Right.

And so then in terms of threats, kind of on that note, the Yuli things are the biggest, or at least the most direct threats that the PCs are going to encounter during this investigation. Everything that the Yuli things will physically attack or bite or, you know, grab whatever is infected with this blue blood tissue. And if it is not treated very, very, very quickly, then whatever tissue they grab, like if it grabs their arm, it's going to become kind of corrupted by this stuff and then rip off of them. It won't make that convenient popping sound. It will be much worse and more painful. But it will spawn another Yuli thing. And then as they consume more organic matter, they'll grow in size. They can spontaneously create whatever limbs and things as they're growing, tons of eyes and hands and teeth. It's awesome.

They regenerate like a motherfucker.

Yeah, they regenerate like crazy. They're potent and intelligent. And so like, as written in the scenario, there are a minimum of 3 Yuli bodies, as we have mentioned, the one from Greaves's house, the one from Amber's body, and the one that caused the CDC plane to go down. Plus, there are some crows that you can emphasize at the start of this scenario that they were picking at Tybalt's body, and so they're infected with this blue blood stuff. And there was a really cool bit of artwork where there's a crow with like some fingers growing under its wing. It's a great handout to give out to players.

Yeah, I love the art for this.

I think that's more to like fuck with the players though, because they can't spawn Yuli things. No, for some reason, like quote unquote, that's what the author wrote.

Yeah, on that timeline, on October 10th, the crows suddenly dropped dead. That's like, okay. I mean, this is a fun oh shit moment, but we're covering as written. So yeah, exactly.

It just, it's gotta be the thought process, I assume, is just that it'd be too damn brutal. Like, because these are things that even a little bit can infect other things. If it were to be attacked by something and that, like, a bear attacks it, bear decides, oh, this is a bad idea and runs away. Well, something breaks out of the bear. Like, this is one of those that if you wanted to do an end of the world scenario, is actually a pretty good start to it because it's real nasty.

But that's also something that I really like about the monster in this scenario because they all have this flawed focus to try to go to Billings, Montana to reach reunite with his wife. Like, I think that without that kind of focus, then this would just be the thing and it would be an apocalyptic-style scenario. But in this case, each one that splits off, once your agents know kind of where they're going, you now like have a kind of a sand trap that you just need to wait them out or find some way to head them off or something in there.

You know, that does make a lot of sense, Lex. I think you've convinced me. Um, because you could just have the crows go all the way to Billings, Montana and just start circling the house.

Yeah, for sure. Like there's, there's a lot of flexibility that you can have in there. And I just think that, you know, making sure you can convey to players, this is the destination of where it's going, especially by the time they see it a second time, then that's going to be, oh, all signs are pointing here.

And the fact that Yuli isn't a mindless, like killing machine monster that's going to attack everyone. Yuli has a goal and it's to just get to that location.

Yeah.

It's not to kill or absorb everyone like the Thing.

It also recognizes its main weakness in that typical monster movie fashion. It cannot stand UV light. And so sunlight will sizzle the blue blood away. It's positively lethal to these things.

UV light too?

Yeah. I say that it's UVB light because that's the more frequent one. So if you're using a UV flashlight or something, that will also do damage to the Yuli things as they are coming around. So we'll cover sort of opportunities for agents to discover this and use it against them as like, again, that's your main threat for this scenario.

Right. And for the post-Majestic angle, right, there's that looming threat of Gavin Ross, uh, in the background. So agents at any point in time can be targeted by any of the roaming goons like the mercs. Or they can, they can blow themselves up in a storage facility.

Oh my God.

They can really, they can really look into the motherlode.

When a green box goes bad.

Yeah, you can have Gavin hire detectives to look into the PCs if they're poking around. You can, you can have those detectives then escalate the situation into Gavin hiring hired killers or sending his mercenaries after them, just waiting to like garrote the PCs. And that's a more exciting conspiracy angle that's not just the monster hunt. You just need to understand that Gam Ross, he wants to cover his tracks, he's a ruthless millionaire, and he's got resources. So that opens up plenty of avenues for the handler to really throw a wrench into the PCs' plans. And not only that, if the program finds out that the agents are digging too deep into, like, Majestic 12 or March Technologies, depending on the scope of what the handler wants, the program can be like, you have to stop.

Right. Which is funny in its own way because this is the exact thing they probably want, is a way to find Gavin Ross. But, uh, yeah, I think we'll discuss that probably a little bit more later.

Yeah.

So what is the beating heart of this scenario?

This may be absolutely shocking for me to say in this episode, but it's the monster hunt. This is a super cool entity that is weird, extremely dangerous and contagious, but with that restricted and now predictable focus, there's a lot of unknowns and threat and danger about it, but at least the PCs can figure out where it's going. Uh, it has elements of The Thing with the blob, but in my experience, the players really do not expect that kind of vaguely human intelligence as a kind of curveball. I still remember Alex's oh shit moment whenever there was security camera footage that shows it grabbing something out of a gas station clerk, and I say, and then the brake lights of a car come on, and you're like, it's fucking driving? As it drives away.

Nice.

I would say the beating heart of this scenario Is the deep dive into the conspiracy with just like danger around every corner, the paranoia, the fact that learning too much will hurt you. And the— it's like the constant pressure of having ticking time bombs visible or invisible because leads are disappearing left and right, whether they get assassinated in their hospital beds or buildings are getting burned down.

Yeah, and I, I'm right there in the middle. Body horror is back, baby. This whole Yuli thing is all elbows and fingers and arms and arms and arms. I love this critter, especially with how it can just convert stuff over to it. And I think if you were to do the conspiracy, it's a good intro to Majestic. And like the effect of a disbanded research like this and kind of figuring out like that sleeper cell side, the, the conspiracy board, uh, that, you know, it's a little bit of like, oh, all these old retired spies are now getting their stuff found out and you gotta keep a lid on it. Also, there's a bunch of blue things that are absorbing animals. This is a problem.

Yeah, I think one of my other favorite bits about the creature in this is that whenever you're thinking about its realigning of consciousness, it's just been kind of dispersed among all these cells and now it's kind of aware again. But if it is just this thread of Daniel Yulee, it's mostly going to create the parts of anatomy that we are used to seeing. So it's all hands, maybe some feet, but you know, it's all the front of his torso and maybe bits of his face, but just a way to really emphasize there's too many hands on this thing here. Tons of fun.

Yeah. I want to follow up. One of the other favorite things I like about this is every individual Yuli thinks that it's the only one. There's not like a hive mind.

There's full-on Highlander.

Yeah. And luckily, I don't know about luckily for your players, they're staggered out among the days. So they don't really cross over. But if they do, they have like a Highlander moment, I guess, where the Yulees are just like, uh-uh, not today.

And then they just grow on the full double size. Like it's a way to immediately fast-track. You get a big one on your hands.

I think a really fun angle that you could explore, uh, and this might be getting into reanimation, is like having the Yulees not even realize that they're monsters. Like they perceive themselves as human. So that's when, when they see the other Ulysses, they're like, oh, I got to fight this monster to protect my family.

We're just noble men. Innocent men.

All right.

So let's talk strengths and limitations. Strength-wise, Lex, I think you've covered it. The critter.

The monster's tons of fun. And also I will say forcing your agents to scramble from Washington to Montana is really rewarding and it makes makes a very fun ethical dilemma because by this point they will likely have learned that these Yulee things can drive cars and that, you know, they're going to try driving it. They can only travel by night, sure, but that also means that if they're taking the interstate driving vehicles, how many other people are going to die or get infected?

Yeah.

As they are forcibly hitchhiking their way across country in this case. Something— this is getting into reanimation, But something that can be very fun to do is giving your agents an option that they can either fly directly to Billings and just take the L and let people die along the interstate.

Oh, yeah.

Or have them start driving to see if they can chase it and head it off, because you can have an isolated showdown on an abandoned interstate or something. That can be very fun and thematic to encounter it, or if they want to head it off, like, yeah. It can be a fun situation to put your players in.

