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 Lex.
I'm Nathan.
I'm Holly.
And I'm Alex.
So let's see what's on the slab. The subject of this procedure is Jack Frost, written by Shane Ivey for Delta Green. In this scenario, Majestic 12 scrambles a rapid response team to investigate a sudden cold snap, which smothered an entire town in the winter under an aurora borealis. As with any dissection, we'll be discussing all the gross innards of this scenario, so from this point on, there will be spoilers. So 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 this episode. Now with that out of the way, let's begin our dissection. So who wants to kick us off with what's going on behind the GM curtain in this 94-page scenario behemoth?
I'll take it. So many, many, many, many years ago, the Kenyan inhabited the region of Willis, Alabama. Why they did that? I don't know, but moonshine doesn't matter, I guess. Yeah. Oh, there you go. Moonshine. All that remains of them is this nasty golden throne dedicated to keeping Etlashua quiescent. Etlashua being Delta Green's take on Ithaca. Same thing. Years passed and some Native Americans settled in the area. They worshiped the throne and they gave it sacrifices. And then they were wiped out by Etlashua when they neglected their duties, which was very rude of them.
Ain't that just the way?
It really is. I hate when that happens. So now Willis is, you know, a little podunk town in northern Alabama. The local crackpot is receiving visions of the coming of Itlaxuah and has attempted to warn others, but he was disregarded, of course, as all crackpots are, and the entire town was killed in an unnatural cold snap, which allowed him to say, I told you so, but he also died, so. Majestic 12 has been brought in and doesn't realize that they are days away from Itlaxuah manifesting to drive them all mad.
Now wait a minute, Majestic 12? I thought this was a Delta Green scenario.
Yeah, this is the only written scenario for the Delta Green role-playing system that has the characters playing the devious and underhanded Majestic 12.
And oh, we'll get up to all kinds of shenanigans, won't we?
Yeah, about that. So since this is going to be a different organization, typically portrayed as the bad guys in a lot of scenarios, that are bringing the presumably PCs in to investigate, are they brought in under any kind of unique or memorable circumstances that GMs could try to emphasize to make this feel a little different than regular Delta Green program stuff?
Yeah, I think they are. For example, they're brought in with a whole operation. Right, so there's 3 different branches of Majestic, being Project Garnet, which is the cover-up wet works division typically associated with like Majestic like as a whole, because these are the NRO Section Delta guys who like will just wipe you out, shoot you, cover up the body.
Yup.
There's Project Pluto, the research division of Majestic, who examines the extraterrestrial artifacts. And then there's Project Moondust, who use Blue Fly, which are paratroopers, to retrieve said extraterrestrial aircraft or whatever.
Yeah, and all the— like, all the player characters that come in are a member of one of those at least.
Yeah, so they're either members of Moondust or Pluto. They are not members of Garnet, which I would argue would be the fun option because you actually do get to play the ruthless NRO wet work people, the Men in Black section, which you don't.
Yeah.
You play the nerds.
And don't worry if all of these acronyms and code names are confusing to you, dear listeners, because it's worse than the scenario itself. I actually got a particular pet peeve and started to take tally marks of all of the different acronyms and code names for things, there are 13 different acronyms and code names, not counting the regular ones like HAZMAT and HQ and things like that. It gets very confusing to just see alphabet soup jumbles and things. So we'll cover this a little bit more, but if you're not following the, the details and layering of the Majestic 12 operating schedule, don't worry about it. There's handouts for it, but we're not going to get too, too detailed into the nitty-gritty of all of that.
Yeah, so just to, uh, reiterate, there's 3 different branches of Majestic, and then on top of that there's the National Guard who's there, uh, the special forces for the National Guard that provide the perimeter but are not necessarily involved in the investigation itself because they're kept out of the loop. So already you have this huge organization, you have tents set up, you have like a command base. So it's so much different than a traditional Delta Green op.
Yeah.
Yeah, it really is.
You kind of have like multiple bosses too, which is very different than a normal Delta Green.
And, you know, they're given that whole like NDA, non-disclosure agreement. You're giving up your right to privacy. You're giving up your right to this. These are all the penalties. You will be put away. No one will ever see you again. And like, you know, that, that does invoke what we're doing here. You know, that's, that's fun.
Alex, you mentioned that the agents, or I guess in this scenario they're referred to as researchers, show up at this HQ that is already decked out in things. Do we want to sort of move into the key locations that the PCs are going to be exploring while they're in the scenario?
Yes, let's talk about the town of Willis, Alabama. That's going to be the main investigation area. And then clues are going to point you to Crow Lake. So there's going to be the throne, the shrine that the Kanyan made to appease Itsala. That's been buried underwater and that's going to have to be drained. So that's also a location. Another location I would say is the command center where you have the autopsies that can be done. You can have the people you can interview, but that's pretty much it. But, and then without going into Willis, because in Willis you got like Hank's— Howie's trailer. Sorry.
It's what, like about a 100-people-sized town? I mean, they're all dead. So. You can kind of go into any building you want.
Right, right. But really only 2 of them are important to the investigation: the city hall that kind of contains the town's history, and then the crackpot trailer.
Right. I would argue that this is a— because of the mechanics of, uh, getting used to the cold and not being able to survive in the heat, that's a good way to keep the players and everyone in the town isolated, because if they ever leave the area, they just burn up. So that's a good, like, closed— it's a large, large, large closed room mystery.
Right.
You mentioned that everyone in the town is dead already. So are there any real NPCs that the PCs are going to need to interact with for the duration of the scenario?
Yeah. Yeah. So they have to deal with the bureaucratic hell that is dealing with the middle managers and the supervisors. And then there's 2 NPCs that they can interview to find out a little bit— not even find out a little bit more. They don't even know anything.
They can't find out anything from Eddie Thorpe and Ellie Forrester. It's just, here's the thing.
Doesn't go well. They find out as well they can't get into town.
Super fun.
Those are like family members that have a loved one in town that died that demanded to get in, so they break through the National Guard barriers and get detained. So I don't even understand why the researchers are interviewing them if Majestic's Garnet Division is going to do that, because they're wetworks.
I think that the purpose of, of those 2 characters is to you know, bring home to the players the ruthlessness of Majestic 12. Like, you're done with them, bam, bam, they're dead. And, you know, I think most, most people would know that already, right? But, you know, just in case.
I would argue against that. I would say that the zeitgeist of what people understand to be Delta Green is like, oh, Majestic's bad. All of them are just going to shoot you.
Yeah.
Yeah. But like, it really is just the Project Garnet/NRO Delta guys. Because they're so separated in branches that even the Moondust or Pluto, they probably heard that like Project Garnet's ruthless, but I think demonstrating the ruthlessness of having to actually having them shoot people is like an eye-opener and a good RP moment.
Yeah. 'Cause the, the players as they are, like they are the researchers, right? And you'll kind of be potentially multiple characters. So You know, grain of salt. So in theory, yeah, exactly. In theory, you've got your, you know, your researcher that probably hasn't killed anybody, probably. And then, you know, you've got your airmen that can fly helicopters and everything, but they— yeah, they probably aren't using them illegally to kill witnesses.
It's not the job of the researchers to kill witnesses.
It's—
that is just straight up Project Garnet.
Right.
And I think honestly, this is kind of the extent of the majestic feeling in this scenario. You show up very well equipped. You have tons of resources. There is lots of bureaucracy and they said, they said, and you interact with some NPCs that do not give you anything. And then they are, as written, they're disappeared and it can trigger sand loss, or you can just have the, like the researchers leave the room and then 2 pops are heard a little bit later. So like you can highlight that, oh yeah, we're not the good guys here. And then the rest of this just kind of proceeds as a regular investigation, more or less.
I would say the only thing that kind of sets that apart with that is Agent Harris, who I think is probably going to be the primary antagonist as written of the, the guy in charge. He's the leader of the NRO Delta, right? Like he's in charge of that, I believe.
Yeah, and he's actually put in charge of all of the investigation, right?
Yeah, and he kind of loses it throughout, you know. So by the end, he's probably killing people left and right. And he wasn't a good— I think, yeah, I think we'll talk a little bit more about his motivations because I think there's some little gotchas in there, or big gotchas.
Well, now Nathan, it sounds like that you were describing Agent Harris is something of a threat that may be operating on a timetable. Are there any other key threats and timetables that GMs should keep in mind to kind of keep the pace of the scenario moving forward?
Well, I'm gonna say yes with a caveat. This is a ticking clock that you have to let run out as the scenario is written. You really, like, as written, you can't rush this because the way this works is every night at like 1:43 or so, you know, Itlasua pops up. There's bad things happen. People scream and shout and let it all out. And, you know, the first night it's bad. It's bad. Second night, oh, some animals came to life. Uh-oh, that's no good.
Yeah.
Third night, again, 24 hours later. Well, now you got the little kids, maybe slightly bigger animals. Then the last night, the, you know, the full-on wendigo parents show up and start eating people. If they figure it out before then, I guess they just smash a couple squirrels and move on with their lives. Yeah, right. Like, Harris is losing his mind, but you can't really timewise put him too early, a lot of the stuff we're going to see in here, the key threat is really just you're going to be wasting time. And I think the, the way it's written is meant to do that, even if it's not obvious, right? It'll say like, you're spending 8 hours doing this dissection. Yep. Fair enough. That's almost a full, like a full workday, right? Like—
Yeah.
