If you go down in the woods today...

 Somebody on Reddit was asking for scenes in the woods that could occur in a Blair Witch-style scenario, where the Agents are lost in the woods and trying to find their way out, and things get weird for them. I kind of got inspired and came up with the below.

- The Agents keep seeing somebody ahead of them who's holding a flashlight, but they're so far ahead that they can't make out who it is, and they don't stop no matter how loud the Agents yell. If the Agents charge fast enough, they only find the flashlight lying on the ground, still on.

- As the Agents proceed, the full moon seems to shift in the sky - one minute it's in front of them, then they walk for five minutes and it seems to be behind them. If anybody succeeds in a Survival or Navigate roll, or has any points in Science: Astronomy, they'll realize that there's two moons in the sky. If all of them look into the sky at the two moons, one of them suddenly flickers out, leaving only one behind. (Hat tip to the movie The Endless.)

- One of the Agents becomes absolutely sure that the moon is watching them from the sky, like an enormous, unblinking eye, and has to make a Sanity roll to avoid hiding from its awful gaze. Who's watching when, just for a second, it seems to blink?

- A stag stumbles towards them, its intestines hanging out of an enormous wound in its belly; it croaks out something that sounds like a word, then drops dead. Are the wounds from a bear, or something worse? And what was the word?

- There's a drumming noise in the distance, but it's irregular - sometimes very fast, sometimes irregular and slow. It begins to become more steady when one of the investigators realizes that it's synced to their own heartbeat, and rises and falls with their pulse.

- They find a fairy circle of mushrooms, each mushroom arranged exactly two feet away from the skeleton of a fox. The skeleton shows visible signs of deformation - the left side of the skull has two eyesockets, and the ribcage has too many ribs.

- They find an abandoned campsite, with a crude firepit littered with empty beer bottles and cigarette butts. There's empty .30-06 shells scattered around the nearby area, and a successful Search roll finds a rifle raggedly broken in half as if by some tremendous force. Underneath the rifle, there's a skeletal human lower arm and hand, that's clearly been chewed on for a while; the marrow has been sucked out.

- The Agents find a cell phone lying on a nearby dead tree, seemingly placed so that they notice it. It still has a little bit of juice left in it, long enough for the Agents to watch a video of teenagers clowning around with flashlights before one of them is suddenly pulled up into the trees. The video ends with a freshly severed leg falling out of the trees and onto the ground before the cellphone goes dead.

- The Agents find a tree with the bark stripped off, and I CAN'T GET OUT carved into the blank wood underneath.

- The Agents find a tree with the face of an Agent perfectly rendered into the bark, as if the tree spontaneously grew into that shape. The face is screaming in agony. Or maybe it's perfectly serene, accepting. As the Agents proceed, the other Agent's faces are found in the bark, then the faces of others that the Agents don't know.

- The Agents notice that the trees here are a lot bigger than before, and seem to get larger and larger as they continue to walk, until they're the size of redwoods. Looking up, the trees seem to go up forever, with only a tiny patch of starry sky visible seemingly miles away.

- The Agents find a wrecked, abandoned car that's been thoroughly overgrown, left here to rot for years. A tree sprouts through the empty space where the engine used to be.

- The Agents become aware that there's small animals watching them, their flashlights reflecting from their eyes. Most of the animals have two eyes. A few have three, or more. They scamper away into the darkness after a few seconds.

- The Agents find a complete set of clothing that's been left behind to rot in the grass, seemingly for months. It matches up exactly with what one of the Agents is wearing, down to any identifying marks made on the Agent's clothing.  (I did come up with this one before seeing Backrooms, I should note.)

- One of the Agents becomes convinced that a tree is now occupying a space that it wasn't a second before - is he just disoriented from only seeing what's lit by his flashlight? Maybe.

- A sizable moth beats itself against somebody's flashlight for a few seconds, then flies off again.

- The remnants of some litterbug's picnic, with trash strewn around the plastic cloth on the ground. The trash looks exactly like normal food wrappers, except written in an alphabet that the Agents have never seen before. Anthropology or Archaeology rolls reveal that it's no recognized human language. Or maybe they're all in Linear B.

- What looks like blood is slowly oozing out of an old bullet hole in a tree. Tasting it results in the Agent hearing a constant low conversation that they can't make out while they're in the forest. Get it to the lab, and it's just tree sap.

- Every blade of grass, every sprouting plant, every dropped twig is leaning in one direction in this glade. They're not pointing to anything. Probably.

- Somebody's disassembled a sizable wind chime and has restrung it from a tree branch. Between each chime is a human bone. When the wind blows, the noise the chimes make seem to to echo for a long time, as if they're in a much larger space than just this clearing. An Alertness roll reveals that the noise sounds like it's bouncing off the walls of a titanic cathedral.

- The characters can see a set of blinking red lights through the trees, arranged into a vertical straight line - the warning lights on a cell phone tower, or power pylon. One of the lights detaches itself from the line and flies off, irregularly.

- An ancient television that somebody threw away, resting on a stump. A crude glyph has been painted on the cracked screen - it seems to depict somebody huddled over, as if they're trying to avoid the notice of something much larger. It takes a successful Sanity roll to tear your attention away from it once you've seen it.

- They find tire tracks leading to the remains of a pyre, apparently the aftermath of somebody's party in the woods. It looks like they were burning Mythos tomes for fuel, but none of them have survived the fire. (Or maybe one or two have.)

- A trio of deer suspended from a branch, their throats freshly cut and their guts lying on the ground beneath them. No sign of the hunters.