Oh, I love that idea of like they're, they catch up to it, but the road's just too busy. So they just have to tail this thing for like, okay, it's going to quiet down in a couple hours.

Yeah, I totally agree with Lex there. The monster is fun. I will also say, I personally think it's very rich in lore, which can be a strength when the players are interested in that. to look into, to tie up. One note is I would definitely not run this as an intro scenario. This is the type of scenario that's going to be rewarding if you have players initially in the first couple of missions or operas that are interested in the lore, then you can insert this in. I would think another one of, maybe it's not even a strength, but it is just the sandbox style of play.

Yeah.

Yeah. A lot of plot points where players go here, then players go here, then players go here. It's, hey, these events are all happening. Players are free to choose.

Yeah. And I think for that, there is a really good timeline at the end of the write-up with those like kind of proposed dates when things would happen, which I appreciate. Um, I, you know, this is the strength, but also a limitation is there are some things that the agents can kick off. that obviously wouldn't be represented in the timeline because you don't know when they kick it off, that I wish we had some, like you said, an escalation threat. It would have been nice to just have some sort of idea of the, like, next to the timeline, the second timeline that says if Gavin Ross finds out about the agents, he does this, and a day later this happens, and something you could kind of tack on.

I feel like we could write up one of those in Reanimation or give an example.

I feel like you can write up one of those. I've put— I've done my time on this scenario now. Okay.

20 years of it.

I'll talk about writing it up instead of actually doing the work.

All right. Well, let's talk, uh, not just about our limitations, but, uh, scenario limitations.

Well, I'm permanently emotionally unavailable. Oh, uh, scenario limitations. Got it. I already mentioned it earlier on in this episode, but I often criticize this scenario for being at least 60% GM-facing lore dumps that is impractical for agents to actually investigate and glean any kind of meaningful information from unless the players themselves are extremely interested in the lore. But even then, it's so difficult to access. Like, it really feels like At least 11 pages of this scenario belonged in a setting book or in the Handler's Guide. It really felt like Detwiller had a fun hook for a monster hunt and then wanted to shove some Majestic 2.0 plot threads in. And then you read pages and pages and pages about this MJ-12 and the Justin Ortega lead and the storage containers and everything. And then it ends with Oh yeah, and then Isabelle is there in Montana and there's a showdown. Like, that's the part that I would have wanted guidance for. Like, it just, it didn't fit. It feels very out of place within the scenario itself because I'm, I'm really focused in on the creature and all of that. It's also, in terms of execution, really odd to have an investigation that will start in Washington State and then push agents to get to Montana to stop a monster that is literally killing and turning people and replicating more of itself, but meanwhile encouraged them to fly over to make a quick pit stop in D.C. in person to break into a single law firm on the flimsiest of leads and then maybe go up to Virginia to look into this top secret thing before then wrapping back up in Montana. It's just that the timeline and pacing was confusing for me in reading, to say the least.

Yeah, I agree with that. And I think, Alex, you mentioned it before, what is the climax of this here, right? Like, that is so much like a— this is not an easy handler experience. Yeah, it's just tough.

It's definitely, like I said, an intermediate level GM, like, type of game.

Yeah, because you're gonna have to pace this.

When you have a sandbox, there's no pre-written ending.

So I'm going to plug my own reanimation on this because with these edits, any GM can do it. I'm telling you, this can be very straightforward and fun if you just cut all of this other conspiracy stuff out, save it for a different game or—

Alex, you were about to say BS.

I neither confirm nor deny.

Yeah, I like that as a goal of the one-shot though. I think that is a clear kind of distinction as we talk about this is There is a big difference between trying to run one or the other, and the limitations won't match necessarily.

Right.

Yeah. Um, so my limitations that I've kind of gotten to point out really fall on the, the writer kind of making assumptions in this scenario for handlers that kind of lead to dead ends or just like straight up don't make sense if, um, you use critical thinking. So for example, like, the writer assumes it's easy for the players to frame Emil Artenza, the stepfather of Amber, and gives a bunch of different ways that they can frame him for the crimes, but then doesn't take into effect that there's the consumed biomass. Like, how do you explain that?

Yeah.

And then this is all for naught because the Yuli's gonna pop out of Amber Griffin's body on October 5th, after— probably after they, they clean up and frame the guy. So it's really just like, okay. Also, there's another part where the writer states that, uh, the players can make the Yulis cross paths so that they can consume one another, but that doesn't happen naturally at all until the end. So the players wouldn't even know to do that, uh, because they haven't seen them interact.

Right.

And then there's also a section with Greeves' colleagues in DARPA or the DOD who have something secret to share with the agents as written, right? But like, who in their right mind would share top secret information with people who are like just looking into it without an in?

Yeah.

So those are things that the handler would have to like either hand wave or find their own solution for to keep that versimilitude up. Um, yeah, another limitation. It's scenario— yeah, super unfocused. Totally agree with Lex there, because the fact that there is a monster on the loose, it detracts from the lore. And the fact that there is so much lore, it detracts from there's a monster on the loose.

Yeah.

So, yep, either I would go all in on one or the other, or do both as separate chapters.

Yeah, and I think that to tag on to that too is it's a forecasting problem, right? There are so many threats in here. Same with kind of that like writer assumption to hint to the players that like, oh, you know, this person in the hospital that you found, they're probably still gonna come after her. You as a GM have to figure out how to put that in front of them. You have to figure out— we'll talk a little bit about the storage box. That death trap, you have to have players that can figure out, oh, these are trained security guards with military expertise. And also, if I type the wrong password twice, I blow up real bad.

That's—

I mean, that to me, if I was a player and I went, oh, I try and break in, you fail, roll 60% lethality, would be a real like, oh, I didn't—

Jeez.

I didn't realize the stakes were quite there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You always want it to be informed risks and not just blindside your players and their agents with just lethality, because that's honestly, it's just a lackluster ending. What are you going to do to follow up afterwards? I just, I really don't see any good outcomes from something like that.

Right. Right. It's super unsatisfactory if like, oh, my player character got vaporized or all of our player characters got vaporized in this explosion at some storage unit. And one, they all die. So it's like, okay, well, how are you gonna pick things up? And two, they never get to see what's in the storage unit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And all of this too, after spending hours of time invested in role-playing and investigating and thinking about clues and whatnot. It's just, yeah, a lot of problems from my end.

Yeah.

And what, and what player behavior are you teaching there? You've then taught your players to always send Send one guy out to the thing to look at it as a cat's paw.

Or always be paranoid, which is not fun when they're taking 5, like every 10 seconds. It's thematic.

Like 10-foot pole behavior. But yeah, that's exhausting.

Yeah.

When agents start packing a 10-foot pole to poke at the tiles in front of them.

So with all these different reasons, right, Dev, this is, this is why I'm saying this is an intermediate level scenario for as written, or if you want to lean into the lore. Um, now a little nitpicking. I would have liked a character chart, like just showing all the characters, their factions and motivations, just so it's a little easier to keep track of the names and the relationships because there's just a lot. There's a lot of people. Yep. All right. I'll get off my soapbox.

No, we're about to get back on the soapbox.

This whole podcast is a soapbox. You kidding me?

It's all soapboxes.

We built this soapbox brick by brick.

So what are the general experiences with this scenario?

I have run the reanimated version of this scenario twice. First for Reanimated RPG Con.

Nice.

And then again for Alex and Beth as a very quick one-shot going through sort of these changes in there. Both the times I think were really nice successes.

Yeah, I had a lot of fun with Lex's run of his reanimated scenario.

And I think I might have run this. And if you played in my version of this, I'm sorry that my brain is bad. I'm very sorry.

That's on me. I thought I saw you run this.

It's 100% right up my alley. Reading it, I'm like, I have some memories of this, but I listen to a lot of podcasts, so I don't know what's real anymore. So let's get into reanimation time.

All right.

Main question. How do we highlight the beating hearts of this scenario.