You're spending time.
The duration of many of the investigative tasks are written with the number of hours that it takes to conduct that investigation element. And it even has on page 22, at least on the PDF, a project list so that you can give your players a timesheet to keep track of stuff with a task and a due date and time, and then to note their manager down. and the personnel notes, there were a lot of decisions made in this. Yes, overall, the kicker of this scenario is that every night at certain points of time that are, you know, ambiguous down to the minute, some would say, they're screaming as this manifestation of Ithlachua, whatever, Ithqua, it doesn't matter. The big bad.
Ithlachua.
are causing snowstorms and weird unnatural things to happen that is associated with steep drops in the temperature and an aurora and lightning and things hitting from there. So shit gets weird every night. And it can be something to really keep in mind for your players while running this, that their first day can be investigation and then shit happens.
Yeah.
But it seems worse. And then it should lead into, this is a race against time because we now have more and more to do that it takes a lot of time to go through this. We can't afford to waste it. So maybe trying to encourage a little bit of scarcity, but it will really require a kind of glossing over or fast-forwarding across certain tasks and not staying in that first-person perspective all the time that we may be used to when running games.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it kind of artificially really tries to limit— I think, Alex, you joked earlier about how they can't leave, right? They're, they're stuck in this area because after the first night their bodies adapt and all of a sudden any heat is very bad for them and they explode. Why is this? Because it needs you to stay there in that circle so that you have to solve it, because otherwise you just leave. Oh, I like that critique. And if you just leave, The situation resolves itself, and that would be a real bummer of a scenario.
You're jumping ahead.
I'm jumping ahead.
We haven't even covered the old threats. The big— to me, to my point of view, there's really 3 threats: Harris, his Delta agents if you piss him off, and Itlaxuah, which doesn't show up till the end. But like, that's really your big, big scary things to be aware of. And arguably, like, Harris and the Delta agents are the biggest threat.
Oh, don't forget zombies.
Yeah. All those wendigos that are threats to all the NPCs that are standing around.
Ah, yes. The NPCs with fully automatic weapons.
Okay.
Uh, no, but, um, Subway Takes, 100% agree with you, Holly.
Yeah.
But you know, and I think that if you tweak it, that's okay. Right? Like Harris and the NRO Delta guys are supposed to be scary. And I think you can really play with that, but we'll get to that later.
Okay. Well, it sounds like maybe we should try to discover the beating or maybe the frozen heart of this scenario. What are some of the key themes that you think GMs should really try to emphasize whenever they're running this?
Just kind of like going off the vibes of how it's written, I think you're meant to really play into you're the bad guys and the infighting between all of these factions more than anything else. It's like, The town of Willis, Itlaxuah, and the cold weather are kind of just a backdrop for being those bad guys and the infighting that's going to occur.
I disagree with you there. I would say instead of being the bad— you're not even the bad guys.
No, you're not. You're not really the bad guys.
You're just— oh, you switch stuff on your—
Well, you're adjacent to the bad guys and you support the bad guys. Like you're, you're part of the organization. All of them would agree, like, yeah.
You're trying to do your best at your job in an organization that is desperately falling apart because history-wise, because of the, uh, the Grays kind of abandoning the— actually, the fungi from Yuggoth abandoning their agreement with the government because of the events of, uh—
Because of the spoilers!
Because of the events of—
I'm gonna bleep you out.
That's fine. I'm gonna get redacted. Sure. They're no longer receiving technology, so they're desperate to get this technology, which is why Harris is like going crazy and why these, uh, 3 branches have been mobilized. So yeah, this is all falling apart.
And you're spending so much time collecting data that you think might be important, right? Like, that's— I, I think a big part of this is just That desperate getting as much as you can. And I mean, it doesn't mean anything, but you have that urge to collect, collect, collect.
And they weren't expecting the mythos threat that they were expecting. This is something completely different.
Right.
I disagree with both of you.
Okay.
Oh, here we go. Nathan, high stakes coming up on you next. I think one of the key themes to really emphasize horror in this scenario is really playing up the cold winter weather, this unnatural horror in terms of these bodies are flash-frozen solid. They're going through essentially a ghost town. The weather can be unpredictable. The cold can hurt. Your eyelids can freeze open or shut in some cases.
Yeah.
Because honestly, as written, there's only one kind of horror scene during the autopsy.
Yeah.
And then the rest of it is just these surges of winter weather, and then eventually you get into, like, all the wendigo stuff, which we'll get to that in a minute. But besides that, I think that it's going to be really important to try to play up those winter elements to set vibes for this scenario, and that this environment is actively hostile to human life. Unless they get exposed to the unnatural, and then it's less hostile, but that's more concerning.
Yeah. Yeah.
Why can't we all be right, Lex?
No.
You know what? I'm gonna disagree with all of you. Yeah, it. I haven't run this, but reading it, I think, Lex, I'm probably closest to you, right? Is I see it as the horror is the weather, but the real terror is has everybody watched Shin Godzilla?
Yeah. No.
Okay, so if you haven't watched, the movie is basically Godzilla shows up and the government goes, uh-oh, well, it's not that big a deal. And they don't— like, they get mired up in red tape, they argue against each other, they fight.
Bureaucracy.
Yeah, and Godzilla gets to be a bigger issue, and then they start going, well, now we have to do something. But it's, you know, it's too late, and they are still stuck in that train of thinking of like We got to do everything by the book, and you can't do it by the book or you'll die. And I think—
sucks.
Yeah, exactly. Like, the Itla Shua in this case is the truck coming right towards them, and everybody is just arguing amongst themselves about what the technology is. Is it mythos? Is it alien? Like, what is this? Who's in charge? who's a secret Delta Green agent. You know, it's this fight and then hopefully by the end they get hit by a truck metaphorically.
Yeah, the game's like, fuck those guys anyway.
I think my semi-concern here would just be to know your players.
Yeah.
If I had a player like Alex at the table who was really interested and well-versed in the Delta Green lore and whatnot, like he went off about the different MJ-12 facets and the difference between Project Garnet versus Moondust, then he will really get into this Majestic 12 angle. And it can be something to play up for your players that may be very interested in exploring that. If you just have a group that is sitting down and they kind of look at each other when it's like, oh, we're not doing Delta Green, then maybe don't emphasize these as much because it's really only interesting if you are interested in the lore itself.
Yeah.
And I would argue it's not even that. It's that you, you need to understand the lore of Delta Green to really understand the desperation you're supposed to feel, the infighting. Like I have run this for people who just know Delta Green like as an RPG for what it is. And we played the scenario and it doesn't mean anything to them. They're like, I don't know the history of Majestic. I don't know why they're desperate for technology or any of this other shit. I don't know.
I wonder if that would be more impactful if this was part of a campaign or like an interlude where they play this and they had been introduced to Garnet. And, you know, I'm kind of struggling, but I think there needs to be some context or yeah, otherwise.
Maybe like after you won the contest or something.
Yeah.
If they were playing as like the researcher and, you know, they did a lot of researcher stuff. throughout the years of Majestic's, like, success. And then afterwards you get this Jack Frost scenario. Yeah, it would make a lot more sense.
I do agree with that. Yeah.
Eh.
But this is getting into—
We're getting into other things.
But this is getting into one of the few strengths that I can actually point out for this scenario, which is by virtue of it being the only MJ-12 scenario made to date, it does have a lot of information on the logistics and interrelationships between these divisions. of MJ-12 that GMs could use if they did want to adapt it for their own Majestic kind of campaign, or at least an arc if you want to tie this in here.
Mm-hmm.
I think the scenario though really relies on it being a one-shot because you're kind of fucked as soon as you step in. It really relies on these very narrow pre-generated character archetypes that if you just have regular agents, I think it's really going to be a coin toss of if they would be even eligible of participating or being of use here. If you don't have someone with hella physics or something like that, I mean, maybe you can make it work. Maybe there's just NPCs because they have some resources around.
Yeah, I think we're veering into limitations though. And we— there are a couple of strengths to this scenario. I thought it was fun that, you know, Ithaca is in rural Alabama. It really is like a total subversion of your expectations, right? And I think For the most part, at the end of every scenario, I've had to tell people like, no, this is, it's Ithaca. It is. That's who it is. And they're like, oh, I would have expected to go to Alaska or Canada if that were the case.
Uh, they don't have the naming rights for that.
Sorry. Whatever, y'all, we are using it interchangeably. Give me some grace.
I don't know.
The culture goblin that lives in my brain, as soon as like there's ice or flash freezes or anything, my mind instantly goes to that entity.
Sure.
Yeah, I think the usage and idea of swapping between characters is a fun idea for kind of this long sort of thing where you might have a researcher where you're like, today they're going to be in the lab and that's all they're doing. And you might still want to involve yourself. I don't know that the book necessarily gave a lot of advice on how to do that well. But I think as an idea and getting players used to character swapping, that's not a bad idea.