- Actually: After the Agents discover the trio of deer hanging upside down, they wander around for a while doing whatever. Then they find a trio of hunters, their throats slit, dangling upside down from a tree with their guts in a pile beneath them. There’s a discarded, stained paper plate with a piece of raw meat on it that’s been rubbed thoroughly with Buttery Garlic steak seasoning. It’s from one of the hunters.

- They find a body crumpled at the foot of a tree - maybe it's a park ranger, maybe it's a cultist, maybe it's a hunter. The tree has had most of the accessible bark removed, and the wood underneath has been carved with hundreds of lines of writing, not in English. There's a Swiss army knife nearby, with all of the blades broken off, coated in sap and wood pulp. The corpse's fingers are horribly damaged, with the distal phalanages visible. When the knife broke, he used his fingernails, and when his fingernails couldn't do the job…

- There’s bear traps all over the place, but there’s been no attempt made to hide them. They’re covered in Christian crosses and excerpts from the Bible, written in what looks like house paint. All of them are unsnapped, except for the last one they find - the bear trap has snapped, but there’s nothing in it. There is a sizable, circular indentation in the crest of the jaws that would match a human limb, melted into the metal of the trap, as if the trap closed around something tremendously hot. There’s an oversized footprint of what looks like a goat hoof nearby, stinking of brimstone.   (This one might not be mine - I think that I’m remembering it and thinking of it as my own.)

Delta Green and Me

I have yet to formally play it yet, but I find that the new version of Delta Green is too bleak and depressing to really enjoy - there’s enough world-ending threats now to play a game about an inevitable apocalypse to feel fun to play. I am fundamentally an optimist, mostly because I have to be just to keep on going; I think that we can overcome the threats that humanity faces.

But Delta Green is almost relentlessly bleak, and winning a scenario feels less like giving the human race some temporarily relief and more like a pointless gesture against an inevitable end. I have enough despondency in my life without adding it to my entertainment.

The world has moved on...

I really like Unknown Armies - I played a short campaign with some friends a long time ago, and had a great time playing “Jailbreak” with a group that hadn’t played anything but D&D and Legend of the Five Rings - but I am going on record as saying that it derives from a world that doesn’t exist. The concept of something being underground just doesn’t exist anymore - even the most obscure bit of information is available in two seconds with a Google search, or, if you’re really unlucky, a visit to archive.org’s Wayback Machine. Information just travels too fast and replicates itself too quickly for something like the occult underground to stay underground and be even vaguely plausible. Set it before, say…2002, and you’ll do okay, but we went through the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution with the invention of the Internet, and you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. Although there’s probably a school of magic that’d let you do it.

The same thing holds true to some degree with Call of Cthulhu - Delta Green has some rationales for why the Mythos hasn’t become common knowledge, and I guess it’s plausible enough to explain why you can’t immediately access a copy of the Necronomicon on the Internet with two clicks. Delta Green is certainly popular enough as a game to justify its own concept - the government suppressing Mythos activity at any cost - but it would be interesting to sit down and see what would happen if you wrote a setting where knowledge of the Mythos had grown to the point where it actively affected society and civilization. Everybody knows that the human race in its current form is doomed, and they’re all scrambling either for an escape hatch or an accommodation with the Mythos; the people who aren’t doing either are resigned to their fate. I started writing up a setting based on the human race essentially going into quiet insanity all at the same time, with the PCs being the only ones who were able to maintain their sanity - by avoiding contact with human social structures - but I was writing it wrong, and it didn't go anywhere. I may pick it up back up again.

I think, in fact, that there was a section in a Delta Green book which essentially stated that the human race would eventually become a Mythos race of its own, like the byakhee or the Deep Ones. God only knows where, though - I think that it was before the reboot into a new game, maybe in the chapbooks. I think that there was also a section where they specifically say that people become Mythos sorcerers because they know that the human race is doomed, but again, I don’t remember where they said that.

The Night Floors: Even if you leave this room...

 Here’s the thing: I almost guarantee you that this particular vignette has been done by somebody else, because it feels familiar - I’m probably plagiarizing without realizing it. If you happen to know where this shows up, let me know.

This is for the Delta Green scenario The Night Floors, available most recently in Impossible Landscapes.

This is something to spring on the characters when they leave the Night Floors to regroup or recuperate. They return to their homes, kiss their loved ones, shower up - but as they’re about to relax, they collectively get an urgent call to a downtown diner from their Handler; they need to be debriefed immediately. When they arrive, the Handler isn’t there. The only occupants of the diner are the waitress and a cook in the back who never seems to turn around as he works at the grill; a successful Notice roll reveals that her left arm is a prosthetic. A critical success reveals that all of her limbs are prosthetic, but move like real limbs; SAN loss 1/1d3. If asked, she says that she’s always been like that, but simply grunts and moves away if they press her for more answers.

A car screeches to a halt in front of the diner and bullets rip through the front windows. The waitress falls to the ground, one of her limbs skittering across the ground sounding like a wooden baseball bat. Stuffing leaks from her shattered head. The Agents can return fire if they want, but the bullets continue and intensify. The only escape is through the back door - make the Agents roll Dodge if they want to make a break for it.

When they go through the door, temporarily remove them from play. When the last goes through, the Agents find themselves back in the Night Floors, in a small private library whose books have all been completely pasted shut, page by page. The door is still open. If they go back through the door, the diner is still there, but the far wall is wooden panelling and both the cook and the waitress are wooden mannequins.

“Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room.” - Room 1418

 SAN loss 1d4/1d6 - and the Agents will now have to contend with the knowledge that the Night Floors are no longer confined to the Macallistar building.