So for running this as a one-shot, your main job is staying on tasks with the monsters and staying flexible with the bangs to drop in on agents to kind of keep them off balance while they're investigating and to increase this threat and spread of them. The players will likely be confused as you first start dropping the hints that this is not just some kind of mindless monster. But whenever it reaches a hand up to unlock the door before opening it or presses the button for an elevator, that's a big what the fuck moment. And I have some recommendations for some new scenes that you can create that really highlight and foreshadow where they are going. Then also with this, like, because you will be juggling at least 2 creatures mostly, like, you don't need to worry about the, the CDC one over Idaho. That's just kind of in the wind to keep your players stressed.

Mm-hmm.

You know, removing the other extraneous factors can do a lot here because your players are gonna be freaking out running around town, right?

Yep.

Then, so that's just some information for the beginning. And then at the very end, I have a couple of things to keep this beating heart for a focused monster hunt going, right? Increasing the stakes of Danny Boy's arrival in Montana. So in my edits, I had Yuli die in 1997 rather than '92. for a couple of reasons. Number one, Isabelle was pregnant with his daughter whenever he died in action, whom he'd never met and would be in her late 20s now, assuming we're playing this in a modern-day setting, right?

Mm-hmm.

So that he also would have some access to the internet and would have been able to use MapQuest by that time. MapQuest was put on the internet in 1996. So by '97, he conceivably would have printed off some directions to get to a location. This will be important as a clue that your players can find at some point later. Then a reason why I set Isabelle in her late 20s is because I use this scenario for a Thanksgiving or a Christmas theme where everybody's coming home for the holidays.

Nice.

So Isabelle, the daughter Miranda, and Miranda's new fiancé are all gathered together at the home where more people is going to mean more chaos and a bigger threat where you're trying to ask someone to leave their house on Thanksgiving. Are you crazy? They're going to stay there unless you're Alex and knock over a power line to just black out the entire neighborhood for the holidays.

Smart.

Alert, alert. This is actually a Christmas scenario. Um, well, personally, to really get things going in support of Lex's one-shot, I would definitely run it as program game so that players have those resources to hunt the monster down.

That makes complete sense because it speeds everything up. If you go as outlaws, you just have— I don't think you have enough realistically to stop 3 separate things running through the woods, the last of which is 3 tons and 45 hit points. That's a, that's a tough sell.

Yeah, just calling the drone strike as a program. Great. However, on the other side, if you want to like slide the difficulty on the scale to harder because you don't have as much resources, definitely go Outlaws.

Mm-hmm.

Um, there is merit to choosing an Outlaw-type game because the Outlaws are way more likely to go after Gavin Ross because they have a Poe, probably has a very big grudge against Gavin Ross and doesn't want him running out free with all these unnatural hypergeometric artifacts. And then there's the— here's the big brain. Like, if you had infinite time and infinite resources, uh, go along the path of running this as 2 scenarios. Program game for the one-shot Yuli hunt. Outlaw game for the cleanup afterwards, once the, uh, program agents make all the— because they make clues as they go to different places and resolve.

Oh, interesting.

I like that.

So then the outlaws could be alerted And then, then you can have the Gavin Ross must die scenario as the Outlaws.

Yeah, that's interesting. I liked, Lex, you had been talking earlier about how there are those like really cool scenes that you can play out that the, the agents will never see, right? The guy stumbling into the driveway in his bathrobe. We need to talk about that later. Um, and like falling apart. They never get to see that. the, the plane flight. They never get to see that. I kind of want to like, there's probably a way maybe you do it as like, you know, the Brindlewood Bay, the scene that the agents are in, but they narrate. Yeah. The unseen scenes. Maybe you do something like that because I really like—

Or cold opens.

Yeah, exactly. Like, that's a cool scene.

That's what I do.

Like, yeah. Like you're a bunch of CDC agents on this plane. And then, like, obviously the plane's gonna go down as the Ulee thing pops out. That would be a great cold open. And then you'll be like, all right, now you're agents of the program. This is your briefing.

Yeah.

Yep.

I'm a huge fan for the cold open because it also feels fitting for, like, all of the, like, the Hannibal and criminal investigation shows or whatever that, like, you get the close-up of the act being committed or, like, the implications of it, right?

I'm addicted to cold opens right now.

So that's what I do. Like you mentioned with Tybalt Greaves falling in his bathrobe. That is what I do as a cold open. Like, as the players are getting set down and looking at their sheets or whatever, I describe the newspaper kid riding up on his bike and then seeing these crows huddled around something in the driveway, going up to it. Then he sees that they're pecking at the exposed flesh on his jaw that's been ripped open and all of these things, and screams as the crows scatter. Then that's when I ask them to introduce their players going in.

Nice.

That— I find that a really evocative and cool cold open, and then it also reduces the number of questions that they will need to ask, where it's like, oh yeah, I already know meta-wise what the body looks like and how it was found. So you can expedite that discovery phase a little bit more. I also like the idea if you want to like do a bio break and then come back with a second cold open for the plane or something like that. That could be a fun scene.

Yeah, I know. That'd be so fucking cool. Yeah. Oh, and you can obfuscate— fuck. You can hide the identity of the monster By like having all the lights go out in the plane.

Yeah.

And like no flashlights. So it's like, ah.

Yeah. I kind of like the cold open of the, uh, of the Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner too, right? Is it's all just chill and then you pan out and there's this blue guy just standing in the snow looking in and that's, you know, it might get the agents thinking like, Oh, we got to get our butts to Billy's.

I, I think at that point, if he's standing outside the window, I'm not sure it would work.

Yeah, I'd say it depends on how well they've stopped it, because the nice thing about cold opens is they don't have to be concurrent. So if they're like way behind and you know they're just going to catch up to it right as it shows up, I do the cold open with them in the snow and then The next part is basically the agents rolling up and doing whatever they do.

There's that, or—

Shining it with flashlights.

That would be a terrific epilogue if they missed one.

Ooh, yeah.

Oh yeah, that would be a good epilogue.

Yeah, if they left the one from the CDC flight or something, then you're like, and as you all go home to your families, home for the holidays, the Yulees gather together, and there is a figure, deep blue, waiting in the snow.

Got him.

A 3-ton elephant-sized man limb thing. Holidays are a magical time. All right. So let's talk about all the stitching we're going to do here. First of all, what are we cutting? Lex, I think you've kind of been talking a fair bit. I think I can guess what you're going to cut.

Yeah. All of the Gavin Ross and Justin Ortega elements. I did a rough hand count before this episode, and it is 11-ish pages of material you can straight up remove if you want to run this as a one-shot. Also removing all of Amber's personal history stuff. I already didn't like that the one Black character in this scenario as written is an exotic dancer with a troubled past, and like, it didn't feel great.

So I agree.

Yeah, you can cut all of Amber's history. Like, I still keep her as an exotic dancer because it's fun to have this like very bougie wealthy house and everything, and it's clear that this guy is just loaded and then he married a stripper and is just living out these like dumb little boy fantasies where he's just like has race car beds and things and whatnot. Like, you know, he's just dumb, right? So you can remove all of that. Also, I remove Isabelle's second home situation and just have her stay at the old one. It seemed like an unnecessary complication that didn't really add anything. And I didn't really know how the players would actually know, like, how will you learn and apply that information was a question I was asking.

Either that or they're going to do the same thing Yuli essentially assumably does and go, Oh, she doesn't live there anymore. She lives there, which is that fun? Like, I'm not sure that's very interesting. So yeah, I love that removal.

Another removal I would do, or something to just keep on the chopping block depending on your players, is the fact that pet death or, yeah, death of animals is used as a clue. So consider your players' lines and veils. An alternative that you can do is instead of like describing it, like you can just maybe— no, I don't know where I was going there with the exploded and burst open wildlife. Oh yeah, yeah, no, you can have the exploded and burst open wildlife instead of like pets. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I meant.