I was actually gonna list that as a limitation just because some of the backstories and motivations for the various pre-gens are kind of lengthy. And depending on who you pick as the alternate character, you are demanding your players familiarize yourself with 2 very different PCs that have their own motivations and their own kind of secret agendas potentially, that the scenario requires players to do a lot of homework anyways if they're going to be a researcher. So it could be difficult. I think that, you know, in theory, if you were going to give your researcher players a different MJ-12 agent, one thing that you could do is use the very abbreviated character sheets, like essentially an index card.
Mm-hmm.
And potentially as a way to have them comb through the town and get some of the relevant information and handouts, just say, you're combing this quadrant, you're combing this sector of the town. Oh, it's this old hoarder lady's house. She has a bunch of archives. Ha! What's in there? And that could be a vessel essentially to get them to discover certain clues that otherwise you have very little motivation to encounter.
Yeah.
Yeah. As researchers?
I don't know.
Yeah, I vibe with that.
But we're still in strengths. I'm trying to be positive for right now.
I think there's some good creepy scenes in here, right? Like the person at the lab that just mindlessly takes off their protective outfit and starts chomping down on the dissections. Like, cool. The nighttime freakout. The first time that happens.
You just say that because we caught you doing that last week.
Come on now.
It's so yummy.
We already talked to HR about that.
No, they're the one I was eating.
You can't use any more of our human resources.
Uh, you know that, I mean, like, I, I love the idea of eating the, the flesh of a frozen victim, but like, how can you actually eat that without breaking your teeth?
Yeah. And I do wish that was followed up on a little bit more, right? Like you kind of have the one time you do it and it's like, well, And then they just drop the threat. Yeah, like, bring it on. And I do think, like, when the howling started when I played, that was very cool of like, oh, yep, we're in the middle of it right now. And we are amongst a bunch of people with guns and itchy trigger fingers and anxiety issues. And I'm more scared of the people around me than I am of the cold. Right. Like, I think that's pretty Pretty cool. Plus there's a bit where dead fish can attack divers in the lake. Now it does say they don't do anything, but I think that's kind of fun.
You get an ew ew ew.
It's minus 20% for ew ew fish ew ew.
Um, can we, can we like take a second and just talk about the eating the scene? Because in the fucking scenario, the author is like, yeah. they can, they can feed on this woman's fetus. I'm like, it's so—
it's a little try-hard.
It tried extremely hard to be edgy there. Uh, this is a pretty decent segue to get into limitations because, yeah, that scene, yeah, was just really odd as written for a couple of reasons. Because it really wants you to strip away a player's agency and have their character chow down on one of the bodies that they're doing the autopsy for. And in doing so, it also suggests that the NRO Delta guards or whoever in there will shoot that PC dead unless someone tells them no.
The license.
So it encourages GMs to potentially kill a player's character after you have stripped their agency away from them.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
And like, it, it's— I think to your point earlier, Nathan, like, it really assumes that you're giving everyone 2 player characters because there are several instances like that where it says Harris is getting paranoid. If any researcher talks back to him, he's gonna throw him in the brig. And it's like, cool, they're fucking gone. What are we supposed to do here?
Yeah, um, I just, I just don't get The reasoning here besides edge factor, because like they can't even cut into the body of these victims because they're frozen solid supernaturally.
Yeah, they're at -5 degrees at all times.
And they stay that way. So like, how can you extract the fetus to even eat?
It's like a jawbreaker.
Yeah, it's—
yeah, well, a literal jawbreaker. And here's the other part of that that's confusing to me, right? Why does NRO want to shoot the person doing this? That's another part I had with Harris as well. Because they're crazy. But why? This is Majestic 12. If somebody starts acting weird, I would think the reaction would be, that's interesting, let's see where that goes. We need that information. What did you see? Let's go deeper. Push, push, push.
Put them in containment.
Yeah. Exactly. Like, why is Harris like He is a brake pad. The whole scenario of, nope, can't do that, can't do that. I'm going to shoot you if you do anything. But does that make sense for Majestic to want that?
That baffles me. That was like, wait, he's accusing people of being Delta Green, but this man is acting a little bit like he's in Delta Green because he's trying to stop all the investigation and blow up the thing. Yeah.
To his own people, which doesn't make sense.
Yeah.
Yeah. The, um, I should not, as a GM, I shouldn't have to call, phone a friend who has a degree in nuclear engineering to understand science.
How many times have we done this?
I've run this like 5 times. I only had to make the call once, but it was, it wasn't even like, I just, I told her, I was like, I need you to help me understand what it's even telling me. And then the bottom line is shit's weird, but the scenario doesn't really give you that. It just keeps throwing technical stuff at you. And I'm like, what are we talking about? I haven't taken physics in 20 years.
Yeah, exactly. I think that Ivy did a lot of homework in terms of writing this scenario to come up with lots of different things and science terms to throw out here, but it ended up being so complicated that the scenario kind of demands the GM and the researcher players to have similar amounts of technical expertise as their characters themselves. I have a lot of critiques about the handouts and things, and like, I'm right there with you, Holly. I think that—
Yeah.
If they want to go into the science-y parts, then it should really have included some kind of a GM call-out box for kind of layman's terms. What does this mean?
Oh yeah.
If you have players that are asking questions and are really scientifically inclined, I love that journey for them. But also, what are you going to tell them aside from just rereading the heavy box text or the heavy text all the time? It doesn't give you interpretations.
Well, and what is the usage of the handout, right? That's, I think, the key limitation. I think there is— I think the research is cool, but what actionable information do you get from knowing that there was a spike in radiation? You can't stop it. You kind of already predicted the second night when it happens at the same time. Does you spending a bunch of time in handouts help people get anywhere, or is it a red herring?
What do people think? It is one of many red herrings. This scenario relies a lot on red herrings and misdirection to make itself seem more complicated than it actually is. At its core, there is very little mystery and investigation to be done. You explore in the town a bit, you find a couple of scraps of paper that point towards a couple of individuals, and you follow low-frequency resonance and radio. You follow some science stuff.
Dig up a chair.
Yeah, that is pointing to something under the lake, and that's it. But it throws so many science-heavy handouts that are almost indecipherable that they, like Holly said, the only thing they tell you is shit's weird. Shit's weird this way. Shit's weird this way. There's no narrative depth or deduction or any kind of engagement to take place here, and you're just overwhelming your players with these handouts that don't add anything. I never thought I would see a scenario that had too many handouts, I'll put it that way.
Wow, this clue shows us that it's cold here.
By Jove, slow taking off glasses.
Oh wait, my charts are showing me that there was a huge spike in different wavelengths of light that happened when there was an aurora borealis in the sky. Say it ain't so. Like, you just experienced a weird event and then you just get readings that say, yeah, it was weird.
That was weird.
There's nothing else to tell.
Boy howdy, that was weird.
I, I really do think a lot of these things are just to get you to the 4-day timer. Like realistically, they have to have so much stuff. And I think, Lex, to your point, a call-out box and then just a, hey, you're going to spend 8 hours doing this research and then try and think of a clue that's useful, like something that they can get out of that research. Because otherwise you're just telling your players, hey, hold up, let's wait till tomorrow night when everybody goes crazy again. Oh, it's worse this time.
Yeah.
Okay.
And I think you're right that this is done an effort to pad out the clock and make this investigation take more time than it otherwise should because they are barking up various wrong trees.
Mm-hmm.
It's just, it leads to a frustrating experience because the pregens themselves are very specialized. And some of them, like I played the microbiologist in Holly's run, they're kind of useless after the autopsy or 3 days later if you're gonna happen to try to do an autopsy on a zombie. And besides that, there's not much else there. The Dr. Merlot is taking readings, taking readings. They just tell us it's coming from the lake, and that's it. Then you have— we already mentioned the, the 2 NPCs, Eddie Thorpe and Ellie Forrester.
Yeah.
That you, you spend real game time role-playing with, and they give you nothing. And as a player, it can be really frustrating to feel like I am trying to explore. I am trying to engage with this scenario and I'm not getting anything out of it. Yeah.
It's like, am I asking the wrong questions? What are you expecting me to do here? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. They don't have any information. I think their real purpose is to show the inhumanity of the White Orcs.
Right. Oh, the inhumanity.
But then don't forget the whole mounds in general. another massive red herring that leads absolutely nowhere. That there's so many things that, like, I think that it's intended to simulate, like, if this were a television show, sure, then you could be like, ah, damn it, there's nothing here.
What else is there?
And then they find some kind of clue.
I think it's like a head nod slash Easter egg that is misinterpreted as a clue because there's copper wires in the artificial mound that are shaped like the chair. Which represent the, uh, the Kanyan Shrine and there's snake bones, which is a head nod to Yig, but that's about it.
But that's Howie, who he's like, he digs up the mounds and puts this stuff in there because he thinks that that's what they want.
No, somebody does.
It said that Howie did it.
Yeah.