I fully agree. Whenever I'm prepping to run this scenario, I will warn players that there may be some veiled mentions of harm to animals. And there is a really lengthy kind of gross scavenger hunt of missing and dead pets that they can follow to track its position throughout the town. I recommend cutting that. Don't even mention it. You know, what I will do is once the agents know that the Yuli things are out on the loose, they'll likely try to track them down.

Mm-hmm.

They can find like half a deer in the woods or something. And, you know, it's sizzling in the sunlight. And then as they are looking through that region of town, someone could surreptitiously be stapling a missing pet poster onto a telephone pole, and that's it. Move on. Like, tell your players you think that it's been this way, and then they can keep going in that general direction. You do not need to spend any additional time on it because I really don't like harm of domesticated animals in these sorts of scenarios.

Definitely.

Yeah, fair. Know your players. Absolutely.

Also, like, Tybalt Greaves is kind of a gooner loser. So—

See, you guys are not giving Tybalt enough credit, I think. Like, all right, I think—

I'm willing to be convinced.

You want to play him as that way, and I get it. Like, I think that's a way to play it. I think another way to play it is he's smarter than you are as the Delta Green agent.

Of course.

He got his patent out from Majestic. He smartly did the one that he can kind of COVID up, and he made, what, millions of dollars? Just lets the money come in, invested it, and now lives in a pretty nice home with a pretty nice lady that he likes. She's like, ah, he's fine. She can go see other guys. He doesn't give a shit. He's rich. Like, he's living the dream. The only downside is that Gavin Ross knows about him. And if Gavin Ross didn't know, he'd be fine.

Like, honestly, I would just change Amber. Why not just change her to like a supermodel? Because that would reinforce Reeve's—

Yeah, you can definitely do that. Like, I, I just kept the exotic dancer angle because it was clear that like she's from nowhere beforehand and Tybalt just kind of seemed to really like her and then they got together. So whenever agents are exploring their house, like he showers her with gifts. Like her room has its own separate long walk-in hallway, not even a closet. And it's like just going into all of this that clearly it's a very shallow, but seems to be happy relationship.

You know, at least he's not like a certain other NPC in, in Presence who's like sleeping with a 19-year-old. Yeah.

None of that.

No, I think that's the important thing there is like, I think exotic dancer makes sense because Tybalt is intentionally not showing off his wealth at an extreme level, right? He's got a fairly normal house, normal car, you know, he gives a lot of nice things, but he's keeping it on the DL. So that's why I kind of would say supermodel, I think, is a little too—

Just a model.

Too much.

No, no, you convinced me. It's even a model.

Like, just, I know people that have gone the, I met someone at the strip club and they're now my girlfriend line, and it is possible. You know people? No, I knew somebody that did that, which—

As long as they're not—

It's a very human, yeah, it's a very human story.

Well, if there's anything about humans, they tend to change a lot.

Ooh.

Oh yeah, you like that segue?

Yeah, yeah, I do like that segue. I'm gonna just ask the big one right now because I know my gut is saying 3 is too many. 3 ULEs arriving at different times, that's a lot to keep going back to Billings for. I don't know, what do you guys think?

So a couple of things with that. Number one, you're not gonna have to worry about the, the third one. Uh, I, I described it as 2 earlier, but you don't need to worry about the CDC one. You know, it's in BFE Idaho woods kind of making its way over to Montana. It is a leaf in the wind as far as as the agents are concerned. Its purpose is to convey to the agents that there is now another vector that is converging onto Billings, Montana. You have to get there if you want to head it off because these ones coming from Washington are not going to be sufficient, right?

Yep.

So as a GM, you don't really need to do much with all of that. You mostly just kind of need to juggle 1 to 2 ULE things that are just kind of in the vague area until they leave. And I have some notes on that as well.

Yeah.

Also, don't stagger their arrivals at the house in Billings. That is a perfect climax scene set up to have this big showdown and whatnot. What I did in Alex and Beth's runs that was a lot of fun is that they sorted out all of these light bulbs. They changed all the light bulbs in the house to be UV lights. That way they could lure them inside with a mannequin and everything and then turn the lights off. on and had this showdown, knockdown drag-out for the, the first one that they had.

That was fun.

Yeah. And I mentioned that they hear this and like crashing and stuff going on behind the house. They're like, I don't, don't have time to worry about that. And so they kill the one that's in the house. And that's when I have the other big chungus bust in right after it. And they were like, what? And then having this like multi-ton one chase after them, like That was a climactic finale.

Honestly, that was a little Resident Evil, like Resident Evil 6.

They did have big eyeballs. But like, that's not just you wait one out each time. I found that like, are you just going to be like a sniper camped out or something? I don't know.

Spawn camping. Forever. Forever too, because there, as we were talking about, like how many of these fucking things are there? Like as written, there's 3, but it's super contagious.

Right. And so that's where in my run of it, I tend to keep a lot of stuff localized to Mill Creek, Washington, and that kind of immediate area. And then Billings is— you have a finite number of threats to contend with. So, yeah, most of the stuff is in Tybalt's home. And of the clues that might link out to MJ-12 or whatever, they will quickly fizzle into obscurity or unusability, right?

Right.

Tibalt has a laptop in his lab where he's been making notes and working on this procedure. And if the agents put in even one failed attempt to log into this laptop typing password, it will start to smoke and then— as there is an incendiary device that ruins the internals of the laptop and the hard drive. Because, you know, not only is this going to stop them from trying to crack open the laptop and go on this big trail that distracts everything else and will eat a lot of time, Like, what are they even going to find? The flimsiest of leads. When instead, this abrupt termination of clues can still indicate that Tybalt knew he was into some shady-ass shit. So that's still indicating to them that, like, he knew what was going on and it's something bad if he's taking zero chances, right?

Mm-hmm.

The next thing that I do to also hint at a broader scheme but not give any room for follow-up up is that there is a box that is filled with insulation and ice packs with a prepaid shipping label addressed to John Smith at 1509 West 8th, Tohoka Highway 380 in Post, Texas, zip code 79356. If they pull this up on Google Maps, this is the Sand Creek RV Park in the middle of BFE West Texas and clearly a dead drop. Right, so what are they gonna do, ignore the monsters that are actively killing people or something and then just sit on their thumbs in post-Texas? No, like, that is something that you can hint that there is something bigger, but we're gonna stay focused and not distract with leads that will take ages to follow up on.

Yeah, that's for another team to handle.

Exactly.

The surveillance while they go out.

Yeah.

Right. Another thing to address, an inconsistency that really bugged me in this scenario. Tibbalt is supposed to have gotten infected through a slit on his glove, but the blue blood stuff rips out his tongue, jaw, and esophagus. If he gets cut on his thumb, it should have ripped off his arm, you know, and I think that the mouth thing is cooler because that's worse horror. You can really emphasize, right? So what I have is a very quick nod that there was a small earthquake in the Seattle area around 2 to 3 AM the night of the Greaves' deaths, and it was so small that most people slept right through it. You know, I may say like, you heard it on the morning news, didn't even realize it. That way, whenever they investigate the cabinet where Greaves is working, they can see as they move their head around a little speck of blue that like it rattled the protective casing around this closed cabinet and he breathed it in. So that's how it hit on his tongue and got the infection and everything going from there. Maybe it's a lot of lengths to go through, but consistency is important for me.

See, and, and I kind of look at it, it's like, eh, if he cut his thing open a little bit, maybe this is solved by the cold open where you just have he's walking around in his bathrobe. He's, you know, just moving around. You see something drip off his hand into the coffee. Glug, glug, smash cut to him jawless running out the door and collapsing.

I can see that. That does remind me of one other change. Don't have him dissolve. It's a fucking gnarly body that you can have as your first big clue. And it also is a great way to indicate that parts of him smoked whenever the sunlight hit him that the cops saw. So like, don't have him melt. Just his throat is all torn and fucked up. And there's this kind of dark residue on the surface of the skin. where it was exposed to sunlight. I don't know why he melts.