He digs up Hiram's mounds to put the things in there, which I also have ideas for how you can spice this up. But bottom line, this scenario has a lot of flaws. And I can be here all night just kind of going off on it, but I want to just stay focused on to the elements that we can actually try and improve to make this a successful game for GMs. One of the massive flaws in this scenario, in my, dare I say, our opinion, is relying on Native American mythological figures that are just mythos entities. Like several other Arc Dream scenarios. That is really tired and doesn't really feel great.
Yeah, I think that, you know, we're kind of past that era of RPGs. And, you know, I'm not a member of any tribe, but my understanding is most of the First Nations tribes where the Wendigo lore originates have said multiple times, please stop using our religion and lore in your fiction, your stories, your horror, because you're not doing it right anyway. So yeah.
Yeah.
At least they didn't have antlers. But yeah, I completely agree. Is it— there's no like, why, why, why use that?
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And like, to this scenario's credit, I believe it originally came out in '98, which is kind of in the heyday for when stuff like this was around. But I think that if you're wanting to run this by today's standards, there are a lot of handouts that are related to Native American Big air quote, like studies and things, I just would not touch with a 10-foot pole. And I think that it is very easy to redress some of the things in this scenario to do it better. Kind of spoilers, remember whenever Holly said that after she has run this, she has to explain, oh yeah, that was Ithaca, basically, because it's not very apparent. Unless you're Alex with a spidey sense for the mythos and you're like, hmm, that's it. It can be something that you can redress very easily, and I think that you can run this with very minimal Native American tie-ins, if none at all. Are there any other limitations that we wanted to cover before moving on?
I think we mentioned it before. There's no reason for the investigators to be there if they do nothing. Eventually, The big guy shows up, raptures like a fifth of the people, and then it's done. It's a little, little Indiana Jones of let's—
The PCs don't affect the events in any actionable, interesting way.
I think kind of expanding on that too, the scenario overall is kind of shallow. Not only do the PCs actually make no difference whether they were to show up or not, things just happen. But even in the very beginning, it kind of irritated me a bit that this scenario just happens because it does. It just says—
Mm-hmm.
Mysterious forces or conjunctions of energy occasionally allow Ithlachua to manifest briefly in an area far from its Arctic prison. The people of K'nyan established a shrine to keep Ithlachua quiescent. A sacrificial victim's life force changes the fluctuation of dark energies that compel the Windwalker to depart. That's it. There's no real background here.
Yeah, like, why is this happening? Why now? You know, I don't know.
Because it's the setup that was thought of. But I think that this also opens an opportunity for a lot of changing, that like none of this really needs to be permanent because it's not rooted very deeply.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, maybe this is just because I just watched Welcome to Derry, but this is Stephen King's It, right? Like it's something that happens X amount of years. Why? Because at least that they had a meteor. This is just kind of like, I don't know. It does.
I would say a personal limitation here is the scenario recommends that willpower and exhaustion are tracked, but there's not really fleshed out mechanics of when willpower should be taxed or charged. Like sometimes it says CON times 5 for exhaustion, but doesn't exactly explain what happens. Usually exhaustion happens in the base rulebook for like pushing yourself and working like 2 days straight. But everyone gets to go home and sleep in their little bunks. So that's, that's not a situation where that happens. And research that would take 16 hours or 8 hours can be split up amongst multiple PCs. So it won't—
Yep. Yep.
There is no rush unless you have a change where the supervisor's like, no, you're going to be working around the clock. Forced labor. Just like, you're not going to sleep.
Yeah, it was also weird to me that the rolls suggested to ward off against frost damage essentially were POW-based, as if my willpower can protect me from getting cold. And that just truly felt like a— that's a CON times 5.
Yeah.
If you fail that, you're taking damage and you're slowing down. Maybe burn some willpower to force yourself to keep going. That I fully agree that there could have been some much more fleshed-out rules to make this kind of more engaging and cinematic for players. On a similar note too, Nathan, related to something that you mentioned earlier, the scenario really seems to assume that all of the PCs will get affected by what I'm just going to call this permafrost condition.
Yeah.
That like they get caught out during one of the main events and then their body temperature starts changing out of whack. They get super hot and regular temperatures and all of this stuff that's detailed in the scenario. I'm not going to bore you with here. But it says it a couple of times, and then by the end, as you get to this, this shrine under the lake, it says probably all researchers had their body temperatures drastically reduced by the first incursion. And if you're gonna do that, tell GMs to do that. Like, it's— if you're going to assume that that's what's happening to the PCs as a way to tie them into this area, Yeah. then I think it should come with explicit instructions to have at least the first incursion really catch the PCs off guard. It just, it's odd.
Yeah. And this is definitely something we can talk about in the Reanimated thing. I'll just like mention this as like a tag-on to yours is I think almost every time I've played it, you know, you have this established perimeter that they're told, like they followed the trail of dead things and then drew a perimeter there. And every time I've run it, people are like, we're gonna leave the fucking perimeter, like right now. And then it's like—
Danger's coming. Why stay here? People died that stayed here.
Do we still have the effects? I mean, I guess it's a GM call. Anyway, we can get to that.
And why would— we had that exact same problem of like, we should leave. And we show the guy in charge who's aware of the danger. And he goes, nah, we have to stay.
You can stay.
It's not— yeah, it's— well, but it's also like, why? Why do you— like, when all your scientists are telling you this, what's your— what's your motivation here, bud?
Right, right.
Kind of in a similar vein, Holly, I think you're the main one among us who has run it because you ran it 3 times back to back. My hat off to you for that. But were there any—
It showed in the third run.
Were there any challenges that you encountered trying to run this by the book?
I think that Nathan brought up the point that it's— you're a ticking clock, but your players don't even know it. And so they're kind of— at some point they end up just twiddling their thumbs. And that's kind of part of it. It's like, I don't know how to convey to the players that things are getting worse and that eventually this is all going to culminate in something very bad. Maybe it is the surprise. train that just takes out the whole town. I don't know. But like, to the PC's perception, this could go on indefinitely. And we don't know that something big is coming.
Which put a pin in that for reanimation. A friend of the podcast had a really good idea for that.
And like vectoring players to the mound in the lake can be a bit of a struggle too, because they get hung up on the mounds. They're like, well, it's the mounds. Let's excavate the damn mounds. And then You finally figure it out. And the big thing to me was the scenario. The only option provided is that they built a cofferdam to excavate the throne. And then they also mentioned that it would take days, days, multiple days, longer than the PCs have. And then they say nothing else. And I'm like, but what do they do then? What is the solution?
I was audibly screaming when I read that section. Because it says there is a dam, but it doesn't drain. So instead, have them make a roll to determine that they could try to build a cofferdam around it. Like, just let them drain the dam. Why is that difficult? You saw it and then made it harder than it needed to be for no reason. I—
oh.
See, our GM just let us use some of those cool helicopters that players are playing as pilots of. and had us hook up basically just a winch to it, right, and pull it out with a helicopter. I was like, great, much cooler, and it's easy.
This thing is 16,000 pounds and 20 feet tall as written.
I don't think it was quite that big for us.
Yeah, the descriptions of this thing are really confusing. I wasn't going to mention this in limitations, but like, yeah, I think that GMs are going to need to kind of decide what is interesting to them and roll with that. Because as written, this thing is like literally the fucking Iron Throne from Game of Thrones. It's enormous.
Apparently the book says it's surprisingly light. So whatever that means.
Yeah.
16,000 pounds, I guess, is surprisingly light.
Well, I think we've spent plenty of time here, so Let's get into reanimation. Overall, how do we want to highlight the beating hearts of this scenario, frozen or not?
I think that, you know, if you want to lean into the winter horror as Lex has interpreted the horror, you know, using those wendigo, the wendigo whack, the children of Itlaxua, whatever they're called, because they have a couple of different names.
Zombies.
But like using that, like it is genuinely an oh shit moment at every table I've sat at. It is fun. So I would say lean into that for sure. And then lean into the slow dissolution of Harris's sanity and like the fact that he is surrounded by extremely dangerous people and he is on the verge of a breakdown.
So.
I think considering those winter horror elements, it's just for me is I really like it. I think that it's such a vibe that could have been explored a lot more for the purposes of this scenario. One way that I think would really emphasize that is if Majestic left the bodies where they were in the town. They might have picked up some of the bodies out of one of the locations to do an autopsy. But besides that, the scenario starts off with a really cool bit of flavor text, you know, about walking by an old man who is kind of staring with eyes unseeing because he's frozen solid.
Mm-hmm.
And I think narrating these PCs exploring the town with frozen dead people still standing around inside of it ups the creep factor exponentially.
Mm-hmm.
And it always emphasizes that there is a danger here. You can also make the coldness more or less interesting. Something that I was kind of anticipating in our run of it was that the bodies would be frozen, But the homes were untouched. The pipes were not burst. So it seemed to only affect organic things as if it sucked the life out of everything here. It can just be a cold snap that kind of decimates everything. But like, there's lots of ways that you can really explore the, the kind of perversions of nature while also emphasizing the hostility of nature.