Yeah, because I think as written he has a foot and a, like, an arm that don't melt, and the rest of him must have been contaminated enough. But yeah, I like that idea of having that melted candy kind of feel around the hole that this thing pulled out of, especially if you can then notice that it seems like almost a hand was pulled out of him or you know, some other organ where you're like, did this guy have a— did he have a skull in his skull?

It's something that you can do to emphasize a difference in his and Amber's cause of death in the first morgue scene, where I note that Greaves, the skin was ripped apart from his jaw, but Amber looks like she was bitten and mauled, that you see sharp things where it looks like teeth have perhaps penetrated and ripped off parts of her face, that Parts of Amber's damage is rips and other parts may be like punctures and things like that. So it's another way to kind of throw your players for a loop a little bit and wondering what the hell happened.

I like it.

Um, I would say just to support the one-shot angle here, the monster hunt angle, one change that you could do is you could make the Delta Green contact, Kane, the one in the CDC, already have the sample that was meant to be on the crashed plane so you can eliminate that scene and give them the sample to play around with. Like, like maybe he swapped out that sample with a fake, like Indiana Jones style, and he has the Yuli sample. Hmm.

Yeah, they go to visit him and then that motor hotel, the room is already demolished. They find a body or something.

But that way you can, you can allow the players to get the essential clue, honestly, to, to see the Yuli thing eat itself, or—

Yeah.

Another instance.

Yeah, I like that.

Yeah. This is something that, you know, me wanting to talk about the edits that I did is— it's not jiving with, with how we're organizing the, the discussion of this episode. But yeah, that's also where I highly recommend a great scene is whenever the agents go into the morgue. And they investigate Tybalt's body first, and you describe the stuff going on, and, you know, the coroner can shine the light. Another change that I make is I make the coroner a Black woman named Louise Stubbs, who is just a little more fun and can be supportive for the players. So like Louise will shine the light. They can see that there's a UV thing. As she's shining it, you see the, the smoke and stuff on Amber's body. And then that's whenever, ah, the other Yuli thing jumps out at them. They can have a showdown, and it's fairly likely that they'll at least do some damage to it and cut a part of it off. And from there, they will have a sample that Louise will have the presence of mind to kind of put in a bag or a petri dish, and then they can test it. That they can see whenever there is organic material, the little cell will wiggle over and consume and grow. If they put 2 of them— The 2 cells will kind of fight and then one will absorb the other. I think that it's a really essential clue for them to get early on.

Yeah.

Did that petri dish grow an eye and wink at me?

I'm just trying to formulate my thoughts on like how we can have a healthy medium of the, this 2-parter, right? Because the idea is, yeah, split it into 2 because right now the first, first the monster hunt and then the Majestic angle, like the cleanup as a follow-up. Yeah. Because like Azerin, it's just, it's way too bloated.

Yeah. I was kind of thinking about that too. And it's a good question of time-wise. I think you're going to have to have them find some clues that you're just, uh, to Lex's point of, they have to go to Billings. That is a time-sensitive gotta-do. And maybe with these other things, give them a little leeway, right? And be like, ah, you can go finish that up. Now you have this batch of clues that you have time to follow, and you also know enough to go like, whoever did this was very intentional. This is not something you want to rush and be obvious about, right? Because they'll just kill you.

Yeah, and you know, I have those exactly in mind. with giving leeway to clues that, to spinning plates or ticking time bombs that the players aren't even aware of. You could create, let me organize this. So first, program game, Eulie things are being dealt with. As the program PCs go throughout the scenario, they're creating clues to leave for the outlaws to find as they make their way through.

Mm-hmm.

come in after the program scenario monster hunts resolved, they can find all the clues that will lead them to what has happened. Not only that, I'm thinking that Evelyn Wells can be saved.

Yeah.

And then this is where we're talking about a little leeway for the, the PCs. She can be saved by like an unnamed NPC with their own motives, whether they're program or whether they're like an independent person or an ex-Majestic who know that Evelyn's in danger. And then, then it's a manhunt, right? Yeah, for Evelyn Wells by these mercs.

Well, see, I'd be tempted. I like that idea of having the outlaw follow-up. If we had the agents, right, find the information that like, ah, there's this lawyer group that's looking into this, I kind of like having the outlaws start out with the information that Hey, we saw this come through the pipeline.

A-Cell could just know it.

Yeah, and a detective agency got bombed, and we know the only survivor is this woman, and you need to get there and protect her because whoever is gonna do this, like, they don't shoot people and then let them live if they survive that first shot. Like, absolutely, they're obviously coming back.

So that could be pre-known information during the briefing from Ace, right? Straight from A-Cell. And like that, that works. I like that angle, Nathan.

Yeah, speed up some of the bookwork a little bit.

Right.

And, and it still rewards them of they originated the clue that led to this, but they don't then have to fly to DC and ask and ask and ask.

And who knows, maybe both scenarios are happening concurrently. Oh, like at the same time with the program agents moving and then the outlaw agents moving just a little behind.

That's kind of what I'm envisioning in, in how you're describing this as another way to keep it exciting for the players. Maybe after they complete the monster hunt portion, you could ask your players, are you interested in digging into this conspiracy element underlying all of this going on? And just be transparent that it will have a lot of lore stuff. So if they're interested in that, it will be very fun for them. But if not, then your mileage may vary greatly.

Love that.

But then from there, you can have them start off like on day 2 of their the program agent's investigation and they can see some additional context. You can throw in some references to shenanigans. Like if they blow up a gas tanker on the interstate, that can be on the news at some point in their second iteration as some fun continuity.

Fun fact, I think just from my experience in college, I ran a game for like 32 people over the course of a summer because we're all stuck in the same building. But I split them up into groups that would play basically 2 adventuring groups and they would play and whatever they did one week would affect the other group in that same week. So I imagine like if you're super ambitious and like you've got 6 to 8 players, you could split into program and outlaw, right?

I love it.

Have that program game first, then bring the outlaws in with the, with the intro that Nathan described with A-Cell already knowing, hey, we need to protect this woman. And like, depending on their actions and depending on if they're ever gonna meet up, you could just have all of them in the same session once they meet up. If they meet up.

I'll leave that to you. Yeah.

I mean, I'm not going to do that, but I'm just—

Good luck and Godspeed.

I'm spitballing. Yeah, no, I, I like that as an aspirational thing. If, if somebody does that, please let us know how it goes because that'd be cool as fuck.

Fuck.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Um, on things to change, this is a high-level Delta Green discussion probably because there's a lot of scenarios that have the classic DG foe where they are way, you know, they're over-ready. They've got hybrid geometry. They're 20 steps ahead. They know everything. Kevin Ross is really tough because he is that, right? Like, if you're playing him as written, nothing the agents do should really surprise him. And like, to the point where when he goes to meet with people, there are snipers watching the meeting, which means your agents probably just die. Like, it's— that seems like it would not feel fair to me in a, like, in a fun way.

Yeah.

So what do you guys think about how do you, how do you kind of balance that of making him feel intimidating because he should be a threat, but also making him an interesting threat to play against.

So you can escalate it depending how lethal you want it. Like first, maybe he would only agree to talk over like a landline or—

Oh, sure.

Then you could construct a meeting where he's just never seen, but you can still hear him through like a loudspeaker. And if they are going to meet in person with that little bit more of trust. Like, just say if there's any funny business, there will be consequences. Just like signpost it, right? Even in that sniper situation, I personally, I would allow the players some kind of alertness roll to see that faint red dot somewhere or see the glint of a scope.

Yeah. Just imagine the players all have a dot all centered on their forehead the whole time. Hey, what do you think that means?

I have a couple of thoughts on this. As to the uber-prepared evil arch-nemesis mastermind villain, that is something that works in the narrative fiction that does not easily translate over into a tabletop role-playing game setting.

Right.

We had a conversation on our Discord server a few weeks ago at this point about how TTRPGs kind of have an implicit assumption of a victory condition. for the players whenever they sit down to play a game.

Mm-hmm.

Sometimes it's them killing the monster and winning, or at least fighting the monster and dying in the effort of it. Like, you still get that confrontation. You can get some kind of resolution. Sometimes it may be the victory condition is learning the full extent of all the bullshit going on. The player gets that knowledge as a reward, even though their characters may be doomed to die horribly. you still get some kind of a victory or resolution.

Yeah.

Showing up and getting murked by an evil mastermind that you never had a chance against is not very fun in terms of a game mechanic, right? And I worry greatly about players feeling shortchanged about taking time out of their day and lives to play this game to then go, well, you shouldn't have gone against Gavin Ross, fucker. I don't find that fun.

I didn't even know his name. Who is he? Exactly.

Right?

The nameless guy who just kills you.

What do you mean his name is Rocks Fell?

So I think that if you are going to include Ross or other uber-prepared masterminds, to what Alex was saying earlier, you have to signpost the bejesus out of their danger and comprehensive threat. If they are going to meet with Gavin, like maybe Michael Bellick kind of feels like he is intended to be like the Smoking Man from The X-Files that would be this mysterious figure maybe their handler disappears mid-investigation and then Michael shows up and says that he's their new handler.

Oh, that's so good. I like that.

Meanwhile, the previous handler's in a dumpster.

Yeah, to like, to Ross, he's a cat playing with mice. Like, they are not a real threat to him and he wants to make sure they know that. If they start to get uppity, then he'll say, okay, let's have a public meeting in this park. They want to try to have someone with a sniper or something. And then that's whenever he sends them a photo of every single one of their bonds, their wife, their kids, their schoolteacher.

Oh, yeah. Open up the dossier.

He has already tracked all of them down and gets candid photos and says, if you do anything, everyone you know who knows your name will die. And he can promise that. That, like, you can signpost this immense threat that not only are they going to get fucked up, but there's massive consequences. So if he talks, you better listen and then desperately struggle to find some way to counter it, right?

Yeah. Nice. Yeah, I like that a lot.

Oh, the carrot and the stick, right? You could also offer them riches.

Yeah.

Money. Yeah, I like that. I like that.

And the whole thing is maybe this can spur another— like, if you were doing this as a campaign, maybe this spurs another scenario where they need to break into a program or whoever's green box to retrieve some item for him. And they're now on Belek's payroll. And if they try to tell Delta Green about it, again, everyone who knows their name is toast. So this can now be gun to their head. How do we try to get out and resolve this? You tried to learn and you went too deep.

Michael Belek must die.

Yeah.

I love it. No, I like that. Don't be afraid to give your players the treasure, essentially, right? Is if they earn all of it through this, be like, great, you found these majestic secrets. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna do the same shit you saw Tybalt do that made him super rich and super happy for a real long time? And you'll probably have some agents that are like, yeah, man.

At that point, they become an NPC.

No, I disagree. That is, I have created all new problems for myself because I know I'm about to be the mission. And the program keeps calling me up to do shit, and I gotta be real careful that they don't know that I'm a millionaire now.

That does remind me of one other change that I made to keep everything focused more in Mill Creek and remove all of this extra searching and whatnot, is that Tybalt has in his office beneath a stack of Rolex watches a hidden safe that if a PC who is perhaps a, you know, white-collar criminal wants to investigate and crack it open, can find more of these old file folders for patents that he hasn't yet filed.

Ooh.

I really emphasize that Greaves has filed multiple patents in totally different fields than his main profession. So like, you're, you're smelling a mouse there, but then they find a stack of 5 more of them. So like, that, that agent was immediately like, oh, I wish there was something in this safe, but it's completely empty. And then like, he's just trying to survive so that he could be a millionaire at the end of the scenario. So it's a fun addition. Motivation for agents.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If that agent doesn't end their epilogue with singing, we're in the money, I don't know what they're doing.

Uh, one more thing about the whole like meeting with Gavin Ross. If, if he shows up in the scene, expect him to possibly get killed because if they, if any, anyone shows up on the scene, they can be shot.

Yep.

Yep.

Players are crazy enough to do that.

Well, they can steal all his pills too, which is kind of a fun little loot the body moment.

Yeah.

All right. So what are some other changes? I think we've covered a lot of changes here, but what are some things we haven't yet mentioned?

More changes, Nathan?

More changes.

I would say as someone who is going to run this, I would just like map out a clue trail of the, you leave directions if the players— if player characters don't interfere. Like, this is their default path, just so I can have it ready when players are looking into clues.

Alex, it feels like you're, you're teeing me up for this next bit here, because yes, this was a couple of scenes that I came up with to try and very clearly indicate where the Yulis were going. Right. So for the first one at the Greaves' house, the creature is going to wait until the night after the agents' arrival to break out. So there's going to be a clear hole in the plastic quarantine wrapper in the back of the house, and it will lead out into the woods. They can, you know, then if they want to explore, they can then find that half of a deer and see like the back of it is smoking. So it's at least—

Mm-hmm.

That's not a new one, but they can see that it has gone that Then I added 2 other new locations. The first is the small farmstead of Daniel Olafson, who raises sheep a little south of the city.

Oh no.

The local cops, if they're hanging around them at all, may note that some of his sheep are reported as loose and wandering around on the road. Otherwise, you can indicate signs that the Yule Thing is heading south towards that way that will point them in that general direction. Once the PCs are nearby, they can see that the animals are gone. As they explore the farmhouse, they can go around the back door and see there's buckshot and all of the stuff across the back porch.

Hmm.

And Daniel's clothes are ripped to shreds in the back door next to the empty double-barreled shotgun. As they look inside, you know, the house is kind of a mess, but then they go over and then they can see that there was a desktop computer station in his living room that is knocked over. And so like the screen is broken, but there's a printer light that's flashing on. They can grab Daniel's phone because it's still on the same internet. He's a farmer. He doesn't have passwords or, you know, do something else with the monitor in order to see that the last activity on the computer was Daniel Yuli searching MapQuest for directions to his home. Oh my God. and printing them out. While they were printing, he looked up Isabel Yuli, and then the last search that the browser is on, he Googled Daniel Yuli and saw that classic scene of like the obit and finding out that he is apparently dead. So he freaks out and smashes all the stuff around in there, but the players, the agents, can reprint the MapQuest directions, which clearly indicates where he's going. And that's whenever they start looking around and realize Daniel's truck is gone. And they find the keys that the Yulee thing has driven away.

Yep.

Another one, there can be a local police alert about a call for an apparent robbery at a local gas station. Again, just mapping out in a general direction where the Yulee things are going. As the PCs arrive, security camera footage can show this blur like a pissed-off Tasmanian devil roll in through the glass doors and rip the surprised attendant to shreds. To shreds, you say? Then kind of moves off screen while parts of the gas station are thrown around. Then after a brief pause, they can see it move back over to the attendant, grab something out of its pants, and then move over. Brake lights come on and then sail off into the distance.

Yep.

As they are looking around the gas station, there's blue shit everywhere, but in the center of everything they can see that the interstate road map display that people often forget about is knocked over and has spread out this highway map around Washington and surrounding areas. And that's when they can see amid all of the blue fingerprints conveniently giving very clear thumbprints, a blue streak is drawn from Mill Creek, Washington.

Nice.

All the way across I-94, ending in multiple taps at Billings, Montana.

If your players don't get that, I don't know how to help them.

The multiple taps, like—

Exactly, like it's— that's it.

That's crazy.

And so having that in there to give a super clear neon sign of it is intelligent.

Circle arrows.

Yeah, exactly. Isabelle here. Uh, and yeah, I love to clearly indicate where it's going and how it's going to get there. Because this is another thing I alluded to this earlier, a scene that I added in the beginning is that I have the briefing take place in a private airport runway hangar at the Seattle Airport that is going to have their kind of cold but efficient handler from the program that's contrasted by this shitty red seaplane with the sign Big Rod's Fishing Excursions painted along the side. So in this case, Rod is a trusted, albeit crusty, friendly, uh, who's a pilot that can not ask questions.

Crusty Rod.