Yeah. And to add on to Lex's point of highlighting the environmental horror, highlighting the cold. Maybe you can have technology fail and that's what they're relying on to being warm. Show the effects of frostbite on people. Obviously you might have to push back certain events because after the first night everyone's just immune to the cold, which I believe just takes away the horror of the cold. So you have to pace it well.
Yeah, I think to me reading this, something I want to highlight with this that I like quite a bit is how insignificant The players can feel in the scope of the weather, right? Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it, as the, the saying goes, right? Like, there is really nothing you can do. And even with all the fancy guns, the most you're gonna do is end up shooting yourself, pretty much. And I think that's a really interesting sort of thing. If you don't go towards, well, the guy shows up at the end and we can shoot him. Maybe, maybe not, but I like the scope of the threat.
I think kind of getting into that for inspiration related to emphasizing environmental horrors, there is a book called The Indifferent Stars Above, which is essentially kind of a narrative retelling of The Donner Party. It's horrifying.
So good!
And I will adamantly say weather can be considered cosmic horror whenever people are just in this situation with uncaring winter that is sapping the life out of them. But I think Alex raised a really great idea too that I just wanted to mention real quick, because even though this is in the '90s, so you can mention some '90s tech, I'd love that even if the PCs are getting unnaturally acclimated to this cold, their technology is failing. Like their walkie-talkies, the buttons are breaking before they are getting depressed. So you now cannot radio back for help. You're isolated here.
That's great.
I love that.
Being able to make any man-made things start fritzing out and failing. We've already established that like a lot of the scientific readings don't really matter that much. So really emphasizing that your toys don't work here anymore.
And I think you could even like seed doubt in your players of like, could Purgatory go off the way we expect it to? It's been exposed to these extreme temperatures. Could the helicopters actually fly in these conditions?
Nice. Helicopters.
Start asking for luck rolls for the helicopters to even work. If you want to try to use those for a speedy escape.
Yeah.
Another way we can highlight the bureaucratic hell portion of, uh, the themes of beating—
It's called living in America.
You can have a lot more open air, just like disagreements, arguing, yelling, uh, between different branches. You can have people requiring their equipment that they're requesting that needs to be signed off on by a superior officer that's all too unwilling So yeah, if you want to get more into that conspiracy bureaucracy angle, I think you can also really emphasize that with—
I imagine Majestic 12 focusing a lot on terms of— it kind of makes me think of Weyland-Yutani in the Alien universe, that everyone is vying for that top spot and willing to throw anybody under the bus in order to get there. The scenario makes a mention that it's unusual that Harris is in charge of this investigation. So bring some of the other NPCs like Bimmel or others who were trying to pull them aside and start seeding doubt that, oh, those escorts that are following you around have been assigned to kill you after this is done. If you do this for me, if you report to me and not Harris, he's losing his cool. Can't you tell?
Yeah.
And give them some layers of kind of intrigue and not knowing who to trust could be an interesting way to kind of up the tension and paranoia in this.
I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're fully in the reanimation now.
Oh yeah, absolutely. This is not emphasizing the beating heart. This is stitching it all back together again. So in that spirit, what elements do we want to try and remove from this scenario with any advice for how to do that in more or less effective ways?
All right, get the scaffold ready.
I think you can just remove the Native American pieces. And, you know, if you want to keep the Wendigo, I guess keep the Wendigo. But I mean the other stuff, like all the Native American handouts and that, because they don't actually give you anything anyway.
This does not forward the narrative at all. It's just more stuff.
Yeah, I think you can just chuck that. Yeah, it's part of the Mythos hoedown because it's like we have, yeah, Blaschua and Yig and the K'n-yan. And so—
Oh, and don't forget Nathan's favorite.
Oh yeah, Nyarlathotep's in here. Don't forget him.
Yeah, it's truly a Mythos hoedown. Um, but yeah, I think—
It's just a nod Easter egg.
Yeah.
I think straight up remove, like, don't use this material. I think safely the Native American stuff can just go out the door.
Well, what's an alternative?
Do you need it? Genuinely, I'm not trying to, like, do you need the Native American piece of it? You can keep the Kenyan, right? But do you need the Native American piece?
I think that's the interesting part, right? Is that race of giant beings before that left their tech behind? that you might be able to figure out, that's pretty cool. And I think there might be ways to— since the wendigo— anybody that knows me knows the zombies, and I hate it. What's the point? They're not interesting to me, especially since as written they just kind of attack other people for the most part. So why not have these frozen things be the kun-yan trying to reach into the future?
Hmm.
To try and stop, like, To try and communicate.
Or spirits that have possessed the body, the frozen body.
Exactly, exactly. Something to do. And you can even, if you really want to get cheesy with it, like they're overriding the players, right? And that's part of why them having multiple characters is their mind is getting pushed into literally other people.
It's almost Yithian.
Yeah, exactly, where it's like, okay, my researcher? Huh, that blue fly guy seems to meta-know everything that that researcher did. That's not good.
Yeah. I think this is something that we can honestly spend an entire Consultation episode talking about in terms of many, many, many Cthulhu Mythos elements are rooted in racism and are rooted in very unsavory sources. And the Kenyan is very much rooted in unsavoriness related to Native Americans. And I think that if you are going to include them, the Kenyan are most interesting completely divorced from that. And they are just subterranean peoples that are really fucking tall and have access to bizarre technologies and things that are just very strange.
Yeah.
And so you could absolutely include the Kenyani elements without having the Native American nods, especially like any of the books or the big air quotes articles, totally unnecessary. In terms of the art, which I'm going to get to because Holly has some awesome handouts for this scenario too, you can just drop the one that specifically has kind of like a Native American call-out person in it and just say these are kind of signals that people are getting. Because Kenyani can communicate telepathically. So maybe this is— you can take a page from another Delta Green scenario that heavily features Kenyani, not doing spoilers, and bring them in here for a slightly different kind of Mythos hoedown as they're trying to steer the PCs into doing this because they don't want to do it. Their numbers are so few, they can't afford to sacrifice themselves anymore. There's too many of us.
Yeah. I think as far as removing things, I think honestly you can remove all of the science handouts and just give your players a big picture overview of what they're seeing instead of giving them data that either they're going to struggle to interpret because they don't have the knowledge of their PCs, or if you're like me, you have a player that actually takes the time to interpret all that data and then throws a ton of scientific questions at you that you don't know how to answer.
Yeah, I agree. I think that a very important part of critically reading and preparing to run this scenario is going to realize how bloated it is with unnecessary details, both in terms of the write-ups, in terms of the townsfolk and like knowing their histories.
They're dead.
No one knows. No one cares. Nobody needs that. And then, as we've mentioned numerous times, there are a ton of handouts in this that communicate very little. Again, I think that it's clear that Ivy really did a lot of homework to give a lot of contextual information and make this a very science-heavy scenario, but it's more than a little overwhelming, and many of the handouts are superfluous.
It's prioritizing verisimilitude over plot.
Yeah, there's such thing as too much.
Yeah.
How do you feel if this started a couple days in where the researchers had already spent the time gathering this information, kind of beginning that process of standing around and stuff? Because realistically, a lot of the time up front is gonna be them taking readings that I think we've said don't matter ultimately other than saying it's weird.
Oh, but that would just snowball the entire first problem with this scenario, which is you sit your scientist players down and then give them a stack of 4+ different handouts, say, have fun reading, to let them kind of decipher the other people's accounts of things, and then just shift focus to someone else.
I think this kind of dovetails into what we would add, and I think all of us want to see more investigation that actually provides information for the PCs to take action.
Yeah, I agree.
So, you know, what if, you know, Nathan, I kind of like latched on when you said this is like dairy and this happens every 30 years. Then let's have a town history of that and a hint at like escalation. You know what I'm saying? Like it's kind of hard because it's like—
Oh, but you get that in the TV script that you'll find for some reason.
It's kind of hard because You know, if a town of 100 people all die overnight, like, I don't know if a whole town's going to be built up again over and over and over again every 30 years. I don't know. But I think you can always just kind of like—
Yeah, it's 200 in this. So they do kind of go that like somebody got hit. But yeah, I agree. It's a tough sell.
But you could at least signpost that things are getting worse. Like the first year it happens, one guy. This next year, 10 guys. And then at the end of it, the entire town is done.
Yeah.
And then it's like, well, what's next? Because this is clearly not over. You know, I don't know.
Well, that's giving stakes, which I think is something that's important for this, right? Is—
Right.
Part of it is, if you were to do nothing, this goes on for a few days and then Yeshua leaves. But I Why do that? Why not have it be the case of you are looking at this and you're realizing, looking at this data, that this is not even approaching the upper limit yet? This is going to keep getting worse and worse every year. And now you at least have something where you have to go like, do we try and solve it right now? Do we tell our superiors that they could solve this? and then have them choose not to? Like, can we damn ourselves to Majestic just so they can get this technology that they may use for good or they may just not?
I think that is a very good idea to give them sort of an abbreviated history that they can get by delving into the area a little bit more. One of the suggestions that Patrick had made, I'll go into more details on this when we get into the actual changes section, But to really emphasize that this is getting worse each time. Not only is it expanding in area, but it's dropping in temperature more and more. And that I think that it's important to really then include some sort of inciting element for why is it going off the fucking rails right now? Because all the other events are— it sounds very isolated, like it's just someone dies in the cold. Little girl walked her dog.
Yeah.
Rip in peace. But then now you're getting multiple auroras back to back, and it sounds kind of like it's hitting critical mass that you can have Howie have fucked something up. Like he attempted a ritual.
Oh, sure.
And that that's what sparked it. That's one of the suggestions I'll get to in a bit. But like, I think that GMs will really want to make digestible handouts to condense a lot of information down into just some actionable narrative to keep your table moving. I'm going to ask you all to bear with me for just a little bit, but I sat down to try and think of how to, to weed these handouts down. The first bit, whenever it tells you to give researchers these 4-ish handouts in terms of like what is known, the reports from the plane, that's really easy to condense that into a single handout. I'm going to include in the show notes of this episode that can just be a single page That's, this is what people are saying. It's not these things and move on. You don't need to know the hows and the whys. Just tell that it is. And then that's whenever you can give them another handout that is telling them, like in terms of meteorological reports, the situation is getting worse. And especially after the, the first night that they are there, this is much worse than what was reported before. This is not a -30-degree drop. This is a minus 60, 70, 80. Like, it's shunting down worse each time. The low-frequency detections are really obscure in how and why they're there. It's MIGO technology, no one cares. And then the— how, how would submarines detect this from an inland lake in Alabama? Makes no sense. Um, this is something PCs encounter during the investigation, don't worry about it. The radiation readings are pretty useless in terms of the handouts giving you, oh, well, 4 kilometers it drops down, here it's a little higher. Narrate this. This is something that you can tell PCs if you want to put it down to a roll, maybe put this player map on a grid and say, on a failure, it's these 4 squares of the grid is where the radiation is most unusual. That includes maybe south of the town and some of the lake.
Yeah.
If they get a success, then they can tell they're zeroing in more on the lake than the town proper.
Yeah.
All of the complex SR box, SLF microwave analyzer, HR infrared— these words and things are all completely superfluous. They all communicate the same thing: shit's weird during that weird thing that you just saw last night. There's no more deduction or mystery to be solved from them. And so really, you can just tell your players in like 3 sentences. Um, actually, no, I should say Patrick actually did the calculations that these handouts would require, and he made his own handout for like if they did the math that we can include in the show notes for this. So shout out to Patrick or Oxford Coma. But honestly, you can summarize all of those handouts with 3 sentences. Every monitoring device directed at this event spiked to astronomical levels. There's some kind of chain reaction happening that should be producing massive levels of energy from positron collisions turning matter into pure energy, roughly equivalent to the detonation of 34 Fat Man atomic bombs, which is vanishing just as quickly as it should appear. The only thing remaining is a fraction of the radioactive fallout that is blanketing this area in a snow. And then just let the players use radioactive stuff or their ELF meters to zero in on the lake. You don't need any of that other stuff that makes this way too technically tedious.
And you can still tell them that it took them all day to realize this.
Yeah, but you don't need to burden your players with it because that is a huge limitation or issue with this scenario. Okay, I'm done.
I want better tools or clues or something we can give players to point specifically to. It's in the lake and not the mounds. And even like, what do they do with this chair? Because people are, you know, rightfully very suspect of this chair. Nobody wants to sit in this chair.
But it tells me it's good.
They may resist not just because it's an unknown thing, but they don't realize that it is actually their salvation. And it's like, how do you signpost that? I don't know.
Right.
Aside from the vision that one person gets.
Or Howie's like drawings.
And I think this, yeah, the solution to that, give them more visions. I think that it's weird that it only has a vision once in the autopsy scene. And then it has you asking like, what are their PAL scores? The person with the lowest PAL might get another one. Make it tied to willpower.
Like let them dream. Yeah.
Give them hallucinations while they're exploring that they can just be very quick snippets. And it's like, you know, you enter this room, people are screaming as snakes are tearing their bodies apart as they sit on this obscure relic. And there's books piled everywhere.
I like that.
Yeah. Like just quick flashes that you can deliver a lot more cool narrative that way.
Yeah, that might be a fun tie-in with the, the kundyan, like kind of taking control and trying to communicate, right?
Pushing those visions on.
Exactly. Like Or just you're out walking and all of a sudden your buddy turns to you and starts saying something in a language that nobody knows and trying to sketch something out. And what does that mean? And then he's gone, right? Like very limited.
Draw something on the snow.
Or more than that, if you emphasize some atmospheric elements that the wind starts howling so much that you can't hear each other speak, you're shouting. And then you can hear someone in your mind as if they're right next to you.
I do like that.
Accidental telepathy. That's weird as fuck. Like, bring that in if your players get exposed to this permafrost or whatever. Like, have them start developing weird stuff so they're feeling very uncomfortable.
Well, and that's really good as a kind of enticement too, right? So if we're looking at this from the majestic level, they want something that they can use probably militarily because That's kind of Majestic's aim-ish, right? So why do they care about this for the most part? And maybe for a cold weapon, maybe. But yeah, I like that idea of telepathy a lot because now the question is, what got you that? Can we replicate it? What can we do?
And to pile on to that, if Harris is also getting these visions, that could explain like he's going insane because of them. and he can't interpret them correctly, he is perceiving it as a threat, which is why he wants to destroy this throne and destroy anyone who's like threatening to utilize it or something like that.
Absolute cinema. That's genius, Holly.
I love it.
So what about things that we would really want to change or alter rather than just kind of cut out entirely?
Yeah, I would definitely change the punishment from getting shot to being contained, being put in a cell to study, to just like highlight what, you know, what kind of bastards you're working with. Like these scientists with no morals, of course they're going to take their own person and put them in a containment cell and study them, poke and prod them.
Yup.
And, you know, that also allows the PC that has been contained a chance to escape once hell breaks loose. If you do decide to use the zombie route or the Ithaca— Itsala attack route.
I think that the PCs themselves need a smidge work. Like, Skylar's side quest says gather extraterrestrial phenomenon, but there is none.
No, he specifically wants an extraterrestrial organism, alive if possible. I get paid less if it's dead.
But there is none.
Yeah, there is none. Like, I think that you really should cut down on the obvious red herrings in this to at least give your players some way to feel like they're contributing to their character's narrative at a minimum. Because like, whenever you told me after the session that, oh, it says like, if you want to capture one of the zombies, basically, that's what you would bring. I'm like, that's not an extraterrestrial. That's a very terrestrial— it's a re-terrestrial.
You can definitely reword that.
Also, I would give them more stealth. Yeah.
I think that all the PCs need better skill spread. You don't need one PC with literally 3 skills in physics. You just don't. Like, spread out the love.
That, and I think, you know, if you are going to have one red herring, it makes absolute sense in terms of verisimilitude that you would pick who you got to go down here. So a microbiologist may not be the most relevant. That this isn't microbial. They didn't know that. So, you know, damn. But give that PC some fallback skills that would still play into an investigation so that They don't feel out in the cold.
I think kind of with that backstory thing, there's already the basis for friends within the group, right? Like some of the researchers know blue fly people back and forth. I think that's a really fun opportunity to have them be friendly and you're in a bond-rich environment. And now Harris is in charge and he is throwing anything to get you guys to find anything. And if he is to kill a Blue Fly agent that you happen to love and know, he doesn't care. You know, you could play up a little bit more of a personal side of this. That could be fun.
Yeah, I would agree with Nathan there. These departments have worked with one another in the past, and it makes sense that they are— they do have working relationships. Uh, even with NRO Delta, even with, um, Harris. So that could make every choice a little more weighty. I would make an NRO Delta PC, like, lean into— they get to be the man behind the gun. They get to put the bullets into the witnesses. And it's like, wow.
Yeah.
And that works twofold.
Yeah.
Because it adds more player conflict when everything goes down, takes less pressure off the GM. And it adds a little more variety, right? They're not just researchers. They're the people who also clean up.
Yeah, this is all great. I really, really like it because it's also an opportunity that you can have the players say, who do you recognize here? Like you see a familiar face. Let everyone kind of create an NPC that they may not be friends with, but they have been on an operation before. They are familiar with. Because something that is highlighted in the scenario repeatedly is that as these nights continue, everyone's paranoia starts going up through the roof and people are trigger-happy and kind of everything is melting down. That if a GM were so inclined, they could really play up these bond and relationship mechanics of like, I don't know who to trust. I think that that's something that is a real hallmark of Majestic 12, that they are about secrets layered on secrets even more than Delta Green.
Yeah.
So who can I go to with this? this because I don't feel safe. I need help or at least a way out because this is not looking good for me.
If you want to add even more tension, just manifest Harris's accusations and one of your Blue Fly people is actually a Delta Green agent and they've heard of Purgatory, but they don't know what it is. And they've said, find out what you know and dismantle it if you can.
Yeah, that was great whenever you did that in our run of it, that it instantly made that PC much more interesting because, you know, we're like, oh my God, this guy's losing. He's talking about Delta Green, this is mole, whatever. And then whenever Dan was like, well, as a Delta Green agent, we were like, oh shit.