As long as they pay You know, hygiene, double or triple his usual rates, doesn't ask questions, and they have access to this plane for the next 72 hours.

Honestly, that's such a good, like, improvement.

Yeah, and it's like whenever they get this, you then set up that conundrum, right? They now know it is using the interstate to get to Billings, Montana. It is about a 12 or 13 hour drive, knowing that it's going to take a little longer because it can only travel by night. But are you going to take this plane and go straight there, letting people die along the way? Are you going to try to chase after it on the highway? So far everyone has taken the plane, but it's still a fun conversation to make your players have.

So, so Lex, I will say, what if they miss the arrow in the circle to Isabelle's house? Well, I think it'd just be good to have a plan, a contingency plan in mind for what happens if the Yuli thing just eats its former family.

For sure.

Well, now what? Does it, does it go on a rampage?

I think so. I mean, like, that's what you get for fucking up. Like, it's predictable up until this point, but then once it consumes its wife and daughter, then it now no longer knows what to do. So the, the entity that was Daniel Yuli is now just going to go on a kaiju-style rampage, and the agents have a much bigger problem to contend with that's practically unavoidable to, you know, it's going to lead to massive media shitstorm. This is your fail condition. And they now have to fight a kaiju. Like, you are going to get shoved to the front lines for messing this one up as far as the program's concerned.

I love it. I love it.

If you want a more fucked up version, I have a counter proposal. He starts to recreate his family out of Yuli's. So it's all like these morphed things that are Like, I'm the daughter, but it's his voice.

It's just sock puppeting.

They're playing like tea time in the house.

Oh my God. It's one of those things that it'll escalate to neighbors because the neighbors come out and go like, what the fuck is that? It kills them. And then it's like, ah, shit. Now I got to make this guy too.

I'm the neighbor. I'm mowing the lawn.

Nathan, you just can't stay away from using puppets, can you?

I can't.

Yeah. So I I mean, if they really fuck up, that's where they go, no one's come out of that neighborhood in a couple days.

But also in that same vein too, like I added these extra scenes to make it crystal clear, not only destination, but avenue. But also I, I'm very liberal with giving the clues that Daniel itself will convey so that whatever, like it's a great scene to emphasize where it crawls out of Amber's body during the autopsy. And the whole thing is it's, Bell! And it's screaming Bell repeatedly, that maybe it just sounds like monster roar, maybe it sounds like a word. As it's creating the arms and stuff I referred to, like, there is a huge US Air Force tattoo on the forearm of some of these things.

Oh, nice.

And then it's giving fingerprints and things everywhere, but then the fingerprints can show it's Daniel Yule. And that's whenever they can see that tattoo on some of his pictures. They can see the wife, Isabelle, Yuli, and then see that she is there.

So nice.

I don't think it's that difficult to connect the dots from there, but then that's why I made those extra scenes to give a neon sign, like, dinner this way.

Yeah. Mel is good too, because it's, it's one of those, it's not a normal, like, everyday nickname, but once they see that connection, they're going to be like, ah, shit.

Right. Like, it's something that it could just sound like a sound that it makes where they're mostly just hearing the, oh, parts of it, but it's still, it's enough that the players can feel like they're deducing some clues out of it. And I think it's fun anyway.

Yeah.

Love it. Awesome. Another change, I would have more methods to obtain UV lights in mind just to give an additional option for players, whether there's like a suntanning store in the same town as the Ulees live or just like other methods.

You can buy anything at Walmart. Like that is not something I try to make difficult to players. That's something that I will do Like, I typically run programmed games because it's just easier. You know, if they need resources, like, make them wait for a minute and sweat it out. But like, if they ask for tactical night vision goggles, yeah, that's a pretty big lift. You know, it may take a little bit. So what are you gonna do in the meantime? But yeah, for UV lights or something, that's why I make them UVBs. Like, they could be tanning bed bulbs or whatever.

I like that.

Just let your players have it because it's fun. Are they gonna take this thing on with a flashlight? All right.

What kind of handouts and props do we want to see for this?

Just get, get some like blue Play-Doh and throw it at the players. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think, Lex, your US map, that idea would be really fun is to have like the players figure out on the line Like where it ends up in Billings.

Yeah, especially if you have an in-person game, that could be a fun handout. Just like get some blue paint on your hand and kind of smear the line across and whatnot and tap around in there.

Yep.

And if you're doing like a longer one too, is make them do the like, okay, so the flight hit here. The next time he's noticed is here. Draw a line, right?

Yeah.

Then you draw the line from the base thing and where that— oh, look, Billings, Montana. Neat. Now we know where we're going.

I think I'm gonna add my GM notes as a handout for this episode. I think, like, as an addition for the episode, I can copy that over.

I love it. Key events, key scenes. We've talked a lot about autopsy scenes, things ripping out. I think we all agree we'd love that shit. But what are some other scenes that are important to hit?

Definitely showing the UV thing's weakness, or at least giving the agents an opportunity to see it.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's what I tend to do with the autopsy, because as you emphasize that the body smoked whenever they rolled Greaves over, that they'll tend to make the connection that like, well, let's try this UV thing. If they poke around inside, there's just a little that like still goes off in his esophagus. As they scan Amber, they don't find anything, but like maybe deeper in her esophagus. Then it's as they make the Y and incision and split her chest open, there's this thing that looks like her liver until it shifts and rolls over. And then as they shine the light, it just pisses it off and causes like one eye to pop up and then contract, and a second and a third for however many people are in the room. And then it springs out and you go right into combat. Like, it's a terrific bang to throw at your players, and especially if it's the first place they go before going to the house. Or better yet, if you have a group like my first one, 2 agents go to the house, 2 agents go to the autopsy, and they think the autopsy is the safer one. That like, ah, it was a great scene. It just leads to a huge clusterfuck as the agents are scrambling to try to chase after the Yuli thing as it's trying to escape into the night. So awesome. One of my favorite moments in the game. Definitely recommend spending some time to come up with good descriptions.

there.

Another one is giving some slight hints about the crows. Maybe as the agents are driving into town, like one of them kind of hits their windshield and then flies away, kind of teetering a little bit too much on the wind. The crows are just acting weird. Sometimes maybe a crow may land outside their hotel window and is looking at them with strangely human eyes. You're not sure if crows have white corneas and a blue iris.

Yeah, and they're kind of big, right? Yeah, like raven eyes shouldn't be that big.

And then you can, of course, like show the one scene with the finger whenever you want to have a bigger moment go off. But like also, because there are a lot of things going on at once, especially for a one-shot in this, like show the crows early, then do the autopsy scene. They know that there's a bigger one on the loose, at least one on the loose. and then just say, and that's when you see that crow looking at you. Because it leads to a huge, oh shit, moment for the players where they may not have connected that the crows are compromised. And what are they even gonna do about this? You can play this up as little or as much as you want, but it's a very fun ball drop moment for my players. Yeah.

Yeah, I, I think the only problem I have with that is that it expands the scope of this so much. that I worry that players can get bogged down in it if you don't push the, you need to get to Billings. Because as soon as you go, well, 2 crows ate, they're contaminated, then it's like, well, then what the fuck else was here? And it becomes this, like, it may feel insurmountable if, if you're not giving them some motivation where they just go, well, we're screwed. Like, all the animals are gonna have this shit. Something's gonna eat a crow.

That's only if you give up on I have a really fun detail that my first group did that was really cool to round out a lot of these things.

Nice.

I feel like you could signpost that the crows aren't that big of a deal, like after the initial bang, by having them just drop from the sky. Yeah, just being unable to sustain themselves.

Why don't the crows dissolve in the sunlight?

I don't know.

Okay. Okay. Sorry, I'm asking too many questions.

says for some reason.

For some reason.

We're gonna, we're gonna take it as word of God.

Can't argue with it.

Yeah, I, I can't. It's fine. It's weird science shit. Because it's cool. Maybe have them smoke. Yeah.