Prepare, prepare, prepare. Yeah. What do you think about having the players actually play some of the higher-ups? Because one of the things we see, right, is there's a lot of like pushback of, no, you can't do that. You must do it this way. Would it be interesting to have somebody be Harris and then having all these people calling him being like, Harris, figure this out or you're dead.
Right.
Bimmel, go figure this out. Because Bimmel is there. She's your boss, but she is investigating useless things. And it's like, well, could she just be a player character? Like, why can't we be Bimmel?
Yeah, I think that would add a layer. of complexity that's much needed. Good, healthy complexity.
Yeah.
Because you get to lean into the theme of bureaucratic hell, right? If you make a decision as someone who is a manager and that ends up killing like 10 people, that's on you. And that's gonna make people upset at you. They're gonna— maybe there's a mutiny and like, that's so cool. Maybe you have to beg the higher-ups for additional resources.
And that might be a way for you to emphasize the disposability of potential player characters if you make a slew of pre-gens that players may fall into. Like if your, if your main researchers get basically thrown in the brig or killed in some way, this also gives you license to be a little bit more lethal with the scenario. Then yeah, give them Bimmel or Harris or someone else.
Yeah. But like with Harris, You just threw some scientists in the brig.
What are you doing now?
Harris is at 25 SAN and he already has an obsession that whatever this is here has to be destroyed. Like, by the time that the PCs would likely be dying and you would be giving them replacements, like, make this feel more desperate. That could be very fun to roleplay.
You could, you know, copy Paul Fricker and make this scenario like full Fathom Five.
That's literally what I was thinking.
Everyone is a playable PC.
Yeah.
Yeah. No, I like that.
Like if your player character dies, gets unalived, unlucky, uh, just tell them, hey, who do you want to play as next? Anyone in the camp, anyone you want. And then you just give them the character.
Yeah. You just made some blank kind of template character sheets and then yeah, just give it to them. And maybe as a GM, you can just keep a mark of what day is it? And this is how much sand they will have left. To really give those characters a bit more fragility.
You're no longer playing as an individual. You're playing as the organization, which is cool.
And a lot of the information that is kind of skewed towards certain players too, I think that's one of the things I like about this is you could then jump into somebody that knows about the super weapon on the base. And you didn't know anything about that before as a player. That'd be like, oh shit, you know, like this is so cool.
I didn't know we had that.
Yeah, there's a death ray here. It probably won't work, but neat.
Meta narrative. You're just a K'un-Yan sorcerer jumping, hopping bodies right now. I like that.
I like that. I do think we talked a little bit about motivations, but if you're going to be jumping around, I think kind of understanding like, what does Majestic want out of this? Right? Like we kind of talked, Do they want samples? Do they want— like, I would think they'd want the throne, but I don't know. Do they want information about how to do things? So what do, what do we think for motivation here? Like, are they data collecting?
I'm pretty sure it's the data collection. They want to utilize it. They want to milk it for all its resources.
Yeah, data collection and then acquiring technology if they can. that we are not here out of the goodness of our hearts, and that Harris is trying to advocate for blowing up the only kind of reward we can get for all of these efforts and all of the, the person power that is now dead in the snow. We need that fucking chair. We need that stupid house-sized dentist chair.
Yeah.
Because I'm gonna put it in the garage and it's gonna stay there and I'm gonna look at it. Like, it doesn't matter for their end goal, but I think that That's the argument I was trying to use as a Majestic agent, that we can't destroy this because then we have nothing. We have nothing to show for this here.
Yeah, I think making sure your players understand where Majestic is in this timeline and how truly desperate everyone really is to find something to please the bosses, to not get killed. Yeah. Yeah.
And kind of to that degree, I wonder you kind of show up and it's already like, oh, you've collected all the bodies, like you started doing things like you mentioned before. Like, let's have the players— part of their work is getting the bodies— like actually experience the thing. And that's kind of why I was like, well, why can't we play Harris? Like, he's the one that's experiencing the thing, right? That's who I want to be.
Yeah, and that's where I think you can make it affecting more people. Like in our run, that was deemed unfit for publication because I kept making so many jokes about finding the brown note in Grandpa's mounds.
That is not why.
And whenever my researcher was exposed to this first kind of vision, I thought that it could be something memetic because I happened to be autopsying Howie. And then that was kind of the signpost into, shit, something must be important here. And so I didn't want to tell the others about it, but I did try to warn Harris. I'm like, if you see anyone acting really odd, trying to eat things or other people, then maybe keep an eye on it. Maybe do a buddy system. That— I think making the visions escalate in intensity at the same time that these winter things are escalating too can make this feel super hectic. And again, you want them to be scrambling by the end of it, I feel.
Yeah.
Yeah. I would say that I would also change the ending. Don't be afraid to have a world-ending catastrophe if the player characters fail.
I'm in.
Right?
Like, I want to see, uh, actual consequences. A new snow age. If they fail, wipe out North America.
Sure. Great. I really agree with that. It is a pet peeve of mine whenever a scenario ends, you know, like we've remarked a few times, nothing really mattered. It just goes away on its own. But I also dislike whenever the world ends, like, oh, boop, and Earth is gone. But instead, make the players feel bad for failing. Make this have lasting consequences. The way that I was really thinking of this, and I'll get into some of the methods that I think you could alter the Etla Shua and all of this stuff going on, but basically, the entity is trying to manifest here.
Mm-hmm.
It's causing these storms every time that it's manifesting, and it's pulling energy in in order to pierce the veil. This shrine, idol, dentist chair, what have you, is kind of using someone's life force energy to shunt it away for a little bit longer, but it's still going to keep coming back. So if you blow it up, or if you just don't use it by a key night, it fully manifests and—
Oh, okay.
Then it just starts roaming around. This is now a plague that you have unleashed upon the world, and now just highlight that there are these roaming winter storms that are like— it just wipes out the entire city of Atlanta as it makes its way kind of towards the coastline. And the players have to live with that, that every death is really on their hands.
Give them some bonds in Atlanta.
Yeah.
And the, uh, The imagery that they have of that final bit where he's like literally rapturing people into the sky and their legs are burning off is like, that's cool. That's really neat.
That's a little nod to the Wind Waker.
That would— exactly. But well, that'd be really interesting if that just like— he escaped prison, you let him out of prison, it's the US, 1/5 of people all get yanked up into the air at once. How are you going to cover that? Like, is that something you can? What the hell do you do?
And I think kind of on this note, like where Nathan, what you were talking about is people are kind of getting raptured up in flames around it. I'll just get into one of the first changes that you could do pretty easily. It's not super apparent, in my opinion, that this is getting into Wendigo territory. And I think that it is extremely easy to re-flavor this as some kind of non-mythos-entrenched entity that is associated with entropy, making hot stuff cold and back again.
Oh, yeah.
It's just absolutely perversing the laws of nature. And so that's why whenever it first shows up, everything drops down and it kind of sucks all the energy out. And then like all of the bodies They're not actually dead. They're just at this super, super low temperature. And then whenever you want to have it manifest a little more, their temperature suddenly spikes and it floods all of these bodies with heat. And so they're like blistering, screaming, bursting into flames, and just attacking madly. You can do a lot of changes just by making— like, come up with some kind of—
Nthlllglbllg.
That's its name.
Fuck it.
Who cares? That's how Lovecraft came up with all the mythos names. But just give it some kind of weird name that can be referred to on the walls and just, again, we mentioned the scenario is not deep as written. There's not a history entrenched. You can just say it's some kind of weird thing that it fucks with hot and cold. So better to keep it locked away. Then move on.
Yeah, I love it. Let's talk Purgatory. Um, it's definitely introduced. Uh, I guess when our play— yeah, right. Like people know about Purgatory. It's a, yeah, it's basically a thing that it does. Yeah. The super weapon that won't really do much against the main guy, which— Except if you get a crit.
Yeah.
You got a crit. It's, it's one of those like, okay, I guess like it's not interesting, whatever. At least for our play, it was introduced in the beginning and people were like, ah, that's there. But there's not a lot of play in the middle with it, right? Like, do we think there's something we could do with that where it goes missing? It, you know, like Delta Green literally tries to heist it in the middle and you have to stop that. Like, is there something? Because this is supposed to be a multi-session sort of thing, I think. Yeah.
If you give one PC the objective that they're Delta Green and their job is to destroy it, that does kind of help. You have that interlude of like, this is a person trying to deal with this, maybe. But no, I agree. As written, it's like a little bit like introduced in the beginning and then only again.
It's basically zombie insurance is how I read it. It's like, oh, you have all these zombies coming in. This thing just annihilates wet materials. So point it at something juicy.
Good thing we have our zombie killing device.
We won't turn it on until the very end though.
Which is funny because I think every time I've run it, like, people run straight for purgatory as soon as the wendigos show up.
Yeah, everybody wants that.
Like, we're just gonna use that then. Great.
I mean, you tell them you have a super weapon, they're gonna want to use it.
We have to thin out some employees. We don't want to pay their pensions.
I mean, it's the thing you hate in every superhero movie where it's like, Iron Man, you have a kill-everything laser and you punched a guy for 5 minutes? Use the laser, my dude.
Yeah, I would simply point a laser at the mouth.
Pretty much. Um, I also like, uh, near the end it mentions like, oh, Merry Christmas, because this ends on Christmas. I think that could be a fun theme to kind of play around with where these researchers might have families who are going, where the hell are you? You know, it's, it's Christmas.
If you want to do a different take on Edla Shua, why not some kind of twisted Santa Claus?
Oh, make it like Krampus or something. Fuck yeah. I like that a lot.
Yeah. Have y'all ever seen Rare Exports? It's like a Norwegian film and they fuck like they're mining and they find like what they interpret to be Santa Claus, but they're like trolls or something like that.
They're the elves. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, and so that's like. You know that idea of like some mythic creature is coming through, or Krampus or something. And then it's a little bit fun, like a little cheeky at that point.
But you know why not make it a Christmas scenario?
Yeah.
The wind is howling. Oh oh oh oh! Coming from everywhere.
Fire the super weapon!
Fire the super weapon! It's in the skies.
Use it on me.
Damn. Um, let's see. So for some other changes, I'm gonna shout out Patrick once again for actually doing math that I was not about to do when I sit down at a role-playing session. But, um, he came up with a neat idea to have the cold snaps increase in severity by about 98-degree increments each time.
Ooh!
Because I think that the PCs hear tell of the first incident, and so the first night that something happens, they're expecting that. And you could really emphasize that it is worse. It is bigger. It is colder. And so it was -68 the zeroth night before they show up. It's -166 the first night that they get there. The second night—
Really? Jesus.
Yeah, it's -264 Fahrenheit. This is the temperature that ethyl alcohol will freeze. So if they go into Harry's Bar, those liquor bottles are shattered. That should be very concerning for any of the researchers. By the 3rd night, it could hit -362°F. At this temperature, oxygen will freeze and nitrogen will start precipitating out of the air, so it may be difficult to even breathe once they get back into the area by morning. And then they would be able to do some math, and that by the 4th night, this would hit -460°F, which is an actual apocalypse happening at 0°C. That should be impossible. So if you want to go that way with it, it's a way to increase the stakes.
Also, the helicopters definitely are not going to work at -362 degrees Fahrenheit.
Well, that's especially scary if they're fine every night, right? Where you're like, this is going to end the world. Everything is going to stop working and I'll still be alive in this is not a good feeling, I think.
And it's also a way to kind of prevent things from maybe feeling a bit gamey. I like the concept that the helicopters now no longer work, so it's not even an option for them to hoist this throne out of the mound. Also, just taking a moment on rereading this, that the throne is so fucking huge as written that I don't think the mound is given proper attention in terms of its size. And honestly, I think that a simple way to deal with the dam problem, pun intended, is have some PCs dive, plant some dynamite in the top of it, blow the top off. Because this mound is so huge, water's gonna rush into it.
Wow.
And now you have this throne that's kind of sitting amongst this cold water with dead fish that are trying to splash at you. Um, it wasn't effective. Pokémon joke.
I think the throne's pretty cool though, in terms of like, it's basically, I mean, can we be real? The Kun-Yan, they're cinnabites, right? They made a chair that like spikes you, but keeps you alive as it's doing this kind of tortury thing to keep evil forces away. Like, I don't know, that's pretty neat. I would feel really bummed if my players didn't get to it.
Yeah, I, I thought it was fine. Like, again, it's just some of the things that kind of happened for the sake of it happening the way that it was set up. Yeah, one thing that I will mention, if you want to completely take any Native American or Kenyani elements away from this and totally divorce the scenario from it, this will take some heavy lifting, but I think that you could pull in a surprise Norse element. So maybe Grandpa Hiram is a World War II veteran who was there whenever they stormed some of Hitler's bunkers, and you can tie in stuff like the Thule Occult Society for a kind of Hellboy angle. And he took some souvenirs with him whenever Hitler was trying to collect all of this unnatural stuff, and some of those things ended up being much more unnatural than others, including some kind of, I don't know, maybe a shield with some runes on it or something. And like, there's a bunch of bullshit that you can find in his house. And so this is what just ate away at his sanity. The longer you stay in this house, it's automatically ticking away at your SAN.
Yeah, yeah.
And so then that's what's giving him the visions. Maybe instead of making just dirt mounds, he starts like carving runes into the actual hillside or something. because it's just what he thinks that he should do. He thinks that it's what it's wanting, and eventually unalives himself. Howie is a local meth head. As someone from a small town, every town's got them. And he is just a world-class fuck-up who gets like his, his trailer and his truck repossessed. And so he just breaks in and starts crashing at his old grandpa's place that's sitting more or less vacant. And in his vulnerable state, it really fucks with his mind more and more. And so the reason for all of this to happen is he attempts some kind of a ritual that he thinks will give him power or something like that. And you could bring in, instead of like a wendigo-type element, you could try to bring in something like Jotnar or frost giants. And that, that way, whenever this veil is happening, that howling that you are hearing everywhere are these things that it's basically kind of another dimension that is right next to ours, and that is them howling because they're smelling food. And that's why they're not super appearing at the moment, but the howling seems to come from everywhere. Also, something that you could do with this is the aurora is impossible as written for it to be blue this low to the ground, so that's all weird and stuff. Something you could do to fuck with the scientific handouts is All of the measurements are spiking, but none of the UV or electromagnetic sensors are triggering. You just watched an aurora happen in the sky, but your devices are showing there was no light emitted, which is impossible because that aurora is in this other dimension that you're kind of seeing a sneak peek through.
Hmm.
As it is growing in intensity. And so then it would be more up to them. Something that I think you could also do as a change is make there be a cave system from the center of the mounds that could also connect down to the mound under the lake. I think it's an easy way to make the mounds not just a waste of time.
Oh yeah, sure.
But maybe that's where Howie or someone stored more of these relics there. So they need to try to get there to stop this ritual from just continuing to propagate. And bringing in some stuff that way.
I'm just sorry. Now I'm imagining them trying to take the chair out through these long hallways under the mounds. Pivot, pivot. Yeah, I like the, the idea. The only thing I'm disappointed you didn't say, Nyarlathotep.
Oh, next time. Next time. I mean, you can bring in Loki, which—
oh, hey.
Oh yeah.
No.
I wouldn't ever tie it like directly into, oh, these myths are real, these ones aren't, but something that you could easily see. Like if somebody saw that, yeah, they might make legends that kind of mirror on top of it, I think is my barometer for stuff like that.
Yeah, the Frost Giants is an easy, I think that's a really smart like kind of mythos thing that would fit nicely there of like, yeah, tall guys, big chair, cold. Yeah.
And so then, yeah, you could like remove some of that history of it having recurred. Like again, you can And do with this as you will. I am not going to run this scenario, but this was an idea I had to completely remove a Native American element out of it.
Yeah.
And you can just throw in something like, why is there Norse shit happening in BFE Alabama? So I thought that that would throw your players for a bit of a loop there. Are there any handouts or props that we would want to use when running this scenario since we've already advocated for throwing out almost everything that is actually included in the scenario?
I came up with something kind of on the fly as we were recording where I thought that it would be fun to send your players the, the non-disclosure agreement that threatens their lives and all that they hold dear before the game as like a contractual, like you agreed play in this game type of thing.
Yeah, that's very fun.
Other than that, yeah, I commissioned a friend of mine to mock up Howie's pictures. I just thought it was better than describing them. So we can put those in the show notes.
Yeah, they're really cool. I like them a lot.
And we can credit the artist who hangs around our Discord. So you can always reach out to him if you're interested.
I would use as a handout that, um, just executive overview summary of all of the scientific discoveries. Like, that's just so much easier.
I would say to, for some of us that maybe live up north, Jotunheimr, maybe take everybody outside for 5 minutes before the game starts and just no coats, just go enjoy the briskness and then go inside and start playing just to remind yourself how awful cold is.
I can imagine you can wheel in your refrigerator into your game room, open it, get in, shove your buddy right into the fridge.
Put them in the emergency storage freezer if they are going outside.
Whenever they take damage, we'll just bludgeon people with ice bags.
We hope this mad howling, seemingly coming from everywhere, has been helpful in bringing this scenario to life at your table. Be sure to check out our show notes of this episode for links to get a copy of this scenario for yourself, any RPG resources we can share, actual plays of the scenario we recommend— a couple might be coming out soon— as well as an invite to our lab's Discord server to discuss more reanimations. 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 Memorial Mortuary and Laboratories. We'd also like to give a mad howl of appreciation to our newest Patreon interns, Born to Be Wrong and JS. Thank you for supporting us. So until next time, thanks for listening to RPG Reanimators, where your games can die or live in the cold.
I just love putting that asshole on the throne.
Everyone puts Harris on the throne. Everyone puts Harris on the throne. Except for Lex.
Except whenever a player 99 crit fails the sand roll at seeing a Thlachua manifest and lose 100 sand in a single go.
That was very fun.
The chair was very comfy.
I think we just pushed Harris out of a helicopter, which was also very satisfying.
Nice.