Yeah, maybe it's because it's feathers. Like, yeah, you can also just have the crows mostly come up at night or on very overcast days. And it's also, they fly around so weird that it could just be another diversion that the PCs may have to go around town with a BB gun or something to take the crows out if that's, you know, they want to go about it the old-fashioned way because they stick out in the crowd and basically that causes them to lose time that the other Yuli thing they know is on the interstate. So increases tension, but it doesn't need to be catastrophically world-ending. Like you're the GM, you're in control of how big of a deal you want it to be.

Yeah. And I suppose you could just be like, hey guys, you know what this would be a good time for? Program resource. Why are you the highly specialized agents hunting crows? Stay on mission, call someone and tell them to deal with crows.

Getting our birdwatcher squad in.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, kinda.

Do any of your other agents have like really mean-spirited nephews or anything? Because I got a job for them.

I will say that Lex already answered the showing that the Yulee things want to return to their former form. Family by having that great scene of, uh, popping out of the corpse and vocalizing Isabelle's name. That, that's a great— it's great. If we're talking about the Majestic angle though, just give the agents tails, uh, in the form of Gavin's goons, whether it's from hired detectives, and then you can escalate to killers. But that would make them curious about who's tailing them, and that would lead them towards Yeah, I think that that's also like quintessential X-Files scene where they're in this hotel.

Yeah, and then they go back to their rooms after like finding some clues or something, and there's some dude waiting there for them. So you can have a fight that they can gang up on them and kill them, and then he has like a business card, or maybe the last call on a burner phone is from X. Like, have that body lead them somewhere else because—

Absolutely.

Yeah, they got overconfident. confident.

Uh, and if you're not running this as like a 2-parter, like 2 different scenarios, then the players should know that there was a detective agency that was under attack that got burned down, uh, whether it's in the form of like a news, um, a news broadcast or like something on TV while they're in the motel room. And that might involve just moving the location of the detective agency to be more Mm-hmm. Sure. To be at the start where that start of that scenario is.

Yeah, and you can kind of also from that, if you are doing the one-shot, just go like, hey guys, like this detective thing looks like it's there, but you know, you don't have time for that shit.

Oh, if it was a one-shot, I'd just cut that.

Yeah, I don't even mention it.

Yeah.

I think, Lex, you kind of answered my question of how do you keep that Yuli fight at the end? Because it's likely they're gonna track one of these things down and there's gonna be some kind kind of, you know, gunfight with it. I would say maybe have a plan for if they show up with the lights. That can be a little anticlimactic to just be like, you shine a flashlight on it and it dies. It's like, eh.

It doesn't die. It takes a little bit of damage and doesn't regenerate. So it can just move out of the way, recover a d6 HP, because almost any hit that this thing does on the agents, they're kind of Because like I will have, you know, if it pseudopods out and grabs onto their arm, they need to spend an action shining that light all over their arm to burn it off, or else like that burning reaches deeper into their bone and they may lose their hand. Oh my god. You know, like it's— these are super dangerous each time. It's also something that I did. I think that it's written in the scenario, but you know, giving as it gets bigger, they get more attacks each time.

Oh, wow.

And the pseudopod can get increased length as they do. Something that I learned from the Alien RPG that's a lot of fun is instead of having all of their attacks go off on the same round, roll multiple dice for its initiative. So that way on an encounter, they don't know when its next turn is going to be that first round, because that's going to be the most tense and lethal. Or should I say, the most thrilling and intense.

I love that. Great thoughts. We've talked a little bit about this. Could you expand this scenario or put it into a campaign?

Yep.

Yeah, next.

Could do, could do. Yeah, I think we've covered that pretty well of there's a lot of Majestic stuff you can play with.

Like, like personally, if I were to do this as part of a campaign or as just like if I had the time, I'd run it as a 2-parter, right? Program first, then Outlaw.

Yeah. That's a really cool Outlaw.

It's cool. And it has potential.

I love it.

Yeah. Great.

Uh, any other GM advice?

Keep it a one-shot.

Yeah. Yeah.

This is, this is fun theory crafting, but seriously, you can keep it a one-shot. And it's easy and fun. I find that's what most of my DG players are interested in.

And then you could keep it a one-shot. And if players are still interested, then run that second part.

Bam. Yeah. I love that.

Oh, that's medium. Woo!

Yep.

All right. Any other cool stories that you want to talk about?

My first group had such an interesting and creative idea that I had not ever anticipated. After they had connected the dots between Daniel Yulee and Isabel and all of that stuff, they were super worried about how to keep it contained in Mill Creek and prevent it from going out to Montana because they were worried about the Crows and everything else. They had the white-collar criminal who stole the files from Tipalt Greaves' home call Isabel on her phone and keep her on the line while they were recording. Oh, my God. guiding the conversation around to get her to say certain phrases. And then they made a deepfake of her voice to have her say, Daniel, it's me. I'm here. And they played it on loop over and over again on speakers.

Ah.

Then, because they knew that, like, people around town would obviously be sus about all of this, they rented a billboard truck and made it look like some shitty indie movie advertisement called Daniel, I'm Here. And then played it on speakers like it was some kind of publicity stunt to drive around town. They had a swarm of crows following them and then ended up like they got a mannequin set up with more of these voice lines and things. And, um, one of the agents crit failed on his search roll and accidentally stumbled into a bear cave, um, earlier in the session.

That's crazy.

And so they led it over to a bear cave They've set up the mannequin and yeah, they just made a trap for the Yuli thing. I was so impressed with their ingenuity. Like they also got the night vision goggles and they just nuked it standing out in the tree line and lit it up with gasoline and automatic weapons.

That's, that's cool.

I love it.

It was a super efficient run. I never would have thought of deepfaking the target's voice.

Well, and that's, you know, that's a good example of kind of the opposite side where I was like, how do you keep it in Sometimes I love that you just were like, hey man, you got it.

Sometimes you got to let the players win.

It's like you, you have thought of a plan, you did it. Let's watch it go off without a hitch. I love it.

That's so satisfying. Uh, war stories here. I think I thoroughly enjoyed just setting up the Home Alone traps at Isabelle's place, evacuating the place and replacing all the light bulbs.

Yeah, I like that.

Yeah, Alex and Beth ended up— they again chased it over to Billings. They got there a day early so that way they knocked over a power line and blacked out the whole neighborhood. So poor Isabel and Miranda had to go and I think—

Live in a hotel.

Yeah, they had Christmas at a La Quinta Inn.

Oh.

While these 2 agents just like post up in their house, change out all the lights, Great firefight in the house. And then whenever the big one crashed in, the house is like falling over, just supported by a couple of beams. Beth's character, the thing gets a crit success to pseudopod her and grab her in. Uh, her character would vape constantly. And so it's just like you get one action as she's taking like a 2d10 damage, insta-kill.

Oof.

She's like, I reach out and I grab my vape out of my pocket. pocket. And so I describe that she— and then a mouth opens up on the side of the Ulee and breathes out from the side.

A smoke ring comes out.

Yeah. Alex shoots one of the beams and drops the house on top of it. It was a super fun explosive finale. Yeah. RIP.

We hope our deranged utterings are helpful in bringing this scenario to life at your table. Be sure to check out the show notes of this episode for links to get a copy of the scenario for yourself, any RPG resources we can share, actual plays of this scenario that we recommend, as well as an invite to our Lab's Discord server to discuss more Reanimation. Thanks for listening. We also post these episodes and resources to our Patreon that's free to follow, or if you like, you can make a charitable donation to help us keep the ominously flickering lights on at the H. West Memorial Mortuary and Laboratories. We'd also like to give a shout out and thanks to our newest patron interns, Raymond and Thomas. Thanks for volunteering to help us test this new regenerative alien substance. You should feel side effects in approximately. 3, 2— Well, thanks anyways. So until next time, thanks for listening to RPG Reanimators, where your games can die or live on the table.

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hold on. You're well actually-ing so hard about all this Gavin Ross stuff.

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if you look at Gavin Ross's stat block,